A Student’s Point of View: The Value of Volunteering
This is Ashley Crichton writing again for RITphoto! For this post I will be featuring a recent collaboration between the photojournalism and the advertising students at the New York State Special Olympics where RITphoto provided photo coverage for this special event.
February 2018, the photojournalism program under the direction of Josh Meltzer partnered with the New York State Special Olympics Winter Games to cover the events and athletes of the Special Olympics. Josh shared a more complete story and can be read by following this link. Josh and his student leaders shared this opportunity with a wide range of student photographers. This opportunity was embraced by advertising photography students who pitched the idea of shooting dramatic and hero style portraits of athletes during the events. The idea was to also shoot portraits of the athletes and their families at the closing ceremonies memorialize how special this day was to them..
RITphoto students (l- r) Frankie Bonn, Dominick Mull, Mustapha Hussain, Ian Hyland, Llyod McCullough, and Clay Patrick McBride getting ready for artificial light portraits
This was the first time many of the ad photo students had done PJ related work and there was a learning curve for all of us. Learning how to properly caption images and what information to gather from the subjects was probably the biggest challenge we faced. I was assigned to photograph at the Swain Ski Resort and photograph the alpine skiing and snowboarding athletes. It was a great cause to be shooting for and the whole day was a lot of fun. We used Profoto B1 lighting equipment so we could add light needed to make the portraits more dramatic. Here are some examples of portraits that were shot throughout the day.
Saturday evening, the entire event moved to Riverside Convention Center for the closing ceremonies. We set up a backdrop and lights to take portraits of the athletes and their families during this celebration. Here are a sampling of the photos that were made of various winners.
This experience of collaborating with another department was really great. I loved the opportunity to get experience shooting with lights on location and also helping on the larger production that was hosted at the convention center. I have learned from this experience, the more you give, the more you get.