alittlenews

I purchased a new iPhone a couple weeks ago.  My first photo with the iPhone was shot through raindrops on my windshield which I posted on Facebook.  I was so shocked at the amazing quality I quickly incorporated it into my daily workflow.  This is my very first smart phone and one reason I wanted the iPhone over some of the others was my comfort level with Apple technology and the photo compatibility the phone brings me.  Purchasing a phone with the intention to use it to take photos both personally and professionally started me thinking about the partnership between photography and technology.

It has not been too long ago that I was practically married to strobes. That was a byproduct of having to shoot with digital equipment that required a lot of pampering to produce a decent result.  Before that, color film had to be heavily strobed in any kind of mixed light, especially if that film was some form of slide film.  If you have been shooting long enough to remember the old days of black and white film photography, you will probably remember using a strobe very rarely. You could just make black and white film do what you wanted it to. With each technological evolution, photographers have acquired a new skill set or improved upon an existing skill set.

Daily Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. The Hartselle Christmas parade moves along Railroad Street and Main Street in downtown Hartselle Thursday, December 13, 2012.

I have been shooting with a Nikon D4 now for about 9 months.  To say the camera is amazing would be short selling it.  I shot the Hartselle Christmas Parade last month and it was just dark. They changed the street lights to these funky, old fashioned looking lights that are not especially bright. I figured it was just going to be too dark to work without a strobe. I dialed up ISO 6400 on the Nikon D4 and took a test image. I nearly laughed out loud. It was spectacular! I shot all night at ISO 6400 and was just amazed at the image quality.

I realized I have not shot with the multiple strobe and Pocket Wizard combo I had become so used to in a very long time, weeks in fact. I realized I really don’t use strobes much at all anymore and when I do I don’t hesitate to set one in the hot shoe and bounce it off of something, even something pretty far away. I realized how much the D4 and the D3 before it have freed me and changed the way I shoot. I literally have the confidence to shoot available light on almost any assignment now and it feels good.

In my mind, photojournalism, especially the news reportage part of it, should be shot as close to reality as possible.  Adding light to a news situation should either be so subtle that it isn’t noticeable or it should be so pronounced that it is unmistakable.  It is a matter of ethics.  Either shoot the strobe so it only does the minimalist work of filling in certain shadows that would kill reproduction, say, in a florescent lit room where the awful under eye shadows and overblown foreheads would create an image that is not one the eye saw, or it should be direct, on-camera flash like you might have to shoot in a night time breaking news situation.  What I would not wish to do would be to set up strobes in a way that alters the reality of the room and creates a situation that the general public attending the event would not have seen with the eye.

Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. Hartselle Police take two suspects into custody on Vaughn Bridge Rd. near the old National Guard Armory Friday, January 23, 2013. The men were suspects in a bank robbery in Decatur.

The new cameras are exciting because they have allowed us to take back reality and not set strobes all over the place to shoot news.  Of course, when we do now have to strobe something, it can be done with far less power because the high ISO quality is so amazing now.  Obviously, when shooting feature jobs like fashion or food or some portraits, this doesn’t apply.  But it is absolutely wonderful to be able to shoot with no flash and not have to worry about image quality and press reproduction issues.  We can now work faster, carry less gear and actually do a more realistic job of reporting.

One other thing that the new technology is allowing is for us to switch between stills and video on the same camera body.  This is a revolution in visual reporting, of course, that has been going on now for several years.  The newest DSLR cameras have such excellent image quality, I suppose you could use the video on any platform.  The audio still needs some work but, Wow!, how far we have come in a short period of time.  I shot video with my new iPhone the other day and was blown away by the image quality.  I mean, the thing is shooting 1080 HD video!  Amazing.

Of course, all this technology also creates choices we never used to have to make.  Just ast week, I found myself photographing police arresting a couple of bank robbery suspects.  I pulled out a tripod and shot from the sticks because I knew I had to get both photo and video and I can’t hold an 80-200 steady enough by hand.  Shooting this way also caused me to slightly miss focus on what may have been the best image.  We don’t have viewing attachments for our LCD so checking focus on the camera back can be a little difficult.  I was slightly out shooting some of the video.  It wasn’t a big deal on the video, but it was horribly noticeable in my still frames.  I switched back without checking focus and the focus had slipped a couple feet behind the subjects.

We are juggling many things including social media.  Our newspaper is really stepping up our online efforts using Facebook and Twitter and I am now tweeting.  Me, tweeting, smh.  Who would have ever thought.  Oh well, it is the next evolution.  Actually, the next evolution is getting iPads and using a new app that promises to revolutionize deadline visual reporting.  We will literally be shooting, pulling an iPad Mini out of my pocket and transmitting without ever leaving the news scene or the sidelines.  What a crazy new world.  I have literally moved in my career from shooting only black and white film for an all black and white newspaper to very soon shooting an image and transmitting within a couple of minutes to update the website.  We used to have one deadline a day, maybe two if there were a special section or something like that.  Now, deadline is, well, now.  Welcome to the brave new world of high-tech photojournalism.

