Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Love Millennial Style


Tyler Haddad, 25, and his wife Anna, 22, walk back to their downtown Columbia apartment. The couple is living on Tyler's income working as a account manager for Veterans United Home Loans while Anna finishes her education degree at the University of Missouri. (Photo by Adam Vogler)

Dating changes with each generation, and when it does the generations that have come before criticize the morality and choices young people. “Kids these days,” is the mournful refrain as elders forget that the same was said of them. The age that people are getting married is rising but many couples are still choosing to wed when they are young despite what news reports about hookup culture and dating applications imply.
            Tyler and Taylor have known each other since elementary school and are getting married the summer of their freshman year of college after five years of dating. Tyler and Anna are about to celebrate their one-year anniversary a two weeks after Anna graduates college. How people find each other has changes over time, from singles bars, to online dating to Tinder but the result of building a life with that person when you’ve met them, remains the same.

A book on marriage sits on Tyler Athon's desk in his dorm room. Athon, 19, is reading the book as part of the marriage counseling classes he is taking with his finance, Taylor Walker, 18. The couple has know each other since elementary school and have been dating for five years. (Photo by Adam Vogler)

Taylor waits as Tyler changes before going to work at the Home Depot in Kirksville, Mo. The couple are freshman at Truman State University. (Photo by Adam Vogler)

Tyler helps Taylor as they work on their calculus homework. They have several classes together since Taylor is majoring in Business Administration with a concentration in finance and Tyler is double majoring in business administration and accounting. (Photo by Adam Vogler)

Taylor checks her messages as Tyler walks her up the stairs to her dorm room. The couple lives in the same dormitory but have separate rooms two floors apart. (Photo by Adam Vogler)

Taylor fiddles with her engagement ring while attending an event on campus with Tyler and friends. Tyler proposed at his grandmother's house and the couple is set to wed in August. (Photo by Adam Vogler)

A photo of Tyler Haddad proposing to Anna that has been inscribed with messages from the couple's friends hangs in their apartment. Tyler proposed at to Anna at sunrise in Columbia's Capen Park in Oct. of 2014. (Photo by Adam Vogler)


Tyler and Anna order drinks at Lucky's Market after taking a walk around their neighborhood. The couple often take walks after eating dinner together as a way to spend time together while not spending money. (Photo by Adam Vogler)

Tyler makes coffee while Anna takes a shower. Anna often makes breakfast while Tyler performs other household chores. The couple met in 2012 and began dating in 2013. (Photo by Adam Vogler)

Tyler and Anna clean up after sharing breakfast before going to church. Anna is in her senior year at the University of Missouri and is a student teacher at Smithton Middle School. She will begin teaching 7th grade Language Arts at Excelsior Springs Middle School in Excelsior Springs, Mo. in August. (Photo by Adam Vogler)

Tyler drinks coffee while Anna gets ready for church. The couple will celebrate their one-year anniversary on May 31 2016. (Photo by Adam Vogler)

Tyler and Anna watch an episode of "Friends," on Netflix in their apartment. The couple often end their evenings watching televisions together while Anna does classwork. (Photo by Adam Vogler)


Relection

Failure is always an option. I don't think that this project was an abject failure but it certainly isn't what I'd hoped for. I knew that going in though. That's part of challenging oneself. You have to be ready and willing to fall flat on your face. That's how you grow. Anyone who tried to do new things and immediately got them perfect would be hated by everyone. 

The biggest issue I faced was that I needed to show intimacy between couples and I had to develop the trust to get those images in a matter of a couple of weeks. This didn't really happen. There are many reasons, my subjects were all in school, it was the end of the semester, everyone was very busy, I'm a weird old guy, etc.

Essentially main biggest problem came from my topic selection. I knew this going in. I was trying to illustrate a nebulous concept rather than telling a straightforward story. I knew that this would be very difficult to do but I'm not here to do easy things. I'm not here to tell a straightforward literal story. I'm here to become more of a storyteller and to learn how I can make even my literal stories and images work on deeper levels. The only way for me to do that is to try to do that and accept that it's not always going to work. 

I like my images. I like how I was able to work with these couples. I don't like how my story comes together as a whole. I do believe that if I spent another month or two working on this I could get it to come together how I saw it. That is the important thing. I know things I didn't know before and I know the gaps that need to be filled to make this a truly effective picture story. 


