alittlenews

The Grinch.  Yep, that’s me.  I am a Christmas grouch. I probably turn green somewhere during the season too.

Being a photojournalist has many appealing aspects and some noteworthy negatives.  Among the negatives are the seasonal photo assignments.  Christmas may be the worst of all for seasonal, highly repetitive photo assignments.  The longer I have worked in the community newspaper world the more I have come to dread December.

First of all, I hate shopping so there is that, which means I also hate shopping photos.  Secondly, I have come to hold a pretty low opinion of Santa Claus.  I know, he is putting me on the naughty list right now.  I can’t help it.  I used to love the whole Christmas thing, Santa and all; however, after photographing a bevy of jolly old impersonators, I have about had my belly full of Santa, photographically speaking, of course.  Thirdly, I have no desire to ever photograph another Christmas light.  Fourthly, is that even a word, I have about worn out on manger scenes as well.

Over the years there has been one particularly, nearly demonically, difficult Christmas photo assignment.  The annual Parade of Lights on the Tennessee River has been an assignment to run away from for years.  I remember trying to make a picture out there using a Nikon D1.  Oh My!  There may have been a beautifully lit boat somewhere out there but one would have had a devil of a time finding it amid all the digital noise.  The D1 didn’t like black too well.

Then there was the D2h and the D2hs.  No great shakes there either.  Then, I must have gone unconscious for a few years or, more truly, just didn’t work the night shift and have to deal with that assignment.  This year; however, I could not dodge it.  I approached the job with a measured dread.  All the bad memories of horrible photos shot on the black river came flooding back.  Then, I suddenly remembered, I have a D4!!!

I think the Hallelujah Chorus began somewhere in my mind.  Perhaps it was the angels singing from on high.  I could shoot at any ISO I wanted to.  I could turn the dark, black river into a medium gray river if the notion struck me!  I got a touch of the Christmas spirit.  Well, almost.  I did remember the dynamic range would be far, far beyond what any digital sensor can handle but I would at least have a picture!

Now all you amateurs, put away your little strobes and don’t even pretend to use one.  Have you ever actually shot with a strobe, at night?  The night sucks up strobe light, like a sponge.  The strobe also blows out your highlights and does nothing for those black shadow areas.  So just don’t do it.  Find a happy medium between whatever ambient you have and the Christmas lights and hope for the best.

My strategy was two fold.  One worked, one worked a little.  I went down on the river bank at a place I had never shot from.  I was across the river from Decatur so whatever light I had in the background, say street lights, would create light streaks on the river thereby breaking the darkness into slightly smaller slices of darkness.  The closer to the water you get, the longer those streaks of light become.  My other idea, and the one with the highest chance of success, was to get the boats as they exited the harbor where there was actually a fair amount of light from the other boats still in the harbor.  This worked okay, not great, but okay.  I think a giant softbox suspended from the Hudson Memorial Bridges would have been ideal but since the ALDOT would have a little problem with that, I just winged it.  Besides, a softbox big enough to do the job would have required its own nuclear reactor to power it.  Brownsferry was definitely not down with that!

The surprise, and the reason I almost got some Christmas spirit, came as I was leaving.  I parked on the elevated section of highway leading up to the bridge.  It overlooks the water, but there is a lot of random tree growth that obscures the view.  However, as I walked back to my car, I looked over my shoulder and saw the boats strung out in a line right over the roof line of the Hard Dock Cafe.  I was freaking out.  And actual picture could be made here!  I shot a bunch of frames hoping I would have one sharp enough in the foreground and the background to use.  Sure enough, I got one.  I was very, very happy.

You can see people out on the deck of the restaurant, a canopy of light over them, and the boats out behind them.  I had beat the black hole and the Christmas lights demon at the same time.  SWEET!  I swear, just like the old Grinch standing on Mount Crumpet, I think my heart grew three sizes right then and there.  I almost said, “Ho, ho, ho,” as I got into my sled to drive back tot he newspaper.  Okay, almost.

There is kind of an art form to finding quiet moments as life blasts past you at super highway speeds.  That art form has a name; looking!  Quiet moments are going on all over the place from crowded rooms to busy streets to, yep, even quiet places.  Finding them comes down to looking for them.  Many times I like the quiet moments I find better than the photo I was assigned to shoot.

