A Little News

How to light a big room appropriately might be a better title to this post because it is something I am constantly faced with.  It would be nice to just turn on the camera and start shooting and never have to worry about light but the fact is that this is technically impossible in many situations.  We have to reproduce our photos on what is probably the worst medium in existence.  Newsprint is notoriously porous and of the lowest quality paper.  I always get really excited when we print a special section on a higher grade paper because the photo quality is going to be higher.  ( I know, simple minds…)

Choreographer Tonya Jones works through the opening number for the Morgan County Jr. Miss Pageant with this year's competitors Sunday at Encore. photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 10/05/08

Morgan County Jr. Miss candidates Ella Cauthen (right foreground) and Marian Rough (left background) work on a dance routine while rehearsing for the pageant Sunday at Encore in Decatur. photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 10/05/08

This means that I am always walking into large rooms that are too dark to allow me to adequately reproduce a photo on newsprint.  That means I am going to be adding light.  The trick is knowing when and how to add light to either preserve the atmostphere of the room or to completely destroy it.  I have two examples in this post of recent jobs that required me to shoot both ways.

The first is the Jr. Miss rehearsal.  It was held in a large, poorly lit facility and no camera, be it a D3 or a point and shoot would produce an image that was usable on newsprint.  That meant just destroying the ambient because the ambient basically would produce a green dungeon effect, not pretty in print!  In this situation I was faced with two options.  The first is to just point a strobe at the subjects and blast away.  Okay, well, that is actually not an option because I will never do that except in outdoor spot news situations at night and I will do every trick in the book to avoid doing it even then.  So that leaves me with lighting the room in a way that simulates at least the position of the available light.  Since I can’t crawl up into the rafters and hang strobes I will go with bounce strobe lighting.

For these shots I set up two Lumedynes on about 100ws each and set the light stands to give maximum coverage of the exercise area.  I tried it with the lights direct but the shadows were very distracting and there was a distinct light falloff from the front of the exercise floor to the back.  That was unacceptable so the bounce flash option worked very well.  I could have used a couple of regular hot shoe strobes on the light stands and set them to full power.  I might have had to bump my camera’s ISO up a bit but that would have been no big deal.  I had the Lumedynes and they are great for that situation.

Austin Cunningham plays and sings for a crowd gathered in Barry and Tammy Nance's home in Decatur. The Nance's served a Texas style dinner before concert honoring Cunningham's Garland, TX roots. photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 10/17/08

The other assignment was on home concerts.  This is a new thing where someone brings a musician into their home and invites over twenty or thirty people and has a dinner party with a concert following.  Interesting concept but having twenty to thirty people in just about any home means it is going to be crowded.  I didn’t even take a light stand in, just a couple of Vivitar 285HV strobes.  These things are really cheap, about $85, and produce a nice light.  I shot with one in the hot shoe bounced for the walking around shots.  When it came time to light the room for the concert I changed up a bit.  I placed one Vivitar on top of a fairly tall piece of furniture and aimed it at the entertainer zoomed all the way out.  I took the other Vivitar up on a balcony and used it to bounce off of a wall to just provide a little light on the crowd.  I balanced the strobe outputs to keep from overpowering the room so the lighting effect was similar to the room light.  This is what I do to get shots that will reproduce in the paper and keep it ethical in the process.

Austin Cunningham plays for a small crowd gathered in Barry and Tammy Nance's home in Decatur.

I know it is a minor point in the great debate of ethics but lighting can be deceitful.  In a reporting situation you need to keep everything as honest as possible.  Besides that, much of the time the light looks more natural and appealing when it is done well.  A straight on strobe is seldom accurate and often just produces bad photographs.

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.

When I wrote about ethics using Photoshop I said that image manipulation was only the tip of the ethics iceberg.  I think the iceberg itself is found in the question in the title line.  I don’t even know how many times I have showed up at a news assignment and had the subject ask me, “So, what do you want me to do?”  I am tempted to ask for a firearm but up until today I have managed to restrain myself!

That question simply means that the subject was asked to show up to have a picture taken.  Usually a reporter has made the assignment and at least one editor has seen it and approved it.  Now I am sitting there in the middle of an ethical mess.  I am supposed to be making a real photo of a real person doing whatever it is they do and here they are asking me to be their director.  Whenever I hear that question I know absolutely that they are just showing up to have a photo made.  They probably are not even doing what the writer is writing about at that time.

