For the fourth spring in a row, this column is profiling a professional in the world of photojournalism. For this issue, John Schultz, photojournalist for the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, is sharing his story and expertise.
Spring 2008
Keeping the yearbook price down so that it is universally affordable can be a challenge. For my school, this required consideration of viable revenue sources beyond advertisements. The winning source for us has been buddy photos.
As a member of the newspaper and yearbook staff during high school, I would always remember the sense of joy and accomplishment when I would see my name in print. I knew journalism was the career for me.
Fifteen years later, the world of newspaper reporting is behind me. No longer am I sitting in my cubicle writing stories and designing pages at a Pittsburgh newspaper. Now I am standing in front of 50 yearbook students, proving to them how journalism can make an impact on their life and give them benefits that are unimaginable.
They stay up late on work nights, suffer the anguish of deadlines, and fill the need for food.
They are the parents of yearbook students.
These parents stay up late to pick up their child from school, spend time and money feeding the staff and suffer as they watch their children learn to balance their lives. But the benefits of yearbook outweigh all that, and they are passionate about the value of the experience to their children.
All of those D-Days during the school year – those deadlines that needed to be met – were just the precursor to your yearbook’s big D-Day – Distribution Day. Distribution is another yearbook job that requires planning, organizing and coordination. It is a lot of work, but that effort before the big D-Day will make handing out the books as rewarding for you as for the recipients.
Photoshop CS2 and CS3 have an option called File Info that can save time in writing and placing captions for photos while helping pho tographers improve their skills.
When photographers open File Info, they should fill in their names under author, then write a standard caption for the photo in the description box. When they close the box and save the file, the information is attached to the photo. Page editors never have to ask who took the photo, and the information about the photo is accurate.
