Photo Package

  • Photo Package Link: “Photo Gallery: Pentatonix Plays at Tulsa’s BOK Center” by Tulsa World, a newspaper based in Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Why I Chose It: I love Pentatonix, the hottest group in a cappella music today. (They got their start by winning Season 3 of the NBC series The Sing-Off and have gone on to achieve many accolades, including platinum-selling albums, YouTube videos with billions of views, and two GRAMMY awards.) I’m a visual person, so I always enjoy seeing pictures of my favorite musical group! Since this is a journalism class, however, I wanted to stick to a journalistic source.
  • What I Like About It:
    1. The photos are crisp, pristine, and of excellent quality, with clear images and nice bokeh.
    2. There is a mixture of single-person and group shots.
    3. The photographer did well at getting different positions of the singers when doing group shots: some with their heights staggered, some linear.
  • What I Think Could Have Been Stronger:
    1. I would have liked to see the singers interacting more with the audience and the venue (the BOK Center is a multipurpose arena and indoor-sports arena in Tulsa). Basically, I’d like to see the newspaper putting Tulsa’s unique thumbprint on a Pentatonix concert.
    2. I would like to have seen more personality in each photo. As it is, they’re great shots of great singers, but that’s all they are. I’d like to look at a picture or two and say, “Wow, he really captured the essence of Avi there.” Nothing really stood out as saying “This is Pentatonix” from “This is a rock band.” There was also no emphasis on the characteristic that makes them unique: that they are a band with no instruments.
    3. I can tell the photographer was either close to the stage or had an excellent zoom lens, but I would have liked to see more mid-range or wide-angle shots. (As a nature photographer, I’m normally all in for tight shots, but with people I want to get a sense of story that’s better told with a mix of all three distances.) They do so a bit (once they showed most of the stage and part of the monitors and lights above it; I just would like to have seen more.)
    4. Captions on all of the slides mentioning singer Mitch Grassi misspelled his name as Mitch Grass. This is bad, because the story linked to the photo package spelled it correctly. Miscommunication between journalist and photojournalist, and a bad error not caught by the editor.
    5. The phrase a cappella should have been italicized since it is Latin.