alittlenews

Okay, you got me right off the bat.  That headline is a bit of an exaggeration.  Well, it is a total exaggeration but it was a very busy day.  I shot five assignments Saturday and they were all multiple photo assignments.  Do you remember that post I wrote about publishing more photos in galleries being an opportunity?  Well, Saturday was enough to cause me to reconsider that opinion.

I had a tennis tournament, a soccer match, a softball tournament, a fishing tournament weigh in and, just to mix things up a bit, a formal ball in the evening.  I output 71 photos from those five assignments and had a nice wardrobe change tossed in to complete the day.  You know it is a screwy day when you have to change clothes before you are done!

Here is the challenge from a day like that.  You have to do something different on each job.  I did not succeed Saturday.  When you shoot a long day, twelve hours in this case, the danger is you start to settle for anything just to get it over with.  By the time I got to the fishing tournament weigh in I just wanted to be finished.  By the time the ball was over I just wanted to get home.  There was not a lot of incentive in a day like that except to finish.  Keeping a fresh perspective on each job is very difficult.

Physical fatigue is not bad.  Hey, I’m not that old yet!  It is the mental fatigue that gets you.  Sports, for all the diversity of the various games, are all very similar at their core.  There is action and there is reaction.  Sometimes, there is precious little reaction so that leaves you with mainly action.  Add the features in to the assignments, and may I say that fans are fans no matter what the sport, and you have a recipe for repetition.  When you shoot all those sports jobs in the same day it is very, very difficult to stay fresh on each one.  When you are having to hurry on to the next assignment you tend to settle for whatever you can get rather than working extra hard to make a different picture from each job.

That doesn’t mean you quit working.  In fact, I found myself working harder and being more conscious of what I was doing than I might normally have been.  The problem becomes time.  The clock drives you and you know that each job has to have a bunch of photos and you know you have to have features from each job and pretty soon you find yourself fairly diluted.  Effort does not always equal results.  Sometimes it just equals a bunch of pictures.  And you have to go back and edit that pile of photos and get them out and get on to the next job.  You begin to see the problem.

The answer?  Well, there really isn’t one.  When you have that many jobs to shoot in a row that require that many photos something is going to have to give and usually it is quality.  One job may be great but another might not be so good.  I had a decent tennis match, a poor soccer match, a really good softball tournament and a really poor fishing tournament.  The ball was about what I expected it would be.  I normally don’t have so many different sports assignments in a given day and I love shooting sports.  The difficulty is that all these sports really require a different approach and what works well with one does not work equally well with the next.  This means you have to be conscious to make the appropriate shifts for each job or you risk mediocrity.

Let me just say I ended up with some mediocrity.  Just take a look below and you will see what I mean.  This is obviously not all I turned in but it will give you an taste.  There is some good, some bad and some ugly.  I really hate to show my failures but maybe you guys will learn more from those than from my good stuff so enjoy a bunch of mediocrity today!  (GRIN)

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.

Photo illustrations may be the single most frustrating part of my job. They are usually not planned very far in advance and they are difficult to do for several reasons. First of all you have to shoot each piece of the illustration you want and that requires quite a bit of planning and forethought. Second, you have to have some Photoshop skills and the more the better. Third, concepts in an editors mind don’t always translate into images that I can translate to print.  And finally, they are like a home improvement project.  They take way longer to complete than you can imagine.

That said, there are still occasions when illustrations are required and we don’t have a graphic artist to pull them off.  At small newspapers you can wear several hats.  Last week we had a concept that needed an illustration.  Presently, Sunday sales of alcoholic beverages are banned in Decatur and there is a voter referendum coming up on the issue of allowing Sunday sales.  Now this is a no-brainer if the churches are involved in the story because then you can contrast the bottle of spirits with “The Spirit” and you can easily do an illustration.  This particular story did not have any church opposition in it so I had to come up with a new idea to illustrate Sunday sales.

