the 14

After a month and a half or so of waiting for Southern Illinoisan intern Claudette to turn in the Canon 14 2.8 lens to the journalism department, I was finally able to check it out! Not only is it the strangest looking lens, but it is the widest piece of glass I've ever shot with. I'm going to shoot a roll of film on it as well, just for fun. It is intensely wide! Wouldn't mind having one if I had an extra $1800 to toss up for it.

And sharp! These are a bunch of pictures I took while walking to class with Scott yesterday. He and I are in the same HISTORY OF EAST ASIA TO 1800 class MWF at 2p.m. I took them while walking, so obviously none of them were planned or thought of beforehand.

The lens is particularly nice for close ups, in my opinion. Close ups of naturey things or people. And of course it's good for landscapey scenes and architecture. It's aspherically corrected, so the distortions are lessened, but it's still 14 mm so it's distorted.


It was a good week for the photojournalism dept. at SIU. Journalism signed on ex-editor for National Geographic Bruce Baughman as a second pj instructor! He'll be teaching next semester and I hope to be in one or two of his classes. He says they're rough and we better be ready for pain and if we don't have a decent portfolio of images before taking his class, we will by the time we're done. He can be seen on the right side of this image and the previously lone photojournalism instructor Phil Greer, ex-Chicago Tribue, can be seen on the far left. I look forward to having classes with both of them next semester (internships pending), because these history classes are killing me.

As far as my actually 'working' shoots for this week so far, they haven't been all that exciting as I talked about saturday or friday or monday, whenever it was. This was a campus minister talking about the different levels of happiness and how they relate to human dignity. It was a very interesting presentation and I enjoyed it. Although i had to miss the 8-9pm handouts of Call of Duty 4 preorders at Gamestop to shoot it. I got the game the next day. It worked out.


This is SIU's Athletics Director Mario Moccia talking to the USG (student government) last night about student fee increases to help pay for a new athletics facility. new football stadium, paying to move other fields, building new fields and courts, stuff like that. i think the senate mostly thought something better could be done with new student fees to improve the school's academics, such as finishing Morris Library and that the new stadium etc. could be put on the back burner. This is Dr. Lietz, at the same meeting, talking to teh USG about other fee increases to help pay for Saluki Way, and was a guest speaker who answered questions the senate had regarding increases.

This is student senator Brandon Allen, who submitted a resolution last night to prevent university staff from wearing Confederate flag clothing while working for the university. The senate held a debate which lasted 15 minutes exactly and held a vote on the issue. 10 voted no, 12 voted yes and 3 votes were invalid. The resolution did not pass because a majority of the senate hadn't voted yes.


The debates were heated and senator Allen was disgusted with how the other senators reacted to his resolution. He claimed to have over 1,600 people backing his resolution and that the opposing senators were responding in a way that reflected their personal opinions, not for the benefits of the students they represent. If you wish to learn more about the resolution, I'm sure you can contact Brandon Allen directly via the SIUC people finder at www.siuc.edu.

Also, today they ran a currents of 'fall photos' that looked like this in the center spread of the paper. They used one photo from each photographer and mine was the one in the bottom left corner of the leaves. I wasn't very happy with it, I thought I had better photos than that and they didn't use any of my feature photos from the weekend. They keep asking for features but every time I turn in some, they don't use them and the next day they're no longer 'fresh'.

Also, today they ran a feature Jason Johnson took of a guy playing with his dog, almost identical to some of the shots I turned in the other day that were never used. I wouldn't say Jason's photo was bad, but he seems to have multiple feature photos in the paper every week.
Oh well, can't complain. I have an amazing job and there's no way I'm going to stop myself from being the best i can be because thing don't go the way I would want them to. Video games, on the other hand, very well may hamper my career as I will never give them up but I spend lots of time on my mac/pc and new playstation 3. I'll save my personal review of Call of Duty 4 for another blog, because it's gonna be good and I've talked a lot already, but I've got to say it's the most amazing game I've ever played. Period. Here's an awesome video off youtube from the prologue of the game, where the opening credits roll and it shows the assassination of the middle eastern ruler through his eyes, but the player does the looking around.

Not only are the graphics "the most photo-realistic... ever seen" (GameInformer), the original score is by Harry Gregson-Williams, amazing composer who did the scores for Kingdom of Heaven, Chronicles of Narnia, all the Shrek movies and all the Metal Gear Solid games.


Out.

TB