Author: syd

Tomorrow is my last excursion into STL for photography purposes. After that, I’ll put together my presentation and be done. I’m nervous about presenting but over the moon about field day and then graduation!!

okay so because of the sheer amount of photos I have, I’m gonna have to use Flickr rather than Instagram to store them all where people can see them. it’s a slow process, getting set up, because they take forever to edit and then upload, but here‘s where they’ll be. (if for some reason that link didn’t work, it’s just @canoncandor on Flickr.)

I’ve spent all day so far working on editing a subject’s senior pictures as well as some photos of my own. that’s pretty much my plan for the rest of the week as well.

First, Recap on Texas:

My family lives in a community of Latin American immigrants. Everything, from the schools to the stores to the advertisements on billboards, is in Spanish, so I got a truly immersive experience. I learned a lot of slang, and even more curse words than I knew before, but I was surprised to find out that I had a pretty complete vocabulary already. It was like riding a bike: once I got going, I started to relax and didn’t have to think so much about how to pedal.

 

Update on Photography Stuff:

I think I accidentally started a business?? It started a few weeks ago, when I took my friend Issy’s prom pictures. After she shared them on social media, a girl from church hired me to take her senior pictures. And then another one. And another. So, that was unanticipated, but definitely not unwelcome. It’s actually really fun, and it helps fund college which is the nicest part.

Anyway, yesterday I went to Soulard to take more pictures of STL. The problem is that time is running out on the project, so I’m going to have to shape it so that I have enough pictures to actually speak of. I’ll do my best to complete the photography portion in a way that accomplishes what I imagined, but I have a couple backup plans in case I can’t.

So far this week has been super fun. My aunt and uncle live in a largely Spanish-speaking neighborhood, and everyone here seems to know everyone else. It’s really cool, kind of like in Casa En Mango Street. I’ve been learning a lot about the culture and I’m really enjoying it.

Tomorrow morning I have an over-the-phone interview with a photographer friend of Elder’s. I’m a little nervous, but I wrote down a lot of prompts just in case, and that helped a little.

Thursday I’ll be on my way to Houston to spend the week with my aunt. Her family is from Mexico, and they speak fluent Spanish, so until next Wednesday my main focus will be language immersion.

I scheduled another STL photoshoot day for a few days after I get back, and will continue trying to schedule more. Until then I’m reading up on STL and talking to people who know more historical/cultural stuff about it in order to figure out the best way to go about representing it thru photography.

So after a lot of research, it looks like the best platform for sharing photos (for free) is Instagram. As you guys know, I conveniently have a few logins already at my disposal, so I converted one of them to use with this project. (See, I knew I had those for a reason.)

It’s @canoncandor if you’d like to follow!

For the second half of my project, I decided to do a photo essay on St. Louis. It’ll just be a series of photographs showing the story of the city, with little blurbs of written history to accompany them. I’m also going to experiment a lot with street photography and general portraiture, so if any of you guys want to join and/or want your picture taken, hit me up.

So far this week I’ve had a huge amount of interviews, many of which aren’t on the blog but will be tomorrow. I’ve also gotten in contact with a photographer who will hopefully be able to give me some pointers.

The more practice I get with interviewing people, the more substantial the results are, and I’m having troubles paring the interviews down to a reasonable length because everything the subjects have had to say so far is just so interesting to listen to and read. That’s okay though–this is a fun kind of struggle.

Something I love about all this is the renewed connections with people because they’re willing to be so vulnerable. It makes for a more fruitful project but it also makes for some genuine conversation and human connection.

I have two interviews in process and a whole bunch more scheduled for this week. After that I’ll transition into more photography-based stuff (with the same goal of showing commonality among humans).

Because geography is something the people I’ve interviewed so far have in common, I’m meeting up with a photojournalist this coming Saturday to take some pictures of places. Also, I’m planning on reaching out to a couple different community groups that will be able to give me information on community statistics and such.

Separately, I can’t help but worry about the project presentation. Do any of you guys have ideas (besides the usual PowerPoint)?

Today I worked with Mr. Elder, who gave feedback on what I’ve done so far and challenged me to really define what my project will do and what it’s all about. He also brought up some new points I hadn’t considered, as well as some resources I didn’t know were available.