Calendar pages came to mind so the only problem became locating the pages and shooting them.  I finally found a calendar in the office that would work.  I grabbed seven pages from the calendar and then spent a half hour tossing them in the air and shooting a couple of frames on each toss trying to get them in an pleasing arrangement.  I know this could have been done in Photoshop but the less you have to do in Photoshop the better.  Back in the old days we actually shot in-camera multiple exposures to produce illustrations.  I never could double print and sandwich negatives and all that.  So the more in camera you accomplish the fewer the hours you will spend at the computer.

My illustration was really basic.  I shot a photo of the background illuminated by a gelled strobe.  That produced the multi-color background.  Then I shot my co-worker Jeronimo Nisa’s hands holding the wine bottle.  Finally I shot several different things of the calendar pages plus several shots of  just the Sunday page.  This little exercise produced a most unwelcome surprise.  The calendar pages were in different focal planes which made some pages further from the apparent camera position a bit out of focus where the pages further away were randomly sharper.  I say randomly because the calendar pages are combined from three different shots which made for an inconvenient situation.

I always make a blank, white file using the new file command in Photoshop.  I usually make it bigger than I anticipate needing.  I then extract the pieces from each photo that I need.  This is the maddeningly time consuming part.  I have found very few places where I can use the magnetic lasso tool which would really speed things up.  I usually end up using the lasso tool with a 2 pixel feather.  This softens the edges just a bit and makes the combining process a little easier.  I copy each portion of the image and then paste each into a new layer in the composite. Each image can then be moved independently of the other layers.  This allows you to position the images in each layer where you want them.  This is also where I adjust the size of each item and add any distortion or perspective changes that are needed.

There are several ways to go from here.  What I did in this illustration is go to layer properties and apply a drop shadow on every layer except the background layer.  This creates a little sense of depth and also eases the edges a bit.  You could also do this in the filters palette but I that is a bit more difficult.  If my edges still don’t look right I take the eraser tool and set it where I have plenty of play in the flow setting.  I never get above 50 percent and will frequently use less.  I usually leave the opacity setting at 100 percent unless I just need to feather back a large area or unless I am using the eraser tool to create a look similar to what I get using the gradient tool.  This basically blends the edge with the background.  It is not a natural look but I not attempting a natural thing.  I want it to look most definitely like an intentional illustration.  This also cleans up any untidy edges created by a less than perfect lasso.

I frequently use a layer mask on each layer and then apply the gradient tool to the mask.  When you have the tool set properly you can achieve a look that fades a portion of the image making that portion semi-transparent.  I really like this look.  I will use this on as many layers as necessary.  When I am satisfied with the product I save the finished image as a PSD with all the layers intact.  Then I flatten the image and save that as a separate image and proof it for the editors.  Saving the image frequently during the process is so important.  I can’t tell you how many times I have had either Photoshop or the computer just freeze up and quit right in the middle of an illustration.  Want to get frustrated?  Have an complex illustration that you have invested hours in evaporate due to a crash.  Save frequently.  Saving the PSD with all the layers intact is critical because if an editor wants to make a change and you don’t have that layered document you have to start all over again, from scratch.  That too is maddening.  And yes, I have made all the above mistakes.  Let me say again, save frequently.  Like every few minutes or after each step.

After you are all done you might just want to open that bottle of wine and take a little nip.  Illustrations just might make you as crazy as they do me.  Below are a few examples of illustrations I have completed.  All but one was done in the last few months.

Photo illustration copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

Yes, this is a basketball post but it is really a post about shooting outside the lines.  Ultimately it is a post about surviving in the brave new world of photojournalism.  When I shoot action I tend to be intensely focused on what is going on in front of me, meaning the game.  This was especially true early in my career.  Partly this was insecurity about my ability to shoot action and partly it was about my ignorance of how to do my job.  As I have aged, no wait, matured, not exactly right either.  How about as I have grown?  Sounds like I have gotten fat, which is also partly true.  Let’s see, how about adapted and gotten better.  There, that is it.  At least it sounds like I haven’t  have gotten old, fat and bald!