If you want to follow my social media exploits, (LOL), you can follow me on twitter @garycos8 and you can friend me on Facebook.  If we don’t know each other already, send me a message so I know you are a reader here.  The times, they are a changing.  The video below was shot on my iPhone.  Stunning video from a phone but the sound is a bit spotty.

This photo is a great example of listening and letting the subject dictate the photo. When Gilbert Crutchfield told us his story, he was standing guard duty at an outpost near Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked. He had only a shotgun. I asked him if he had a shotgun handy, which he did, and we posed him with the sun over his shoulder to harken to the Japanese flag and made a picture

My wife and I celebrated our 25th anniversary last week.  We took a trip out of town for the weekend and, among the many pleasurable experiences we had, we visited the Louisville Slugger factory and museum.  Holding those wonderful bats in my hands brought back such great memories.  I had this amazing Johnny Bench model Louisville Slugger when I was 14 and man, I could hit the daylights out of the ball with that bat.  Then I made a terrible mistake.  I let another kid on our team use it.  He broke the bat in his first swing.  I wanted to take that broken bat and just wale on him.  That must be why I never made it to the big leagues!

Anyway, I started daydreaming back to the days when I could hit home runs.  I remember how, when I would swing the bat and connect and never felt the ball hit the bat but I knew I had nailed it.  I would look up and see that ball soaring into the the sky and watch it land outside the fence.  Man, what a feeling that was.  Hitting a home run was my first true pleasure.  The memories of those home runs remain to this day as some of the purest feelings I ever felt.  It was like the bat was a perfect extension of my arms and that moment when I knew I nailed it was incomparable.

Photography is a bit of a different animal.  Back in the days when we used to shoot film you couldn’t know anything about an image until you saw it in the print tray and knew you had it.  You could feel like you got it but you couldn’t know for sure until you saw that print.  Digital changed all that.  You can chimp an image immediately and know if you got the shot or not.  If you are doing a set up shot you can reconfigure on the fly and leave knowing you have one in the bag.

Photojournalism is, by its nature, unpredictable.  May times it is like we are swinging at sliders on the outside corner and just trying to make contact.  Forget about the sweet spot, just get a shot and get it in on time.  But every now and then, just every now and then, you know you got one.  That fastball just hangs out there over the middle of the plate and you whack the daylights out of it.

I could teach you how to hit in the sweet spot if we were really talking baseball.  It’s all about keeping your hands back, your weight back, staying loaded until the last minute and then blasting the bat through the zone with that nice inside out motion and flicking your wrists through the ball while smoothly moving your weight from the back foot to the front keeping those hips closed until the last possible second and following the pitch with your head perfectly still and just ripping the cover off the ball.  But then, we aren’t talking about baseball.  This is photojournalism.

Wow, how do I teach you to shoot in the sweet spot? If I had a consistent answer to that question I may have the illusive Pulitzer Prize by now!  Instead of having all the answers, let me give you a few suggestions that might increase the probabilities of shooting in the sweet spot.

First, stay on your subject.  Shoot through the moment because, as often as not, the shot you really want is either before or after the photo you were assigned to shoot.

Second, stay with your subject as long as you can.  Sometimes this is five minutes instead of two minutes.  Sometimes it may be five days instead of one day.  Most of the time it means hanging around for an hour instead of thirty minutes.  The reason being, most people put on a show for the camera as long as they are camera conscious.  Once they have become accustomed to you, and this takes a different amount of time for every person you shoot, they kind of forget you are a photographer and treat you like a regular person.  That is when you get your sweet moment.

Third, find the flow of the assignment and get into that flow.  This can be pretty tough especially on short assignments.  How many times have you been assigned something that amounts to a quick portrait, you run in and grab a shot or two and leave and you realize you have only been there a couple of minutes and you are leaving with something less than you would have liked.  I have hurried so many jobs over the years.  There might have been a shot, there might not have been.  One of the best ways to find the flow is to engage the subject early so they will relax around you.  Once a person relaxes and knows you are a normal dude (or dudette) they will not look at you as a camera but as a person.  When they are in the flow of their life, and not simply posing for your camera, you will find the flow and actually get real photos.

Fourth, work simply.  The more photo gear you set up the more uncomfortable the person you are shooting becomes.  Of course, if you are doing a set shot on purpose, throw this step out.  Pro models are a different story.  The everyday Joe you are doing a feature on is going to get a bit uncomfortable if you come in and do a four light set.  It will take him a while to settle down so keep it simple as often as possible.

You know, I have to do a post about high ISO bounce flash and how amazingly effective it is with modern digital cameras.  You can do so much more with a little strobe than you could have ever done before and the results are simply amazing.  Maybe next time.

