Judo Class by Jennifer Kay

The assignment was to shoot a portrait of a Miami teenager who had turned to judo to turn his life around. I looked at the exercise as another opportunity to problem solve. The problems were: lighting, a limited lens and noisy backgrounds.

I was shooting with a 50mm normal lens inside a gym under florescent lights. I moved forward and backward along the sidelines to frame the teen working with younger judo students or sparring with this classmates. With his dark skin, if I shot him in front of the blue padding that lined the gym’s walls, he tended to disappear. I had to keep moving to keep the background behind him light so that he stood out.

I looked for graphic elements and movements that captured the rigors of the judo practice. Keeping the background clean was a constant challenge -- if it wasn’t too dark, it was filled with gym equipment and cluttered doorways.

Once I established the limitations of the assignment -- the lighting, noisy backgrounds, the focal length of my lens, the speed of the action in front of me, etc. -- I found I was free to do whatever I wanted. Identifying and solving an assignment’s technical challenges up front means I can shoot however I want as I go. It’s easier to make adjustments while shooting than to try to fix problems later while processing the images.

A Day at the Zoo by Jennifer Kay

I approach shooting family pictures the same way I approach other assignments. I try to keep backgrounds clean, and I look for candid moments and graphic elements that will keep the images from devolving into static snapshots.

 I recently spent the day at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago with my brother and his family. It was cold, so we spent most of our time inside the buildings where the great apes, primates and big cats were housed. 

In the great ape house, we watched zoo trainers work with two gorillas through a mesh wall. I saw how the gorillas would mimic the movements of their trainers, and I wanted to show a kind of mirror image illustrating that behavior. 








Shooting through the glass of their enclosure, I framed the gorilla and the trainer with a piece of the wall between them.

Elsewhere, I looked for ways to show the relationship between the animals in their enclosures and the humans watching them. I tried to capture frames of my family and the apes in profile, of the animals in motion and the size differences between the humans and the zoo animals.