What was I talking about?  Oh yeah, shooting outside the lines was the topic.  Or was the topic photo galleries?  Oh yes, as I have gotten better over the years I have become more confident in my ability to capture the game action which has allowed me to look around some during the games.  There is another world of coaches, cheerleaders, spectators and stuff out there to shoot that helps complete your coverage.  Now there is a balance, one might even say a limit, to this.  You have an assignment to cover the game and all of this comprises the game atmosphere.  How much you focus outside the lines is determined by your assignment.

If you have an assignment to cover the game from the sports desk your focus will be the game and the bench areas.  If you have a more feature oriented assignment your focus will be more around the edges and up in the stands.  Any more, we have to do all of this all the time for the online galleries.  Not being one to complain about having photos published this whole idea of photo galleries is a double edged sword.  You can become enslaved to the gallery and actually not do as well covering the assignment.  The best idea is to find some balance.  If you are looking around in the stands for features and miss the key play to the game then you have completely failed to do your job.  If you get all the plays but miss the reactions and the fans and all the other stuff that makes up the game atmosphere you have also failed to do your job effectively.

My friend Rob Carr addressed this issue in a post he wrote for us a while ago.  He simply asked the question “is more better?”  I think we all know the answer to that.  More is definitely not better unless it is actually better.  If more is not better more is just, well, more.  Probably no one would waste their time on a gallery of images loaded with mediocrity.  At least they wouldn’t do it but once.  The balance is there is no reason to come to a site that doesn’t offer enough.  In the newspaper business we are all searching for the balance.  That means there will be pendulum swings from one extreme to another before we find the sweet spot.  At The Decatur Daily we are experimenting with really overshooting assignments so we can publish more faces.  Saturday I shot three assignments that in the pre-internet days would have warranted four or five photos from two and maybe three from another.  I turned in about fifteen shots per assignment.

The down side of all this is that we are turning in many more photos than the assignment calls for which means we are going to be turning in some photos that are not up to our standards.  Some of these photos don’t seem to forward the story at all.  They are just there in the hopes of generating page hits.  If you let it, stuff like this drags you down and can be very frustrating.  The upside of all of this is it presents an entirely new challenge.  How do I fill photo galleries with images that do have meaning and do forward the story and still meet the requirement of publishing more and more photos?  Like all things in the business these days, this dichotomy will drive some to new fields of endeavor and it will push others to excel.

I am certainly not a Darwinist but there is something to be said for adaptation.  If we don’t adapt to whatever the reading public demands then we utterly fail and the photojournalist will become extinct.  This seems an entirely preposterous idea in the face of ever expanding demand for visuals.  The problem is the changing environment is not a stable environment and instability breeds danger.  New media has created opportunities for anyone running around with a cell phone to fill the public’s visual hunger.  Professional photojournalism, for all its craft, technical and aesthetic excellence, and credibility can easily fall prey to the changing world where photo buyers no longer have to pay for images.  They are available for free everywhere.  I did not say high quality images are available for free everywhere.  I also did not say that images produced in a highly ethical environment are available everywhere.  I just said images are available everywhere.

The end game here is that we have an opportunity masquerading as a problem.  Focus on the problem and you are doomed.  Become angry or frustrated and you are doomed.  Adapt to the demands of the new environment and we might find that we have successfully weathered the storm of change and have learned how to survive in the new media world.

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.

Having a child with Down Syndrome certainly opened up my life to a new world.  Having Reece die could have easily closed that door.  For good or bad, and sometimes it is an inconvenient mix of both, I have been in touch through my job with a great many people who have Down Syndrome since Reece passed away at the end of September.  I can’t tell you how difficult it is to sit with a family who has a precious person with Down and see them enjoying their child.

