This slideshow is about the Hall Council’s annual “Puppy Petting Pen” event hosted on campus, and I wanted to show the actual event itself juxtaposed against the planning of the event talked about over the voiceover. It is almost a narrative arc that pans from the collective atmosphere of the event, showcasing how students engaged with the event in such a positive way, to lots of pictures of the puppies interacting with the people themselves. By adding in an interview with Shelby Crowe, the President of the Hall Council, the story is a lot more holistic and tells the viewer just how much effort and time goes into planning an event, and how much it can mean for the people putting it on. Crowe was very happy to talk about the event via an interview while it was happening. 

I chose to photograph the event from a variety of perspectives to provide a total look at the environment (in wider shots that establish the setting and close-ups that show the joy on people’s faces). The slides are ordered roughly to transition from the general scene to the specific; this starting with a wide shot of multiple people to establish the large crowd, then narrowing down through the interactive shots like the puppies play-fighting and the people interacting with the puppies through the pen fence, and ends with settling on the quiet moments like the puppies sitting on people’s shoulders/laps. My chosen pacing allows the viewer to be drawn into the event as a whole, the “big picture,” before finding the individual experiences of students within it. I experimented with video in this audio slideshow as well because I wanted to capture how crazy the experience was within the pen for anyone who did not go. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to bring my tripod into the pen due to safety concerns with the puppies, but I opted to bring just my camera in for a more casual video shot. Regarding audio and text, I integrated Shelby Crowe’s interview to act as the narrative’s backbone and I tried to match the photos to what she was saying when I could. As mentioned, I wanted the audio to feel like a behind-the-scenes look into how the people made the event as special as it was, and to tell students that they too could be involved with curating special college memories like that. 

Reflecting on the process, finding a healthy balance between the chaotic energy of a puppy event with intentional photography was the greatest challenge. What worked well was the candid approach and finding those five-second moments like the puppy over the girl’s shoulder, and also capturing those more solitary moments like the puppies by themselves to provide a necessary breather in the narrative flow. After all, the event was pretty much just a constant stream of people getting in and out of the petting pen. If I were to do this again, I would likely capture more high-angle shots to better portray the layout of the pens and the set-up, as some ground-level shots like the opening grassy shot were occasionally obstructed by the fence. This is to say that sometimes that was a choice to add in some leading lines into my photos. I chose to include photos that paint the interaction, like student Jackie Perez-Parra playing with the puppies and the puppies doing things on their own, because they best showcase the bonds created during the event (so many students stayed for the entire time because they wanted to spend more time with the puppy they dubbed “their’s”), but I excluded images that felt too cluttered or lacked a clear focal point. Ultimately, I learned that in a high-energy environment with people constantly being churned in and out, anticipation of those key intimate moments when the people are really experiencing candid emotions produces much more visually interesting results than shooting the action as it happens.