My stock response is to turn the question around on the subject asking something like, “What would you be doing if I were not here?”  If their answer leads to an action I tell them to go ahead and do that and we will shoot them doing whatever they do.  If the answer is something along the lines of “Oh, I am just here to have my picture taken.  I don’t do that until tomorrow,” I have no choice then but to shoot some kind of environmental portrait.  Anything more than that is a misrepresentation.  In other words, anything more than that is a visual lie.

Here is what irritates me beyond words. There is sometimes a difference in the way editors view photos and they way they view words.  The editor who says to set up a photo showing the subject doing xyz would never tell a reporter to go out and get the subject to say xyz.  They might hope the subject says that but would never tell a reporter to make up the quote.  On the other hand, the same person will have a photo set up to show a person doing something they either are not doing at that time or that they don’t do at all.  This drives me bonkers.

This ethical problem is often driven by the need to fill that day’s news budget but that does not make it right.  If we expect reporters to get real quotes we better have an expectation that our photographers are getting real pictures.  Otherwise, we are just making it up.  So the road to good ethics begins in good planning where the photo editor or a photographer is present when stories are being planned.  This is not easy because a bunch of stuff happens on the fly and with staff sizes decreasing all the photographers may be out on assignments when the planning is going on.  I didn’t say it was easy but we have to be truthful.  If we are not truthful, where does that leave us?

Remember that addage that says, “Proper planning prevents a poor performance.”?  It is never more true than in the business of ethically reporting the news.  If all that fails, you better get really good at shooting environmental portraits because you will be doing a bunch of them.  Since most of us are not photo editors, how do we do our part to make sure assignments give us the best chance to suceed both aesthetically and ethically?

You have all heard this one before but it is the best one.  Make you own assignments.  Develop story ideas yourself, shoot them and then request a writer to come and do a story to accompany your pictures.  Or you can collaborate with a reporter on story ideas.  That way you are in on it from the beginning.  The other thing to do is just spend some time every now and then talking to reporters.  See what their story ideas are and begin talking early with them about how to best shoot the story.  Again, you are in the loop right from the start and even if you don’t end up getting the assignment you have made the assignment better for another photographer.  In a nutshell, we all need to be more proactive and less reactive in the process of generating stories.  Complaining about bad assignments doesn’t usually help much but coming to the table with the solution will help tremendously.  No one wants to produce photos that are not ethically pure so if you can present solutions you go to the head of the class!

About the photos: The top image is from one of those jobs where I showed up to shoot ghost busters only to find that they had no plans to do any ghost busting that night.  I am in a mess because the story is already slated to run and there is no wiggle room for rescheduling.  After some negotiation, the members agree to do a bit of ghost busting since we are all there and they have their gear.  Night saved!  The second photo is from an photo story I shot on natural childbirth using a midwife.  I had a great couple to work with and they gave me total access to the process.  This is an image of her enduring labor while her husband snaps a photo.  I know what all you women are thinking.  Please put away the guns and knives!

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.

If you have paid any attention at all over the past few years you will be aware that photographic ethics have become a huge issue. Photographers of some renown have lost jobs for Photoshopping images to make them look like what they wanted rather than what they actually saw and shot. That’s the tip of the iceberg. The part most people don’t see comprise the greater part of photographic ethics.

Let’s just start with what is and is not appropriate for a photojournalist to do with Photoshop or your image editing software of choice. The first step in any discussion of visual ethics must be the determination that you will not do anything beyond what is needed to make the photo look in print as much like what you saw in your viewfinder as is possible. That means whatever tool you use from a traditional darkroom to a computer program must be done with the end result being accuracy.

The most important part of that opening statement is this. I may do some things at my paper to prepare an image for print that are peculiar to the requirements of my paper’s printing plant. You may not need to do some of those things. I do them and I will show you what I do and why it is needed at The Decatur Daily. Some of you guys may work for papers where the prepress work is done by an imaging technician. We don’t have those at The Daily. Photographers are the imaging techs so bear that in mind as we go forward.