Fifth, and lets cut this off at five, allow you subject to dictate the photo.  (Not what you think.)  You may be shooting a photo of someone and be struggling with an idea of how to do it.  Ask them to tell you their story.  Ask them what they talked to the reporter about.  If the reporter is there, listen for a while and get a feel for what they want to tell.  Many times, if you listen you will end up with a much better picture than if you go locked into a preconceived idea.  Allowing the subject to dictate content is actually a pretty smart way to work.  I don’t mean allowing the subject to tell you what to shoot.  I mean, listen to the subject and hear what they are really about.  In hearing their story you will almost always find a nice photo, a photo that you didn’t expect.

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Click on the first slide to see the show in a larger format.

Burningtree Country Club in Decatur hosts the Spirit of America golf tournament annually around the Fourth of July holiday.  It is always hot but this year it has been extremely hot.  Several days over 100 the last few weeks. Whole lot of sweating going on down on the links this year.  Compounding the normal load for shooting the tournament, the demand for video has added a tripod to the load I carried around.  It is not a huge tripod and it is indispensible.  Have you ever tried hand holding a 400mm lens without shaking?  You can get away with it in still photography but not in video!

The other part of the equation is figuring out when and what to shoot video on versus when and what to shoot the photos on.  Here is a tip.  Pick out a storyline for your video before you start.  Listen to what the reporters are thinking and maybe do a video on the person they are featuring.  Of course, a video on the tournament leader at the end of his round works fine too.  Here is how I handled the balance between stills and video.

I began the day by selecting the video target.  I then went onto the course and focused on the video story keeping in mind that I need to get an interview with the subject after his round.  Both days I shot things worked out where I could follow my subject for the last few holes of his round and then get my interview immediately after he finished.  I am shooting for about a minute and a half of video so my interviews formed the baseline with plenty of cut aways of my guy on the course.

After completing the video stories I headed back onto the course to fill out my photo gallery needs.  Obviously, I shot both stills and video of the guy I was targeting for the video and I shot his playing partners as well.  This gave me a good start on the photo gallery.  I was able to leave the tripod at the media which lightened my load a bit as I returned to the course.  A lot of this is psychological.  Thinking about, no, grumbling about, shooting the video and the stills at the same assignment is counter productive so you will do yourself a favor by focusing your mind and knocking out both.  It takes a lot longer and that is no fun in the heat but if that is what they are paying us for then that is what they are going to get.

One way to expedite your shooting is by paying attention to the course.  The great thing about golf courses is they present more opportunities for photographs than any other venue in sports.  Most sporting arenas are fairly generic places with fields or courts of all the same, or relatively the same dimensions.  Baseball is a little bit of an exception but golf is the exception.  No two courses are the same and, if they are holding a tournament at the course, it is probably a good course meaning it is also probably a beautiful place.  Ergo, pay attention to the course, pick out some nice spots and then shoot around those spots.

The fourth green at Burningtree is set up especially well with a pond in front of the green that has a fountain in it with trees inf front of  and behind the green.  It is also situated between two other holes with a pair of close by tee boxes and another green fifty yards or so away.  In other words, you can shoot from there and get several different looks very quickly which helps on a multiple assignment day.  The one thing to avoid is overshooting the golfer swinging.  Not much more boring than that.  Look for players working in and around hazards and especially look for player reactions.  You don’t always get reactions but some of them can be pretty nice.

You may be able to use your wide lens from time to time but the telephotos will be your bread and butter.  Golfers are a sensitive lot and don’t like noise, especially a clicking shutter, while they are in their swing.  I usually don’t even start shooting until the down swing is complete and the golfer contacts the ball.  I don’t care how good his reflexes are, he can’t screw up a shot by hearing the shutter click during his follow through.  That said, you will need to be sensitive to when you shoot.  It really is a no-no to shoot during the players back swing.  They keep the course quiet while the player is swinging for a reason so be courteous.  Other than being an all around nice guy, have some fun on the course and if you are shooting in a hot climate, make sure you stay hydrated unless you just like rides to the hospital in a shiny ambulance with IV bags hanging above you.

Transit of Venus from Gary Cosby Jr. on Vimeo.

Once in a while you shoot an assignment that fires the imagination.  The transit of Venus across the sun was just such a job.  We had a small gathering of amateur astronomers and a group of enthusiastic observers at Decatur Heritage Christian School and I had the assignment to photograph them sun watching, or Venus watching.  I had the good fortune to have a band of clouds move over the sun about a half hour before the transit began and it lasted for more than a half hour into the transit.

How could that be good you ask?  It gave me time to shoot both photos and video and we have a big emphasis on video going on.  As I have already stated, it is very difficult to do both stills and video and do either one justice unless you have a slow moving event.  Even then, you are still sacrificing one for the other or, more accurately,  you are sacrificing both for neither but that decision is not one that is in my hands.  Since newspapers are, by and large, shrinking, you have no hope of adding staff so you make do and do more with less.  That is the unfortunate nature of the beast right now.  (As you read this, I have friends in Huntsville, Birmingham and Mobile who are waiting to see if they still have a job.  Major layoffs are expected very soon.)

