alittlenews

Here is an example of allowing the baseline ambient exposure determine your overall exposure for the image. I exposed for the building and waited.

Okay, first of all let me say I stink at getting good lightning photos.  I got lucky with these the other night shooting literally in my back yard.  I stink at shooting lightning for the same reason I can’t fish.  Two reasons really, I am not lucky and I am not patient.  The luck part is because I can’t control where thunderstorms happen and for whatever reason when I show up with a camera the storm seems to clam up and save its lightning bolts for someone else.  Better still, the best lightning happens while my camera writes the previous image to the card.  Now that is frustrating.

The other reason is I am impatient.  To successfully shoot lightning you have to have the patience of a good fisherman.  Lighting strikes but n0t always where you can see it.  The storm the other night is a great example.  The lightning was flashing so frequently it looked like paparazzi at and Elvis sighting.  The flashes were nearly continuous but most of them, like 90 plus percent, were all either inside the cloud or were streaking in areas out of my field of vision.  Patience allows you to wait it out until you get the frame you are looking for and I am not willing to invest too much time waiting for something that might not happen.

I didn’t mention that I don’t presently own a tripod.  Actually, I have not owned a tripod in so many years I don’t really remember the last time I did own a tripod.  I am contemplating purchasing one with the idea I will have to have one when my video capable SLR arrives in a month or so.  From all I have seen a good set of sticks is almost a prerequisite to shooting solid video.  We will see.

Without the tripod I am left bracing the camera against first one thing and then another.  These lighting photos were shot with my camera sitting on top of a large, plastic recycling container the city issues.  The trick becomes positioning the camera in such a way that it doesn’t move around during the exposure.  I just put my hand on it to hold it in place but I have used my camera bag to stabilize a long exposure in the past.  I have always been a whatever works kind of guy.

The other part of good lightning photos is safety.  I am always envious of the lightning photos I see from the west, especially from places like Phoenix.  They have these great sight lines where there are no obstructions for miles and miles and you can see individual thunderstorm cells from a great distance.  Down South we have our storms obstructed by the heavy tree cover and the lay of the land.  That means the lightning is all over you before you can really shoot photos.  My Dad will quickly tell you if you can hear thunder you are in danger of being hit by lightning.  (You can tell I have heard that one a few times!)  So safety has to top your list when shooting electrical storms.  The metal leg tripod is a wonderful conductor of electricity.

The final problem is, of course, the rain.  Because most storms in this part of the world are not simply there for my photographic pleasure it is important to shoot from cover of some kind.  This relates to not having great sight lines over distance.  If the lighting is close then the rain is close too and this means your multi-thousand dollar SLR is in danger of getting wet.  They don’t seem to like that too much.  And because the sight lines are limited that means shooting with a fairly wide angle lens which is much more susceptible to front element moisture than a hooded telephoto would be.  All in all, shooting lightning is not so easy.

Exposures are the other factor in the equation.  Here is a hint; allow the ambient light to dictate your exposure.  The most effective lightning pictures have other visual elements in them and you will usually be shooting at times after sunset.  My little out building was illuminated by a street light that was about 50 yards away.  The exposure for the building was between 10 and 15 seconds at f5.6 with an ISO of 400.  I bounced back and forth with the exposure between 10 and 15 seconds and moved my ISO around between 200 and 400 until I was relatively happy with the results.  Find your base ambient and work from that.  Your results will be far better than just guessing and hoping.

Once in a while I try shooting lightning in daylight.  This is borderline insane because about the best exposure you can hope for is 1/4 at f22 ISO 200 and that is with a particularly dark storm cloud late in the day.  It is really pot luck and catching a lighting bolt by reflex is close to impossible.  It happens to fast.  Once in a while you might get one if the lightning bolt is intense and hangs there for a little longer.  Of course when this happens you will be very close and you will be likely running for cover and miss the shot anyway.  Bottom line is lightning photos are great and beautiful but you must never forget that lightning kills more people annually than any other storm characteristic.  Let’s bet careful out there.