Almost all of my Nikon camera images require some degree of manipulation in Photoshop and it is a fairly rare image that doesn’t require the use of the history brush tool. That is my most common PS tool. I use it all the time to add contrast in shadow areas. Our press tends to run very flat and very blue so I have to tone accordingly. That includes really working the shadows and mid-tones. This is not as much a problem shooting with my personal Canon because Canon tends to do more in-camera processing than Nikon. For those not familiar with history brush, I use it essentially like a dodge and burn tool. It is just more accurate and easier to use.

I begin with a baseline toning of the entire image. Then in the history section of the pallette I create two snapshots. I do the toning on the first snapshot that I want to do for a particular area of the picture then click on the history brush and “paint” in the area I toned up or down. You can go on doing this as long as needed. Each new snapshot uses the last snapshot you worked as the baseline to build from. I usually don’t do more than two sets of snapshots and about ninety percent of the time I only do one set.

There have been some unfortunate uses of Photoshop that have resulted in some prominent photographers being fired over the last couple of years and it has become fairly routine for images coming out of governments that control their media to Photoshop images to meet their propaganda needs. The Iranians just did this to cover a botched missile test launch. One of four failed to launch so they simply cloned one of the others over the failed launch vehicle. I am not naming names of the photojournalists who have been caught because most of them have been adequately roasted already. Here is a summary of some of the ethics pits they fell in. One guy cloned out a person’s legs in a photo, another combined two photos (from a war image) to make it more dramatic and another lost his job for violating a specific policy regarding over saturating/toning photos. All three were failings, not of Photoshop, but of personal ethics.

When you leave home every day, and this is not just about photojournalism, you make sure you put on your ethics just the same as you put on your clothes. You end up naked if you omit either of them.

This is exactly what the Nikon NEF looks like. (Click on the smaller images to see a larger version) In the first screen snapshot you can see I create two snapshots of the raw image. I click on the first snapshot and tone the image not worrying about what the clouds are doing. I am toning to bring the values up in the lower third of the frame where the cyclists are. I then use the history brush tool to “paint” in the new values. This is just like dodging used to be in the darkroom for you old timers. Dodging was, wait, the darkroom was, oh, just forget about it and I don’t want to hear about how old I am either. Darn pups! Next I create two more snapshots. It is important to remember that the last snapshot I worked in needs to be the one highlighted before I create these next snapshots because I want them to based off the work I have just done. Now, in the new snapshot which will be the third overall, I will retone the image to get the clouds to look like I want them to then I will click in the fourth snapshot and “paint” in the clouds using the history brush tool. When I am satisfied that I have the image that will reproduce I just save the image and I am ready to caption, proof and print the image. Some of you will notice that this image is a bit over toned and it is. As David Hobby at Strobist likes to say, we in the newspaper industry are printing our photos on toilet paper. This means I have to hype my tones and exaggerate the values just a bit to make up for the loss of contrast and saturation in this medium. My goal is to get an image press ready that will replicate what I saw as closely as I can get it. Clouds are particularly tough because their tonal range is short and generally dark so I have worked these clouds more than you would if you were just making an 8×10 for the wall. That short, dark tonal range is really tough on our printing press. Like I said earlier, some of the things I do are a bit exaggerated because of the age of our printing press and because of its color reproduction tendencies. That said, the history brush is a wonderful tool to use for dodging and burning and it is much more accurate and easy to use than the dodge and burn tools themselves. No matter what tool you use just remember to use it ethically. Of course, if you are a reader who is not bound by the ethical standards of photojournalism and are just creating work for yourself, have a blast. The rest of us like to eat so we will mind the ethics shop.

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.

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.

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.

For the reader profile this week I have come back across the pond and across the country to Corey Ralston who works in Selma and Kingsburg in California. Corey also happens to be the top contributor to the A Little News flickr pool. Corey comes from Olan Mills where he was a portrait photographer and, in his words, lucked into the job working for the newspapers. He is the only shooter for both papers which can be both a curse and an opportunity. I think Corey is seeing it as an opportunity.

The photos with this post are from a horrible accident on the interstate which was caused by
extremely foggy conditions. What follows is Corey’s description of the accident.