Monday, April 18, 2016

Fail, Fail, Fail

I'm putting myself behind the eight ball. I feel like I'm back in junior high trying to get a date to the dance. I'm doing a lot of reaching out but there really isn't anyone reaching back. I'm still stuck with one subject set that I'm fairly certain won't work, at least not alone, and I'm having a lot of trouble getting others. Catching a cold and going to Denver for POYi certainly didn't help. It's really not  a good idea to go over to someone's house when you're contagious and constantly coughing, at least that's what I told myself when I didn't go shoot anything Tuesday and Wednesday. The good news is that while I'm having trouble nailing down additional sources I'm not lacking any for potential subjects. This does concern me as far as how valid my original story idea is but it does make me hopeful that I will find subjects. 

So I've got my work cut out for me. I've not reached the point of needing to think of moving to a backup but I'm going to need to put a lot of hours into my subjects when I find the right ones.

Thursday, March 24, 2016

80’s Television





The mind is a funny thing. These readings made me think of old TV shows. Broccoli instantly made me think about Thomas Magnum's little voice. A continuing theme in the monologue as Magnum drove around Hawaii in his borrowed Ferrari was him speaking as to what his little voice was telling him. Failing to follow his intuition often led to his being roughed up by the bad guys of the week or ending up on the wrong side of some authority figure. The same principle applies here. The mind process a great deal of information that never reaches the conscious level as anything but your intuition, a gut feeling. While ignoring it will probably not result in a car chase you still do so at your peril. The point remains the same if you are writing fiction or working on a journalistic project. The story will tell you what it is if you listen to it. Trying to make it what your conscious mind wants when your own little voice is expressing its displeasure will probably not end well.
WKFD of course led me to recall WKRP in Cincinnati. To be honest that is simply the similarity between the call letters and I really wanted to include the bit about Magnum PI here. It was a really great show when I was 10. I don’t have any reference for jealousy but we’re saying that everything is related to 80’s TV for the theme of this so deal with it. I wonder if Magnum PI is on Netflix?

The counterpoint to listening to the little voice in your head is that you also need to tell the chorus in your head to STFU. I’ve long joked that the internal monologue of a photojournalist goes like this: “I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck I’M THE MOST BRILLIANT MOTHERF***ER THAT EVER LIVED!!!!!! I suck, I suck...”

None of that is useful. A lot of the time it doesn't do any harm, it can even help keep you from being a pretentious asswipe, but when you need to get some sh*t done it is the worst thing you can have. It is vital to be able to learn to shut that down. Take a walk, take a breath and quiet your mind. 

The same goes for being envious of other photographers. You just have ot let it go. I see friends who make brilliant work and think about how much that I’d like to create images like those, to see how they do. Then I remind myself that that’s total bull sh*t. Those are THEIR images. I don’t want to make THEIR photos, I want to make MY photos. I want MY photos to be great. That means that I need to work on how I see, not think about how others see. The best way to do that is simple. You just stop thinking, go for a walk, clear your head and then go make some f***ing pictures.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Photo Essay

SPRING






Spring_Essay from Adam Vogler on Vimeo.
This was way out of my comfort zone. That was the point of course, and it felt good to be doing something that lies outside of what I grew to used to working at newspapers. Almost all of my work there was focused on light, moment, person; rather than the feel of an image. That was what I focused on here, how the photos I was making would make the viewer feel.
My biggest problem here was not in the shooting but the editing. So much of what I’ve done has focused on literal images that I wasn’t sure how to edit my photos. I wasn’t sure if the point I was trying to convey was getting through. I found it even more difficult than usual to separate myself from my images during the editing process.
My other problem was that my audio blows goats. A big part of that is that I didn’t devote enough time to my interviews. I spent that time shooting, the thing I enjoy, as opposed to emailing and calling people, the thing that I loathe. I plan on spending a great deal of time before the re-submit correcting this error and will probably use my images during the  interviews in order to elicit the kind of responses that will make for the audio component that I had in mind. A minor issue is that I don't care for my title all that much but that's an easy fix once inspiration strikes.
Overall I’m quite happy with how this is coming along and will continue to work on it in the future, perhaps a four part series on all of the seasons. It was a great exercise to get my creativity flowing and the images that I was making improved as I went along. Even if I don’t end up with something suitable for journalism this is the kind of project that I should tackle from time to time just to try something different from the norm

Tuesday, March 1, 2016



It’s nothing personal. It don’t mean nothing. It’s just a photo contest thing. Those are the words I try to keep in the front of my mind every time contest season rolls around. I’ve been a pretty regular entrant in various photo contests since I got into this wacky professional way back when I needed to get a haircut every other week.

