make new friends, but keep the old

tonight i was reviewing some multimedia pieces that i worked on earlier this year — namely, the one from my final photo class, documentary photojournalism. i took it in the spring, and each student in the class had a semester-long story to work on. no other assignments, just focusing on going in-depth.

i was so looking forward to it... the time to spend on just one story, not a lot of mini-assignments and then cramming the last 2 weeks to get a good 8-10 picture package for my final story (as the other classes in the major were).

but it didn't quite work out that way. my story was on quinceaneras, the 15th birthday party that many latin cultures go all out for and throw a party bigger than most weddings i've attended. though it took me all semester to get contacts and i ended up doing the story in essentially 2 days, looking back on it, i realized how much fun it was and how much i learned in the process.

my photos were good. i'm really proud of them. i spent 17 hours straight photographing and shooting video on the day of one of the quinces. probably 11 hours for the other. and lord knows how many hours editing. it was the first project i learned video on, first project using finalcut pro, and while i think my video skills have improved tremendously since then, i miss taking photos. looking for that ONE moment that will tell that prism of that story better than all the other moments prior. observing, waiting, moving, composing as i go. video is a totally different workflow, and i think my brain has been operating in that mode ever since the summer. i've loved it, but tonight, i remembered that my first love is photography and that some stories need to be told in a series of still images, rather than a rapid succession of moving ones.

its like that old song that my mom used to sing to me:
"make new friends, but keep the old
one is silver and the other is gold"

cheesy, but applicable. video is silver — new, fun, in demand. photos are gold. they aren't going anywhere and they are what have given me the visual and mental tools for creating so many other things in life. becoming a photographer has changed the way i think, the way i see the world, the way i organize and plan, the way i speak. everything. so all of that has translated to video. gold indeed.