2024

The theater departments performance of Mamma Mia, was highly anticipated, and they actually sold out every show, which made it tremendously important that the photos captured the magic of the performance that had clearly captivated audience members. I attend a full dress rehearsal the night before the opening performance, which gave me and the two of my staffers I brought along  a much greater range of movement inside the theater, and allowed for angles we might not hae gotten otherwise. The show was fantastic, and the photos I feel captured the energy and enthusiasm of the performers. 

The annual senior sunrise - where seniors gather on the beach near school to watch the sunrise and commemorate the start of the year - was the first event I photographed this year. I was initially hesitant given a variety of factors, particularly that expensive camera equipment and sand and water seemed like a poor combination. But I did end up going, and I loved how these photos came out. The whole event was very sentimental and fun for the seniors, and I feel like these photos capture that wholesomeness and fun.   

The Prism Concert is one of the most major events we cover at our school, and the sprawling nature of the performance means that we have to organize several photographers to cover the event. See more about that in the editorial leadership tab. From a technical standpoint, I tried to focus on color rich and highly detailed images of the performers, capturing the intense individual effort and various personalities that must come together to produce this show.  

The Impromptu concerts can almost be classified as a fun twist on the traditional drab piano recital, and the show usually features costumes, collaboration with band and strings students, and lots of colors. I tried to capture the much more festive nature of the performances they put on in my photos, and I particularly like how the colors came out as very vibrant. 

These photos were tricky for a lot of reasons.  The first was the issue of getting realistic-looking vapes to photograph (my initial attempt using paper cutouts of vapes went very poorly). This was solved by using the hollow exteriors of real vapes. The next issue was creating hazy smoke, which, after considerable trial and error, I managed to do with a clothes steamer. The hope of adding the smoke to the image was to incur a sickly effect like that of a vape, but the smoke alone failed to create the desired effect, so I used Lightroom to make an HDR composite image, which made the final image look much more eerie and undesirable, befitting the real nature of vapes.

As is well established, the hardest spot to take photos of on our campus is the gym, which is always guaranteed to be poorly lit. This makes for a frustrating mixture when you add a high shutter speed for fast-paced sports like basketball. I tried to compensate by dropping my aperture as low as possible and taking up a strategic position at the end of the court with the strongest overhead lighting.

Spirit Week easily provides some of the best opportunities for photos at Dreyfoos, especially in terms of crowd reaction shots. Our sports games usually get minimal student attendance so the most emotional and energetic we see the collective student body in the stands is during Spirit Week - particularly the Pep Rally. The tricky part of covering a spirit week event though is balancing photos of the action and games going on with photos of the crowd - made especially hard by the fact that the best crowd reactions often happen at the same time as or immediately after the most exciting moments of the games. This requires a constant split attention and you must be ready to spin straight from the action to the crowd at a moment notice. 

Besides those special crowd photos, however, Spirit Week provides lots of other awesome moments to capture. The hardest part of capturing any of these moments is, in my opinion, getting yourself in the right place at the right time. In moments like the Lip Dub filming, you need to stay just ahead of the camera and to the side so as to capture whoever is being filmed clearly, but with something like the dunk tank on Field Day, you need to be focused on the dunk tank's victim right as a student successfully hits the target. Choosing when to be where relies heavily on skills of observation needed as a photographer.