I am doing something with the photos in this post I never do, that is, converting the pictures to black and white.  There is a method to my madness.  I want you to see the moments, not the color.  I want you to see just the basics of what the subjects are doing without anything to interfere with your perceptions.  I am a big advocate of shooting in color.  You may have noticed, life happens in color.  I am adamant about not converting images to black and white for contests because we live in color, work in color and shoot in color with the only black and white images existing because the printing press doesn’t have the capacity to print color on every page. Don’t freak out.  Color will return!

Finding quiet moments comes with practice.  Make yourself slow down and look.  Literally, wander around the edges of an assignment and look around.  If there is a pack of journalists hounding a subject, back away and look for what they are missing.  You know why journalists do that?  Simply put, fear.  They are afraid they will miss the one thing an editor sees on TV or in another newspaper and sometimes that is exactly what editors will do.  Don’t ignore you primary subject but after you get the shots you need back off and let the mob do the mob thing.  You do the different thing.

As you roam around shooting the fringes you may also find new stories opening up to you.  Talk to the people around the edges.  Listen to what they have to say.  You may find that one thing that can make your report completely unique from the competition.  They will be sitting around their photo office cursing you for beating them and only you will know how you did it.  (Clearly, your competitors don’t read this blog!)

Besides all that, shooting things other people don’t see is fun.  It is not that I am competitive or anything – what would ever give you such an idea – but I do like to win and many times in the news business you can define winning as getting the shot the other guy doesn’t get even when he is at the same assignment as you.  Like I said, I am not competitive at all.  But how did we go there?  This is about quiet moments, not about ripping out your competitions heart then dancing on it.  Oops, there I go again.  I am really a mild mannered photojournalist who loves to see my competitors do well…really.

Truthfully, the reason some folks don’t shoot like this is because they have lost the joy of simply shooting.  I have done this.   I have gone to work and shot and shot and shot and not done anything I really liked or was proud of.  This stretched from months into years.  At one point, I had gone three years without much to show before I woke up to the joy of why I do this to begin with.  Internet photo galleries have given a place for these wonderful little moments to get published so there is a reward beyond the pure satisfaction of finding a nice moment.

Hopefully you are now inspired, unless, of course, you are a competitor in which case I hope you can’t read or you find this post ridiculous and never do any of this stuff.  But I love you, really I do.  Oh, and if you are working for the Tuscaloosa News, by all means, disregard everything I just wrote and rest upon the laurels of your newly minted Pulitzer because I want you to become complacent SO I CAN WIN A PULITZER!

This is the eighth installment of the Twenty Moments 2011 series.

Daily Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. Colton Richter and his younger sister Madison play together near the ruined Camden Ct. area off of McCulley Mill Rd. east of Athens. Their father, Tim, owned a mobile home that was destroyed and they were there with him while he cleaned up the remains Thursday, May 5, 2011.

Nearly two weeks into the tornado coverage I was fading fast.  My work life was consumed with the disaster and it was definitely coming home with me.  When I wasn’t shooting I was thinking about shooting or thinking about the lives that were changed, destroyed or ruined.  My body was doing fine but my brain was on overload.  I was emotionally spent but I wasn’t about to quit working this story.  I was heavily invested in it.  I am, in fact, still heavily invested in it.  But, I needed something.

Holly Hollman and I were waiting to meet Kevin and Sarabeth Harrison and a video crew from CNN at their ruined home on McCulley Mill Rd.  They were not on time.  I was standing around watching Colton Richter and his younger sister Madison playing together.  My mind was not registering what I was seeing.  There was this massive incongruity between happy children playing and my mental and emotional state and the obvious ruins all around us.  I was numb enough that it didn’t register that these kids were just the kind of picture I needed, not to tell a story, but to refresh my spirit.

I finally told Holly that I had to go shoot a picture.  Their father was removing some debris from what remained of a rental property.  They had a wheel barrow and were pushing one another around in it.  The photo of Colton pushing his sister was cute but not exactly what I wanted.  When they switched positions I knew I was going to get a nice photo.  It didn’t take long for little sister to dump big brother.  They laughed.  I laughed too, maybe not on the outside but inside, where I needed it most.

This picture was like a drink of cold well water on a blistering hot day.  It was refreshing.  I didn’t even know if the newspaper would publish it.  I didn’t care.  I was the one who needed it.  If the editors decided to share it with the readers that was just fine.  The image of these two children playing with those ruined homes behind them was just the metaphor my soul needed.  This photo says to me that, while there was a disaster, life would prevail.  Two kids playing in the sun was a sign of hope, a sign that life would return.