I am eaten up with envy.  Then I have to deal all over again with my own emotions over losing my son.  Then I have to go on and do my job and continue to live and try not to think that life sucks right out loud.  That is the bad part.  The good part is being with all those families and, in the case of the little children, to be able to love them a bit before I leave.  While it certainly is difficult to not have my own little man to love on I appreciate every family who has shared their lives with me since his death.  You will see the fruits of all those hours before too long.  I can’t wait to share the project with you.  In the mean time, I want to show you a family who is not part of the project but has found a place in my heart.

Last week I spent an hour with Scott and Katie Braddock and their four daughters.  The youngest, Caroline, has Down Syndrome and she is a precious little lady.  Scott had run in a marathon that raised money for the Bell Center in Birmingham the weekend before our story.  It was one of those things we found out about after the fact.  Scott and Katie live just a mile or so, as the crow flies, from my house.  They let me in to photograph them with Caroline and her sisters and to enjoy a few minutes holding Caroline.  She was crying a little when I took her and I just patted her on the back and held her close like I used to do with Reece.  In just a minute she calmed down.  Then she heard her dad’s voice behind her and that little head popped up from my shoulder and she took one look at me and started crying again.  I think she thought I was dad for a minute because I must have been holding her like Scott does.  Now that is a job perk!

In photo terms I have been vacillating back and forth between not lighting anything that doesn’t just demand it, to hauling out a set of monolights to using the old reliable Nikon strobes.  Lately I have been favoring using the small strobes.  Part of recovering from the loss of my son has been recovering some degree of motivation.  Part of that motivation involves lighting things.  I know it may seem as nothing to you guys but it is so difficult to just be motivated to haul out a light stand and a strobe to make a job better.  I didn’t say it had to make sense, it just is.  The little strobes allow me to leave the stands in the car and just lay the strobes on mantles or TV sets or whatever is handy in the room.

That is what I did at the Braddock’s house.  I set up two or three SB strobes bounced off the ceiling and just made them disappear.  I bet it just looks like room light to you.  That is what I wanted to do.  There are times when you want the light to be “visible.”  There are times when you want the lights to just “disappear.”  This was one of those times.  I did not want the lighting to draw your attention away from the family.  I just wanted you to see them and not even think twice about how it was lit.  That is what two or three strobes properly placed will do for you.  Keep that in mind as you go about shooting jobs.  Decide what kind of lighting is needed then do it.  If you can see it in your mind you will eventually be able to make it happen.

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

I wonder how many times some well meaning soul has asked me that?  I never have a proper answer because I simply can’t name a single picture.  I have many favorites and my list of favorites changes all the time.  However, today I was driving down Highway 157 and passed through the Hatton community.  I almost always remember a very special young woman whenever I pass through that part of the world.

Right around the time I started working in Decatur in 1994 a young girl who was a star athlete at Hatton High School had a serious wreck.  She was paralyzed in the accident and has been a paraplegic ever since.  I met her the day she came home from the hospital.  Her father, who was also the football coach and assistant principal at the school, had remodeled the home to accommodate her wheel chair.  I also remember the love in that home that day.  I pass the house every time I go through Hatton on Highway 157.

As great a day as that was it was not the day that made my memory.  The young woman’s name was Courtney Carpenter.  She has since married and I don’t remember he new last name.  What I do remember is her pledge to walk across the stage to get her diploma at graduation.  I was there the night she graduated.  It is the most memorable graduation I have ever seen.  When the principal called Courtney’s name she struggled up from her wheelchair and, with the help of some special crutches, made her way to the stage where he father was waiting with a rose.

I will never forget the look on Royal Carpenter’s face as his daughter approached him.  Laughter, tears and intense pride mingled in his face.  Coach Carpenter had a rose for all the young ladies that night but Courtney got a little bit extra when she came by.  I think she could have floated across the stage on the strength of her father’s love that night.  I don’t think anyone who witnessed that graduation will ever forget it.  I know I never have.  The thing is, I don’t have a picture to show you.  The negatives are, I am sure, still stowed away in a file somewhere at The Decatur Daily.  What I do have is a picture in my mind that will be there until the day I die.

