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Friday, I got a call to go cover a serious traffic accident. The inital reports were an 18 wheeler and a little four wheel ATV. That would have been an automatic fatality so, thank God, the initial reports were incorrect. There was a very bad accident involving an 18 wheeler and a car with one person critically injured. The accident site was about 20 minutes from where I was at the time of the call and when I arrived on scene the occupant of the car was still trapped inside. Firefighters were just cutting the top off the car to extricate the driver.

I parked well outside the emergency zone. This is a standard practice for me. I would rather walk a good distance into the site than to park too close and be told to move or be ticketed. I began shooting pictures immediately as I approached; although, I knew we would never use the photos. I do this just in case an officer stops me from getting closer or just stops me from shooting period. If that happens I will have a few frames already shot.

Like covering a fire, mobility on the accident scene is your best friend. The lead photo could really only be shot from one position and that position was partially blocked by an emergency vehicle. I also asked one of the firefighters if there was a fatality as soon as I got close to the scene. We have a policy that prohibits us from showing a body, even a body part or, in some cases, even a sheet covering a body. We are a community paper and we live with the people we are photographing so there is some understandable sensitivity to death images. The firefighter told me the person was critically injured so I was very careful to make sure she was not actually visible in the photos. We usually don’t publish an image where the person in the photo is injured to such a degree that they could die before publication of the photo. Again, this is just a sensitivity to the community values that I do truly appreciate.

The accident scene was spread over something like 75 to 100 yards of highway. The 18 wheeler had spilled its load and the impact and resulting forces ripped the two wheel trucks from the back of the trailer. One of the wheel trucks was laying in the middle of the scene halfway between the truck and car and the other wheel truck was actually laying across the cab of the truck. I knew this would be my secondary photo. I had very free access to the scene as long as I was out of the way of the rescuers so I used my mobility to get as many angles as possible making sure to include the rescuers working over the decimated car in at least one photo.

When the MedFlight helicopter landed I saw I could work the helo into the photo with the cab of the truck and as the patient was loaded I made my way to the truck cab to line up the shot. As the helo took off I was able to get the shot of the damaged truck in the foreground with the helo taking off over it. I left the scene immediately after getting this shot so I could cross the highway before the lanes were reopened to traffic. This sounds trivial but try crossing two lanes of traffic on foot while the traffic is going in opposite directions after the highway is reopened. The traffic will be solid for about 15 or 20 minutes because they stopped all traffic while the helo was on the ground. It is just a good safety precaution for me. You would not believe how people drive around accident scenes. It is crazy. Stay out of their way unless you want to become part of the news. Just ask a cop, rubberneckers are the worst.

About the photos: All shots in this post were done with a Nikon D2H and an 80-200 f2.8 and a Nikon D2Hs with a 17-35mm f2.8 using only available light. There is nothing technical to report just keep moving and getting your angles.

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

A Little News is a year old today.  I don’t know if that is an anniversary or a birthday but there you go.  The confetti is flying and the party whistles are blowing, at least metaphorically.  My wife, who is the chief baker and party thrower, is in New York visiting family so there is not really a party.  In fact, the pad is a bit bacheloresque right now.  Read here, sloppy!  I am beginning the clean up effort now in hopes of having all ready and normal looking by Tuesday.  Now, on with the post.

For those of you who are statistically inclined, here are a few numbers.  According to the stats widget supplied by WordPress, the blog has had 89,787 views as of right now.  Sometimes the stats function is a little funky so I take that with a grain of salt, or maybe a spoonful of sugar is a better metaphor.  The busiest single day was 9,011 visitors on February 8 where most of the viewers visited one of the two top posts on the blog.  The most popular post was written by my friend Corey Wilson about his experience shooting in the deep freeze in the Packer’s NFC title game against he Giants last season.  The Nikon followers gobbled up his post with interest and spouted their opinions about Corey and the D3 and forums all over the Internet.  The second most popular post was the one I wrote following February’s deadly tornado.  Corey’s post has generated 10,619 views and the tornado post has generated 8,258 views to date.  Today’s post is the 175th since inception.

