{"id":319,"date":"2010-11-01T04:11:54","date_gmt":"2010-11-01T04:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/?p=319"},"modified":"2013-09-25T04:15:22","modified_gmt":"2013-09-25T04:15:22","slug":"my-life-as-a-photo-journalist-by-zall-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/?p=319","title":{"rendered":"My Life as a Photo-Journalist, by Zall, 14"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Life as a Photo-Journalist, by Zall, 14<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Hah!<\/a>

Hah! Caught her!<\/p><\/div>\n

Crouched under a bush, I laid down on the dirt; the dusty camera lens poked through a gap next to a mud-stained fencepost. Pulling back the zoom a little bit, I attempted to focus on a group of women trying to sell things down below.\u00a0 I adjusted a few things; no, it\u2019s way to dark, bring up the light settings. Ease down on the button, and\u2026 *click*.\u00a0 Being a photographer overseas isn\u2019t as easy as you may think.\u00a0 As a matter of fact, there can be some major drawbacks and problems along the way.\u00a0 A lot more work and effort goes into each shot than one might believe.<\/p>\n

\"I\u2019m<\/a>

I\u2019m loving her grin!<\/p><\/div>\n

One major problem with shooting photos of the tribal groups is that a lot of them don\u2019t want their picture taken due to religious or community beliefs.\u00a0 A very common belief is that a depiction of them takes away part of their soul.\u00a0 As you can see, this makes the picture process even more complicated, because now you have to hide in a bush, or behind a house.\u00a0 I would often ask my dad to stand still and then act like I was taking his picture, when in truth the lens was focusing over his shoulder on a person behind.<\/p>\n

Another dilemma is that nobody smiles in a photo.\u00a0 Photos are believed to be very serious things, so you must look very serious, leaving most of our portraits looking gloomy or mad.\u00a0 In truth, the people look so much better when they smile.\u00a0 It seems their personalities shine when you can see the wrinkles and teeth.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A sneaky shot of a hard-working mom harvesting manioc root with her hard-sleeping baby.<\/p><\/div>\n

An additional problem is my parents (yes I\u2019m blaming this on them).\u00a0 They like to continue walking on and not stop for a couple of minutes for a good shot.\u00a0 They\u2019re normally almost out of sight on trails, yelling at me to hurry up.\u00a0 Because of this, I can\u2019t get just the right angle or light settings.<\/p>\n

\"One<\/a>

One of the perks of the job\u2026<\/p><\/div>\n

Yet another problem with time is that people don\u2019t stay in one spot or do one thing for very long.\u00a0 Most of the time I may only have half a second of the right angle, and if I don\u2019t click the button on that moment, I miss the shot.\u00a0 I don\u2019t like getting pictures of people when they know they\u2019re getting looked at by a camera lens, so the only way to do that is catch when they\u2019re doing their regular everyday things.\u00a0 So it seems I walk around with my camera out, ready and wasting battery power, a lot more often than I\u2019m actually focused on taking a specific shot.<\/p>\n

Problems, problems, problems; It seem like that all I can talk about, so I have to add:\u00a0 photographing things overseas is one the best things of my life.\u00a0 I love the constant struggle to get the right point of view, and to get the shot just at the right time.\u00a0 I truly think that taking photos in the remote hilltribes of Laos is the best possible photography assignment I can think of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Life as a Photo-Journalist, by Zall, 14 Crouched under a bush, I laid down on the dirt; the dusty camera lens poked through a gap next to a mud-stained fencepost. Pulling back the zoom a little bit, I attempted … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=319"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":324,"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319\/revisions\/324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hilltribeart.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}