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.

f2.8, its the new f8.  Actually, in the world of photojournalism you would be surprised to know how many photos are shot at f2.8.  Back in the day of Weegee, and if you don’t know that dude you need to dig up a photo history book and do a little reading, you had this big 4×5 camera with a flash gun attached and you shot everything at f8 with a big explosion of light.  If your flash bulb happened to burst then there was a literal explosion.  Now, with fine, high ISO cameras, we are back to shooting wide open in available light and getting nice results.

When I first began in photojournalism I was working for an all black and white newspaper and I never put a flash on the camera except in the darkest of dark situations.  When T-Max 3200 came on the market I thought I had died and gone to heaven.  That film represented the high water mark of available light photography in my opinion.  You could push that film to 6400 with virtually no grain.  You could go to 12,8oo but the results were pretty hideous.  Then the whole world changed.  The all color all the time USA Today fully changed the world of newspapers everywhere from my little paper in North Carolin to the “Gray Lady” publishing color fronts.

This meant we were lighting a whole lot of stuff.  You could shoot ISO 800 film with decent quality but you could not get good color.  You had to strobe almost everything to get your colors anywhere near balanced.  I guess we all figured out the film stuff, and may I add a thank God for Fuji comment here because they pushed the mark higher for everyone in the business with excellent positive and negative films.  Then we went digital and had to reinvent ourselves again.

This meant all we learned shooting chromes and all we learned shooting negs was again shelved and now we were shooting for a cantankerous medium that didn’t like available light much, especially if you happened to shoot a Nikon D1.  Anything other than daylight was problematic.  Back to the strobes but with much more focus on finely tuned exposure.  The digital medium changed the sloppy habits we all got shooting color neg and brought us back into a disciplined approach so we didn’t have to fight Photoshop to wring the quality out of those cranky image sensors.

Now we have come full circle.  We again have cameras that will do remarkably well in low light and have excellent color characteristics.  And we are free again.  Well, almost free again anyway.  So we are back to being f2.8 and be there shooters.  I hear the angels singing!  Photography as God intended it, wide open, full frame, available light and with virtually instant results.

So I found myself wandering around in the dark waiting for a CD release party to start and looking to kill some time productively.  I got to the job at the assigned time only to have a member of the band tell me they would not be playing for a while.  They wanted the crowd to warm up a bit using some canned 50′s music.  I think he meant they wanted the crowd to become well lubricated by the rather large supply of beer that was trickling in with each new guest.  Whatever the case the delay caused me to wander around.  I turned the ISO up to 5000 and set a manual exposure down in the shaky land of 1/8th to 1/4 sec at f2.8.  I was standing in an alley outside the warehouse looking for any light when I noticed the guy in the window.  I had a nice image right there and I was blessing the Lord for that D3 that sees in the dark.  I shot a few frames and then the magic happened.  While I had him framed in that window with that lovely yellow light wrapping all around him he tipped his bottle for a drink.  I was nearly ecstatic.  I knew I had a really nice feature image.  It was all I could do to hold the camera still.  I quickly chimped my image and it looked good.  Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!  Photo satisfaction.

The rest of the release party was a bit anti-climatic for me.  I had the image and we actually did publish it.  It is a nice image but we live in the Bible belt and sometimes will avoid images that might touch upon the southern religious sensibilities.  I realize that some of you are scratching your heads over this.  In most other regions of the world people don’t think twice about having a beer but down south beer is the devil’s first cousin.  I don’t mean to make light of this.  Drinking can lead folks into some really bad spots because most folks don’t know when to stop.  I’m not judging, I’m just saying.

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.  Just for the record, God might not agree either.  And I know my momma don’t agree so don’t even bring her into this!

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.