Now, I would like to thank each one of you personally for visiting this site.  Your feedback is very nice and every comment is valued.  There have been one or two folks who left cryptic or just plain nasty comments. I didn’t let y’all read those.  But everyone else has been very supportive and it is a pleasure to write both for and to you guys.  There is a wonderful thing that happens when you teach others.  You learn yourself and you remember things that you had forgotten and that makes me better both as a person and as a photojournalist.  I have found that writing is very beneficial but that staying organized and actually remembering all that I have written so that I don’t get redundant is a little tough.  To be honest, most of this stuff is not really planned all that much in advance.  Things that go on during a day or a week tend to trigger something and I decide to write about it.  Not very scientific but at least it is fresh.

There have been some struggles for me as I have been doing this blog.  First of all, I have fought with the whole idea of promotion.  Should I try to promote the blog and if so, how?  I have basically decided against promoting it and have been blessed by an association with David Hobby at Strobist who has recently added A Little News to his blogroll. For those of you who are not already fans of Strobist, I strongly recommend you to check it out. There is a treasury of lighting information over there for free that you could not get even if you paid for a four year college degree in photography.  David has kindly placed posts on his blog linking to mine that have driven very high volumes of traffic to this site.  Some of those folks come and go but a few have stayed to become loyal readers.  Many thanks to David. Since there is no promotion I have just depended on people who need this kind of thing finding it so if you know anyone who could benefit from it, please tell them.  At this point, A Little News is not an income producer and WordPress does not allow advertising anyway so anyone you direct here is more for them than for me; although, I admit, writing to an audience is far better than writing to blank cyberspace.

Now, what to do with the coming year and how long can I keep this up?  I have already thought that I have written all I know about six or seven times at least.  I really don’t know yet.  I have a strong feeling that this year will find us exploring some new topics such as slide shows and video in the news environment.  I have talked to my friend Rob Carr at the AP and he is going to try to do a post or two about covering the Olympic Games.  He is heading over very soon to be part of the AP team.  Beyond that, we will just have to see where things take us. I hope you stay for the ride and, once again, thank you for being part of A Little News.

It kind of struck me the other day that being positioned for success is not just for sports.  Positioning yourself well is the key to all kinds of excellent photojournalism and spot news is no exception.  In fact, covering spot news is a lot like covering a sports assignment.  You are looking for peak action and emotional reaction.  I thought I would begin with the spot news that I know best which would be covering fires.

First note, I do not speed going to spot news assignments.  Number one, I don’t like tickets and cops don’t care if I am in a hurry to get to the fire.  Number two, my life and safety are of much greater value to me than a house fire.  Number three, the lives and safety of other motorists on the road are equally important and I do not need to risk theirs to get a picture.  That said, I hurry safely!

Regarding fires in the city, unless it is a big, nasty fire, I am not going to get there before the fire department has all the flames knocked down.  They are just too good and too fast.  Fire in volunteer districts where response times are slower give a greater opportunity but they also usually take longer to get there.  Big fires, no matter if they are in the city or in the county, will still be burning when I get there.  It is just like a fatal accident, it will still be there when I arrive just don’t kill yourself getting there, literally.

Now, on the scene, the most important thing to remember is that your job is secondary to the job the firefighters are doing.  Stay out of the way.  I have been both a firefighter and a photojournalist and I can say that, as a firefighter, I am not thinking about you.  I am laser focused on my job.  So, stay back and let them work.  There are a few occassions when I have spoken to a battallion chief while the fire was going but I am always careful to be very brief and pick moments where he is not obviously busy.

Mobility on the fireground is your best friend.  Keep your feet under you and keep moving.  One minute, you may have a great shot in front of you and the next the fire may shift to another part of the building entirely.  There have been a number of fires where there was noting much happening in front of the building but chaos was erupting in the back.  Walk around and stay out of the way.  BTW, don’t trample people’s flower beds and gardens and stuff like that.  Be a citizen first and have a care for where you are and what you are doing.  Don’t make a bad situation worse.

Try to use all your lenses.  Try to avoid strobes.  Don’t forget to actually compose and make images rather than just snapping wildly away as your adrenaline drives your shutter finger.  Think about what you are doing and seeing.  Don’t forget to try and layer your images, especially with the wide lenses.  Use the hoses, fire trucks and firefighters to make visual layers in your image.  A burning building demands enough attention on its own and you can turn a dramatic fire image into a great one by layering.

