Charles Bertram Year End Show

2005! How can 2005 be coming to an end when it seems like it just started? When I began looking at my photos for this year-end show, I was amazed at how much history I had witnessed in only 365 days: everything from hurricanes to the near demise of the tobacco farmer, gas reaching $3.00 per gallon, a war in Iraq, and the passing of a great Kentuckian-Dr. Thomas D. Clark. In 365 days, I made photographs in Canada, Kentucky, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and West Virginia, all with one goal in mind: to visually record the lives of Kentuckians.

In the simplest terms, a photojournalist’s job is to visually chronicle the everyday lives of our readers. We photograph the joys in life. We also photograph the sadness in life. But any photograph that evokes an emotion is a successful photograph. I hope the photos in this end of year photo show cause you to reflect on the year–both with tears and smiles.

The show can be viewed at heraldleaderphoto.com

(The photo on the title slide is of my son, Michael Bertram, a senior on the University of Kentucky baseball team. He was sliding headfirst into third base in a game played February 18, 2005 in Charleston, South Carolina. I encourage you to come to a UK game this spring to watch an exciting baseball program that is on the rise. Send me an email address and I’ll make sure you receive a schedule.)

Thanks,
Charles Bertram

Perry’s Year in Review

I tried to make my Year in Review as much about music as about photography. Because of the music, I hope my slide show becomes more entertaining. And because there’s photos, the show becomes more than just music. I enjoyed putting together music tracks available in Apple’s GarageBand and chose some photos on the basis of the music I could “compose” to go with them. I hope you enjoy my initial effort. You can see it here. – David Perry

End of the Year for Stephenson

People are always asking me which of my photos is my favorite. I never have a good answer. It always changes, and there are so many that I like for so many different reasons. So from 2005, I’ll pick one to talk about.

Sometimes you like a photo more for the experience of taking it, or being there, or meeting someone, regardless of how the picture comes out in the end. In this case, I was photographing the sunrise at Gethsemani Abbey in Trappist, Ky., in November and thinking to myself how beautiful and peaceful it was out there, and how lucky I was to be there. The only thing missing, I thought to myself, was another person to be in the photo so I could show them enjoying the same moment I was. Before I could even finish that thought, Eddie Ralston crested the hill and sat down to watch the sunrise. We didn’t speak until he started back down the hill, but then had a nice conversation about the beauty of that morning and what it meant to us.

This photo was part of an equally satisfying project that I worked on with Charles Bertram. Dr. Clark’s Kentucky Treasures was first printed in the Herald-Leader but then expanded and printed in book form and published at the beginning of December. At the last minute, I was asked to shoot three of the eleven locations – in three consecutive days no less! Each one of those days was spectacular. Certainly they are three days I’ll remember clearly from 2005.

(Coincidentally, another one of my favorite photos – one that is hanging in my home office, was taken on that same hill at Gethsemani. In 1994, at my father’s invitation, the Dalai Lama visited Berea, Ky., where my father was the President. After his time in Berea, we a jumped in a helicopter and flew to Gethsemani where his holiness was planning to visit the gravesite of an old friend of his, Thomas Merton. The picture on my wall is of my father holding hands with the Dalai Lama as they walk from the helicopter where it landed at Gethsemani. You can see the same statue of St. Joseph in both photos.)

My congratulations go out to the rest of the HL photo staff for their great multimedia shows. I have had a little experience putting a few of these together, so this task probably wasn’t so daunting for me as it may have been for some of the others who were faced with an entirely new way to tell a story and present photos. We in the print media are faced with a pretty steep learning curve when it comes to the new ways of story telling on the internet. My hope is that you’ll be seeing more and more of it on our photo website.

To see my 2005 Year in Review multimedia presentation, click here.

Cornelison year in review!

Being that this was the first year of us doing a “multimedia” presentation, I looked forward to learning how to do it. I must admit, one of the harder parts would be the cutting up of the music to enhance the photos but, like Janet said, we learned in the 11th hour we could not use copyrighted music. Fortunately I had already bypassed this problem. Shooting so many local bands and concerts I contacted my friends who form the band “The Apparitions” and asked if I could use one of their songs, “Emilio” as background for my photos. They gave me an emphatic yes and so it plays on in its entirety. That actually turned out to be the easy part after all. Picking 20-30 photos that I felt represented my year was a little tough, but kind of satisfying at the same time. With so many assignments year after year, it is nice to look back on the year and see it as a complete body of work. Like I say in my show, I know I do ALOT of sports but when I see the other stuff I have done like the Biloxi MS coverage, the Taylor Made Farm stuff, and the Sweet Corn package, it reminds me that I am possibly more well rounded than I sometimes think. At least I hope I am. Guess you all can be the judge after watching the show!

Multimedia Debut

This month we had a crash course on how to piece together a multimedia show, accompanied by all the joy and frustration that comes with learning a new skill. Choosing my favorite pictures and music was the easy part. Feeling my way through the new software was somewhat cumbersome, only because I had never used GarageBand or Soundslides before. The really frustrating part was finding out at the last minute that copyright laws do not allow us to use up to 30 seconds of a song like we had originally thought. So I trashed my carefully crafted masterpiece and went back to the drawing board, or in this case, my computer. In record time I meticulously wove snippets of guitar and piano music into a blanket of sound to soften my voice and help the photos flow better. I think it turned out pretty good for a first attempt and I promise next time will be even better.

Check it out at heraldleaderphoto.com

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