The wreck that I shot was caused due to extreme fog conditions on Highway 99. We have a horrible foggy season and accidents due to fog are nothing new. On this particular day there were over 10 vehicles invovled in this accident. My news office was about 5 miles from where the accident occured, my editor told me to rush out to one of the accident scenes. The fog was so horrible that I was unable to see any of the accident sites from the overpass, so I took an educated guess and parked on the side of the freeway and said a prayer and ran across the lanes and found the scene where this woman and two other passengers were pinned in a car. I was the first journalist on the scene for a good 45 minutes. Soon after two other newspapers showed up and every broadcast news station in the area. The woman was stuck in the car for over an hour and a half. There was limited space to stand without feeling like I was getting in the way. The fire rescue teams seemed very understanding of what my job was and I for them. They even kept their cool when the other news teams showed up and we all crammed together in a little space between a wrecked big rig and car and a passenger bus with Canadians watching the horrible scene.
I try to not get caught up in the emotion of the scene. I felt awful for the womans plight, and as you can see from the look on her face she was in horrible pain. And I know she was watching me at some point take photos of her. There was never a point in time where I felt excited about a shot. I just wanted her to be rescued safely from the accident and wanted to be there to capture it.

Corey faced the very tough ethical situation of whether to shoot or not to shoot and then, after deciding to shoot, he had to decide what to shoot. You can see by the horror on the woman’s face that she is scared and hurt. The photo conveys the message more than just bent and twisted metal can but photos such as these come at an emotional price for both the victim and the photographer. If the photo is published, you can guarantee calls to the office canceling subscriptions and protesting the judgment of the paper and the photographer. People will call you names and some may threaten you. It can be a very difficult place to be in.

Here is what you face when doing these kinds of jobs. First, is the photo necessary to tell the story? Second, if the photo is necessary, how can I tell the story without unduly infringing on the victim who is already hurt? In other words, is my taking the photo and publishing it going to cause more harm than good. Every situation is different. Many times I look for a way to tell the story without causing more trauma; however, there are times and places where I will go for the highest impact image regardless of the victim. Some of these situations would be a wreck in a particularly dangerous place where wrecks happen regularly or when there was a chase or drunk driver or some other important factor. Where I shy away from shooting the victim is in the everyday accident situation because there is no compelling reason to shoot the victim. It would just look like exploitation.

Why go for victim shots in the situations I mentioned above? Why not just do a scene shot and avoid shooting the victim at all? The primary reason to shoot the victim is because showing the human aspect of the tragedy gives the photo more impact and the more impact the photo has the greater chance that someone with the ability to make changes will do so. Will a photo of a victim get the highway department to make needed changes? Will the photo cause the police to be more diligent patrolling for dui drivers? Will the publication of the photo raise public awareness of dangerous places on their highways? If by shooting a controversial picture I can hope to save one other life then it is worth doing in my opinion. There may be some heat. It may be uncomfortable. If you are in the news business you just have to be prepared to deal with those things if you ever want to produce change.

Photos copyright Corey Ralston. The opinions expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect those of either my employer or Corey Ralston’s employer.

Having compassion is not all about entering into someone’s misery; although, this is a core component of compassion. There are many faces of compassion that we express visually. The photos in this post show three people with major, even life-threatening, problems yet, in the middle of their suffering, there is joy. So much of life is both bitter and sweet and you can have sweetness in the middle of the darkest night. If you are ignoring this aspect of compassion you are missing a major portion of the picture.

Finding these moments is a combination of timing, patience and an understanding of the nature and character of the person and the situation. Some people will never show joy even in the most joyful times of their lives. Others will seldom show any negative emotion because they are naturally upbeat people. Most of society is somewhere between these two extremes. In any situation of life you will find both good and bad.

I am frequently amazed at how people react in tragic circumstances. From my days in a volunteer fire department until now, as a photojournalist, I have observed the reactions of people under stress. It seems to me the worse the scope of a disaster, the more hope you seem to find. Conversely, the more personal the tragedy the harder people seem to take it. Let me give you an example. Some of the greatest hope I have ever witnessed comes out of the most horrific tornadoes I have covered. People just sense the scope the disaster and determine that the circumstance will not beat them and they resolve to move on. Most of these folks seem to be very positive. On the other hand, someone who experiences the unexpected loss of a loved one seems to be the most stricken.