There is emotion on the fire ground from time to time too.  Unfortunatley, fire is a very deadly thing and people die and are seriously injured in fires.  People lose pets in fires.  That may sound trivial but I remember pulling up to fires to hear a home owner screaming that her baby was inside.  What she meant was she had a pet in the house.  The only rescue I actually made when I was a firefighter was of a screaming cat.  I never knew a cat could make such a noise.  It survived and the last I saw of it was it careening down the street after I let it down.

Try and be sensitive to the misery of others.  There is nothing like having the assembled collections of your life be destroyed in a fire.  It happened to my wife when she was a girl.  You have to photograph it but don’t be a jerk.  Behave in the manner you could respect if you were on the other side of the camera.  That is pretty good advice for almost any shooting situation.  I am going to cut this off and try and be a bit more specific in the next post.

About the photos: The top photo is one showing the value of movement.  I shot several frames in front of the house but the scene was a little bland.  I walked through an alley and into the back and there was a great shot I would have never seen without moving.  D2H with a 80-200 f2.8 available light.  The second photo is from an apartment fire in town.  I used the D2H with a 17-35mm f2.8 to accentuate the ladder and the foreground to background relationship.  The last photo is from a church fire.  The front of the building was billowing smoke but I found the flames around back.  Being prepared allowed me to catch the firefighter shedding tournouts as a result of suffering heat exhaustion.

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

This is a guest post by Richard Hamm, a recent grad of the University of Georgia. Any enterprising photo editor might think of hiring this young man who is presently freelancing due to the dearth of new jobs in the photojournalism industry. Richard was also the subject of the very first reader profile because I really liked some of his work which he was kind enough to share with me. I hope you enjoy reading about his visit to the infamous Redneck Games.

Sometimes you just need to shoot something. You hear about some event and say, “Wow, I gotta shoot that.” For me, the “that” was the Redneck Games in East Dublin, GA on July 5, 2008. The Redneck Games are an annual event started in 1996 as a parody of the Summer Olympics held in Atlanta that year. The games feature a strange assortment of activities from seed spitting to bobbing for pigs feet. The event culminates with the mud pit belly flop contest which is loaded with visual potential, to say the least.

I wasn’t shooting this for anyone so I had no deadline nor did I have any particular focus. I just wanted to show a glimpse of what goes on in this strange little place. The lack of credentials might have limited where I needed to be to shoot pictures but I have found it better in these situations to apologize than to ask permission. If something was happening in front of the stage, I just took my camera and got on stage. Usually no one will say a thing as long as you don’t get in the way.

The biggest problems I had were getting pictures of the VIRs (Very Important Rednecks) who are more media savvy, and getting a good vantage point amid the sea of thousands. There were tons of photogs at the event along with a film crew from CMT on hand to film a sequence for “My Big Redneck Wedding.” Indeed, someone did pledge their undying love at the Redneck Games.

I always learn a lot from a shoot and the Redneck Games were not exception. For one, ask more questions and expect the unexpected. I shot the Redneck Wedding and got some interesting information but I missed the big picture. I never thought the couple would dive head first into the mud pit which is exactly what they did. I got a picture but it was not my best work by any means.

Other than that, the challenge was to watch for clean backgrounds (pun intended?), watch out for harsh lighting and stay in front of the action. Oh, and try and keep the new camera dry against the barrage of rain and mud splattering from the pit. Next year I will take some plastic bags and a poncho.

About the photos: The first picture if of “Elbow,” one of the VIRs at the games and is a good example of finding a clean background. The second shot is of the bride and groom taking their post nuptial dive into the mud. The third shot is one that I thought just summed up the whole day. All the photos were shot with a Canon 40D and either a 17-40 or 70-200 lens.

Photos copyright Richard Hamm. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any redneck either living or dead. I don’t reckon they reflect those of my employer either; although, I don’t know anyone who could possibly object to a head first dive into a decent mud pit.

Just about all your strobe work in the news world will involve mixing your light sources.  Frequently this will be some combination of strobe and daylight.  Being able to control your ambient to strobe raito is what command and control is all about.  What works at high noon will look awful inside and what works inside may be completely wrong at sunset.

You probably already know this but sometimes a bit of a reminder will trigger something and give you a really good idea so hang in there.  In a mixed strobe and ambient situation, your shutter speed controls the ambient exposure and your aperture controls your strobe exposure.  I know this is photo 101 stuff but hang on anyway.  This gets important because in a mixed light situation you will need to decide how you will blend your lights.  Will the ambient be dominant and the strobe fill or will you allow the strobe to dominate and the ambient to fill or will you just balance the two as nearly as you can.  There is no right or wrong answer just what you decide for a given shot.

