Moving Day!

I’m moving my blog!

The new address is http://blog.ivyashe.com. I’ll be updating quite a bit this summer with work from my job at the MV Gazette (-:

Note: The “blog” link on www.ivyashe.com will still take you back to this site. I should have that fixed in the next couple of days.

Summer Job!

I’m officially in Freelance World now. I have to say, it’s not bad so far, and REALLY not bad for a summer gig. I still need a second job to supplement the work I’m doing for the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette, but mostly I’m just glad I don’t have to put journalism on the back burner for four months. Hooray!

I tend to take it for granted that everybody knows about Martha’s Vineyard, but then, I don’t know how much press it gets outside of New England. It’s an island off the coast of Cape Cod, sort of near Nantucket (which is smaller and farther offshore). There are about 15,000 people who live here year-round—and about 100,000 who live here in the summer. Quite the increase (my aunt and uncle, who I’m staying with, are some of the year-rounders).

The Vineyard is also, like Columbia, a place with two competing newspapers. Both are weekly (the Gazette just switched to biweekly for its summer schedule). Both are very old-school (no AP style!). In addition to those two factors (which, coming from the Missourian, is a little surreal to me), the Gazette publishes exclusively in black and white. It also publishes in broadsheet, so a copy of the Gazette is six inches wider than your average copy of the New York Times (I measured).

From a photography standpoint, that latter point is perhaps the greatest thing ever. I LOVE how big the photos are run. I love that there are no teeny mug shots. I’ve always known this about the paper (I actually profiled the Gazette during my Picture Editing class and learned allll about their visual policies), but it’s one thing to know it and a whole other thing to see your own work in giant form.

This is the Lifestyles section of the Friday paper, which is running six (SIX! How is such a thing even possible?) of the photos I took during various ballet rehearsals over the past couple of days. That lead photo is 4×9 (again, I measured)! INSANE! In. Sane. It makes me want make better photos, which is always a good thing.

I’m also doing some writing as part of the job, since the staff’s not big enough to send a photographer and a reporter to every event. The articles (so far) aren’t particularly long ones—500 words or so, and it’s all been straight event coverage, which is in many ways less stressful than other types of news reporting. So that’s nice. The first of these assignments (which was also my first assignment, period), was a Memorial Day parade.

Making this job a little more interesting, I’m working without the benefit of a staff locker, which means that right now I’m working with my baby RebelXT (I’m supposed to be getting a 7D as a graduation present, but that’s been a little slow coming), and the three lenses I own. I just ordered a 17-40mm, which is going to make things a lot easier when I’m indoors (the 18-55 kit lens I’ve been using forever is finally starting to show signs of age, and refuses to autofocus). My 50mm, meanwhile, has been a real workhorse. I would be completely lost without it.

I can’t wait to get that second camera, though—then I can have TWO bodies, and I can finally push the ISO past 400 without having to worry about signs of grain. It will be amazing.

So that’s what’s been happening here in New England…I’m way behind on blogging, but am going to try very hard to post something every other day or so. Happy summer!

Nature Boy

This is our dog O’Lio’s first spring in the house, and he’s not used to my mom’s garden plants blocking his view of the neighboring yards.

Not that this has really put a damper on his explorations:

En Route

Hm, haven’t updated in a while. Here’s what happened since the last post:

*Defended thesis.

*Graduated from Mizzou with my Master of Arts degree.

*Got a freelance photo job with the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette for the summer. I’ll have to find some sort of other work as well to supplement it, but I’m pretty excited (and nervous)!

So now I’m back at home in Connecticut for a week decompressing before the summer jobs start. I made one last MoEx trip from Columbia to the St. Louis airport two days ago, and took this photo out the window of the shuttle bus. I think it pretty accurately sums up I-70 in Missouri.

K is for Kauffman

I’m slowly working my way through all of the Major League Baseball ballparks in the country. So far I’ve been to a third of them*; I added my tenth last night when I went to see the Red Sox (my most favorite team ever) play Kansas City at the K. Having now been to both of the Missouri ballparks, I can confidently say that, while I love the roofdeck at Busch Stadium, I like the overall coziness of Kauffman much better. I think I also might have preferred the Cardinals’ old stadium to their current one.