Another group I am always amazed at are the terminally ill. Many of the people I have encountered with terminal illness have made their peace with the act of dying and have passed over the darkness into something akin to hope. The friends and family they are leaving behind will usually be far more glum than the one who is actually ill. I went the long way around the mountain with this one to say you can find many different ways that people deal with the situations of life and death. Some will laugh, others will cry. Compassion allows you to enter in, if only for a few moments, to their lives and translate what they are feeling into photographs.

The best way to capture these moments that really translate into photographs of emotion and intimacy is to go into the situation fully prepared. Are you going to have to light the room? Are you going to shoot available light? What is the best lens? What are the best angles? Make the preparations and then be ready for the moment. There is nothing worse than being in the middle of a lens change when the key moment occurs.

It usually helps to talk to your subjects for a few minutes. It will help you gain a better understanding of their situation and helps you find the key place to enter in to their lives, especially if your time on the assignment is limited. You can set your lights while you talk or you can be scoping out your angles and doing all your mental prep while carrying on the conversation. When you start to shoot you will probably be better off shooting a few frames while allowing your subject to get used to the idea of being in front of a camera. It usually takes a while for the subject to lose their “camera consciousness” and just start to be normal. Now when the moment comes, you are ready, your subject is acclimated to you and the camera allowing a “real” moment can emerge.

About the photos: The first photo is from a first time reunion of guys who served together in the U.S. Army during the Viet Nam conflict. The man in bed was dying and his old buddies payed a visit. This was a situation I had to light and decided on a single strobe placed on a dresser at the end of the bed. The light was contrast but the approach felt right. The middle photo shows a lady getting a Bible and the keys to her new Habitat for Humanity house. Out of her poverty came this priceless moment of joy and just maybe, a turning of the tide in her life. The final photo shows a little girl in her backyard. The normally joyful shot of a child swinging is tempered by the fact that she is suffering from leukemia, a disease which may have been caused by fuel leaking from an underground tank at the gas station behind her house.

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

My wife teaches Latin to our kids and in the process she teaches me some too. We were talking one day about compassion and she asked me did I know what it meant. I said I thought it meant something like having sympathy for someone. She said it is actually born of two Latin words that combine to form the English version. Com means together or with and passion means suffering. Literally then, compassion means suffering with someone. Compassion is a tremendous identification with the condition of our fellow man.

I don’t know about you, but most of us got into this profession for reasons greater than just going out and shooting pictures. We wanted to make a difference. We wanted our pictures to be documents of such import that they helped change things. I don’t know if I have ever gotten there with a photo but it is a greater aim than simply shooting good pictures and winning a few contests. Part of what makes a great photojournalist great is his ability to identify with his subjects. By identify, I don’t simply mean that he gets along with the person being photographed, I mean he actually enters that person’s world and attempts to feel what that person is feeling. Then he takes that experience and translates it into photographs so his viewers are able to enter into the subject’s life as well.

Okay, I am not ignorant. I know how hard that is to accomplish when you are rushing between four or five assignments that are spread out across three towns and you have to do it all on deadline. If you are shooting for a living, you know what I mean. You pick the subjects that you can do this with and go in depth with them. Usually, photo essays are born out of this but you can apply the trait of compassion on your everyday jobs too. It just means you slow yourself down mentally and really try and identify with what your subject is going through whether they are having trouble with the city not picking up their trash, a person with an outrageous electric bill or a little kid hitting his first home run.

Since it is Sunday as I write this, you guys pretend you are back in Sunday School with me for a minute. Jesus was frequently moved with compassion for the suffering of the folks around him. Throughout the gospels you will find a phrase something like, “Jesus, being moved with compassion…” When he was moved with compassion the dead were raised, the sick were healed and the hungry were fed. I don’t know how many miracles you and I will be a part of but we can apply compassion as we go about our lives and jobs. Allowing yourself to feel compassion for a subject first and foremost means you are not judging them. If you judge someone you can no longer build that compassionate relationship with them because you will have locked them into your perceptions rather than allowing them be who they are. Let me give you an example.