When I am shooting outdoors during the hours from about 10am to around 4pm I will usually try to knock down the ambient and allow my strobes to be the dominant source because down here in Alabama there are few worse shooting situations than those hours of high sunshine.  The atmosphere is frequently hazy here in the summer, especially in the middle day hours so being able to knock down the ambient a little helps deal with the haze and saturate the sky.

Conversely, when I am shooting indoors, especially in an incandescent environment, I tend to allow the ambient to dominate and the strobe to accent or fill.  The only time I really try and overpower the indoor ambient is in a tight portrait shot or in a florescent environment.  I hate florescent and balancing with those little green filters has never worked for me.

My technique is maybe opposite what you might think of as normal and it may not be normal for you.  Like I said, there are no right or wrong answers.  You decide what to do and do it.  The key is in knowing how and that is something that took me a while to stumble onto.  Both of the portraits in this post were done using exactly the same strobe technique but with exactly opposite ambient techniques.  Both shots are done with an SB800 off camera with an 8 inch home made snoot.  (I make the snoot out of a flexible mat that I buy for about 89 cents at Hobby Lobby.  I attach velcro strips to both ends so I can roll them as tight as I want to form the snoot.)

The difference in the two photos is the portait of the quarterback was shot in the middle of the afternoon in August which is nasty hot, hazy and humid weather while the portrait of the cowgirl was done inside a barn that was very dark and also very hot.  Shooting inside barns in August in the South is just not smart unless you need a rapid weight loss plan.  The Alabama sky in August frequently turns a very lovely shade of brown due to the haze and dust in the atmosphere.  By dropping my ambient exposure just about one stop below what I metered I was able to saturate the sky and underexpose the subject.  When I added the flash I was able to make that nice light on the face while allowing everything else to fall back.

Going into the barn, I purposely dropped the shutter speed to the lowest speed I could easily hand hold.  This allowed the light coming in through the slats to become a visual element itself and it provided needed fill light.  The strobe then fills in the face creating a nice balance of light between the strobe and the ambient.  BTW, the heat and humidity in a barn filled with hay is impressive.  I sweat pretty easy anyway and I walked out of there after about five minutes absolutely soaked.

So then, you take a buck and a half, a little knowledge and a little imagination and make pictures.  I seldom get it right on the first try but I usually dial in it in just a couple of pops.  It helps when you start with an idea.  That way you are not fumbling around looking like you don’t know what you are doing even if you really don’t know what you are doing.

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.

We talked all about being ethical with light in the documentary situation and that is all serious and necessary.  Now it is time to have a little fun and let the light do the talking.  For a long time I didn’t really pay all that much attention to lighting.  I was an available light guy unless there was just no other way to do it.  When I had to add strobe I just popped one in the hot shoe and used it in bounce mode.  That was about all there was to it.  If I wanted to get really fancy, I used an off camera shoe cord.

The problem is that photojournalism has grown more complex over the years.  A typical newspaper photojournalist now shoots food, fashion, portraits, sports portraits, environmental portraits and illustrations of all sorts.  Some of us even have to shoot advertising jobs.  Lighting skills are a must.  Why, you ask?  I am sooo glad you asked.  Have you picked up any magazine lately?  Our readers do all the time.  What are they seeing?  I am sooo glad you asked.  They are seeing highly stylized food photography, well lit portraits of the famous and infamous, action portraits of sports figures and well lit architectural work.  Why does that matter, you say?  I am sooo glad you asked.  It matters to the daily newspaper guy because our readership is dwindling, our readers have limited budgets of both time and money, the internet and TV show them thousands of top quality images a day and we have to compete in that environment.

Now you can see how important developing good lighting skills is.  The great news is that you can do this with a couple of battery powered strobes and Pocket Wizards or some of other form of wireless remote.  Once again, allow me to recommend Strobist where you can get one of the best primers available and all for free.  What I want to do is just point you in the right direction, not reinvent the wheel, or the strobe.

