Better late than never, I suppose—here’s pictures from my second attempt at shooting baseball on April 19th. Click the photo below to see a 12-picture slideshow. Duke unexpectedly lost to UNC Greensboro 5-4 with the go-ahead run coming in the top of the ninth inning. All shots were taken with a Nikon D3 and a 300mm lens. As always, comments are appreciated.
Right fielder Anthony D'Alessandro avoids getting hit by a pitch in Duke's 5-4 loss to UNC Greensboro April 19, 2011 at Jack Coombs Field.
Over the last two weeks I’ve learned something about myself: I like shooting sports. I actually like it a lot.
My first assignment was a Friday night baseball game on April 8, featuring Duke against Boston College. I grabbed a Nikon D3, courtesy of The Chronicle, and headed out with Tyler Seuc, one of our staff photographers who was assigned to show me the ropes (and make sure I didn’t break anything). I’d never shot an event of any type before, so I think I snapped a few good shots. For a rookie, at least. Click the picture below to see a 12-photo slideshow.
Dillon Haviland winds up against Boston College on April 8, 2010 at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park. He pitched 5.2 innings and earned the win in Duke's 10-6 victory.
I was on my own this past Friday night for the Duke vs. UNC Womens Lacrosse game. I took the trusty D3 and also dragged along our awesome 300mm lens. I could tell I was getting better shots than I did last week—and, needless to say, had a bunch of fun shooting with the 300mm. Tyler taught me last week the importance of getting a player’s feet into the shot, which is something I focused on during this game. Click the picture below to see the slideshow from the game.
Christie Kaestner attempts to shake her defender in Duke's 11-10 victory over North Carolina on April 15, 2011 at Koskinen Stadium.
Please leave any tips or critiques in the comments section! I’m (obviously) just beginning to learn.
Now that the dust has officially settled on the Duke vs. Alabama football matchup of more than one week ago (this past weekend Alabama continued to exert its dominance over the rest of the college football world while Duke dropped its third straight game), I wanted to look back over my work leading up to and immediately following the most hyped game in Duke’s recent football history.
I had eagerly been awaiting my opportunity to cover the defending national champions and scheduled a sit down interview with Blue Devils head coach David Cutcliffe the week before the the Crimson Tide rolled into town in order to write a feature detailing his Alabama football days under legendary head coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. After the interview, I had enough material to turn my feature idea into a miniseries previewing the matchup, and spoke with Mal Moore, Alabama’s director of athletics, for the second part to add a more balanced perspective. Here’s the tangible results of my reporting:
Overkill for a game that was essentially over within the first 10 minutes of the opening quarter? Perhaps some would argue that. An example of the beat reporter I hope to be after graduation? Most definitely. Dutifully completing my senior at Duke and being a professional-level beat reporter for the paper has been a balancing act—feel free to watch as I can keep juggling both gigs.
My summer will officially end at 2:50 p.m. when I go to my first class of my last year in college. With the start of a new year comes a plethora of opportunities—you can anyone you want to be (why yes, I will take that flier to try out for your a cappella group and Bhangra dance troupe!). Fortunately, though, I know I want to be a journalist, and I have spent the past three summers working to ease the transition from student-journalist to professional, paid, real-person, real-job journalist (by the way, my resume and clips pages are all up to date with this summer’s activities).
While they don’t get paid and normally don’t get published by traditional media outlets during the year, student-journalists are still journalists. As Robert Niles of the Knight Digital Media Center points out in his advise for journalism students blog post, the career of a student-journalist has already begun.
His other advice includes:
Duke Chronicle Photo by Maya Robinson
My first story as associate editor for Towerview, the monthly magazine published by Duke’s independent daily student newspaper, The Chronicle, hit the web July 1. It is a narrative feature on Duke’s incoming freshman point guard, Kyrie Irving. With no self-promotion from me, it has received 4,898 hits as of 11:45 p.m. and is the second-most popular story on dukechronicle.com. It has also received 35 “likes” via the Facebook Like button on the page, which is the metric I use to judge its popularity with the target demographic (see my post titled The Facebook Frenemy for more info on the Facebook Like button’s takeover of the web).
The reporting was challenging. It was my first assignment after I completed The Poynter Institute’s College Fellowship, so I was eager to put all of my new reporting tips and tricks to work. Unfortunately, I was in Dallas and St. Petersburg, Florida, while Kyrie and his father were in New Jersey, so all of my interviews were held over the phone. Not ideal. Also not ideal were the fact that my MacBook was in the store for repairs when I needed to write, and that I was on my own to find contact info for Kyrie and whoever else I wanted to talk to for the story. With a copious amount of research and a little luck, I was able to interview Kyrie, his father, Drederick, his high school basketball coach, Kevin Boyle, his AAU coach Sandy Pyonin, and a Duke basketball associate head coach, Chris Collins.
The first tool I used was whitepages.com. Remember that scene from All The President’s Men where the two reporters are pouring over phone books? Whitepages.com is the 21st century equivalent. I found one of the sources there (I won’t say who to protect that person’s privacy), and then he helped me find contact information for a few of the others.