Did you ever look up at a big, full, harvest kind of moon and wish you were there?  Unfortunate though it may be, you are not going to make it.  Shooting the moon is about as close as any of us will ever get but even that presents a few obstacles.  The most obvious is the moon looks a good deal bigger to your eye than it does to your camera so pointing your 70-200 toward the heavens leaves a little something to be desired.

I have been frustrated for years trying to get good, tight shots of the moon.  Lacking a telescope with a photo mount, how do you go about it.  First, lets look at what most of us have as our most difficult limitation, focal length.  Lets say you are limited to a 200 or 300 mm focal length.  The moon is just too small to get that dramatic appearance on digital media that you see with the mind’s eye.  The best way to overcome this problem is use something else in the photo to give you context.  I recently shot the fingernail moon over the Decatur skyline.  The moon was just too small all by itself but including the skyline with the last glow of sunset allowed me to use an 80-200 at 200mm and get a really nice shot of the moon that included the foreground which really helped with perception.  The 200mm actually looked better than a similar shot with a 300mm in that situation.

Friday evening of this past week I noticed a nearly full moon in the late afternoon sky and did a few quick mental calculations and decided I would have my best shot at getting moonrise with enough ambient in the sky to make a picture Sunday evening.  I made my plans.  When I got to work Sunday I made sure to grab a 2x converter and the 300 f2.8.  I wasn’t planning to settle for some skyline picture this time.  I wanted the full orb hanging right over the horizon in all its fall splendor.  I arrived at the river around the time I expected and waited.  Then, just at the opportune moment, an editor called sending me to a fire.  I had not yet seen the moon so I just bagged it and was getting in my car to leave.  That’s when I saw the full moon just over the tree line on the river.  Arrrrrrrggggggghhhh!

I jumped back out and hand-held the camera with the 300 f2.8 and 2x converter and grabbed a few shots using traffic as a foreground.  Not what I had envisioned but still something that was usable and I was resigned to the idea that was all I was getting.  I drove to Hartselle to cover the fire but it turned out not to be too big to begin with and was out with the fire units clearing up before I could get there.  So here I am with a great big moon still on a half hour or so above the horizon.  All it’s orange color was gone but it was there in all its glory.

Now an empty black sky with a bright moon is a pretty boring photo so I began looking for something to place in the foreground.  Since our part of north Alabama is not resplendent with tall buildings I settled on steeples.  Many steeples have crosses on top and that makes for the highest point in most towns.  I drove all over Hartselle trying to find a suitable cross facing in the right direction.  I finally remembered a church just a couple miles from where I live and raced down to it.  I found a double treat when I got there.  Not only did the church have a cross but it had a blue, neon cross.  I couldn’t have planned it any better.

I set everything up on a tripod and fired away.  The tripod steadies the wiggles inherent in using really long lenses and allowed me to stop down to f11 to get some sharpness in the cross as well as having a tack sharp moon.  I left very delighted with the picture and was only a couple miles from my own church where they were serving a Thanksgiving meal.  Not only did I fill my appetite for a good shot of the moon but I also filled my belly with food and my life with good friends.  All in all, not too bad a night.

As a technical note, the moon will often appear orange when it is near the horizon.  That is because you are looking through accumulations of dust and dirt in the atmosphere and since you are looking laterally across a long expanse of atmosphere filled with dust and dirt the moon will take on the orange color it is picking up from all that stuff.  The atmosphere also has a magnifying effect on the moon which always appears larger when it is near the horizon than it does when it is at the apex of its trip through the sky.  As the moon rises it moves clear of much of the atmospheric dust and becomes whiter as it goes higher in the night sky.  One final note, the moon is far brighter than you might think.  Take a spot meter reading off the moon to get an accurate exposure or you will have a really blown out orb in your sky.

The images in the gallery represent several other attempts at moon photos from Sunday.  My favorite is at the top of the post.  You can see how I played around some with the compositions before arriving at the one I like the best.

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.

A boater pulls into Ingall's Harbor as the sun sets painting the water orange. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr.

This time of year is especially hard on the feature hunter.  The weather is not conducive to drawing people outdoors due to cold or rain or just the glum nature of winter when there is no snow.  You have to be a real nature lover to appreciate the stark, rather brown nature of winter in this part of the world.  Those things all create an equation that is difficult to solve.

There is one tried and true method when all other features disappear.  Run to water.  It doesn’t seem to matter how cold it is, how rainy it is or generally how drab the winter is, people are always doing stuff on the Tennessee River.  Decatur has some very nice places on the water but it is also a very industrial waterfront so, even in cold winter there is something going on at the River.  For that matter, fishermen are just plain crazy and they will wet a hook any time of the year.  So waterways are my favorite, uhh, fishing holes.