So, you ask, when is it right to just cut loose and blast the dark right out of a subject?  I am sooo glad you asked.  Let’s start with the portrait.  There are varieties of portraits we get called on to do all the time.  The most common is a portrait of a person who is a newsmaker for one reason or another.  We mostly end up shooting portraits of these folks when the story being written is about some event that has already taken place or about and event that has not yet taken place.  You may also be doing a profile story on the person where a portrait is the best visual option.  We will call this the news portrait.  My personal approach to this is to use fairly straightforward lighting.  By this I mean that I avoid using color gels and funky light setups.  I try to highlight the person, not my lighting skills.  I want the light to talk and help tell the story and not become the story.  This is the first step beyond the documentary lighting already talked about.  I try and keep this straightforward because it is still a news situation.

The next level of portraiture, and my favorite too, is the sports portrait.  You can really move away from anything standard and just go nuts here.  Use gels, funky angles, all kinds of light modifiers and just have some real fun.  Many times you will be shooting someone in uniform which adds a great color element.  You can add action or movement to the portrait, maybe even using a panning/blur technique here if your paper is cool with sort of technique.  You can do some really different stuff with posing here.  Many athletes, be they high school, college or pro, will work with you to make a really interesting photo because they are still young enough to be willing to take some chances in the posing and setup.  This is just a wide open field.  Go check out Spots Illustrated or ESPN Magazine and see how accomplished pros use light and posing in those shots.

The last area is what I would call a feature portrait.  We do a bunch of these for our Living section.  They are usually and environmental style portrait of someone who is having a light, feature story done on them.  This opens a whole lot of possiblilities too.  It is second to the sports portrait as far as how funky you can get.  We have done these on everyone from chefs to stay at home moms.  Again, this is a wide open area where you imagination is the limit.

Let me just close this post with a word about imagination.  When you get a job order for a subject that will work as a portrait, kick the big imagination into high gear, even if it is only while driving to the assignment.  Previsualize what might look good and see if you can work that angle when you get to the job.  The final shot will seldom look exactly like what you imagined but it will give you a good jumping off point to work.  That’s the way I worked the Blue Angels shoot.  I do this all the time and it really helps when you get to a job to have an idea in mind.  Even if you find it won’t work you can modify quickly to fit the situation.  Remember, it is easier to turn a idea that in the works than it is to start from scratch when the pressure is on.

About the photos: The top photo is actually one of the Living section portraits I did about a guy who had made a psychotic/horror movie so the lighting could be absolutely over the top.  I used two strobes.  The background light is behind the girl in the back with a red gel.  The light on the subject is a snooted strobe to camera right just lighting his face.  The second photo is about my first successful off camera strobe photo.  The man was prominent in the civil rights movement in the 1960′s and was shot with a Vivitar 283 using an off camera sync cord.  The final shot is a two light sports portrait of a football player.  I used one strobe direct and high right.  The other strobe was laying on the floor aimed straight up.  All these shots were done with a Nikon D2h or D2hs and a 17-35mm zoom except the news portrait which was shot with a Nikon F3 aand a 24mm f2.8.

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.

In the last post on adding light I was talking about using light ethically in the hard news environment. One of the things I said was when I add light while covering news I try to use the same angles as the existing light. In other words, I am trying to honestly show the readers what was there and still create an image that can be reproduced well on a printing press. Yesterday, Governor Bob Riley was in town to give a press conference on the new robotics center that will locate at Calhoun Community College just outside Decatur.

I brought in two light stands, strobes and pocket wizards. The room the press conference was in has a high ceiling, and I mean thirty plus feet high, and is painted black. The room has the odd combination of filtered daylight which is somewhat blue, incandescent spots all along the wall about fifteen feet up and some variety of sodium vapor lights in the ceiling. As you can image, this creates an interesting variety of light. This makes my decision to strobe pretty easy. Lighting angles were not a problem since light was coming from so many directions so I set one light stand at about 45 degrees to the podium left and another about twenty degrees to the podium right. Both strobes were a good fifty feet from the podium. I set the strobes on 1/4 power and my ISO on 800. The color balance worked best on Auto or on incandescent.

In a press conference you don’t usually have to worry too much about being unethical with the light. TV people usually bring lights and the assortment of still photographers will be shooting flash too. In the conference yesterday there were at least five still photographers and all of them were using on camera strobes except me. Most of them were using some form of bounce. The TV guys just used room light. The reason I am talking about ethical use of strobes in the news environment is because it is really easy to get to fancy with lights. Since I found STROBIST I could easily be tempted to do something “extra” with the lights.