Me and my D3

That screaming sound you hear is actually me singing the hallelujah chorus.  I got a new D3 from The Decatur Daily this week and it is sweet.  We also got a new 300mm f2.8s and I am practically in a faint!  I think the light is better, the temperature more bearable and the birds are singing sweeter.  Yes my friends, days of glory indeed.

Now my boss expects a Pulitzer.  No pressure!  No big deal.  So in celebration of this momentous occassion I thought  I would take this opportunity to basically scream at the top of my lungs then settle down and do a litte post on shooting products.  While this doesn’t come up all that often in the newspaper business it is still a very useful skill to have.

Most small product photography is going to be in a controlled light situation and you are in control of the light.  For these shots I used only one light, a Lumedyne strobe fired through an Octobank.  The power pack was set to 100ws and the aperture was around f8-f11 approximately.  The real key to remember when shooting small products is to have a really big light source.  With the Octobank just a foot over the table on average I had a huge, soft light source.

I positioned the light behind the product which had me shooting what is basically a back lit set up. This means that you must use a forward fill card of some kind.  For these shots I just used a piece of aluminum foil.  I used this because it was at hand.  You could use small cards, notebooks are pretty much anything you can position.  My background was aluminum foil as well so I got some fill off of that.

I like to keep the small product lighting really simple.  If I had to add more light I would have used an SB800 real close to fill a selected area and would have probably used gobos of some sort to control spill.  Again, just pieces of cardboard, a book or just about anything else you have on hand can be used to modify the light.

When shooting the glass in the 20mm lens, the Octobank gives you a nice, deep, multi-layered reflection.  This is thing that makes the lens pop.  Shooting glass can be tough so the large source makes you life a lot easier.  Now I just racked my 24-70 lens out to 70mm and shot at the closest focus point, or very near it.  The Canon 5D makes such a beautiful image you can hardly go wrong.  Just make sure you check your fill and your baseline exposure and keep it in the ballpark and you are good to go.  There are lots of techniques you can use in small product shooting but simplicity in any technique is your friend.

If you can get good at small product work there is a big market place where you can probably find a niche and make some real money.  I have done lots of this in the past but this is not my thing.  I love photojournalism for its diversity.  Doing small product every now and then is a nice break for me but it is not what I want to do all the time.  The key to shooting for money for most folks is to find that niche and work it hard.

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.  (The photos of me were taken by my daughter Katie who is a grad student at Auburn University.)

Daily newspaper photojournalism is amazingly diverse.  In recent posts I have talked about the qualities of compassion and vision.  Today I want to throw one at you that might not be immediately obvious.  Imagination is an hugely important tool in your photojournalist tool set.  I don’t ever recall a professor telling me this but over the years I have had to use imagination time and time again.  In fact, without imagination this job becomes stale and boring.

I will grant you this, the word imagination may seem out of place in a business where we are charged with creating accurate records of what is transpiring in front of the camera.  Indeed, there are situations where you need to keep that imagination tucked safely away in your tool kit.  When you are covering a literal news event you might not use imagination all that much.  After all, when you are shooting a trial, an important public meeting or a traffic fatality imagination might get you in more trouble than you can get out of.

Portrait of Jacob Holt shot with two lights, one on either side and slightly behind. Both lights were fired through a white umbrella and the ambient was underexposed by about one stop. Holt plays football for Clements High School in Limestone County, Alabama.

The reality of daily newspaper work is that you will shoot far more portraits, food, fashion, features and assignments like these than you will the gritty breaking news that most people associate with our jobs.  Having a good imagination helps you take an ordinary portrait assignment, for instance, and make something really special with it.  Imagination in photojournalism is the ability to take that blank canvas of an assignment, one that reads something like the one I got yesterday which said to shoot football practice for Clements High School and we need a portrait of Jacob Holt, a lineman.  That was all that was given to me.  The rest was up to my imagination.

