California

California, where I was born and raised, is a good place to reflect on my place right now in our course. Trips that involve family typically paralyze me creatively. So while I'm enjoying seeing parents, sisters, aunts, uncles, neices, nephews, cousins and friends and introducing my children to my home, it's tough to get much done photographically. One strange thing for me in Los Angeles that I always find is that I suffer a bit from over familiarity and or even being numb or maybe simply overwhelmed by all there is to photograph there. It's such a huge, sprawling place that I have a tough time focusing or even figuring out what to photograph. I can't really pin point it and even sat back and considered if I lost the progress that I made. However, if I was actually living in L.A. or even for a newspaper, it would definitely be different.

As of this point in the course, one thing I have achieved is a clear focus on photography I hadn’t had for some time. I'm thinking about photography, the imagery and what I want to communicate. There are several points I have improved upon or refined. I am thinking in terms of projects and stories I’d like to do as opposed to single images.

In my shooting style, I have become more disciplined and am concentrating on the entire frame more than ever and very rarely crop. I have thought more about the content of my photographs as well as all of the compositional elements.

The things I must improve upon are still self-editing and improving the development of story ideas and organization and execution of stories themselves. I see my greatest weakness as becoming overwhelmed by broad ideas and then a large body of work. One of my goals coming into the course was to improve on the business side of photography and finding new ways and profitable outlets for my work.

Guest lecturers and tutors have given powerful advice and ideas such as Homer Sykes’s extensive experience with stock photography and publishing his photography in books. Classmates have also given invaluable inspiration and gotten me in touch with elements of photography, technology and media that I hadn't considered or may not have learned about.

My greatest challenge remains remaking myself from a career newspaper staff photographer and editor into an effective freelance photographer and defining what that means to me. More tangibly, I have seen that multimedia, as much as I am resistant to it, is essential to learn. My personal goals remain to learn to increase my freelance cliental, publish a book and to show my work in a public exhibition.