Recently I've been placed in charge of photography as a part of the media staff for a nonprofit organization group here in Minneapolis that's fairly new to the game, although after it's first show that it put on to help raise money to build a school in India it's beginning to expand quickly. The group is called Face Forward, and it focuses on putting on performing and visual arts shows to raise money for multiple causes, hence it's motto "Humanity Through Art". Since it's first show, the group has been expanding as I mentioned and part of that expansion has been to hire new media staff. I've been around since day 1 so I'm used to being one of the two people that was in charge of media output. Recently, we've taken on a crew of 4 videographers who I'm now working with, so instead of "You're one of the main outlets" it's now "you're helping out on the set".

What does any of this have to do with journalism? Quite a bit, actually. One of the main projects that the video crew is working on, in addition to creating a promo video for the upcoming second show is to create a documentary on the startup of the group and the process of preparing a show of this type. Being the only photographer in the group as of this writing I'm in charge of the still images that will be published in a book format publication that will be released with the video documentary. This means working in groups hardcore. I usually work alone so I've always been the boss and controlled my output 100%. Setup, style, editing, etc. That's changed. I now have 4 others to consult with on what everyone wants out of the project, types of shots that we absolutely need and shots that are extra goodies are decided on as a group, the look and feel of our finished product is a group effort as opposed to a one man job.

The first day of working with the new crew I was a little restrained, not knowing what to expect from them. Will they be professional or not know what they're doing at all? Are they people I can work with? How demanding are they in terms of what they want from me? These questions got answered fairly quickly into the first day of working on a set with them, to my great relief everyone was very professional and knew what they were talking about, and pretty much let me do my thing as long as I got the necessary shots. Despite having very easy people to work with, I learned quite a bit about working with others. There are still other issues to address such as do lights satisfy everyone? could we be shooting from a better vantage point? If so, which of the current angles can we sacrifice in order to get that viewpoint? And most importantly, who's driving everyone onto location today?

Working with others has multiple advantages, especially for a documentary project such as this one. We have a video camera for each person and a still camera for myself, which means shooting multiple angles at once is possible, making the job much faster than if you were to do it on your own. Getting a second opinion on a viewpoint or a light setup is made possible since there's more than one knowledgeable person with you, with teamwork comes better results.

Overall, it's a new experience, at least for me. It's a new style of journalism also, I haven't touched the documentary world a whole lot, and I'm doing it with a great group of people. Given all of the new things I'm doing in the media world I thought I would share with everyone here