I get job orders like that all the time.  Sometimes your hands are completely tied up by the time allowed, the situation you have to shoot or how free your subject feels in front of the camera.  I find it nearly always easier to work with young people when I have creative ideas because they are generally more willing to experiment with you and are far less image conscious.

This is the same shot with some heavy post processing in Photo Shop aiming at the gritty look made popular by Dave Hill. There is a nice tutorial in the discussion threads on Strobist for this technique.

So during my 40 minute drive to the assignment I started day dreaming about what I might do in a perfect situation.  For some reason known only to God, the idea of using a deflated football came to mind.  I began to day dream about what I could do with the kid and a deflated ball.  Since he was a lineman I figured he would want to look tough and mean so I day dreamed a picture of him in his lineman stance with the deflated ball in his mouth and a really mean expression on his face.  I even had an idea of what I wanted the lighting to look like.

I arrived at the practice field thinking it was unlikely to find any of the necessary things to make the portrait.  They were just starting stretching exercises when I arrived.  I talked to the coach and asked him about the ball.  He said, “I’ve got one of those in my office.  Let me get it for you now.”  Surprise number one!  Then I asked him when a convenient time to shoot the portrait would be.  He said, “You can have him for about 20 minutes when they finish their stretching.”  I was so surprised I nearly fell over.  Twenty minutes was like an eternity when dealing with football coaches and their practice schedules.  I have literally had kids for less than two minutes when the coach started hollering for them.  The final element was the young man himself.  Turns out he was a great subject.  I even found a location where the team name was in the background.  As they used to say on the TV show the A Team, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Very seldom does a plan come together so thoroughly as it did for this portrait but using imagination can really help.  By the time I arrived at the facility I had a plan in mind that was totally based out of what I had dreamed up so I was prepared.  I did my portrait in way less than twenty minutes and got a shot that I was very pleased with.  I got home and played around with it and gave it an alternative gritty look patterned after the Dave Hill approach just for kicks.  You will find that the essential quality of imagination will really stand you in good stead as you go about the very literal business of photojournalism so keep those synapses firing.

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

Brothers Kolby and Caden Chandler watch as two members of the Red Thunder team makes a heart shaped loop in the sky. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 6/13/09

You’ve got an assignment to shoot an air show.  Nice!  I love air shows.  Time to grab the long glass.  Not so fast my friend!  Don’t forget your wide glass.  Oh, you will certainly need your long stuff just don’t lock yourself in to the long glass.  You never know when the nicest photo might not be done with your bazooka.  Evidence.  The lead photo with this post.  This image was shot with a 17-35mm on a D2Hs laying on the ground.  It is my favorite shot and my second favorite was also done with that lens.  When you check out the slide show you will see a little kid with the greatest look on his face.  So my favorite shot you can barely even see the airplanes and my second favorite you can’t see them at all.

For those of you unfamiliar with the great state of Alabama, Courtland is a tiny little town tucked into the northwest corner of Lawrence County in North Alabama.  They, and the community of Town Creek just a couple miles down the road, have produced so many state championships in football and track that I lost count long ago.  Both are very small towns but you will have heard of them only through the NCAA Division 1 football talent they have produced.  A few have even made it in the NFL.  Aside from that, Courtland has an air field.  During World War II, the Army trained pilots at the Courtland Air Base.  The military is long gone but the air field remains.  Courtland used to host a regular air show back in the 90′s but had not done one in more than ten years.  I was very happy to see one return.  I really love covering air shows.

This was not a big dog show with the Blue Angels but it was wonderful.  There were plenty of individual stunt fliers, the Red Thunder air show team flying Yak propeller driven fighters complete with red stars marking them and the Alabama Boys Comedy Team.  Now those fellas can put on a show.  And the pilot, Greg Koontz, can make an airplane stand on its nose.  I swear I think I saw him make it move backwards.  Then he landed the airplane on a moving truck.  Very cool stuff.