Anyway, the game itself was excellent–it was a matchup of Zack Greinke and Josh Beckett, which is in itself fantastic. The game itself was pretty competitive for the first few innings, until the old guard of the Sox (Jason Varitek and Mike Lowell) decided they might as well make the most of their limitd playing time and hit some home runs. Once Greinke was taken out of the game, it was over for the Royals. A huge thank-you must go out to Laura Herring and her friends who were also at the game for not giving this Red Sox fan a hard time about her team loyalties!

We were in the nosebleed section, and my 70-300mm can only do so much from that range, but I tried to make a few photos anyway:

*I am doing much better in my parallel quest to go to all the NPB parks in Japan. I’ve been to six, with six more to go.

Zack Greinke. He was on my first and only fantasy baseball team five years ago.

Jacoby Ellsbury all alone in the outfield

There was a hot dog race. Ketchup won. He’s so jaunty!

People started leaving in the seventh. Boooo.

Laura’s boyfriend kept score the whole game.

I have NEVER seen the opposing team’s gear for sale in an MLB team store. They do that everywhere in Japan, but here it seems kind of weird.

Wide-open shutter…

Easter Shenanigans

I’ve been to many, many Easter egg hunts.

But I’ve never tried to photograph one, and it was a very good thing Caitlyn reminded me yesterday (after her own egg hunt shoot) just how short they really are. There’s a whole lot of buildup, a mad dash, and then…it’s over and you go play games.

When I went to cover the Douglass Park EGGstravaganza (their emphasis, not mine) this afternoon, I intentionally went straight for the part of the park where the 1 and 2 year olds would be gathering eggs, since I knew they would be the slowest group. I was right, but the hunt was still over in less than two minutes.

All things considered, I guess the egg hunt photos aren’t terrible…except that two of the ones I liked best—the first two—couldn’t be used in the paper because I lost track of the families right after the eggs had been collected (there were about 350 people there) and I thus didn’t get names. FRUSTRATING. I’m still mad at myself about this.

The kids are still cute, though.

Extra bonus photo- balance flash from the in-camera flash on my baby Rebel XT! I just love the facial expressions here; the little girl had essentially just cut in front of the first boy, and you can definitely tell.

Softball + Rainout

I covered a softball game for the Missourian this afternoon, but the game was rained out and rescheduled after 3 and a half innings. The reporter didn’t write up a story, and the sports desk had left early, so none of the photos were published. Oh well. I had fun shooting anyway!

In Praise of the Disposable Camera, part four

This one’s from the archives—summer 2007. It was taken with a waterproof disposable camera while I was treading water in the channel. My cousin (the one jumping) is a total rock star.

Off the Mound (black and white)

I like everything about the Nikon D2xs except its ability to shoot action in low-light situations—you can’t push the ISO past 400, which gets to be a problem in baseball…since shutter speeds when photographing batting and pitching have to be pretty high. Even a 2.8 aperture can only do so much.

Result: Supergrain.

Off the Mound

While Mizzou is on official spring break (it’s freakishly quiet in town now) and the Columbia Missourian newsroom is about a fifth of the population it normally is, I’m standing in as the department’s photo editor. I haven’t been in the newsroom at all this semester, and it was a little weird to get back into Missourian mode—but I didn’t forget the workflow process (that stuff gets deep inside your head), which is nice.

There’s only one other photographer working this week, so last night I picked up an assignment while she covered a Passover seder. I got to shoot my first college baseball game since spring of 2007, and it was excellent.

I’m usually pretty good about shooting pitching and batting, so I was trying to focus on baserunning and dugout photos. If there seem to be an excess of celebration photos, that’s because there was a serious excess of runs scored- Mizzou whomped Purdue 22-14.

I actually don’t think I’d like this more if you could see the players’ heads (the 300mm forced to me to compose creatively). Then it’d just be a picture of the backs of heads, which is boring. Discuss.