Photo story day – JEM 200’s in-class lecture assignment

Lecture assignment, March 25, 2010

Students in the JEM 200 course at the University of Tennessee were assigned to do a photo story of the lecture itself last week. Here’s a short video of how the class went. Below are some of the instructions students received about the assignment.

Students,

You will be asked to begin an in-class photo assignment in lecture this week. To prepare, do the following.

• Acquire a camera and get familiar with the kind of pictures it can take — particularly pictures indoors with reasonably good light.
• Establish an account with some picture hosting service. Recommended is Picasaweb, Google’s service.
• Upload some pictures to your account so that you can get familiar with the process.
• Review JPROF’s series on photojournalism, especially the part about writing cutlines.

You will be asked to take enough pictures to select 10 to 15 good ones (which means you should be taking 50 to 100 pictures, at least) and load them into an album on your hosting service. (Picasaweb is good for this because it lets you create new albums at will. Then, it can automatically make an embeddable slide show from that album.)

You will need to write cutlines for all of the pictures that go into your album, so part of your assignment will be getting cutline information. We’ll talk more about that during lecture.

Your photos should include examples of long range, medium range and close-up pictures. You should have more close-up pictures than anything else.

This is a graded assignment, so do some thinking about it before you come to class. Some of the best advice you can follow are these guidelines for the student photojournalist.