Approaching an air show is very like approaching any assignment.  Use every lens in the bag even if you can’t immediately see a use for it.  Most everything I shot on the show was with either the 400mm or the 17-35.  I shot some with the 80-200 as well but I tend to gravitate toward the extremes of whatever focal lengths I have available.  As far as content goes you really have to be careful or you will leave the show with nothing but airplanes zooming around the skies.  Remember to watch the spectators and get expressions and body language.  Look for other folks shooting pictures.  Sometimes this makes for an interesting, even comical composition.  Also shoot airplanes on the ground.  Shoot details of the aircraft and whenever you can, shoot pictures of the pilots on the ground prepping their aircraft or interacting with the fans.  Airshows usually feature some pretty unusual looking aircraft too so that makes nice images.  What I am saying is that the show is just part of the show.  Make sure to divorce yourself from the skies every now and then and look around.  See what other opportunities present themselves.

I developed a serious case of lens envy while shooting the show.  Chris Rohling, who used to work with me here at The Decatur Daily, was shooting the show for our sister paper The Times Daily from Florence, Alabama.  He had a nice Canon 400mm f2.8 and another nice Canon 300mm f2.8 and a nice 1dMark IIn body.  I admit it.  I was drooling at one point.  My 400mm you have heard about before.  It is the Noah’s Ark old 400 f3.5 Nikon manual lens that only works wide open at f3.5.  What I have never told you is that much of the anti-halation coating on the front element is either gone or seriously rubbed up making the lens both soft and flat and difficult to focus.  Then one of my two aging D2H bodies inexplicably stopped metering so I was having to meter on one body for both cameras.  Some may be thinking this is not a big deal but did I mention that it was a partly to mostly cloudy sky and the sun kept drifting in and out and the pilots kept flying into bright spots then back into darker spots in the sky.  Nasty indeed.

Equipment envy aside, here is what I look for in the air.  First of all, if there are airplanes flying together in formations I am looking for a maneuver that puts them in close visual proximity to one another.  You may be thinking, “Hey man, they are flying three feet apart.  What are you talking about?”  Let me tell you, three feet when the aircraft are directly above you doesn’t appear very close.  Three feet when they are in front of you makes it look like they are in the cockpit with one another.  I next look for break apart maneuvers.  All the aircraft will be close together when the maneuver begins and that first move is often very photogenic.  At times you might also have an aircraft low enough to the ground to get other elements in the photo so keep an eye out for this too.

When airplanes are in solo or joint moves I look for them moving in and through the smoke trails they are leaving.  These can make some interesting patterns and the aircraft can be superimposed over an existing trail or appear to be balancing on top of a trail.  These smoke trails can make very cool images.  One final piece of advice.  Take some sunscreen or wear a hat.  I have yet to be at an air show where I didn’t get a bit too much sun.  Enjoy the shows but hate to feel the pain of a sunburn for days afterward.

Jack Smith and his sister Patsy Terry lived in the Lawrence County Jail when their father was the sheriff. They toured their granddaughters through the jail Friday showing them their old home. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 6/5/09

Working as a photojournalist puts one in numerous situations that, to say the least, are very fluid.  People moving all over the place.  Very little ambient light.  You need to get workable photos.  What is one to do?  There is not just one answer because every situation is very different.  For instance, if the thing I am shooting is going on in just one room I will simply light that room.  Maybe I will bounce a couple of strobes into the corners or off the ceiling on opposite sides of the room.  This works well in any reasonably normal size room.  A couple of SBs can throw a decent amount of light.

Unfortunately, many times the people are moving from place to place or there is just no way to set lights.  My solution in that case is to slip one strobe into the hot shoe and use it in bounce mode.  Then I take a second strobe and either hold it off camera or place it on another object nearby.  I use the hot shoe strobe to trigger the other strobe which is set to its optical slave mode.  This gives me a two light set with one light giving direction and another light giving fill.  The light is reasonably attractive and it is extremely mobile.