Back to the transit.  I used the cloud cover to do interviews which formed the basis for my video.  I then shot some “b” roll and added a few still photos during the edit and made a fairly decent video.  The fun came as the sun began peeping through the clouds.  The kids watching on a video monitor went kind of crazy.  You will love them in the video.  Just before the sun made a full break from behind the clouds, I got a really good idea.

One of the guys there had a nice telescope that was a little larger than the rest.  He said it was not as good as some of the others but it was certainly creating a nice visual.  If I got low behind the scope I could shoot up the barrel, past the eye piece and see the sun.  Problem was, this created a silhouette of anyone looking in the telescope.  I ran to my car and grabbed a couple of light stands and popped SB28′s on them rigged with Pocket Wizards.  I set them on about 1/4 power and got them as close as I could to the telescope.  This would allow me to overpower the sun just enough to avoid a silhouette and give some definition to the face of the person looking in the telescope.

It worked great!  I placed one strobe just to the front of the scope and one just to the rear.  That worked really well but my best picture came when the rear flash failed to fire.  Only the front flash hit the kids face and it hit it in such a way as to just give a little light right around the eyes.  I had a very happy accident and it turned out to be my favorite photo from the event.  There were so many good people photos to shoot I didn’t even think to try shooting a photo of the transit with my own camera.  I made a picture of the video monitor but never even tried to shoot it myself.  Duh!  Oh well, I will just shoot the next one.  I will only have to wait about a hundred and five years!  Yeah, not likely.

Daily Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. Rheagan Harvel reacts with intensity after making a steal but stepping out of bounds during Brewer's 56-53 overtime win over Cullman in the Northwest Regional Friday, February 24, 2012 at Wallace State in Hanceville.

I have probably shot less high school basketball this season than at any time in my career.  We don’t work fixed shifts but my regular shift puts me on days most of the time and basketball usually happens in the evening.  Translation, I have only done a handful of games leading up to the Regional Tournament and tournament time is when I actually enjoy shooting basketball.  The emotion, the intensity and the generally high level of competition make for an awesome environment and really good photo opportunities.

Wallace State in Hanceville also boasts just about the best basketball facility in the northern part of the state, maybe the entire state, so it is a pleasure to work there.  I shot seven games in the Northwest Regional and enjoyed every one of them.  State final four is next week in Birmingham and that will wrap up the hoops season for our staff.

I have done this tournament for most of my 18 years in Decatur.  I have shot from every conceivable place in the arena except the overhead catwalks which they don’t give us access to.  I am sure, even not being overly fond of heights, I would go hang a remote camera up there if it was open to us.  Just as a side note, I am not crazy about overhead remotes.  Shots from overhead remotes are like a visit from a long-lost relative.   They are cool for a while but pretty soon you have seen as much of them as you want and are ready for them to go back home.  I am not too crazy about backboard remotes either.  Both can bring a different angle to your coverage but they are really, really overused.  Just my opinion whatever that is worth.

Back to the regularly scheduled post.  I have shot from everywhere but I have more or less settled on shooting directly under the basket after having shot from the baseline near the corner for years.  I never shot basketball with a wide lens early in my career.  In fact, the few attempts I made with a wide lens never appealed to me.  Over the last few seasons, and especially at tournament time, I have migrated to the basket using wider lenses.  The action in the lane is cool and you can make some dramatic, low angle shots using that wide lens.  There also seem to be more than a few scrambles for the ball with kids diving on the floor right in the lane and this is the best position I have found to shoot them.

The other benefit to shooting beneath the basket is, when using a long lens, say a 300mm, the action at the other end of the court is squared up, for lack of a better term.  I can shoot action around the opposing basket straight on which has a nice look and I can get good defensive shots of the team I am covering.  Some of the best action comes from front court defense and full court pressure  and you can get nice and tight, especially on presses in the mid-court area.

The other benefit to this shooting position, and it trumps all other benefits, is I no longer have an official standing right in front of me.  For whatever reason, they seldom stop directly under the basket.  When I shot from the baseline further out from the basket my view was invariably blocked by the ref’s back side.  Way too many frames have been ruined by the intervention of a referee in my pictures.

For this tournament I shot my long stuff using a Nikon D3s with an 80-200mm lens with a 1.4 converter.  This gave me an effective focal length of about 112-280mm at f4.  Given the high ISO ability of the D3s this was not even a challenge.  I shot with this combo at ISO 4000, 1/1,000 second at f4 for almost the entire tournament.  I also carried my personal camera, a Canon 5D, with a 24-70 f2.8 lens.  I normally don’t use my personal camera at work for the obvious reasons but for this tournament I find it invaluable.  We do have second bodies but they are the massively deficient D2 series bodies.  The image quality is so bad relative to either of the aforementioned cameras they are not worth using in combo with those bodies.

One more week of hoops.  Hope at least one of our local teams brings home the big blue state championship trophy!

