Insatiable Challenge – Boogie Boarding
The second assignment for my journalism class was to spend the day in Waikiki and document sports or action shots. I was lucky to be paired up with the talented Yuko Onizawa for this project.
She is originally from Japan and is pursuing her second bachelor’s degree at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and came here in order to learn english.
I asked her what type of sport she wanted to shoot and she exclaimed “it’s Hawaii!” Of course we headed straight to “the wall.”
We immediately went into work mode and were glued to our cameras, panning the boogie boarders as they rode in wave after wave. Occasionally rogue waves tried to sneak up on us and we ran away as fast as we could, shielding our cameras as if our lives depended on it. It was like we played a game of tag with the ocean swells and the ocean was always “it.”
Almost three hours had passed before we knew it and we met up with our professor, Frederic Larson. He looked through some of our photos and asked, “so what’s the story?” We knew our work was far from done. Interviews.
Yuko seemed to be afraid that our interviewees weren’t going to understand her because of her english (which is a crazy notion because I think she speaks english very well). However, she truly shined as we conducted interviews together. She had a sort of poise and grace in the way she asked questions. It must have been her former job as a radio show host in Japan that seasoned her interviewing skills. I felt lucky to have been her partner and to have learned from her.
