2007 Flying Short Course: Here's Why I'm Going

 

 

By Donald R. Winslow

AUSTIN, TX (October 19, 2007) – The 50th annual NPPA Flying Course at the end of October is a landmark, tangible testimony to the educational mission that the organization has maintained for five decades as its primary focus. And I’m going because as photojournalism continues to change and grow, there’s a lot I can learn from some of the industry’s best photojournalists. The Flying Short Course gives me a chance to sit five feet from them and hear their words, see their work, ask them questions, and get a sense of where the craft is going and what it’s going to take to produce the best work in the coming years.

Given the national traveling faculty, the local regional speakers, and the folks who are also attending one of the three stops, this is a concentrated opportunity in a supercharged environment to become reinvigorated. I want to hear the real story behind the Emmy Award-winning broadband video, “Michigan Marines: Band Of Brothers,” that David Gilkey worked on for the Detroit Free Press; to hear what Rick Rickman has to say about freelancing in today’s environment, and whether freelancers are going to have to follow in the footsteps of newspaper staff photographers and start shooting video and producing multimedia packages too; and to pick the brains of Andrew DeVigal from The New York Times about what he thinks the next big breakthrough is going to be for multimedia on the Web and the future of the design environment that we’ll be working in.

As if that weren’t already enough for one day, three of my favorite photojournalists are also on the traveling faculty: Carolyn Cole from the Los Angeles Times, Mary F. Calvert from The Washington Times, and Renée C. Byer from the Sacramento Bee. All three of them fascinate me, for different reasons. Cole amazes me because she can consistently go from story to story, around the world, and bring back the same caliber of images that are on par with her Pulitzer Prize-winning and Robert Capa Gold Medal-winning work. How she maintains that intensity while appearing as calm and collected as a floral still life intrigues me. Calvert never fails to make me laugh at how she seems to be able to talk anyone into almost anything; her personality is such that most people are probably disappointed when she’s done photographing them and it’s time for her to leave. The people who are blessed with her kind of personality, combined with her photographic skills, can make it look really easy to do what the rest of us struggle to try to even come close to in quality. And Byer is just one of those photographers who find a great story and bring it to life the way a treasure hunter on a vast beach of endless sand finds the one gold coin that’s buried on the island. Just look at how she spotted Cyndie French and one of her children walking across a parking lot at the end of a long, exhausting, hot day in Sacramento after a breast cancer fund raiser and turned a five-minute conversation with French into a Pulitzer Prize-winning feature story. Talk about having the gift.

So for these reasons, and to honor all those who came before me in the spirit of teaching and sharing for five decades, I’ll be at the Flying Short Course. I hope to see you there as well.

 

The 50th Anniversary Flying Short Course

 

 

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