Guide: Shooting for College or School Newspaper

When you shoot for college or school newspaper, you are shooting in photojournalism style. What is photojournalism?

Photojournalism is a type of photography that has purpose to report an event or moment. Photojournalism focus on telling the story truthfully and the content of the photography can not staged, altered or directed by the photographer.

Before we started, there are three basic criteria that determine a good photo for newspaper. There are technical excellence, creative composition and relevancy to the story. I discuss more about it here. Read it first.

Usually, assignments from college newspaper consists of:

1. Portrait

This is the very common assignment. For example, portrait of new staff, students, new president, speakers and so on.

Lily B, former Editor in-chief of The Bucknellian

Lily Marie Beauvilliers, former Editor in-chief of The Bucknellian

When shooting a portrait of someone, the most important is to keep the person relaxed. Introduce yourself and talk with them a bit, ask for hobby, and light stuff, establish good rapport. By doing that, you will potentially get a better photo. The personality of the person will show up in the picture.

There is two kinds of portrait, a tight close up / mug shot and environmental portrait. Depend on the space and the story, environmental portrait is generally stronger because it tells a story. Environmental portrait is capturing a person interacting with their environment. For example, a student working in the lab. A professor teaching in class and so on.

Some pitfalls that you might want to avoid when taking portraits are as follow:

Lighting problem: Avoid strong back light or strong front light. If you position a person in a strong back light condition, the photo will be dark/underexposed. If you position the person in a strong front light directly to the person. They might squint and feel uncomfortable.

To fix this problem, in strong back light situation, you can fire flash to fill in light to the person face. The other solution is to move the person to shade areas, such as under the tree or close to a building. Avoid strong front light directly to the person at any cost. Read: Shooting Speakers with fill-in flash

Background problem: Choose your background carefully, don’t let background distract viewers from the main person. set a large aperture (portrait mode), shoot from a reasonable distance (don’t be so close to the person). Zoom in your lens to blur the distracting background.

Check out:

2. Shooting student events

Students events could be anything ranging from student rally, community services, late night music and so on. When shooting an events, make sure that you capture the activity. Let them do their thing and don’t stop them and asked them for pose unless you are shooting portraits or group pictures.

Common mistakes
Photographer is trying to capture a whole “chaotic” scene. The result is a weak image. The photo do not have dominant focus, the background is distracting and there are too many things going on.

Bad example: Too many things going on in this picture. Viewers might be confused on what they need to pay attention first

When you shoot an event picture, make sure there is you have dominant subject. Background should not be distracting as well. Aware of lines, shape of the background. Occasionally, there will be a candlelight vigil. When it happens, try to include something in the frame that tell what that candlelight vigil is about. It could be sign, posters, or a badge.

Read: Candlelight vigil camera setting

There is dominant element of this photo which is the female student in the front, and the background is telling the story but it is not distracting or competing for attention

The badge shows that the candlelight service is dedicated for Branko

Sometimes, editor would like to layout photo essay of an event, for example, homecoming event. To build a good photo essay, you will need to take variation of photos. For example: wide horizontal pictures to cover the entire scene, close up detail shot, an activity shots that tell what is the event about and so on. The more variation and the more creative the composition and perspective, the stronger the photo essay.

3. Action and Sports Photography

Action or sports photography are challenging, especially indoor where the lighting is very low. For outdoor sports, you need to telephoto lens and a camera that have fast auto focus and continuous shooting. You will need to be able to predict and anticipate the movement. Capture the peak action/reaction should be your goal. In indoor arena, you need a low light lens, or flash to freeze movement. I have specific guide on camera settings below this post.

That’s all for now, I will update this post as soon as I can with more tips and sample images especially for sports and dance. Meanwhile, please visit my photo gallery.