In many situations you simply have to add light. It is unavoidable. An on camera strobe is not more ethical than an off camera one. The main thing you are looking for is to document honestly what you are shooting. That means using light and all your other photographic tools ethically.

For instance, if I added a background light or put a gel on a strobe to do something other than color balance I have effectively changed what I am photographing. Then I am going to be presenting a picture that I created rather than a picture that I recorded. That’s okay in some environments but not in a documentary environment. Now this photo of the Governor during a campaign stop is a nice image but this lighting just didn’t exist. In all honesty, I wasn’t thinking about lighting ethics when I shot this photo. It was dusk, there was virtually no available light to work with and I hate on camera strobes. I had my son stretch an SC17 off camera shoe cord around behind some folks and aim the flash directly at the governor while I framed using several other people. Now, no one is going to jail over this photo but it is not really and accurate representation of what I saw. No reader standing beside me would have seen this light because it simply did not exist. I created it.

Like I said, it is not the end of the world but there is one thing my dad taught me a long time ago about life. He said, if you will give in to the small temptations now it will be much easier to give in to the bigger ones later on. Lesson being, if you are honest in the use of light it will be far easier to be honest in your use of your other tools such as Photoshop and we have seen quite a few people get in trouble there.

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

Smoke

Some who read this blog are working photojournalists who are trying to get better or they are established photojournalists trying to get better or they are aspiring photojournalists who are trying to get better. Perhaps you see a theme here. But not all readers are photojournalists. Some, like Will Nickelson simply love photography. Will is a local guy. Well, he is local to me. We probably don’t live more than thirty minutes apart here in North Alabama and have even been at some of the same events; although, we have never met. I had been thinking about profiling Will for some time seeing he is from my neck of the woods but it was the photo of the Blue Angels’ Hornet on the runway that tripped the switch for me so lets get to know Will.

Will says he is a nobody, a stay at home dad to a 15 month old little “monster,” (his words) who writes, does gaming reviews and loves photography. Being a dad myself, let me tell you there is no such thing as a nobody if you are a father. You instantly are the most important person in the world to at least one other human being! Now, on with the show. Will is a hobby shooter who is turning his hobby into something a little bit more. Will said he shoots just about everything but action is where his passion lies. He loves airshows, hockey (yeah, I know, North Alabama should not have hockey), and about anything else where there is movement. Will said his wife is a hockey player. Uhhhh, hello Mrs. Will. Please don’t high stick!

Will’s gear is from the “redheaded step child” collection by Pentax. Okay, I didn’t say that so if any of you folks from Pentax are out there take it up with Will but be nice cause his wife plays hockey and she knows how to use the stick. He shoots with a K10 digital body with zooms and Vivitar 285 HV strobes and the eBay wireless remotes. (If you have a question about these devices, check on Strobist and search for them. He has done extensive reviews on the product.) Will said that he is aware that the equipment is not the final arbiter of good photography and he did his homework before deciding what equipment to buy. Not ever being one to bow to the gods at Nikon or Canon, Will shot Minolta gear before the digital era; although, at 31 years old he may have been like 7 or 8 at the time. Dang youngsters! And he is gunning for my job. Double dang! Will said he would like to be a newspaper guy somewhere down the road and he would like to have his own studio. Trust me Will, go for the studio!

Back to Will’s wife, she plays on two hockey teams in Huntsville including the Huntsville Blast which is the only women’s hockey team in the area. Sorry Mrs. Will but he didn’t tell me your name. Anyway, Will shoots her games and the University of Alabama Huntsville’s games and they are quite good. UAH Chargers have a National Championship level hockey team in the NCAA Division I. How a really quality hockey program took root in Huntsville, Alabama may be one of the great mysteries of life. We grow up here in Bama playing ball, wearing cleats or basketball sneakers. Anyway, Will has taken his love for the game and turned it into photo opportunities and, in some cases, money making opportunities.

For a guy who is not a photojournalist, Will is pretty well grounded in ethics. Let me give you a quote from his email to me: “As great as the instant gratification of digital is, especially compared to the nail biting agony of waiting on a roll to be developed only to discover that you didn’t get the shot, I often feel that many use the ease of digital as a crutch. It is far too easy to correct everything in post and not worry about the fundamentals in this digital age. Composition, correct exposure, color balance, and so many of the other things that you had to really give thought to on film are so easily manipulated that few give credence to actually knowing how to take a photograph. I personally try to fight against this and always strive to remind myself that it’s not a chip in a camera or a processor in a computer that makes a photo, it’s the monkey behind the viewfinder that does.” I know a few guys who should have read that before making some image adjustments that have cost them their jobs and reputations.

