After a record breaking 62 tornados passed through Alabama on April 27, 2011, eight students (including myself) from Western Kentucky University documented the tragedy.
Our work was awarded 3rd place in the college multimedia team reporting category of the Hearst Journalism Awards Program earlier this month.
Bowling Green, KY — 2/22/2012 — Louisville junior Kelsey Thompson (bottom right) leads warm-up exercises with cast members during a rehearsal of “Women and Wallace” in the Gordon Wilson lab theatre on Wednesday. Thompson, the play’s director, is happy with where her cast stands despite a wave of illness. “I think once opening night comes around we’ll be ready,” she said. Performances were held on Feb. 27 and 28 at 8 p.m. in the Gordon Wilson lab theatre.
ELIZABETH FRANTZ/College Heights Herald
Bowling Green, KY — 3/28/2012 — WKU Symphony musician Keith Pennington, of Alexandria, Ky., has been playing the violin since he was 8 years old. Now, twelve years later, he is a music education major here at WKU and is giving lessons. “I have a passion for music and I’d like to inspire children to want to play the violin and enjoy music,” he said.
ELIZABETH FRANTZ/College Heights Herald
Tug, 2012
Photos by Elizabeth Frantz
In a process of personal ethics, I reaffirm the concepts that hold my life´s philosophy in regards to photography. These are compromises wich on occasion come with the heavy burden of that which I live and show through the eyehole. Basic rules of conduct for a photographer:
1. Learn to look without the camera, it´s only a tool, don´t let it decide for you.
2. Experience without knowledge doesn´t lead to the best port. In order to be a photographer you need to prepare, study and comprehend everything that surround you, always be a scholar. Languages must be the first step toward that knowledge.
3. Do not live off dreams, start taking pictures enjoying without losing the illusion nor the thirst for curiosity, thinking always of the present.
4. What to do, how to do it and why do it.
5. Finish what you start because out of optimism the best results are born.
6. Never give up because photodocumentalism is a way of life, the faster you learn this, the better. We are not always prepared to confront the truth.
7. Act first, then think.
8. Always show truth even if it is frustrating. Sometimes we won´t reach our goals but we have to continue. Leave cockiness buried, good photographs and better people are not this way.
9. Be critical and realistic with us and others. Any essay is worth and honest, truthful, objective and constructive critic on behalf of who is watching or admiring the work, and not allways does experience or age give reason to the ones who know. If we believe in the story, then we must have faith in the arguments, accepting others opinions however hurtfull they might be.
10. Let the sentence of the day be “for once in my life I´m going to listen”, you will feel the cure for the world´s evil. Indifference.
11. Don´t let glory consume you. We are not bohemians, nor the chosen ones, nor mass-media stars. The main actors are those who we talk about. With humbleness, our job makes things better… but it can also make them worse.
12. Think about you last, the people around us are first and deserve our time. Stop being selfish. We have beautiful way of life that is hardly understood and better not explained because only those who have turned themselves to Photography know that satisfaction.