The greatest act of compassion I have ever witnessed happened while I was working on a story on the homeless. A reporter and I had been following a homeless man around for a couple of weeks and he agreed to introduce us to a guy who lived in a junk yard. It sounded like a great photo to me. We arrived early one morning to find the poor man suffering from alcohol withdrawal. He could barely speak he was shaking so bad. Our homeless guide excused himself for a few minutes. When he returned he had a bottle of beer which he gave to the man going through the withdrawals. I was a swirl of emotions. The guy looked like he had just been given a kingly gift. Here I was a “Christian” and had never even thought to do this and was somewhat offended by it at first. When I saw the gratitude and realized what a sacrifice the one homeless guy made to give the other one the beer, I was shamed. One guy had identified with the subject of my photograph and that guy was not me. I learned something that day.

How you apply compassion then is going to be diverse. Until that day, I would not have considered it compassionate to give an alcoholic a bottle of beer. When you are working in photojournalism you will find yourself taking more than you give because of the nature of the beast. However, from time to time a moment will present itself where you can give back, either with your camera or in some other way. Let compassion be your guide. It will make you a better person and a better photojournalist.

About the photos: The top photo is of a woman and her son taken a couple weeks after the husband and father was killed in an auto accident. The pain of their loss was palpable and they were also angry because his life might have been saved had a highway guardrail been in place where he wrecked. I wanted to show the depth of their emotion so I used a high contrast lighting style and their expressions did the rest. The bottom photo is of a lady with Alzheimer’s disease. Her son in law is kissing her on the forehead and holding her hand. In that moment, I felt both the love of the man and the hopelessness of the situation and I hope they both come through in the photo.

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

I have been a photojournalist for 18 years now. In all those years of shooting I have found the toughest thing to do is infringe upon a person’s mourning with my camera. Technically the photo is usually pretty easy to shoot. That is not the issue. I simply can’t get excited about photographing someone mourning at accidents or fires or other traumatic situations. I have always held the philosophy that a person should be able to have a private moment even if it is happening in a public street. To be fair, not everyone holds this point of view but I don’t have to sleep at night with someone else’s philosophy, I have to sleep with mine.

I’m not trying to put on a halo here. I have photographed family members mourning the loss of someone in a wreck or fire and I will have to do so again. I wish I could tell you when to do this and when not to but I can’t. Much depends on who you are. I am not a person fond of situational ethics but there are times when shooting the picture feels right and there are times when it definitely does not. There are times when I have shot the photo and times I have walked away from it.

To be honest, some people put on a show for the camera. Other people are oblivious to the camera. Some others are conscious of the camera and are obviously trying to avoid being photographed. Every situation is different so there is no one set policy that says shoot in this situation but not in this one. Personally, I try to cover the story without infringing upon a person in a way that would cause them more pain. If I have a chance, I try and talk to them even before I shoot the photo. This allows them to know who I am and that I care about something other than the picture.

I remember covering a fire once and the home owner came over to me and a TV journalist and demanded that we leave and stop taking advantage of him. You will run into that. This man was very mad at us for just being there. We tried to explain our job but his emotion made him unreasonable. I had a friend who was attacked at the scene of a fatal accident when a family member literally assaulted him. Thankfully a deputy was nearby and came to his aide. I was shoved by a drunk and enraged family member while covering a house fire. I have been at other scenes when the family members were very accepting of my presence and understood what I was doing. There is just no way to predict how people will react under pressure.

Don’t forget that when you shoot a photo of someone, you also have to get their ID. That makes a tough job even tougher. (This makes me glad I am not a reporter!) People may have no problem with you shooting but may not even be willing to speak to you much less give you their names. On the other hand, I once had someone come up to me at a shooting and try to tell me the whole story. I finally realized they thought I was a police investigator and was able to point them to a real cop. To say these are fluid situations would be an understatement.

Whenever I walk into a situation like this I do a few things that may help you. First, I want to get a feel for the emotional atmosphere. In other words, how emotionally charged is the situation. This can be a red flag and you should pay extra attention when you walk into a high emotion situation. Journalists can be easy targets of aggression. Next, talk to bystanders. Neighbors of the victim can be an excellent source of information, including names. This allows you to shoot without having to further intrude on the situation. Sometimes this is a matter of logistics, sometimes a matter of courtesy. Either way, it may make your job easier just remember to verify all second hand information before you submit it for publication. Neighbors may also lead you to shots you would not ordinarily even know about. Third, and probably this should be first, put yourself in the person’s shoes you are about to photograph. If that were you out there crying over the loss of your child would you really want a photographer shooting your picture? You remember the old Sunday School golden rule? Do unto others the way you would have them do unto you. Pretty good advice. Finally, is the situation significant enough to intrude upon another person’s grief. That is the ultimate barometer. Grief can’t and shouldn’t be ignored but do be sensitive to the person you are shooting.