I will do anything as you can see from these photos.  Fishermen, fish, boats and even scenics are all things I will look for.  When I can combine several of these things that just makes it better.  The only real problem is the photos can be a tad repetitious.  Of course, if you happen to live in a desert I guess you are out of luck on this one.  But for those of us who live near water we have a ready source of features.

I tell you, even the nature surrounding the water is good for features.  We have the Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge here and it is home to a wide variety of water fowl as well as everything from fish to alligators.  Of course, you won’t be seeing gators this time of year unless they are being smacked around by The Crimson Tide.  (BIG GRIN)  Sorry Florida fans.  That was a cheap shot.

Back to the point, the water is one of the few places where you can find nice, outdoor color in the winter.  All the flowers and plants that give you color in spring, summer and fall are dormant so the interaction of light and water gives a continuously changing palette of color.  That’s a double bonus in my opinion.

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.

Last year I did something to wrap up the year that I really enjoyed and got some nice feedback from all of you on so I decided to do my 20 moments series again.  Basically, I am choosing 20 photos from 2009 that were some of my favorites.  It doesn’t mean they necessarily had the greatest news value or were even the greatest photos.  The 20 moments may have only significance to me.  But I want to present my selections again this year.  It is helpful to me to review my year and it might bring some value to you as the reader as well so I hope you enjoy the 2009 edition.

Reece plays with his therapist Melissa Steele. This was the last photograph I took of Reece and it is an appropriate last image. He was making great progress and he had really shown off for Melissa. It was a great day for a wonderful little boy. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 9/22/09

Let me deal with the elephant in the room first.  This is by far the most significant moment of my year, or of any year of my life to this point.  My son Reece died this year as most of you already know.  He passed from my arms into the arms of The Lord in the very early morning hours of September 27.  Reece was two years, two months, twenty four days and about three hours old when he died.  I have never known such pain.  As I look around at my family, I know that none of us have ever felt such pain.  Everyone I know who has lost a child, and the list seems to be growing all the time, tells me that the pain never goes away but it does ease over time.

I won’t dwell on this because it is beyond words but I do want to say just a bit more.  David wrote in the Psalms words to the effect that he soaked his couch in tears and that his eye was wasted away from weeping.  I used to think David was speaking in metaphors or was just being dramatic.  Let me assure you that David was writing reality.  I wish I had never learned this.  I wish I did not have to look at my wife and see the deep pain in her eyes.  I wish that I did not have to hold my children on my lap as they do their crying.  Most of all, I wish that I had Reece back in my arms.  Since none of my wishes about this seem to come true I will hold my children, love my wife, cry when I must and remember my precious little man.  God has done his best to comfort me.  I appreciate it but it is just not the same as having him here.

Okay, one small story to take the edge off of this.  I was really lamenting Reece’s death the other day and the Lord spoke to my heart.  He said that Reece was a great blessing in heaven.  As he was on earth so he is in heaven only more so.  The Lord said that every place Reece goes in heaven and every one he comes in contact with is blessed by the love that he has.  Reece’s gifts on earth have been magnified, or maybe perfected is the word, in his heavenly life.  I can’t wait to get there, to hold him, to experience his love in its purified state.  He must really be something!

Just to give this post a little photographic slant, photographing Reece was always a pleasure.  If you are a newcomer here you will not know that I had been a documentary project on his life.  This means we have a special treasury of photographs of Reece that are really very journalistic.  This photograph of Reece was almost the last frame I ever shot of him.  He was having his therapy session with Melissa Steele from the Center for the Developmentally Disabled.  This session was by far Reece’s best.  He had done everything he could do in this session and he had done most of them without crying which was a big deal when we are talking therapy.  Reece even climbed up onto our couch.  It was the first time he had ever been able to do that.  I was just about to burst with pride as I watched him.  In fact, I wrote a blog post about Reece making real progress.  That was only a few days before he died.  This photo was not by any means the best I shot of him this year but it does have something of a triumphant feeling to it.  I like to think that is the way he left us; triumphantly.

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

The Green Goblins and the Blue Sharks face off beneath a full moon Monday evening in Hartselle during the U8 AYSO end of season soccer tournament. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 11/02/09

Ansel Adams is one of my photographic heroes.  There are so many of his photos that I absolutely love that I am hard pressed to chose just one.  I suppose if you backed me into a corner and made me choose I would select the photo of the moonrise over a small adobe church and cemetery in Hernandez, New Mexico.  The photo was taken in 1941.  The story of the photograph is almost as remarkable as the photograph itself.

