Life Through a Lens

"Photography is a means of recording forever the things one sees for a moment." —Aaron Sussman


This weekend was the first time I fully appreciated and understood the beauty of photography. For my semester project, I'm covering Rood Music who had their first live show this weekend in Lawrence, Kansas, so my boyfriend, best friends and I road tripped to Kansas City and made a day out of it. We carried around cameras all day and after loading them on my computer, I realized we perfectly documented all of our adventure. 


We started off the day at Oklahoma Joe's in Kansas City, one of the top 12 places to eat before you die. We had to wait in line for about 30 minutes before we could order and started talking to the adults next to us. Turns out they are all from Chicago close to the area we are, and we had a good laugh with them in line and learned about each other's lives. While we were eating, the MU-kU basketball game started.

After lunch, we drove to the Plaza. Someday I'd love to go back there and just spend the entire day taking pictures of all the houses and churches. The architecture is beautiful. We walked around and did some shopping, constantly refreshing the basketball game score on our phones. After we left Forever 21, the game was in OT, so we tried to find a place that would have the game on tv. We finally found a sports bar and ran in for the last 8 seconds of the game. We left the second the buzzer went off and the bar full of Kansas fans went crazy. Then we walked down by the river and pouted for a bit after realizing that we were going to be on the kU campus that night and have to deal with all the Kansas fans celebrating.

As we were taking pictures on a bridge, we saw a large group of people holding up a bunch of poster boards. Being 3 curious journalists, we walked over to see what they said. The signs said "Michelle, will you marry me?" We started talking to them and they told us how the couple was going to be coming around on a horse and carriage ride and stopping right in front of the sign for the man to propose. We offered to take pictures and a video for them. James went across the street and got the whole proposal on video, while I stayed with the signs and took photos. I was so nervous because I've never had to photograph something spontaneously and where I'd only have a few shots to get the perfect picture. The sun was setting quickly, so I had to work with the settings on the camera. After we combine our video and photos, we have a beautiful compilation of the proposal.

After the proposal, we continued on our way to Lawrence, Kansas. All of the kU fans were already out at the bars completely drunk and wearing "Muck Fizzou" shirts, so we drove around blasted Rood Music's "Doin' It (Mizzouted)" song and screaming MIZ out the window. We arrived at The Granada and checked out the area we would be working with. James is working on making a music video for one of Rood Music's songs, so we were able to bounce ideas off of each other for good shots. After we got all set up, James and I decided to walk around and find somewhere to eat. After we saw a few drunk kU fans in the street, we decided it would be a perfect time to interview some and see what they had to say about the game. We shot hilarious videos of 3 different groups of kU fans, which James hopes to put together if we end up playing them in play offs. 

After we finished interviewing people, we headed back to The Granada for the show. Photographing the concert was a great experience. I got some good shots, but also learned a lot. I was so focused on "oh my gosh, I need to get a good shot of Roy singing," when really I should have gotten more of the group as a whole, detail shots and more crowd shots. It was also really difficult to work with the stage lighting, so editing the photos was a challenge. Looking back on it, there's definitely a lot of things I would have done differently, but I'm happy with the work I did considering it was my first time photographing a concert environment. It was definitely an exciting, journalistic weekend!