I’ve also been a judge for the NPPA Monthly Clip contest a time or two and I’ve watched the judging of Pictures of the Year International, either in person or online, whenever I’ve been able to manage it over the last several years. Ah, that special feeling of seeing the best image you’ve ever taken get voted out in what seems like 0.2 seconds, “Click, click, click, click; OUT.” Worse is when there is that long pause before the last click, when your heart swells with sudden hope, only to be crushed by the cold, mechanical voice of the POYi Robot.

That’s why I try to keep those words in my head when I’m watching the judging. It’s just those judge’s opinion. It isn’t an indictment of the photographer, or their work. Photography is subjective and contests are doubly so. There are so many different factors that the judges may or may not consider, the story’s subject, other stories that they’ve seen, the dynamic between the judges, the images themselves, etc., that it is a completely useless exercise to argue that there is a definitive, numerical order that the entries should be in. This isn’t a race where you can show that one runner finished ahead of the other.

That said what you can do is to try and divine what is going on in the heads of the judges. You can try to determine the why. Not to make a judgmental argument to assert your intellectual and artistic superiority but to better learn how photographs affect three to four very sophisticated viewers.  

I was present for several of the judging sessions over the two weeks of the still photo categories but was unable to take notes do to my volunteering during the competition. I’ll begin with some general observations from these sessions before delving into my thoughts on the Feature Photo Story: Reportage category which I watched undistracted, and in it’s entirety. First off there is the constant, yearly refrain of the problems of not editing tight enough. This is said every year, in every story category, over and over and over again. Few things can drill home the need to have a tight edit than watching the judging of a photojournalism contest. All it takes to sink a story, for any viewer, is one bad photo. Finally captions. If you don’t write good captions you better hope and pray that not one of the judges ask for it to be read because if they do it’s goodnight Gracie for you.
“After reading the lame caption,” Ken Geiger said regarding an image in Iran’s Children of Islam “so much for liking this further.”

My second observation comes not from the judges but from the entries themselves. There was a lot of repetition. I lost count how many stories there were on American politics, the refugee crisis and transgendered people. These were all major stories in the past year but as far as their photographic coverage most of the entries were almost exactly the same. You could take all of the images from all of the stories on those topics and mix them up and you wouldn’t be able to differentiate between most of the entries.

This is an important thing to bear in mind when looking for a story topic. How can I tell this differently? How can I inform my audience? This was particularly troubling regarding the numerous stories on transgender individuals and groups. Few of them showed many anything about who the subjects were as a person. Many of them seemed to concentrate on what set these people apart from the general public at the expense of showing what made them a part of society. This is the kind of angle one should look for when pursuing a story that has been extensively covered.

Observing the judging of Feature Photo Story: Reportage I quickly came to realise that the judges and I were fairly far apart as far as favorite stories go. What moved me and what moved them seemed to be very different things. They seemed to be more drawn to what I’d call essays and less to entries that had more of narrative structure. This could be a preference over essays or it could just be that the narrative stories just weren't bringing it. I will reiterate that this doesn’t matter in any way shape or form, again, just a contest thing.

I still love Chet Strange’s MPW story Half Empty, I’m totally biased, he’s a friend of mine, and I’ve been digging on Matt Slaby’s ongoing essay exploring the relicts of the Cold War, The Pasture of the Fourth Horseman. (I think it was his, the entry dealing with the subject didn’t advance so I’m not sure if it was Matt’s or someone working on the same topic.)

The only winning entry that really moved me was their first place, Iran Coming Out of the Shadows, by Newsha Tavakolian. It’s just so damn pretty. It was also the one story of the winners that felt more like a story to me.

“It feels more like a story to me,” Janet Jarman said. “I think this one is a very nice set of pictures and it flows and has a rhythm to it.”

I’m probably never going to Iran but I do think that there are aspects of this story that can be very applicable to a piece done on an area or a community rather than individuals. This is something that I want to improve upon with my own work. The images have a very distinct look and feel about them which enables them to flow together despite their different individual subjects.

I do have to disagree with the judges about Antonio Gibotta’s The New Addiction. I’m not going to argue that it didn’t deserve recognition, that’s their decision. I am going to say that I wanted to see more.

“The addiction story, it’s magnificent,” Matt Campbell said. “It’s a tough concept, how can you illustrate the social screen time? The subtlety, the face reflected in the stereo, every single picture works towards this message. This story is very important and  is growing as well. This hits on a lot of points, is well edited, well photographed. No repetition though it is a kind of thing that would be easy to have repetition.”