Was that the best picture I ever took?  Not even close.  Was it the best moment I have ever seen?  Well, there may be some debate about that but I can tell this for sure, it is one of those moments that I will never forget.  The emotions written on Royal Carpenter’s face that night will always be with me.  I am quite sure of this, love always triumphs.  We are going to go through some awful stuff in this life but we go through those times on the arms of love.  I think when I am done with my career I will think very little about the photos I took in those bad situations but I pretty sure I will remember the people and the moments like the one that passed between Royal and Courtney Carpenter that night.  That is what makes this career we have chosen so special and that is what keeps me coming to work every day.

The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

 

I just spent the week covering the Northwest Regional high school basketball tournament in Hanceville at Wallace State.  This is as close to basketball heaven as you will get in the great state of Alabama.  Wallace State has, without a doubt, the best gymnasium I have ever shot in.  I don’t know if there is a better one anywhere in the state.  The light is fantastic and the arena is really excellent and they serve the best chocolate chip cookies in the hospitality suite.  What more could one ask?

The winners of the Regional advance to the State Final Four in Birmingham but the arena in Birmingham is nowhere near as nice as this one.  The lighting is much poorer and the facility is older and you are in Birmingham as opposed to a quiet little country town.  Which begs the question, who do these people know to get such a facility?  The entire campus at this community college rivals anything you might expect to find at a four year school and they keep on building new structures.  Amazing!  Their politicians must really be good.  Whatever, it is a great place to shoot hoops.

I shot 13 games over the past four days and I am fairly certain I now have a basketball bouncing around in my head.  Whenever you shoot that much hoop action, or that much of anything for that matter, the challenge is keeping it fresh and approaching each game with the proper attitude.  This requires a vastly different approach than shooting a half of one game and rushing it back to the paper on deadline.

Whenever I shoot a regular season game on deadline I have only one real goal; to shoot a few successful images and get out of there as quickly as possible so I can get the images in the paper on time.  But with the tournament, many of the games are going on during the day with no deadline pressure.  This means there is plenty of time to shoot and explore your options.  The lighting at Wallace also frees you from the shackles of slow recycling strobes so you can essentially shoot basketball like you would any other sport.

My strategy is very simple.  I check out the teams and see how athletic they are.  If I have teams that are very athletic I will take two approaches during the game.  I will shoot about one quarter with nothing but a wide angle zoom.  In my case it is a 17-35.  This allows me to get the athletes flying around in the area of the basket or diving for balls around the base line.  I usually shoot from a low angle and don’t even look through the viewfinder.  Just set it low and let it rip. If the teams are not very athletic then I use the 80-200 and hope for the best.

The second part of this involves shooting with a long lens but especially a 300mm.  I use this to get the mid-court to opposite end of the floor action.  This lens is great for getting those steals and blocked shots and it works well when shooting the coach or tight stuff of players on the bench.  These days we have to shoot a lot of features so I devote a small amount of the game to shooting a few features.  These are almost all for web galleries but one does pop up in the paper from time to time.

Finally, I use the 80-200 for close to mid-range action.  This is my work horse lens during the regular season because it is the lens I am most comfortable with.  It is pointless to drag a 300 into a gym you are having to light unless you have the time and equipment to light both ends of the floor.  That means the 80-200 is my friend.  I normally don’t shoot with a 17-35 on a regular season game because it is a lens that can produce amazing pictures if you have time to wait but it can also produce nothing at all.  This means I go dance with the girl that brought me and stick with the 80-200 when the pressure is on.