Daily Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. The 2nd Ave Street Scape work began Monday with a bit of decoration and traffic management changes. Daniel Massey, from Decatur Parks and Recreation Department, hangs a banner proclaiming the area "Dig Town."

After writing about check presentations and ribbon cuttings I had an epiphany.  People tell me all the time what a great job I have.  Most people think my job is great because I get to shoot college football and national championship games.  Some might even think it is cool to shoot stuff like fires and tornadoes.  What most people don’t realize is those are infrequent events that make up only the smallest percentage of my job.

The bulk of my job is in covering the community, the annual events, the city council or county commission meetings, the school events, plays, birthdays, funerals, retirements, and all the sundry stories on people who have done stuff or are doing stuff.  I can’t imagine anyone who thinks my job is cool when they see photos from those events.  Lots of people volunteer to carry my gear at Alabama or Auburn games.  I have never had a single person say they would like to carry my gear while I cover Depot Days or The Spirit of America Festival.

If you really want to know the truth of the matter the “glamor” assignments are very rare.  You may get only a few of them in a year.  Some years you don’t get any.  So what do you do when, as many of us complain, “these assignments stink!”  If you are saying that right now about your photo assignments you need to slap yourself.  I would do it but a cyber slap just doesn’t have the impact of a good, old-fashioned, whap across the face.

The reason you get those really good assignments is because you have worked hard on assignments that most of us complain about.  Really.  I do my fair share of complaining, to be sure, but I don’t let my complaints keep me from giving my best effort on every job I shoot.  Believe me, at a community newspaper you are going to shoot a bunch of jobs that have the potential to make a yawner of a photo.  It is completely up to you what you do with those jobs.  When you do well and bring back a pleasant surprise you get brownie points with the boss.  You turn a few sow’s ears into silk purses and before you know it the boss is tossing you some silk to start with.

If you are a young gun right now you are ready to go, ready to get out there and shoot anything.  Those of you jaded old dogs, and you know who you are, are busy finding another blog to read.  But wait one minute.  Have you ever heard the old saying, “Practice makes perfect?”  The old saying is not accurate.  The correct version of is, “Perfect practice makes perfect.”

The way you work on those boring assignments you have shot a hundred times really determines how well you will do when you get a really good job.  Let me throw some Bible at you.  Jesus said “He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much…”  You prove yourself out there shooting all those festivals, ribbon cuttings, check presentations, community events, 100th birthdays, enterprise features and the miscellany that happens all around us every day.  Finding a moment amid the chaos of normality separates a real photojournalist from a person just grabbing snap shots.  (By the way, if you value your life don’t tell me I take nice snap shots!)

Now for the concrete stuff that gives you something to build with.  Try lighting assignments you would never have lit before.  Never let another environmental portrait be “good enough” with room light.  Push yourself to be better every time you pick up the camera.  Use a telephoto where you would have never used one.  Use a wide where you should use a telephoto.  Climb a tree, but don’t scrape your knee (Sound of Music ref for those uncultured swine out there (That one is from Toy Story!)).  What am I telling you?  Push, push, push, push, push, push and don’t stop pushing.  Push yourself every single assignment to do something great.  It won’t always work.  Don’t quit pushing, ever.

The next time you have an assignment that bores you take it as a personal challenge to do anything but bring back a boring image.  Go early.  Stay late.  Lord forbid, try a motion blur.  Do  A N Y T H I N G  different.  Before you know it your pictures will be better, you will be motivated, you will be surprising your bosses and your readers and your job happiness rating will be through the roof.  Most of all, and this is the most important thing, don’t wait on good assignments to come to you.  Turn every assignment you get into a great assignment.

I have walked on both sides of this street, let me tell you, this is the best side!  The photos with this post are a collection of images I pulled from last year’s file from your ordinary, every day photo assignments.  Hopefully I stretched my envelope just a little bit on each image.  Remember, every technique you perfect on “ordinary” jobs makes you that much better when you get one of those extraordinary jobs.

If I am fairly unqualified to tell you how to shoot and edit video then I am really unqualified to teach you anything about graphic design.  There are some amazing graphic artists out there doing work I could only dream about.  In fact, my graphic art transpires more from nightmare than dream.  As you know from my last post, we had two area teams playing for state football championships.  I forget exactly how it came about but I was drafted to create full page, commemorative posters for each team to publish on the day of their games.

I did the work and they turned out rather nicely and looked wonderful in the paper.  Each ran as a full page and I think they were well received.  When Hartselle won the state title we again decided on a poster that was going to be in the same format as the first ones, a horizontal, full page that would run as the back page of the special section.  I was very nearly finished with it when our managing editor came back and asked would it be possible to transform it into a wrap around cover that would use both the front and the back of the special section.  Sounded great but it meant starting all over.  Not fun when it comes to photo illustrations.