I have done several jobs recently where this was the most workable solution.  The one that really stands out is the jail tour featured in the photos with this post.  A grandfather was touring his granddaughters through the old Lawrence County Jail.  Virtually no ambient light and very dingy old jail cells.  The only ambient was perpetually back lighting the people and the tour covered three different floors in the old jail.  The story was that, when the grandfather was a little boy, his father was the sheriff in Lawrence County.  He and his sister grew up in the jail and slept in empty cells many times.  Nice story but terrible light.  I had to have light and I had to have mobility, ergo, shoot and scoot.

I set my hot shoe strobe to about 1/16th power for most of the shots and the other strobe at about 1/8th.  The hot shoe strobe was always in bounce configuration and was used to simply trigger the other strobe which was my main light.  I kept diffusion domes on both strobes so the hot shoe strobe was only doing a little bit of fill light.  The strength of the off camera strobe was really determining the lighting and I would set it up somewhere and then move around with the camera relative to it.  The only real trick is to keep your off camera strobe out of the frame.  The jail was, well, confining.  (Pun intended.)  They don’t make these things to be luxury hotels and this jail was a really old one so the quarters were very tight.  With all the girls family members tagging along and shooting pictures too it got a little tight in there.  Everything then becomes a wide angle shot so keeping the second flash out of the pictures is not as easy as it might sound.

I also used this strobe technique while shooting a robotics workshop.  I could have lit the room because it was mostly done in one classroom but that was not going to look right.  There was a lot of ambient coming through the windows and the room lighting was a peculiar shade of fluorescent.  It was not enough to go ambient only because of the color shifting that would come from mixing the daylights and the fluorescents so I opted for the shoot and scoot method.  I just kept my shutter speed high enough to knock down some of the ambient and then cleaned up the color shifting in Photoshop using the history brush and saturation tool.  But that is a post for another day.  Just keep this technique in mind when you are shooting tours in old, dark jails and you should be good to go!

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.

Apparently there is a class in journalism school where they teach young reporters to schedule photo assignments at high noon.  I must have missed that class in “J” school but there has to be one, otherwise reporters would know that we should never be shooting in the middle of the day outside.  I don’t seem to get too many jobs at high noon in the winter months when the light angles are ever so much better.  Oh no, that would be too easy.  Instead they schedule at high noon in the summer when the sun is directly overhead and exceedingly bright and contrasty.  Nice!

This was done with a double Lumedyne set up fired through an umbrella and then Photoshop was used to bring up the shadows in the building.

Since I don’t get to give much input on scheduling times I just have to deal with it when I get a job at noon.  Now the best way to handle a high noon assignment is to not come in to work until 1 pm!  Not an option for me most days so there has to be another way.  Basically you are facing a question of contrast and shadows, especially on faces.  Even buildings have a pretty rough appearance in high noon and for the same reasons.  You will have some parts of the building dramatically over lit and some parts in deep shadow making it a bad time of day to shoot even a building.

Front and rear views of my strobe set up for the pastor shot. The clamp is a variable friction arm with a camera platform that is very versatile. I don't think Joe McNally has anything to worry about here!

Fill light is the obvious answer but fill light can be difficult.  Have you ever heard of the Sunny 16 rule?  Old timers probably have.  You could read the rule inside old film boxes or old photography texts.  The idea is to take the ISO of the film you were using and turn that into a fraction then set your aperture to f16 and you would have an accurate exposure on bright, sunny days.  So ISO 200 would be correctly exposed at 1/200th at f16.  This is actually pretty accurate even with digital.  If you are paying attention you can see the problem right away.  Unless you are extremely close to the subject, f16 means a whole lot of strobe power and many small strobes won’t be able to tackle this alone except at very short distances.  If you are using some sort of diffuser then you will have to have even more power.

