Getting to know feature photography

John Deere technician students remove a CCS seed hose on a tractor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photos by Parth Pitroda 

 Feature photography is fun and tricky at the same time. Feature photography is the lighter, more entertaining side of news.

    Photographing features can be fun because you get to meet new people doing odd and out of the ordinary things. 
   The kind of thing you may find in feature photography is people doing interesting activities that are of human interest. Some of these activities, for example, could be a man running with one fake,  metal leg; a blind person dancing on the stage; a dare devil jumping off a cliff. The more the photographer looks around, the more feature photography he or she may find.

Auto body tech student Chandler Boyer feels for Imperfections on a car panel.

  Feature photography can also be tricky. The trickiness occurs when looking for it. The photojournalist has to be alert while shooting an assignment, and even after, because you never know when there is a feature photography opportunity. Features also give the photojournalist a change from plain old hard news.

   Hunting for feature photography has been quite a journey for me.  I had to deal with poor indoor lighting. Camera controls were limited because of the lighting situation, which meant shallow depth of field and a slower shutter speed. 
   The search for feature finding was harder than I expected because the School of Technology, which was my beat had very little going on this week. I had to go there spend all day waiting for something interesting to photograph. Photographing people has always been a challenge for me as opposed to tangible objects and still is so no, I am not getting used to people photography.     Composing the photographs in a tight spot with very little room to move around is what was challenging in this assignment. The type of lens I was using also limited my widest aperture to f3.5, with only an 18mm lens being widest which challenged my camera skills. I feel that feature photography is fun and can be challenging in some ways.