Please check out Will’s Flickr Photostream . You can also go to his blog Gaming With Baby , especially if you are into online gaming. Will does some work for heavyweights like a little company called Nintendo. Last but not least, Will is a member of the North Alabama Photographer’s Guild. Hope you have a chance to get to know him. For that matter, I hope I get a chance to get to meet him since we live in the same part of the world!

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

Shooting natural light in the documentary situation is great and ethical and all that but sometimes I shoot natural light just because there is no way to beat it or duplicate it. When you can combine something as cool as the Delta Queen riverboat with excellent natural light then you have a winner, maybe even one to hang on the wall. The Delta Queen is a historic boat and I had the chance to go on board last year and produce a Soundslides show from my visit for The Decatur Daily. You can go the the site and see the show at DecaturDaily.com and click on the extras tab. You then have to navigate to the show in the multimedia section. Sorry it is not easier. Be that as it may, the DQ is a very special boat in my life.

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This boat is really special to me because it is probably the earliest memory I have with my grandfather, Helon Waddell who was the lock master for many years at Wheeler Dam on the Tennessee River.  When I was a small boy he would call my mom and dad and let them know the Delta Queen was going to come through the locks and they would take my brother and I down to watch the boat lock through.  I was very cool then and seeing the boat today still produces wonder and awe in me and connects me to a time now long past.

I shot the boat for The Daily Thursday morning but the light was really not good.  Basically it was somewhat backlit by high morning sun and there was some haze in the atmosphere which eliminated any possibility of a decent scenic type shot.  I went ahead and turned the photos in and they were placed on the page.  I had already decided to take my kids back up to see the boat later in the evening after work because I wanted to give them a memory like I had from when I was a kid.  Plus, the Delta Queen will not be sailing the nation’s waterways much longer.  She lost a Congressional exemption last year that allowed her to carry passengers in spite of having a wooden hull.  She is also listed on the National Historic Registry and is just a beautiful boat.

I had already decided to take my children back up to see the boat before she left port so, after work, I grabbed my EOS 5D and the children and headed back to Rhodes Ferry. It was already right at sunset so there was little daylight to work with. I used this light to get a couple of photos of my children with the boat. As the daylight disappeared altogether, I tried some hand held shots in the dusk light. I used the human monopod technique to steady myself. My shutter speeds were something like 1/4 second and I was shooting at ISO 800 wide open. The only light was coming from the lamps in the park, the dusk sky and the riverboat itself.

I thought if I got something nice I would try and transmit it back to the paper after I got home. After we finished shooting the pictures, I did some chimping and decided that the photo of the riverboat at the top of this post would trump about anything I had shot earlier so I called our copydesk and they agreed to hold the page for me for about thirty minutes. I got home and zipped them a photo up and our readers had a nice, visual treat to wake up to and I think the photo did a nice job conveying the end of an era with the sunset metaphor going on.

Technically there was noting to these photos but aesthetically they are really special to me. They recall a bygone era and my grandfather and some great childhood memories of spending time down at the lock with him. Sometimes natural light is special and this was one of those times. There was not way I could have duplicated it in either quality or in quantity. The softness of the light and the muted blues in the photos are just beyond my technical ability to reproduce. So natural light is not all about ethics. Sometimes it is just about aesthetics.

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

Light is funky.  Light is cool.  Light is hot.  Light is good.  Light is a particle.  Light is a wave.  Light is essential.  All true in one fashion or another and, most importantly, you can’t make a photograph without light.  Light is so very cool that if you want it to behave like a wave it behaves like a wave.  If you want it to behave like a particle, guess what, it can do that too.  While that is not essential to our use of light in photography, it is one of those cool things that everyone should know just so you can wow your friends.

Seriously, light is the essential ingredient in photographs and how we create, use or manipulate light often determines how a photo is perceived.  There is a wild variation of natural light ranging in color across the full visible spectrum on an almost daily basis.  Throw in a little geometry and the right color of light and you can make a stunning photograph of a rusty gate.  I love light.  I love to find great light and I love to create great light.  Light is the most challenging aspect of photography; therefore, light is the most satisfying aspect of photography.

