After work stroll through the park.
Shaun finishes his long day of work at the park alone, relaxing.
Some of Church Hill shining as the sun sets on the city.
Jennifer and Nellie relax on a bench to end a stressful day.
Zeus and owner Otis took a break from an intense game of tug-a-war.
Jennifer soaking up the sun, reading a book.
Nellie posed in the dog park as the sun set on the city.
Zeus and Otis’s intense game of tug-a-war.. who is winning?
Nellie trying to navigate the grated steps.
Enjoying the aerial view of Church Hill from Jefferson Park.
Looking up at downtown RVA.
All my photos for #TheWorldsAtVCU #Richmond2015 #bikes #hashtags
Traveling through time and space with Eurah J.
It’s Wednesday morning and Jess is holding on to her Apricot Mimosa at Perly’s Delicatessen in downtown Richmond. I think she will make it through the week.
Thanksgiving in Alexandria, VA. Buses are still running and people are still living.
Ex-Italian roommate, Rebecca, and I are hiking down from the steep rice paddies in Yangshuo of China’s Guangxi Region.
Man with Vera Bradley purse watches the Venice Beach skaters catch some air by the beach.
LXGX Models and Stylists at NuSpace in Los Angeles pose for a quick photoshoot before the live mannequin Fashion show!
Taking a run through the San Fernando Valley. Are we south of the border yet?
Robert Tillery and his backyard overlooking the San Fernando valley of California, as he heads out to a birthday party at the cigar lounge, I mean park.
Man freshens up his ‘do’ in the public eye of downtown Los Angeles, I suppose a female friend asked him to combover.
Sam hanging halfway out of his loft apartment in the fashion district of downtown Los Angeles. He blows out his cigarette smoke as half his mind is still in Richmond and the other half is in LA.
Grace at Speakeasy’s Wine N’ Paint night in downtown Richmond. Fortunately by the look of her painting, you couldn’t even tell she skipped the wine and went straight to the martini.
Fresh clips
I wasn’t sure how to make this interesting, but I honestly hope I did.
Students walk through a brick walkway on the VCU campus, headed about their day.
Students walking by have become accustomed to the disruptions the renovations of James Branch Cabell Library have brought to the center of the VCU campus
Large holes, their purpose a mystery, exist in parts of the upcoming library expansion.
Students utilize bicycles to move to and from campus at a quicker space. It is unclear how the upcoming UCI Road World Championships will affect casual riders.
Tyler Conrad, the manager of Break Point in the VCU Student Commons, looks up from a quick snack for a portrait.
Hibbs Hall was built in the 1950s as the first new space for academic instruction on the VCU campus.
Cassandra Hudson stops for a portrait on the way home from class.
Dustin Reinink hides from the camera following a particularly awful pun from the photographer.
A driver finishes his delivery in front of a pedestrian bridge built to transport people over Franklin Street during the UCI Road World Champions.
Students play with their dogs during a quiet afternoon in the compass.
Hello World!
Hi! I’m Lauren, an RVA native and senior at VCU studying Strategic Advertising in the Mass Communications department. I signed up for this course as a way to dip my toes in journalism a bit, and with the world coming to RVA for the bike race, it seemed like an exciting time to take this class!
Outside of academics, I’m heavily involved with my sorority on campus, have a deep love for theater and the arts, volunteer with a local nonprofit, and work as a nanny after school during the week. Fairly recently, I was a social media intern for a non-profit and scholarship program called Project Yellow Light and am excited to dive into the social networking portion of this course!
I’m definitely not a bicyclist and haven’t owned a bike since the 10th grade. So with that said, my bicycling knowledge is next to none, but I’m looking forward to learning about the culture of it as the UCI Road World Championships come to good old RVA.
As far as social media goes: I use Instagram and Facebook on the regular, I use Twitter to lurk on various accounts, have dabbled on Tumblr, wasted many hours on Pinterest, and use Snapchat to send my friends generally embarrassing and rather unimportant pictures.
Cheers to a fun semester with Crowdsourcing the Worlds in RVA!
Wife and Life
Couldn’t get the fire engine out due to snow. Had to pile equipment and personnel into a 4 wheel drive brush truck. Picture was taken in 2010 on the return trip to the firehouse.
My wife and God-daughter excited to ride the tractor to pick out pumpkins at the pumpkin patch. She wanted all the pumpkins in the field and made me carry as many as I could on the way back to get the discounted price! They love hanging out together. Taken in October 2014.
God daughter helping me water my Mothers plants while they were in Key West. She thought it would be funny to soak me rather than the plants. She loves spending time in her nightgowns more than any other type of clothing. Taken in August 2014.
