Show Me How It's Done

Her work literally causes my heart to beat faster: Melanie Burford. 

RIT is hosting a series of workshops beginning in May and going into September. There's a video storytelling workshop August 22-26 that you should look into if you have any desire or affinity for photojournalism. Evan Vucci, William Snyder, and Melanie Burford are going to be teaching it. 

Today our professor got to the heart of something. He talked for a long while and finally pointed out that we put up these walls and fronts to protect ourselves and it hinders us when we try to relate to people we are photographing. It's really rare to find people that don't put up walls and who are happy with who they are without the straining to be cool. If you don't want to be like anyone else, don't be like anyone else. And they aren't- they're honest, open-faced people and I think because they love their lives, they find beauty in the lives of others. Donald Miller makes an excellent point... 

"Everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves. I mean, maybe people want to be themselves, but they want to be different, with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. It's a fact. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn't want to be anybody else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him." - Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

What a foreign concept. 

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 Personal note:

I just ate an entire box of Pop Tarts only to realize that one Pop Tart is chock full of 200 calories. Where do they hide those darn calories?