I agree with everything that Campbell said. The New Addiction does an excellent job of showing that there are people, particularly young people who spend an extreme amount of time staring at their personal electronics but it doesn’t say anything to me about how this is a problem. I want to see more. I feel like a story is something that is going to give me the who, what, when, where and why. This only gives me the what. Perhaps I’m being too literal and am expected to accept that the problem is implied but I’m a firm believer that our duty is to our audience, not ourselves, and we need to ensure that the point of any story is going to get across. That is something that I will keep in mind as I search for projects.

I got a lot of ideas from POYi this year, both for stories and approaches. I’d like to explore some of the Cold War relics here in Missouri and Kansas like Slaby has been doing. The old missile silos and even better to take it in a different direction and look at the people involved in addition to the communities. There was also a story about Coney Island in Winter that showed me some approaches to take, and not to take, with my idea about resort towns in the off season. That’s going on the back burner for awhile but that is an evergreen story that should provide a good way to kill some time and make some rectangles in the future.  

Monday, February 29, 2016

Back 2 Basics Cooking held a special Valentines Day cooking class for couples Saturday, Feb. 13. in Columbia, Mo. Three couples spent their evening learning new recipes and some cooking tips while preparing a three-course meal. (Photo by Adam Vogler)


The One Day story assignment was right in my comfort zone. This was pretty much what I did for seven years working as a newspaper photographer. Ninety-nine percent of what I did outside of spot news and sports was come up with photo stories, essays and photo galleries I could do with one visit to the subject so this was pretty much old hat for me.

I set about doing the same thing I'd do back at the paper, look around for an event that would make a nice feature story. I settled on the Back 2 Basics cooking class for a couple of reasons. I was sure it would have some fun images, it would have lots of opportunities for detail photos and going back to my days as a photo editor it would be something that would allow for a Valentines Day feature that could run on Valentine's day since it occurred on the Saturday night before the holiday. 

Things did not exactly go as planned, though they never do. To start of I got lost on my way to the venue. I'd planned for this of course so I still arrived on time, but I wanted to be there earlier. The class was a bit smaller than I'd hoped and they were working in a fairly crowded area which made it more difficult to blend in. I'd thought this through before hand and made sure that I had brought a variety of lenses including a 70-200 so that I could hang back if needed.  

I was able to get some good emotive images fairly quickly and some good detail images but I was finding it difficult to find some images that connected everything together. I wanted to find something different but I was pretty much just doing my usual wide, medium, tight shot list. I knew that this might be a issue with this story, that was one of the reasons that I chose it. I shot more than I really needed to but I wanted to have more images than I needed to have a better hcanc eof putting it together in the edit.

Overall I'm ok with my results, they aren't great but I think that this would make for a fun, Valentines Day feature. It ain't going to win any awards but it'd get the jib done as far as daily work. 


Nathan Atkinson, right Elizabeth Hatting and Anthony and Tela McKire cook risotto during a cooking class Saturday, Feb. 13. in Columbia, Mo. Three couples spent their evening learning new recipes and some cooking tips while preparing a three-course meal during Back 2 Basics Cooking's Valentines Day cooking class. (Photo by Adam Vogler)

Nathan Atkinson, front, and Elizabeth Hatting dice zucchini  during Back 2 Basics Cooking's Valentines Day cooking class Saturday, Feb. 13. in Columbia, Mo. The zucchini was part of a relish and toasted bread that comprised the appetizer of the three-course meal the couple prepared.

Nathan Atkinson and Elizabeth Hatting add sautéed vegetables to their risotto during Back 2 Basics Cooking's Valentines Day cooking class Saturday, Feb. 13. in Columbia, Mo. This was the couple's first class and their first time making risotto, a creamy rice dish native to northern Italy. (Photo by Adam Vogler)

Nathan Atkinson sautés red onions for a risotto during a cooking class Saturday, Feb. 13. in Columbia, Mo. Atkinson and Elizabeth Hatting were one of three couples spent their evening learning new recipes and some cooking tips while preparing a three-course meal during Back 2 Basics Cooking's Valentines Day cooking class. (Photo by Adam Vogler)

Nathan Atkinson and Elizabeth Hatting check to see if their risotto is done during Back 2 Basics Cooking's Valentines Day cooking class Saturday, Feb. 13. in Columbia, Mo. Risotto, a rice dish native to northern Italy, is cooked in broth until it reaches a creamy consistency. (Photo by Adam Vogler)