The image was shot in Adams’ trademark black and white using an 8×10 view camera.  The real trick is that he could not find his exposure meter at the critical moment.  If you know much of Adams’ story you will realize that this was a minor obstacle for him.  The account he gives in the book, “Examples, the making of 40 photographs,” is amazing.  Here is a short quote from the book.

“I was at a loss with the subject luminance values, and I confess I was thinking of bracketing several exposures, when I suddenly realized I knew the luminance of the moon – 250c/ft2.  Using the Exposure Formula, I placed this luminance on Zone VII, 60 c/ft2 therefore fell on Zone V, and the exposure with the filter factor of 3x was about 1 second at f/32 with ASA 64 film.”

A pumpkin moon rises over the bank of the Tennessee River at Decatur, Alabama. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr.

Yeah, he lost me too.  The photograph, however, is exquisite.  I love to shoot the moon but I have never even come close to anything as nice as this and I have the best light meters and equipment.  It doesn’t keep me from trying though.  I am showing you several photos of the moon which, by the way, is much, much brighter than you think it is.  There is just about one day a year when the sun and moon come into the proper alignment to get the low moon on the horizon with enough light left from the sun to give some detail on the ground.  It usually comes around late October or early November and you get literally one shot at it.

This year I actually made a nice image – the kids playing soccer – because of a fortunate set of circumstances.  My son Peter had a soccer game which I wanted to see being the last one I would have a chance to see this year so I left work early.  On the way down I suddenly realized that if everything came together I might get a shot of the full moon rising over the field.  It was a perfectly clear evening.  When I arrived the moon was just peeping over the tree line which meant I had to really hurry.  I ran down to my son’s game only to realize the moon was not visible from his field.  I ran over to the field next to his and found a low spot to stand in.  This raised the level of the kids relative to the moon so it closed the visual distance between the two.

I don’t remember the exposure exactly but it was something like ISO 1250 with an f13 aperture.  The shutter speed was barely legal for action with a long lens at about 1/125th second.  Those are approximates.  I simply could not hold depth of field to make the moon sharp and the kids sharp so I settled for a nearly focused moon that was nearly exposed properly.  It is a bit over and the kids are a bit under.  It takes a bit of creative Photoshop work to make the image presentable.

Wispy clouds painted orange by the setting sun partially obscures the moon at the end of a stormy day in Decatur. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr.

The other shots were done with the combination of a 400mm f3.5 lens on a Nikon D2H body.   I have no idea what the exposure was on either.  The vertical shot is of the moon rising over the Tennessee River.  The horizontal is one I saw and grabbed on the fly because the beautiful clouds were lit by the setting sun which was already below the horizon.  I just had a few frames with that wonderful color.

Should you try some moon shots just remember if you want detail in the moon surface you will probably have to sacrifice detail in your foreground elements except on those rare occasions when the old thrush is sitting on the doorstep cracking snails with its beak when the sun goes down and the moon is just rising.  (For those who don’t know, that was a little reference from J.R.R. Tolkein’s classic The Hobbit.  Come on people, get some culture.)

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.

Storyteller Carmen Deedy entertains the children with a story about a boy coming of age in a Mississippi swamp. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 10/28/09

I covered a job Wednesday that made me smile, even laugh, and that is a big deal right now.  The Athens Storytellers Festival is in its third year but this is my first time to shoot the event.  I loved it.  Not the light.  It is ugly!  The light filters through a big top style tent that is red and white striped and there are two huge halogen floodlights bounced off the top for interior lighting.  Not nice.  But the event is great.

Storyteller Donald Davis entertains the children with a story about baby sitting his baby brother when he was a child. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 10/28/09

I heard two storytellers Wednesday, Donald Davis and Carmen Deedy.  The lady was hilarious.  She told a story about a boy coming of age in the Mississippi swamp country.  The idea was the boy had to face and overcome his fears made manifest in the form of the ‘hairy man.’  She does great voices and her body language is wonderful.  I could have listened to her all afternoon.  Mr. Davis also told a hilarious story about the time his mom asked he and his brother to babysit their younger brother.  The consequences were a hilarious disaster that involved an entire bottle of Calamine Lotion.