At Wallace State, you can get some nice photos from the stands too.  The arena slopes up dramatically so you can get quite high in the stands and shoot down on the court.  It is not nearly an overhead view but it certainly changes your perspective.  My normal shooting position is right under the basket.  I have adopted that position because the ref never stands directly under the basket.  I will also move around the edges of the court behind the benches and things like that to vary my points of view.  Shooting a tournament is just a great way to put everything you have into play.  You have the time to try things you can’t do during the regular season and you have the freedom to use a variety of lenses and perspectives.

If you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments section and I will answer them there.

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

My dear overly politicized climate scientists.  I wish to call your attention to the fact that 49 of 50 US states had snow on the ground Friday.  It might also be worth noting that in the US Capital they couldn’t see over the mountains of snow.  Uhhh, have you guys checked your temperature gauges lately?  More appropriately, have you guys checked with your political handlers lately because someone has missed something.

You might have guessed that I am not too concerned with the whole global warming hysteria.  In fact, even if the globe does warm I don’t think anyone could say whether that would be good or bad.  All I know is it is cold in Alabama and has been for some time now.  We had a little light snow in the southern part of the county Friday which meant I did some feature hunting.  I was very, very fortunate to find a couple of kids out having a snowball fight.  The snow was light to begin with and didn’t last very long.  The heavier snow was falling south of our area and some even fell in the Florida panhandle.  Imagine that!

Snow in the south can be a very bad thing.  Even a little bit of snow down here can shut things down completely because there is no capacity to clear any snow or ice from the roads.  Go to New York where my wife is from and they can have a blizzard going and still move around.  Here, a dusting sends people into a panic.  Watch out bread and milk vendors.  By the way, can anyone actually explain the bread and milk phenomenon?  Why bread and milk?  Why not steak and fries or lobster and shrimp?  Really, it happens every time it snows and I am just flummoxed over why.

Snow in the south also means that photographers will be on the prowl.  We joke that if a single flake falls someone better be there with a macro lens to shoot it!  Snow does make for nice pictures because people just go crazy over it and it is a pretty diversion to the normally brown winters we have.  Our youth pastor grew up in Michigan and he begins a pray for snow campaign every winter.  He must be doing pretty well this year.  We have already had two or three small snowfalls.

These photos are all done with the Nikon D3 and an 80-200 lens.  Nothing special to report on the technical side of things, just a 1/3rd stop of + exposure compensation and let it rip.  Hope y’all are all warm and cozy as you read this one.  If not, grab a handful of snow and have some fun.

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent the opinions of my employer.

 

Last Friday there was a school shooting that killed one student in Madison, Alabama.  One ninth grader shot and killed another ninth grader.  Apparently there was some gang connection.  As ridiculous as that situation was, yesterday’s shooting at the University of Alabama Huntsville is even worse.

During a late afternoon staff meeting, a non-tenured University of Alabama Huntsville professor in the Biology department opened fire killing at least three of her colleagues and wounding three more.  Two of those were in critical condition.  The professor, a Harvard trained PhD, learned earlier in the day she would not be retained.  I felt like the Ivy Tower was at least safe from this kind of violence but apparently even professors are not immune to the lunacy that seems to be sweeping across the country.

I am not a gun control advocate.  I am a people control advocate.  But the problem is obvious when even a person who is smart enough to have earned a doctorate can’t control herself.  I mean, what happened to simply moving on if you lose a job.  It is not like there are unemployed PhDs on every street corner looking for jobs.  Surely you can find another job.  Blame it on the degeneration of the family.  Blame it on the violence happy entertainment media.  Blame it on the declining morals of America.  I don’t know where to blame it but people, get a grip on yourself and consider the consequences of your actions before you do them.

I am done sermonizing.  We found out about the shooting probably 15 minutes after the incident and it was nearly an hour after the shooting before I made it to Huntsville Hospital and my colleague Jeronimo Nisa arrived at scene of the shooting.  The Huntsville Time photojournalists Bob Gathany, Eric Shultz, Robin Conn and Dave Dieter did an excellent job covering the tragedy in the early moments as it unfolded.  It is probably one of their pictures on your front pages this morning.