You can see the step by step process involved in the sequential images with this post.  The first, and far and away the most difficult part, is coming up with an idea.  Without an idea you can’t form a game plan, you can’t pick out the images to use and you end up with a mess that takes twice or three times as long to do.  The first thing to know is what images you have available to work with.  Since I shot this game I knew the images that were available.  Check item number one.

I usually build an illustration from the background out.  Because the format of this double truck was essentially a square I didn’t have a single image that would work for a background.  I started with a white canvas 21 inches square.  I liked the image of the players running from the smoking helmet and I wanted the words State Champions to rise out of the smoke.  That was my only idea and it was only for the lower quarter of the page.

Each image you use has to be heavily modified beginning with selecting the area to include by creating a clipping path and cutting that portion out of the mother image.  I like to use the lasso tool with a 2 pixel feather.  This is tedious and time consuming.  You clip the image and paste it into your canvas then move it around, resize it, sometimes dump it and start over.  You change the opacity, use layer properties and special filters until it looks roughly like you want.  I never make a perfect clipping path so I usually zoom in really tight and use the erase tool to smooth the edges of the clipped image.  Using that eraser also eases the edge so it blends better with other layers.  Again, tedious and time consuming.  You do this for each layer.

How do you know when to stop?  Good question. I guess it is about the same way a painter knows when to quit painting.  Of course, I am not a painter either but I imagine him standing there looking at the thing he has created and his imagination has run dry so he cleans out the brushes, puts the easel away, hangs it on the wall and hopes he is famous and wealthy before he dies.  For this illustration you can see in the step by step rendering that I added two bucket fulls of color right at the end.  I just didn’t like the way the image washed out to white.  The red felt about right.  I played with it, erased some of it and wriggled the opacity  a bit with my eraser tool until I couldn’t do anything more. We will see about the fame and fortune but I am not holding my breath which could prove prematurely fatal thereby giving my wife a shot at the money even if I missed it.  Sorry, been reading Mark Twain tonight.

The final step is showing it to the editors for approval before compressing it and save it as a jpeg.  By the way, if you don’t save after each and every step you are a mad man.  Save each time you do anything.  When, not if, Photoshop or your computer quits on you the saves will bring you back to your most recent step and not make you run screaming and cursing from the building which, by the way, is the way I know that the PC is created in hell by the devil himself.  (Everyone knows the Mac is made in heaven BUT they haven’t given me a Mac at work so I am stuck using a hellish PC!)  I know, I really should learn to say what I think.  Still, Mac or PC, save frequently and you will live a relatively happy life.

Courtney Upshaw and Jesse Williams sack Auburn quarterback Kiehl Frazier. Click the image to view the slideshow.

I covered the Iron Bowl Saturday with my co-worker Jeronimo Nisa.  It was a pretty normal day of game day work for me and it was a pretty lopsided Iron Bowl.  Auburn didn’t put up much of a fight and Alabama rolled to a 42-14 victory.  This is, of course, the biggest game of the year in Alabama.  About 98 percent of the state has an opinion or a rooting interest and the other two percent, well, they ain’t from these parts.

This was my 15th Iron Bowl, or something close to that, and it was Jeronimo’s first.  I covered Alabama and he covered Auburn; although, we were not turning away from pictures from either side.  We set things up so he always faced Auburn whether on offense or defense and I always faced Alabama.  This ensured we covered both teams as well as possible.  Obviously, Jero didn’t see too much action.  Like I said, it was very one sided.

I have written pretty much all there is to write about covering football but I have never really touched on the editing post-game.  There are some things I had never thought about and Jeronimo asked me a couple of questions that prompted me to think about what I was doing and how I was doing it.  I moved a total of 41 game pictures, 19 at half time and the rest post game.  I was completely finished before Jero moved a single photo and that is when the questions started.  How was I working so fast?  I had never thought about it and had never tried to explain it to anyone.

I have covered an awful lot of football on very tight deadlines and now do things without thinking about them that I have learned either by personal experience or by watching how other shooters work.  Editors really like for you to make deadline and if you can beat the deadline the more time you give them to work with pictures the greater the potential that good results will appear on the pages.  So here are some editing tips that can help you speed up and work both quickly and accurately.  As usual, this is just the way I do things and not necessarily what others do or what will work best for you so don’t take this as if it were the gospel.

The best way to speed up editing is to edit while you shoot.  On the Nikon pro bodies there is a little button on the back of the camera that looks like a key.  This lock button allows you to mark images in camera.  When you mark an image in camera it also tags it in Photo Mechanic so you can import you entire take and then just search the tagged images.  You will miss some stuff so a secondary edit will be needed but if you use the TV timeouts to edit on your camera back you will have marked your best photos and they will be ready immediately.

Equally important to marking images is setting up your IPTC Stationary in Photo Mechanic so files are named and pre-captioned when you import.  I usually set up the caption with a sentence like    “during the second half of Alabama’s 42-14 win over Auburn in the Iron Bowl.”  All I have to do in Photoshop is add the player IDs and any necessary description.  A great many photojournalists use another speed function when captioning.  Preloading the team rosters into code replacement fields allows you to type the player’s number in brackets like {AU32} and the player’s name will appear in the caption.  I don’t do this but I know many who do.

