LifeSource International

LifeSource Reflection Essay

In this multimedia project, I learned how difficult it is to work with indoor lighting that changes. For some photos, I'd have the ISO and shutter speed set just right for a certain direction I was facing, away from the windows, and then I'd turn around toward the windows to take a quick shot. The quick shot would never turn out well without a lot of time spent resetting the ISO, by which time, the shot opportunity would be lost. I also learned that it's better to have the subject talk for a while about one topic than to have them talk in short snippets about very specific topics. With short answers, it is harder to incorporate the subject's response into the final sound recording. With longer answers where the subject goes on from one topic to another on their own, it is easier to put together corresponding thoughts and full sentences to work with.

With this project I was a little bit too timid. Since I had more people to take photos of than previous projects, I felt a little more uncomfortable in that I didn't have time to warm up everyone for the camera. In the next project, I would have to get over that fear and start taking pictures from the get-go.

Multimedia projects like this are a good way to put together a news story and images. Written word or even video can't always tell the full story, because the emotions or images pass by quickly, or there is nothing to give you the visual you need to understand the story. With audio and photographs, though, feelings and activities are caught in a still, solid image. The audio gives meaning to the photographs, and the photographs give meaning to the audio.