The best solution is to group a couple of strobes and shoot direct.  If you are really close you can get away with one strobe direct.  I am very fortunate to own a set of Lumedyne strobes that can really kick out some light.  My strobes will do 200ws each as configured and have an upper limit of 800 ws per head in their max set up.  All this is from a battery powered unit.  Heck, I can produce so much light with those babies even Joe McNally, Mr. Unlimited Nikon Speedlight dude, would be quite envious.  Perhaps you will remember him from my post on McNally and Hobby Light Mars.  Yeah, that guy.  For those of you not so fortunate to own a set of Lumedynes or an electrically powered monolight, group a couple of strobes on a light stand and fire away.  If you have two strobes, you can actually shoot through and umbrella.  With only one strobe you will probably be limited to shooting direct.

This is a single Lumedyne fired direct at about ten feet. The strobe is low so it could reach under the man's cap to fill the face.

I have two photos with this post demonstrating both methods.  In the photo of the guy between the two cars I shot direct with a single, unmodified Lumedyne strobe at about ten feet flash to subject distance.  In the photo of the pastor, I ganged two Lumedynes and fired through an umbrella.  Both shots were done at or near f16 in the middle of day on bright, sunny days.  I was shooting at 1/250th for the car dealer shot and about 1/125th for the pastor photo.  I needed the shadow side of the church to show up because the story was about small churches.

I am not pretending that either of these photos is great so don’t sit around scratching your head.  There are times when you are locked into a certain shot like it or not.  I didn’t want to do either of these photos the way they were assigned but that is what was assigned and both were very specific assignments.  I would like to have had some input into the assignment ahead of time but that didn’t happen in either job so I had to just deal with it.  Hey man, we are professionals and we get paid to do this so we have to put in every effort to make it happen and happen well regardless of the assignment.  Not every job you shoot is going to be the best thing you ever did but you have to give every assignment the best effort you have.  Most people don’t get into the paper ever so when someone gets into the newspaper it really is a big deal.  We owe it to the people we photograph to do the very best job possible.  In some cases the photos you shoot will be handed down generationally in the person’s family.  I have some newspaper clippings where my grandfather was awarded for heroism when he saved a man’s life.  It is not a great photo.  Just an award presentation but you see my point.

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.

This was the best of a poor lot. Notice the flash burnout on the ceiling of the cave. Amateur! Photo copyright Gary Cosby Jr.

When I saw this month’s National Geographic story on caving in Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia I remembered my own mercifully brief exposure to the underworld and thought it would be worth the time to dig around in my files and share the story with you.  I grew up in northern Alabama where the whole world sits on top of limestone rock which is prone to erosion which creates caves.  All over the northern part of the state you find sink holes.  Those are places where the rock beneath the surface has eroded and the land above it literally falls into a hole.  Legend around my home town in Cherokee, Alabama has it that a man entered a sink hole on his property and didn’t come out until days later and miles away at a cave opening on the Tennessee River.  That might be classified as a tall tale but I did know the guy who told it and said the man in question was a great grandfather of his.

My own exposure to North Alabama’s underworld was mercifully more brief and slightly more controlled.  I went caving with my son Alex and his Boy Scout Troup.  I thought, naively, that it would be no problem.  I would get ahead of the boys and have lots of great photos.  Right!  My first thought that I could get ahead of strong, healthy teen aged boys who, I swear, have mountain goat blood in them, proved to be slightly erroneous.  I did not know that the atmosphere underground is excessively humid and that alone pretty much whipped my butt in the first half an hour.  I don’t think I even saw the front side of one of the kids until we stopped for lunch.  Did you know that young teens have absolutely no fear even when they can’t see more than the beam of a head lamp will show them and they practically run over large boulders that put an old man to the test?  I did not know how badly out of shape I was until I got underground.

