Photojournalism Today

In today’s world where we can share photos of what is going on in our lives with anyone at a moment’s notice through the use of our smartphones and social media accounts, what role does photojournalism really play in our society? Is it becoming obsolete as a career?

With the release of social media websites and apps such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, along with the invention of smartphones with fairly featured cameras in their own rights, many people feel that the role of typical photojournalists in spreading news has virtually vanished.

Now any witness to an event can simply snap a photo with their smartphone and post it to social media almost instantly, thus making it much easier to share news with the world, while most photojournalists use DSLR cameras, which do not allow instant sharing of the photos, thus forcing the photographer to wait until he or she has access to a computer to share their photos with the world.

And possibly even more important is the nature of the photos being shared on social media-the people taking these photos and sharing them online don’t have to wait to write an article about the photo or let their publisher see them first-they can simply post them instantly and say whatever they want about the event depicted in their photo.

Technology like this that allows anyone to become a type of journalist is the reason why many people believe that the roles of traditional journalists will soon vanish and be replaced by normal, everyday people.

Johnstown: Third Fastest Shrinking City In The US

According to a list recently released by 24/7 Wall Street, Johnstown and its surrounding area is officially the third fastest shrinking city in the United States, with the only ones listed above it being Pine Bluff, Arizona and Farmington, New Mexico.

When describing Johnstown, 24/7 Wall Street said “Most metro areas with declining populations also have declining economies. Few had as rapidly shrinking GDPs as Johnstown, however. The metro area’s economic output contracted by an average of 2.4% annually between 2011 and 2015. As is common in areas with significant population declines, property values are low in Johnstown. The typical area home is worth only $89,100, one of the lowest median home values of all U.S. metro areas.”

From 2011 to 2016, the population of Johnstown decreased by 5.50 percent, the average household income was a mere $38,512 (compared to the nationwide average of over $50,000), and the unemployment rate was 6.1 percent, versus the nationwide average unemployment rate of 4.7 percent.

Johnstown is shrinking fast, and many are now wondering whether the city will be able to recover, or if it is destined to go the way of so many other small cities-slowly fading into the background over time.

Respect Your Peers (Fellow photographers)

I have recently been seeing this a lot in social media, so I wanted to make a short video of it.

Portraiture Advice From A Beginner

Portraiture From a Beginner

Mr. Smith, Greater Johnstown Senior High School Principle

To a young photographer with little to no experience, portraiture can be a very daunting experience to try.

A portrait is any photograph where your subject is a person, although normally, a portrait is more of a posed photo instead of the more candid ones.

This photo here is of my niece, Aria, when we went for a hike one day in the woods near her aunt's house.

The reason portraiture is a little scary to most new photographers is because it can seem so formal, like something that only professionals can really do, but in reality, that's not true. Every time you lift you camera and take a picture of another person, you are taking a portrait.

My brother, Melvin, and his daughter, Arial. 

To take a portrait, you don't necessarily have to bring your subject into a studio and spend twenty minutes getting a perfect pose out of them. Just try to capture their personality in your photos. That's really the ultimate goal of any portrait photographer, to just capture the personality of their subject and tell a story about the person with a photo.

When you're taking a photo of someone, do your best to make them feel comfortable. If they're nervous about being in front of the camera, you won't capture an authentic vision of who they are, because everyone acts different whenever they're in front of a camera. 

Make your subject forget that the camera is there. Make them think you're just a normal person-one of their friends even, and that's how you get the most genuine depiction of who a person truly is. 

Nikon D3300 Review

Now, I know this review is probably more than a little late, considering that the D3300 has been out for a long while now, and has technically been replace by the D3400, but I still want to write this, because I want to give my opinion on the camera as a teenage amateur photographer.

Now, my school’s journalism department owns the Nikon D3300 with the 18-55mm kit lens, and we also have a collection of older Nikkor lenses that belong to film SLR cameras, but due to Nikon’s choice to keep their lens mount the same, the lenses still work with the D3300-albeit only on manual exposure mode and with no auto focus.

The camera performs fairly well with the kit lens, and it offers a nice little range, from a wide angle to a short telephoto, and works for everything from landscapes to portraits, although it’s not the sharpest lens available.

Nikon D3300 with 18-55mm kit lens.

The camera focuses fairly quickly, but not in like a split-second time, like some other cameras are supposedly able to do.

The camera is fairly easy to use, and I was able to learn the basic, and even some of the more advance controls, in about a week or two, and then I quickly learned how to operate the rest of the camera, to the point where I am now able to use the camera in whatever shooting mode the situation requires, including full manual mode.

Shot In Manual Mode with The Nikon D3300 and 18-55MM Kit lens

With five frames per second continuous shooting, the camera works fairly well in situations where I want to catch a lot of photos in a short amount of time, which isn't very often.

With an Iso range of one hundred to twenty five thousand and six hundred, the D3300 performs fairly well in low light, although the higher ISO's definitely introduce their fair share of noise to your photos, so I recommend shooting at the lowest ISO possible and changing your other settings accordingly.

The D3300 does include a live view mode, although I rarely use it due to several reasons: It lacks and adjustable screen, so even when shooting in live view, the camera needs to be directly in front of you in order for you to see exactly what you are shooting. Also, the focus in live view is not very great, and is much slower than the focus when using the viewfinder to frame your subject.

Overall, the D3300 is a good camera for beginners such as myself, although I wouldn't recommend it to more experienced/professional photographers.