You may be thinking that this is all out of place for a photojournalism blog but hold on for a minute.  Photojournalism is all about light too.  We don’t always get the pick of the light we shoot in.  Well, to be honest, we very seldom get to choose the light we shoot in.  That makes it all the more important to know how to manipulate or modify the light we are shooting in to our best advantage.  I know, the purists out there are collectively retching right about now but the purists clearly don’t have to make a digital camera reproduce on newsprint which can only generously be called paper.  So we will talk about being ethical with the use of light while we are talking about how to make light work for us.

Leading off then we will talk about using existing light without modification.  That will satisfy the purists and maybe help them keep down their lunch.  From a strictly documentary point of view, light just is what it  is.  If the light is good, great.  If the light is bad then that too is part of the story.  Believe it or not, I actually agree with this.  When I am shooting in a hard news environment I am extremely reluctant to add light.  When I do add light I am very judicious in the application of that light because I want the images to be as absolutely honest as possible.  If you add a strobe into a hard news environment you are actually modifying the environment and presenting something to the viewers that you actually couldn’t see or you present it in a way that the reader could have never seen had they been standing there.  This is even true if you are using a strobe to even out shadows in a daylight environment.

Here is reality.  Most of us work in a photojournalism environment that requires our images to be reproduced in a printed medium.  That puts us in a place where we are required to modify the light to some degree to get it into a range where the image can be successfully reproduced.  In other words, the honesty of an image is not changed by me making enough modification of the light to present an image to the readers that reproduces like I saw it.  Huh?  Okay, try this.  If a reader were standing beside me on a hard news assignment at noon, would the reader see heavy dark shadows under the eyes of my subject?  Actually, they might see the shadows but the human brain does a wonderful job of abstracting.  They would see but would not perceive.  Which means that they would remember a scene that was real but had certain details modified to fit their perceptions.  Heavy isn’t it?

I am not suggesting that reality is relative.  Actually, I guess I am.  Consider the eyewitnesses to an accident.  Every person sees and reports to the police what they have seen and every one of those eyewitness accounts will be somewhat variable.  Not that any of them were lying but they were all perceiving the scene from a slightly different point of view.  For a photojournalist that simply means that we must be as honest as possible with what we are seeing and recording without pretending that what we are recording is the absolute reality.  It is simply the reality we perceive from our point of view which we modify by lens choice, moment photographed and placement of light.

The human eye has a dynamic range that is many times what your camera can reproduce and many, many times what the printing press can reproduce.  So what you are doing in recording an image is compressing an image your eye sees and your brain perceives into a range that approximates what you saw when it is printed.  This sometimes requires you to modify the light to shorten the dynamic range of the image.  (The dynamic range for those of you who are not familiar with this term, is basically the range of visible tones from the brightest light to the darkest dark in your scene or image.)

Now, all that said, in a documentary situation you need to be as honest as possible with the light.  If you have to add light to the situation, add it from the same direction and in the same quality as the existing light.  Have you ever seen the W. Eugene Smith photo of the little girl in the bath.  Her mother is holding her and the scene looks totally genuine.  In fact, the image is strobed.  The angle of light and the quality of light mimic the light bulb in the room.  It is a convincing picture to me that really nails the whole issue of the poisoning of the village these folks live in.  You should also make yourself familiar with the work of Sebastia Salgado.  His work is amazing and it is largely documentary.  If it doesn’t move you then you might want to check you pulse.

Just to wrap this up, when you are shooting in a documentary situation modify the light as little as possible and only modify it to the extent that you are making the image more reproducable for your printing press.  Use natural light whenever you can and remember when you modify light to maintain as closely as possible the light quality that you observed in the situation.

About the photos: All three images are available light only.  There was not light modification at all and all three settings were documentary type situations.  The top photo is of a car that crashed into a church office.  D2Hs with a 17-35mm.  The second photo is from a fire in Athens.  I used the same combo for this image.  Adding flash to a night fire/crime scene is problematic because of all the reflective tape on emergency vehicles and firefighters.  You just get garish bands of wash out.  The final image is from an Indian religious service in the Bankhead National Forest.  It is all fire light and a sodium vapor security light in the edge of the woods.

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.