alittlenews

Andie Wall successfully spells "grimace" to win the Morgan County Spelling Bee Thursday at the Hartselle Fine Arts Center. Wall attends Julian Harris Elementary School. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 1/22/09

I had an assignment last week to shoot the county wide spelling bee.  Visions of the National Spelling Bee danced in my head as I drove to the Hartselle Fine Arts Center.  Not quite.  This was a fairly subdued crowd of spellers and even the winner didn’t really give me a reaction.  Bummer.  I wanted to see one of the kids get really excited at the end and scream out the letters like on the promo that ran on ESPN last year.  No such luck.

In fact, when the little girl who won spelled her last word she looked more confused than overjoyed.  It was difficult to tell when the contest ended even for the contestants so I am not surprised at her reaction but it didn’t make for a great visual.  You hope for a child jumping up and down or leaping off the stage with a giant letter A in her hands, you know, anything.  So much for day dreams.

Still, I had all the time in the world to shoot the spelling bee and that is uncommon.  Normally there are enough assignments to keep you moving during any given day but this was just a slow day.  I was able to spend about an hour and a half shooting the bee so I had plenty of time.  It was reasonably well lit, not that I could have used strobes anyway since the kids w0uld have been pretty disturbed by that.  I was able to shoot all available light and the building had a balcony which made for some different shooting angles.  I shot most of the time with a 70-200 lens and occasionally added a 1.4x teleconverter to give me a little extra reach.

There is a bit of a formula you can use to cover events like this.  I usually begin with something wide that shows the scope of the event.  In this case, I did a photo of all the spellers on the stage at the beginning of the event.  I did not include that photo here.  Make absolutely certain you have a photo of each contestant in case you have to leave before the event is over.  This will ensure you have a photo of the winner.  Then look for kids who are doing something out of the ordinary.  I included a detail shot of a girl who rolled her ankles a little every time she came to the microphone.  There was another photo of two girls sitting with hands clasped nervously which you don’t see here.  If possible, get shots off stage, back stage or in break areas.  This gives an option that is related to the competition but not the same old, same old of child at the microphone.

If you can stay long enough, concentrate then on faces of the spellers.  Not much here in this contest but some kids really make faces when they are trying to remember how to spell a word.  Then, as the contest draws to a close, be alert for any reaction from the winner, or the others who are in the finals.  This contest did not yield any reaction at all either positive or negative which is a bit uncommon but be alert for it because that will usually be your  best image.  Finally, look for moments that allow you to tell the best story even if it is not of the winner.  My best shot was of the little girl seated with all the empty chairs around her.  We almost ran that one but decided it was necessary to run the photo of the girl who won as the dominant photo.  Had we used two photos, that one would have been in the package.

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.