Photo

journalism

Front page photo as published May 2020

Fun fact: I snuck onto school property at 5 a.m. to get the photo of the school (I wore a mask). So, the sun is in-fact rising, not setting.

This photo remains one of my favorites to this day because it serves as a reminder of the moments where journalists are not always supported but it still remains our job to capture the story.

Getting comfortable with the camera

To be honest, I started out a staff reporter hating photography- I remember thinking to myself that I signed up to write not carry around a camera. Over time, I came to love this art form and strongly advocating for teaching it as much as possible in the classroom. Check out my presentation from 2019 on the basics of photography.

My photojournalism through the years

2020

When news of the certified election results first hit news channels everywhere, I was out on a walk with my dog. As I walked back home, I began to get dozens of alerts on my phone from CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and more. I ran home, grabbed my camera, extra SD cards, and batteries, and drove to Philadelphia before traffic piled up on the highway. When I got to the city, I went to the streets and started documenting. Here’s what I saw. The photos in this gallery that were used on the page were awarded a second-place PNA award for news photography this past week (2/22/21).

2019

Throughout my time at Conestoga, I made it a point to cover all the school events I possibly could to gain practice being uncomfortable. When I was a freshman, I remember being extremely uncomfortable, scared to get in the way or take up too much room. Over time, that fear left me as walking in and out of events became a second habit and my camera and voice memos app became my best friends. Here’s some of the student life I covered at Conestoga as web and sports editor.

2020

Combining my love for activism and journalism became one of my favorite parts of my experience as a student journalist in 2021. When I first heard of the planned protest on the Main Line, I had yet to find out it was being run by past Conestoga Alumni. While we wanted to further explore that aspect of the story, our first priority is to provide timely and truthful coverage to the entire community. For this reason, we initially ran a brief and my photos on the event and later wrote an in-depth story that outlined our school’s involvement in the protest and the organizing group’s future plans.

This set of photos contains some of my favorites from my high school career. It was also the first time I learned to fight for credit for my own work, as my photos were picked up by local accounts and blogs and were being used without permission from me or the students in them.

2017-2021

Sports photography, was at one point in time, my least favorite part of being a journalist. However, since becoming a web sports editor, then sports section editor, my happy place is on the field capturing the best and worst moments of a game. While I lost access to a lot of my photos due to loss of access to my school's server in the pandemic, these are a few of my favorite shots from over the years. For much more sports journalism and sports, photography coverage: See the web and social media section of my portfolio.

2017-2021

In addition to photographing and reporting for my role as a reporter for the Spoke during all of my 4 years on staff, I also spent time documenting what I could outside of school. See my media account for some more of my extracurricular work.

@ananya_kulkarni_media

BRINGING PHOTOJOURNALISM TO THE STAFF

One of the first practices I implemented as Editor-in-Chief was bringing back our "Humans of 'Stoga" project in the form of "Humans of Quarantine" in order to drive up web engagement. See some of the posts below.