Another aspect that speeds editing is having decent typing skills.  The faster and more accurately you type the quicker you can move.  For those of you who are students reading this, take a typing course so you can learn to type properly.  Hunt and peck is terrible for speed.  Being able to quickly bang out captions really moves along the process.

I guess the other thing that makes me fast is a personality thing.  I can focus intently when I need to.  When my wife sees this look she just steps out of the way.  I think the first time she saw me edit a game take she was shocked.  I get into the editing zone and focus completely on the task at hand.  Editing time is no time to be social.  After you are done you can joke around with the other shooters who are finished and have a good time.  Editing time is for editing.  Focus and knock it out.

This is really difficult for a person whose personality is either very gregarious or very meticulous.  Editing on deadline is not kind to either personality type.  For the meticulous person, editing on deadline kind be unnerving because they are seeking perfection in each image.  For the gregarious person they are always asking for others 0pinions on their pictures.  I don’t mean every now and then, we all do that.  I mean they are asking for editing opinions all the time.  Neither is very conducive to speed.  Neither personality is a bad personality.  A person has to understand who they are and work within their personality as fast as they can.  You can always tidy up toning or cropping or get second opinions after you have done the deadline work.

When I first open my images in Photoshop I do a very quick toning in Camera Raw and then crop the images before opening.  The only thing I do to files that are open in Photoshop is complete my caption info.  I then save in two folders, one is my primary, monthly image folder and the other is a “Move” folder.  The images in the Move folder have a slight modification in the file name and object name field so they are searchable in our system.  Then I transmit images via ftp from Photo Mechanic.  After that I make phone calls or send texts to editors to confirm the images were received.

Then I can click off my driven personality and get back into my friendly personality and fellowship with my friends.  I have never been a perfectionist so I don’t have to worry over that part but I do enjoy hanging around and talking to all the excellent photojournalists from around the state.  Iron Bowls are kind of like homecomings for the photo community and the after game photo party is usually nice.

This timeline segment shows the title sequence to Eddie Cosby's vidoe. The top is a still photo. The middle layer with black boxes are the titles. The bottom blue line is the video with the green audio bars beneath. In this edit, the video is completely muted in favor of the still photo.

Now comes the hard part.  Editing video was the most daunting thing I have tried with the computer.  Just finding a starting place was complex.  I muddled through a couple of edits making a mess of everything.  Then my co-worker Jeronimo Nisa came to the rescue and explained some of the basics of video editing.  That got me started and from there I was able to add techniques and learn as I moved forward.

This frame from the editor shows what the timeline edit looks like in the video sequence.

The most basic step in editing is understanding and cataloging each clip.  You may have twenty or more clips so it is important to listen to each clip and log notes.  This takes a while but it saves time in the long run because, as you edit, you will remember a quote you want and then have notes to refer to so you will immediately know which clip contains the segment.

After logging your clips you are ready to move into the actual editing.  This involves moving segments from your raw clips into your timeline.  The average video in the Twin Killers series is about six minutes long.  My first edit usually left me with about two minutes to trim.  This is painful because I felt I had already cut the content drastically from the raw clips.  The trick is to preserve enough detail without allowing the video to bog down.

This can be a challenge when editing for the internet.  A normal person will sit down and watch a documentary from 3o minutes to 2 hours long on TV without batting an eye.  That same person may click out of an internet video after a minute or two.  Holding their attention in a six minute video becomes a challenge and good editing helps meet that challenge.  Let me beat the quality drum one more time.  I believe strongly that the reason most people have a shorter attention span on newspaper web sites than they do for a TV show is because of the vast difference in quality being produced by TV versus the relatively poor quality videos on many newspaper sites.  Translation:  If you build it they will come.

This is a section of the time line that shows fade cuts done manually. The video editor also provides some preset transitions you can simply drop on the timeline.

Interesting clips are an important component in editing and transitions between clips are a key to moving the story along.  I discovered that jump cuts should be used most of the time.  That means the scene jumps from clip to clip without any transition.  When I first began editing I was fading every clip into another clip.  As it turns out this is boring.  On the positive side, a fade cut is a good way to transition between ideas in a video.  What I found was that jump cuts kept an interview flowing but a fade cut is a good way to change the flow.

After you assemble all your clips and get the transitions down you are ready to add titles and subtitles.  You may also need to add motion to a clip or a still image you incorporated.  All this takes time and, in my case, repetition to get it right.  There were many times when I just wanted to quit and say an edit was good enough.  I sometimes closed the program and walked away until another day when I had a better attitude and could put in the time needed to refine the edit.

This frame shows what the fade cuts looks like in the video editor.

