Daily Nebraskan: Through Our Lens

I can pretend I know exactly what I’m doing when I’m on a photo assignment, but the truth is most of the time I have doubts running through the back of my head.

I have been shooting for less than a year at the time that I am writing this, and there’s always some part of me that questions whether or not I’m getting the best moment from an event, composing my frames the right way or approaching subjects in the best fashion. A million different variables go into the makings of a good photograph, and trying to control as many of those factors as possible is one of the things I’m working on. Tonight I came closer than I have before to feeling like a true photojournalist.

I covered the FUSION party’s election night watch party, which was the culmination of weeks of work towards becoming the next party to control the Association of Students of the University of Nebraska. Party members were milling around the back section of Yia Yia’s, a pizza joint in downtown Lincoln, which they had reserved for that night. I shot for about an hour and my brain was in regular expose, compose and take your time doing it mode. Looking back through my take, I took some frames that I was happy with while my brain was in that mode.
Then the phone call came that everyone had been waiting for.

FUSION presidential candidate Reid DeSpiegelaere walked outside to receive the results of the election via phone, and internal vice presidential candidate Kiana Mathew and external vice presidential candidate Emily Schlichting followed closely behind.

My brain went into a completely different mode at this point, and it’s hard to describe. I knew that, in the next 10 minutes, I had to take photos that told the story and captured the emotion of those 10 minutes. The light in the restaurant was awful at best, and I struggled to manually focus, compose and point my hot-shoe flash in the right direction all at the same time. Mathew was crying in front of me and I ended up quickly getting the shot I needed there. DeSpiegelaere was standing on a booth telling the crowd that their party had made it through and would participate in a runoff election with NVISION next Tuesday, and I layered and shot that photo next. I moved further towards the back of the crowd after DeSpiegelaere’s speech and found Matthew again, sitting next to Schlichting in a booth alone.

In the chaos surrounding them, they found a spot to celebrate about their party surviving the first round of the election, and, to me, this moment was stronger than any of the others I captured that night.

For one of the first times I felt like my mind took control and I knew exactly what to look for and what to shoot. I found the right moments and captured them in a way that I felt told the story of the night.

It’s a good feeling.