About this photo: I was assigned to shoot something at a karate studio following the murder of the popular instructor. I found some of his students outside the building crying with a few flowers on the doorstep. This was an entirely appropriate time to photograph grief. I believe this was done with a 17-35mm on an Nikon D1.

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

After spending two days covering the tornado that struck Lawrence County, I went back to a more or less normal assignment load on the third day after the tragedy. I have been doing this a long time so it came as a big surprise how difficult it was to shift my mindset back to “normal” mode, whatever that might be. As I walked around covering the immediate aftermath and the beginnings of the recovery effort, it felt a bit like being in another world. Stepping back into the every day assignment load was jarring. My Friday jobs included photographing a group of high school seniors who are graduating in the spring, a profile for the Meals on Wheels Program, a profile on a man and woman who met on the job, married and now work together and the swearing in ceremony for a new district judge.

All day Friday, I spent thinking about what was going on in Lawrence County and how the people were doing that I had photographed. You never think about the impact the things you shoot have on you because your everyday work load doesn’t normally produce the mental impact that a tornado produces. I find myself linked to these people who I mostly didn’t know prior to Wednesday in a way that is surprisingly strong. Although most people don’t think about it at all, or if they do think about it, think that journalists are recorders at best and some kind of uncaring low life at worst. In reality, we do care about the people we interact with. There are people I photographed years ago and I have never forgotten. Many of them I will never see again. I just dipped into their lives for a few minutes and never saw them again.

If you remember how I said in an earlier post that there is something of you in every photograph you make and if I see enough of your photographs I will have a pretty good idea who you are, you will understand what I am talking about. A photographer invests himself in the subjects he shoots whether it is a person whose life was ruined by a calamity or a kid running down the street playing with friends. That is what makes photojournalism appealing to me. If not for that, I could just go off and shoot flowers or sunsets and be perfectly satisfied.

As photojournalists, we are continually documenting whatever is going on around us. The good, the bad, the ugly, and sometimes the miraculous happen right out there in front of our lenses. The camera is something of a shield but it also is the open door we walk through into and out of the lives of our subjects. No camera can shield you from the emotion of what you are photographing.I was once called upon to shoot a photo of a little girl who was stricken with leukemia, and I have never forgotten her. I did that sixteen years ago in Portsmouth Naval Hospital. Before I left that room I was invested in the little girl and her family. She died two days after I shot her picture. That photo stayed on my office wall until I left North Carolina to move to Alabama. That photo still hangs in the gallery in my mind. You just don’t forget.

Too many times I hear people say, “Man, you have a really great job taking pictures.” Most of these guys have very physical jobs and I know what they mean. They don’t know that I carry around the image of that little girl who died from leukemia, that she never really leaves me. They don’t know that I have seen death raw and ugly way too many times and have had to see too many famalies grieving over their loss and still have to find a way to tell their story without making the situation worse than it already is. They don’t know about the guy who shot a Pulitzer Prize winner a few years ago of a kid dying in Africa and just couldn’t deal with it and later killed himself. That’s the part no one thinks about so you just nod your head and say, “Yeah, most of the time it is really great.”

It’s not all about sadness. Fortunately, there are many joyful moments as well. Probably the good things I have shot outweigh the bad by at least ten to one. I know that outside the 1/8th mile wide, seventeen plus mile long path of that tornado life is going on pretty much as it always has. I also know that inside that same path, life will never be quite the same again. That is the dichotomy of being a photojournalist and that is why the job is both bitter and sweet.

The photos in this post are from our Sunday edition on the miraculous story of one woman surviving the tornado because the chimney of her house fell on her and kept her from being blown away with the rest of her house. The other is a photo of a little, sweet lady who gets Meals on Wheels and must use a huge magnifier to read her Bible because she suffers from macular degeneration.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily express those of my employer.