My own physical condition was only one of several challenges one faces when caving.  Although this should seem obvious, caves are full of grit and grit gets into everything.  And I do mean everything.  In fact, grit has a way of working its way into human crevasses that nothing should really ever find a way into and then it tends to grind and scrape until said parts of the body become extremely irritated and sensitive.  Don’t even talk to me about where I was finding sand and grit from that cave for the next couple of days on my person!  Back in that time, we were shooting with the Nikon D1 which was a fairly sensitive camera to start with.  It hated moisture so I feared it would not last fifteen minutes in that humidity.  Fortunately it made it out alive.  But grit got into every opening on that camera and for months after that caving trip my 17-35 zoom was grinding away from all the grit and junk that somehow forced its way into the zoom and focus mechanisms.  NPS must have loved getting that lens in for repair.

The other problem is that caves are not just dark but they are big dark.  I had one strobe, an SB28DX, no pocket wizard and no way to fire the flash off camera at all unless I just held the shutter open and had one of the kids fire the strobe using the manual test button.  That was the solution most of the time but it stinks to have only one strobe in that kind of darkness.  Literally, the only available light was the helmet lights and flashlights we were carrying.  Did you know it is near impossible to focus a camera on a moving kid in total darkness when your only focus point is a head lamp bobbing around in the darkness.  AF is totally useless unless you want to use the focus assist beam on the strobe in which case it is only mostly useless. And, I didn’t have a tripod.  A mini pod would have been great to have and a set of Pocket Wizards and a couple of strobes or forty would have been better.

I finally got to a place where I could see the shot of the day.  All the kids had climbed up a fairly steep rocky incline to an elevated platform and their headlamps were painting the cave ceiling so well I decided to do a timed exposure.  I don’t remember how long but it was probably a couple of seconds at f2.8.  I steadied the camera against a rock and the shot was great in principle.  Unfortunately I was pretty tired at the time and my heart beat or some slight movement caused the shot to go slightly soft.  I could kick myself but that is how it happens sometimes.  I finally got a fairly decent shot of one of the leaders walking through a “room” I believe they call the totem room.  My son acted as the voice activated light stand and we pulled off a decent shot together.  I wish that I knew then what I know now about strobes but, like my grandfather used to say, “Live and learn, die and forget it all.”  If there is a next time I will be more prepared.  I think the Scouts do this about every year.  Maybe I will get in a bit better shape before going back down under.

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.

Chicken Marsala from Benning's Restaurant in Decatur, Alabama. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 2/23/09 All Rights Reserved

Man, I love food photography!  Every now and then you get a food assignment and the cook offers you a taste, or a plate full, and you get to sample some excellent cuisine.  Of course, you do have to photograph it first!  Back in the early days of my interest in photography I used to see my mom’s Southern Living Magazine and thought it would be really cool to shoot for a place like that.  They do food.  They do travel.  They do people stories.  They do architecture.  I like all that stuff and maybe someday, when I am all grown up, I will get to shoot a job or two for them.

Even now, shooting in the in the moment world of daily newspaper photojournalism, I still enjoy the softer side of photography.  Food shoots and fashion shoots come to mind immediately and, once in a while, an architectural shoot, soften up the daily grind of news and sports and more news and sports.  One of the really twisted up parts of my photographic personality is that I love to light stuff but I absolutely, positively hate working in a studio.  Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam and nary a roll of white seamless paper can be found.  There is just something about the barren, artificial studio that does not appeal to me at all.

Part of the challenge of shooting food then becomes doing it with appropriate light, location and background.  Now, let me tell you, not all food assignments are good.  I remember one time doing a story on a lady who was cooking ‘traditional’ food and I ended up with a pot of brown beans and some cornbread.  Really.  And the location was a tiny little kitchen with a single, bare bulb in the ceiling for light.  That was back in the time before I cared to do a lot of fancy lighting so there I was with a single flash that could only be used on camera in a dark little kitchen shooting a bowl of brown beans and a wedge of cornbread.  Not my most memorable food shot.  Fortunately, we have some spectacular cooks that we work with for much of our food work and they not only know how to cook it, but they also know how to present it.

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