On the range with work testing out new suppressors for all different weapons. Shooting Benelli M2 with SilencerCo Salvo. I will use this suppressor from now on hunting waterfoul. In this picture, I am patterning this gun. Taken in May 2015.
Getting one of my diving certifications through a class taken at VCU. Water temperature that day was 34 degrees. Made for a lovely day. From February 2013.
Working on my dump truck with a co-worker. Who knew a 1972 Ford F600 could look so good? Taken July 2015. 
Spending time with my wife the week before we started school and my final semester at VCU. She is in nursing school so we don’t always have a lot of time together. Also that evening we enjoyed some of the corn that is seen in the background in the field behind her house. Taken in August 2015.
Working on the farm building a shooting range. Dog days of summer, but that tractor had the coldest air-conditioning of any tractor I have ever used. Clearing out brush and getting ready to grade the soil to build a more permanent range. From July 2014.
Clematis’ first bloom of the season. I do landscaping/nursery/farming work and have thousands of plants planted everywhere. This was taken at a customers house that absolutely loved this plant. From May 2015.
This is one of my most fondest memories from when I was in Key West with my best friend. We caught many different species of fish and a couple of citations on our kayaks. Cannot wait to go back. Took the kayaks out everyday and to this day, this is still the home screen on my phone. Taken in July 2012.
The Great VCU Bike Race Book
[This is a note from Dr. Gardner Campbell, VCU’s Vice-Provost for Learning Innovation and Student Success and Dean of University College.]
Welcome! This course is part of a larger project called The Great VCU Bike Race Book. Your work in this course counts not only for the course, but also for the entire university—and the world. In fact, The Great VCU Bike Race Book demonstrates to the world what happens when our students and faculty think together about a single event, question, or challenge. You are doing work connected to historic event, and you are helping to create history yourself. Eventually, the best student work will be preserved in the final edition of the “book,” archived in Scholars Compass at Cabell Library for future generations to enjoy and learn from.
We hope you will find your course a perfect blend of fun, learning, and creativity. Bring your best work to this opportunity! The world will be following along.
Dr. Gardner Campbell
Vice-Provost for Learning Innovation and Student Success
Dean, University College
Best practices — & an assignment — for cell phone pics
We’ve all taken a ton of photos with our cell phones–some beautiful like postcards and others so bad we hope no one ever sees them. In 2015 it’s expected that worldwide we’ll take a trillion…with a T!…photos with our cell and smart phones.
There’s also a debated stat out there that 90% of people have only EVER taken a photo with a camera phone, as opposed to a real phone. (Not sure I’m buying that.)
This outlines some best practices…and an assignment…for taking better cell and smart phone pics. After this not only will you be ready to take some great pictures connected to the UCI Worlds, but what you post on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter will get more traffic…no kidding! More…
Best practices — & an assignment — for tweets
Most if not all of you probably have a Twitter account. We need to get your Twitter handle (mine is @jcsouth and Tim’s is @mediacabbage). So please provide that here. (I’ve got the handles for: Angela Judson, Audry Dubon, Benjamin Weiner, Niyah White, Rodrigo Arriaza, Samantha Federico and Travis Ellison.)
Before we examine how to use Twitter, let’s consider why journalists use Twitter. Here’s a PBS video that provides this context: More…
Assignments through the weekend
Hi, folks. Thanks to (almost) everyone who provided the URL for their Rampages blog. I’ve now aggregated all of your blogs on our class blog — so your latest entries will be displayed on our home page. That helped me learn a lot about each of you. What an eclectic group: a pre-med major who was a standout high school journalist and runs Brownies Production Company on the side … a social justice and econ major who leads a high school ministry called YoungLife … a broadcast journalism student who’s backpacked alone all across Europe and Asia, mostly to eat spicy food … a member of the punk band Partition (hey, I found you on Bandcamp) … The list goes on.
So where do we go from here? First, we want to give everybody a crash course in journalism — so we’ll all know the basic ethical values and skills for being a reporter. So make a free account at NewsU.org — a journalism training program funded by the Knight Foundation and the Poynter Institute (a media think tank in Florida). Then complete these training modules:
Journalism Fundamentals: Craft & Values — https://www.newsu.org/courses/journalism-fundamentals-craft-and-values (Be sure to do the segment called “Your Turn: Try Your Skills.”)
News Sense: The Building Blocks of News — http://www.newsu.org/courses/news-sense-building-blocks-news
The Lead Lab — http://www.newsu.org/courses/lead-lab
Next week, we’ll get into creating content for social media platforms.
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