I was able to make a couple of frames of HPD officers outside the Huntsville Hospital ER.  I got a good expression on one officer’s face which I did not notice while shooting.  I was across the street shooting with an 80-200 and was actually trying to include and ambulance in the frame.  When editing, I noticed the officer’s expression and felt like it summed things up nicely.  This is one case where having the D3 made a huge difference.  That 12 megapixel sensor gave me plenty of cropping flexibility and the image you see is less than 1/4th of the actual frame.

There really is nothing more to say about the photojournalism aspect of covering this except to say I wish we had laptops with air cards so I could have transmitted pictures immediately from the scene.  It would have saved about 45 minutes.  In today’s now, now, now media world we are a bit behind the curve there but I suspect the near future holds changes in that area as well.

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

Let me say up front, I hate covering traffic fatalities.  Unfortunately, traffic deaths have been part of my life since I became an apprentice firefighter in the Cherokee Volunteer Fire Department as a 15 year old.  My very first emergency response was a wreck and my second one was a traffic fatality.  I remember it in vivid detail including several rather graphic memories of the victim.  Since that day I have either worked as a firefighter/EMT or as a photojournalist more traffic fatalities than I care to even attempt to remember.

I never liked doing this part of the job but the day that distaste turned into outright hatred was a hot summer day in 1998 on Alabama Highway 20 where four people were killed, two were small children.  I remember walking into the midst of that scene with firefighters and paramedics doing CPR on the little children and working on the one woman who was still alive.  I made a great picture that day but it didn’t change anything.  There are still fatal accidents happening on that same spot on Highway 20 all these years later.

This week I had to shoot another fatal wreck.  I know this is part of what I have to do as a photojournalist but I will never like it.  This time the victim was a young woman who lost control of her car and slid sideways into oncoming traffic on an undivided section of four lane highway.  Whenever I cover these things I think how pointless the death is.  I think in traffic fatalities I feel they are always avoidable.  Maybe the driver made an error.  Maybe the weather played a role.  Maybe it was speed, or texting or driving under the influence.  Maybe, once in a great, great while it was just unavoidable.  I still think that something could always have been done to avoid this situation.  Maybe a guard rail, a median barrier, more careful driving or just slowing down and paying attention.

I have no idea what caused the wreck that killed this young woman.  Whatever it was I hope that publishing a picture of the accident causes at least one person to pay more attention, to slow down, to put their cell phone down or just be more careful.  After my youngest son died last year I have a new perspective on what it feels like to lose someone you love intensely.  My heart goes out to the family who must some way or another find a way to live through this.  I have already been praying for them.  I will continue to do so.

I have only one piece of advice for shooting fatal accidents.  Be compassionate to the family members who will see the photo.  Be very conscious of what you are shooting and if there is anything that could cause them additional pain just find something else to shoot.  It is going to be bad for them one way or another.  Don’t make it worse for them if there is any way to avoid it.  I arrived at this accident at least 15 minutes after the ambulance had taken the victim away to the hospital.  There were still things that I avoided shooting because I know the pain it would have caused the family had they seen it.  Just remember that we are members of a community.  We live with the people we photograph.  We never know when it will be someone we love.  Just remember the gold standard.  Treat others the way you would want to be treated and you will do okay.

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

I have friends now that I have never met thanks in large part to the Internet.  That is case with Chris Frear who lives in Scotland.  Last week he sent an email with a beautiful slide show from the area around his home in Nithsdale.  I emailed him to ask permission to share the show with you.  It is truly beautiful.  I felt like I had stepped over into the Chronicles of Narnia a couple of times.

There are a couple of things you will notice about Chris’ photography.  First, he loves the people he lives around and with.  Secondly, he has a great appreciation for the land and the animals that live in it.  There are some great moments here.  I hope you all enjoy the show.  You can also see more photos on Chris’ Flickr Photostream and on his website at chrisfrear.photium.com.