I found that editing had several layers.  The initial layer was a basic layout of the story.  I then took that basic edit and trimmed the fat to get it down to an acceptable time.  After that I would set my video transitions.  Next I would refine the audio.  You would be amazed how difficult it can be to cut audio so it sounds natural and, try as I might, there were some transitions that were just impossible.  There was one clip where the subject was talking about 200 mph winds and the mic dropped out right when he said the word “two hundred.”  I noticed it because I was monitoring the sound so I had him say the sentence again.  During the edit I clipped in just the word “two hundred” and it sounds pretty natural.  After finishing the audio transitions I added my title slides which was usually the last step.

I would show the video to a couple of people and take their input and refine the edit one more time.  By the way, make absolutely sure to save often.  Video editing can be complex enough you might not remember exactly what you did if you have to redo a piece should your computer fail or your program close.  (Yes, this did happen to me once when I lost an entire edit because I failed to save.)  The final step is outputting to Quick Time and uploading the finished project to the web host.

After finishing the six videos in the Twin Killers series I calculated the time involved in editing.  I came up with the rough number of one hour of edit time for each minute of finished video.  I estimate thirty hours of editing for the whole project.  Someone who is experienced may have knocked it out in a hurry but you don’t get experienced without doing it.  Maybe someday I will be both better and faster.

A Rode Video Mic is mounted on the camera. This set up is great for gathering directional sound but has not proved so great for interviews in an indoor setting.

Here is the one area that makes shooting video so difficult for a person coming from a still photography background.  Sound is the single most important aspect of your video.  Without good, clean, crisp sound it doesn’t matter how good your shots look.  Without good, clean, crisp sound it doesn’t matter what kind of editor you are.  Sound either makes or breaks the video.

This is the dimension of video that is completely foreign to a traditional still photographer and really is what separates the men from the boys in the video world.  We have two microphones at The Decatur Daily.  One is a shotgun mic built by Rode and the other is a wireless lavalier mic built by Sony.  Each has its place and learning that is a work in progress for me.  I tried using the shotgun to record some sound during an interview and combined that with some sound gathered during another part of the interview using the lavalier and the difference was more than striking.  It almost ruined my piece.  I had to do some heavy duty sound editing to even make them close.

The shotgun is good for gathering ambient, directional sound.  It gathers sound mostly from directly in front of the mic but don’t be deceived, it will pick up ambient sound from any direction.  The mic is balanced to gather sound directly ahead.  Where my interview was almost a disaster was in the hiss it added to my audio track and, for lack of a better term, made the subject sound distant.  It was the devil to get even some of that hiss out without ruining the the sound all together.

The lavalier is a mic that clips onto your subject’s shirt and sends a wireless signal to a receiver unit attached to the camera.  This is a perfect mic for getting interview sound.  This is its strength.  It’s weakness is the mic has to be more or less attached to your subject to gather sound accurately.  It is not a directional mic so it picks up sounds from any place and this can work against you if you have a noisy ambient sound environment.

This is the camera mounted receiver on the Sony wireless mic set up. This produce great sound for interviews.

That brings me to the key to collecting sound.  You really have to listen to the ambient environment.  Trucks, cars, planes and trains, not to mention wind, can corrupt your sound and create a distracting environment.  Our Sony has a monitor port so you can actually hear the sound coming through the mic.  The Rode mic does not.  It is a real eye opener to actually hear sound for the first time.  You will be completely surprised how distracting those sound environments can be.

I did one interview in a room that was sparsely furnished and had a concrete floor.  The echo was terrible.  I didn’t notice it in conversation.  I noticed it when I put the ear piece in.  I needed that sound and couldn’t edit out the echo.  I just don’t know how.  I am sure there is a way but I don’t know it.  Have you ever seen a studio sound board?  That may be the most intimidating single piece of recording equipment I have ever seen.  Forget about it with the limited tools, and even more limited knowledge, I have.  The best answer is paying attention as you shoot and adjusting where you shoot until you have a clean sound environment.

These videos were all natural sound meaning I did not add any kind of supplemental sound track.  I felt the story demanded a documentary approach so I kept it all natural.  At other times I might add a music track or another, underlying ambient sound track.  I certainly wish I had audio of the actual tornado.  It was the most impressive, fear inspiring sound I have ever heard in my life.  You can’t even imagine unless you have actually heard it.  Literally gets down in your bones and vibrates.

Most people who use a Dslr to shoot video will say that recording sound is the great weakness of this camera type no matter the manufacturer.  There is no way to control the recording levels so you can have clipping of the audio track.  It is like having a blown out highlight in the visual.  The sound exceeds the dynamic range of the recording device and you can’t control it.  Some people will use a recording device solely dedicated to sound gathering.  I don’t have that luxury but there are a number of excellent devices on the market if you are interested in sound recording.  Be prepared to spend some money though, which, in part explains why I don’t have one.  You would then have to sync your audio and video track in your editing software which can also be a pain in the back side.

Bottom line, sound is the single most important part of video storytelling.  Pay a great deal of attention to sound because it can be your best friend or your worst enemy.