I shot the event with the D3 and an 80-200 at ISO 3200.  This was giving me an exposure around 1/320th at f2.8.  The only problem was the color of the light.  It was mostly red and balancing or toning that out is difficult.  I also mixed in the 50mm f1.4, an old manual lens I found lying around the office and the 17-35 for a couple of shots.  The entire shoot was done available light.  Strobe in that big tent would have been fairly useless and would have changed the light quality which wasn’t actually bad.  It was just the color of light that was hard to deal with.  The light itself was soft and made photographing faces a breeze.

So the story on shooting storytellers is all in the faces.  You shoot the storyteller because they are continually making faces as they tell their tall tales and you shoot the audience reacting to the story.  In this case it was all elementary age school children which is nice because they just react.  They don’t think about what the person sitting next to them will think about it so you get some nice facial expressions from the kids too.

This is a classic ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ type assignment.  There are not any major technical challenges aside from the red light and all you have to do is lock in and shoot.  It is great.  You can have fun, hear some really good stories and bang away to heart’s content.  That is what I call a photo assignment!

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.

A steady rain fell on the Depot Days in Hartselle but did not appear to dampen the crowd along Main Street Saturday. Gonca Huff and her husband Mark Huff play the cello and double bass respectively in front of Grecco Fiore, a new clothing store. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 9/19/09

In the never ending quest to stay visually fresh, I have stumbled across a couple of really nice images that were both shot through glass.  Not only does the glass provide nice framing but it allows you to include some nice reflective elements.  Last weekend I shot an art festival in Athens and found the image of the stained glass window created by a stained glass artist.  This weekend I was shooting a street festival in the rain and kept hearing this beautiful music.  When I approached the scene the first view of the musicians I saw was through the window.  I was absolutely arrested.

I love to hear classical music well played and strings singing together are just beautiful.  The lady and her husband were two members of a string quartet but they were the only two playing when I arrived.  The music floating out from under the entryway to a store was just wonderful.  Then I saw her face framed in the reflections from the street and I knew I had a very nice image.  The musician, Gonca Huff, was playing a cello and her husband Mark was playing a double bass.  Her face was a study in beauty as she focused on the music.  I don’t know if a picture could do justice to the sound but I absolutely loved the way her face was framed amid the reflections.  She had a classically beautiful face that matched the music so very well and that is the first thing I see when I look at this photo.

The previous Saturday in Athens I was wandering around the courthouse square trying to find anything that would set this festival apart visually from the many other festivals that we shoot this time of year.  September is just loaded with festivals.  I found the stained glass booth and as much as I am a sucker for classical music, I may be twice as big a sucker for stained glass.  I am drawn to stained glass like a moth to the flame.  So I was bound and determined to get me a shot there.  It didn’t take long to find the small, stained and cut glass window and to see the potential for framing a shot through it.  The only difficulty was in waiting to find a person who would come close enough to the window to get a discernible face in the frame.  I was on my knees and didn’t have to wait too long.

There are no great technical secrets involved in shooting this kind of picture.  The only thing you really have to do is see the picture and make sure you do the little things to make it a good shot.  For instance, framing the girl’s face in an undistorted portion of the window was really important.  If her face distorts I don’t have a picture.  Likewise, placing the musician’s face in a portion of the window that is not showing a distracting reflection is critical.  Like I said, the music caught my attention but her face framed amid the reflections is what really arrested my attention.

Art shopper Lori Wilson browses stained glass art by Julie Gill during the Art on the Square event on the courthouse square in downtown Athens Saturday. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 9/12/09

The real challenge in shooting images like this is in getting something that is publishable in the newspaper.  To be blunt, newsprint is about one step above toilet paper in terms of its ability to reproduce a color image well.  If you are shooting for a magazine or the internet then you have no problems.  If, however, you are shooting for newsprint you need to be aware of the limitations of your media.  When ink hits newsprint it tends to wick out because of the porous nature of the paper.  This can degrade sharpness and contrast so some images might not do too well on newsprint.  That is another reason to pay close attention to the positioning of the face.

This type of image can be overdone too.  In the newspaper business we are in the business of reporting the news.  That means that editors may sometimes shy away from “artsy” images feeling they don’t help carry the news pages well.  Doing “artsy” images, and I really hate that term by the way, is something you need to do sparingly.  Festivals are great opportunities for these types of light weight images because if you don’t find something a little off the well worn visual path you will come away with nothing but images of people walking around looking at stuff.  I don’t think I need to tell you how visually boring that would be.  So use your opportunities to be “artsy” wisely but definitely use them when the opportunity presents itself.

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.