Photographers focus on experimentation

Studying photographs has always brought me the same excitement as ripping open gifts as a child.

At the Daily Bruin, my job is to make sure our photography department can provide you with this same sentiment.

Here, I will explain the changes we’re making to do just that.

One of our major additions is the new Daily Bruin photography blog, which has the capacity to become a boundless space for both our own photographic work and that of the UCLA community.

The blog will provide our photographers the chance to digitally publish their more creative, unconventional work as a supplement to our newspaper content.

You can, and we encourage you to, submit your work to the blog through our themed reader-submission projects.

We hope to spark and facilitate an ever-evolving discussion between you and our photographers. Readers can comment on every blog entry; we want to hear about your photo ideas, your thoughts and any relevant Web sites and online resources that come to mind.

The Daily Bruin as a whole is adjusting to make our content more versatile and accessible.

Now, with the addition of a Daily Bruin photography page to our new Web site, finding our photo galleries and multimedia projects is easy.

You’ll find our featured galleries in the top menu, and our most recently added galleries in chronological order and by section.

Interested in football? Prime magazine? What about concerts and events on campus? Find galleries like these at the top of our page.

Feel free to e-mail us or post a comment to tell us what you’re interested in, and we’ll work to put that type of content at the top so you can browse through them conveniently.

Our Photo page also features an embedded slideshow of reader submissions to our Daily Bruin Flickr pool, and a direct link to Flickr so you can submit your own photos.

To complement the enhanced visibility of our online content, you can also expect to see improvements in our photographic work.

When it comes to our work in this upcoming year, experimentation is our focus.

There is no line dividing photojournalism and fine-art photography. Our work is a fusion of the two, and we will strive to push the envelope in both of these disciplines.

This year you will witness major changes in the Daily Bruin photographers’ eyes. We will strive for more innovative compositions and complex layering from fresh angles of view.

Experimentation extends also to our journalistic endeavors. Look for more stories focused on people in the UCLA community covered more creatively than our traditional portraits and general-event coverage.

The media through which we report on these stories will also change drastically.

Nowadays, the definition of photojournalism has expanded beyond the still image. Today’s photojournalist can be considered a multimedia master who supplements the traditional pictures with video and audio.

Don’t get me wrong ““ sometimes a single photograph is powerful enough to tell the entire story. But with our new philosophy of experimentation, get ready for a revolutionized photography department that produces content in multiple forms.

What revolutions do you hope to see in Photo? E-mail msugarman@media.ucla.edu to tell us what you think.

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