A Little News

Maybe I should say that the Alabama Jubilee used to be one of my favorite things. I have just spent 24 hours in the last two days covering the Jubilee which is anchored around hot air balloons. These things are absolutely great to shoot pictures of. It is one of those situations where a blind monkey could get a photo and a person with any kind of game can really nail some beautiful photographs.

And I got to fly. Local pilot Tom Lane who lives in Somerville, Alabama, took me and reporter Catherine Godbey up in his balloon, The Griffin II. I think that riding in a hot air balloon is about as close as a human being will get to walking on air. It is incredible! Just don’t drop the camera. It can be a long drop with a sudden stop which is usually pretty bad for the camera. Otherwise, hot air ballooning is just about as cool and experience as you can have.

This was actually my third flight. The first time I went up the weather was very overcast and we almost didn’t fly. I got some decent stuff but it didn’t sing like I wanted it to. Then, a couple of years ago, I got my second flight and the day was spectacular. Yesterday, the weather was decent but hazy which made for a few problems. Our pilot was one the last to take off so we were a bit behind the rest of the balloons. It made for great pictures of the balloons massed together in the air but the haze caused some frames to simply be unusable. All the problems melted away as we closed in on the other balloonists. The haze factor was eliminated leaving me with just smooth light to work with.

Then, Saturday night, I went back to Point Mallard Park for the balloon glow event which features the balloonists inflating but staying on the ground. At dusk, they fire their propane burners and light up their bags so that the balloons glow. It is really beautiful and the photo opportunities are just fantastic. I shot with my person camera, the EOS 5D for both the flight and the glow because I wanted the beautiful saturation and clean images I get with this camera. I was thrilled with the results. Except for the length of the day which began at 5:30 a.m and ended at 11 p.m. this was a wonderful day to be a photojournalist.

You can view a slide show of all the images I posted at decaturdaily.com and click on the link to the show. I hope you enjoy it.

About the photos: Everything in this gallery was done with my EOS 5D and either the 24-70 f2.8 or the 70-200 f2.8 all shot available light. For the balloon glow pictures, I used the incandescent color balance setting and shot real slow but still hand held. I don’t think any of the images were shot above ISO 400. I used the human monopod technique I detailed in an earlier post to steady the camera.

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.

I didn’t intend to do a series on my favorite things, but why not. It’s my blog after all and that makes me the boss, after a fashion. I don’t seem to be making any money at it so I can’t pay myself, but I guess the fact that you folks are out there reading reading is pay enough and that is pretty good wages. Anyway, on with the show. Since we are now talking about my favorite things, let me introduce you to Boss Hill. I guess he has a real name, but I have never heard anyone call him anything but Boss so we will go with that.

Boss has a big stew every spring at his home near Elkmont, Alabama. If you have never heard of Elkmont, don’t let it bother you. It is a little town about a stone’s throw from the Tennessee-Alabama state line just off of Interstate 65. It is a little southern town with all the fancies and foibles that go along with being a little southern town. Boss Hill is one of the celebrities of the community. I am sure that it doesn’t hurt Boss’ status that he doesn’t charge for his stew. You come, you wait in line, you hear some music and you eat free until your belly is content or until the stew is gone.

The real hook is that Boss makes goat stew. It is the only place I know of where you can have a bowl of goat stew. I have never seen it on a restaurant menu anywhere and there are some weird dishes on restaurant menus in the south. For those with a gastric uncertainty toward the goat stew, Boss also makes a more traditional chicken stew and beef stew but if you ever get there, at least try the goat stew. It is better than you think.

The real payoff for me is not the stew even though I really like to eat. The payoff is all the excellent people who show up that I get to photograph. There was one fellow who was a volunteer cook who kept up a non stop stream of conversation with anyone passing by whether he knew them or not. He parsed his conversations with stories of his wife, God bless the poor woman, who he claims is a bit of a hefty cook. I am pretty sure he was telling these stories because his wife was not actually present. The man himself seemed to have enjoyed a bit of her cooking over the years. If there were ever a tall tale to be told or heard, this is the guy to look for.

This is a political year in Alabama so there were any number of politicians who came to get a bowl of stew and to spread their message which always ended in a flier being passed and the statement, “I sure would appreciate your vote!” That is not one of my favorite things but it is impossible to talk about Boss Hill’s stew without the politicians. They are as much a part of the mix as the salt and pepper are in the stew.

Speaking of the cooking. The food prep starts at 4a.m. I was not there for the beginning. I arrived at the lazy hour of 7a.m. to begin my work and was chided by the cooks for being so late. There were five large cauldrons of stew boiling and bubbling by the time I arrived with a lively banter around the pots. If the stew could be flavored with words then these pots would be the best tasting stews in the world because the cooks, all long time volunteers with Boss, kept up a salt and pepper barrage between one another all morning. One poor man had the misfortune to have been born in the North which made him the target of more than a few barbs. He has lived in the South most of his adult life so he took it all in stride. When Boss Hill finally deems the stews ready to serve everyone present pauses for a moment to bow in thankful prayer and then the eating begins and my work is done. Except to sit down to a steaming bowl of stew myself.

About the photos: Well, what do you say. They were shot with Nikon D2H and D2Hs bodies and either a 17-35mm or 80-200mm lens all available light. It just comes down to finding light that is not too contrasty to produce an image. Oh, and I had to make sure not to spill stew on the cameras. That makes a mess.

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

Faces at an Auction II- He wan’ts how much?, originally uploaded by Chris Frear.

A Little News reader Chris Frear lives in Scotland and freelances for the local farming press. What follows is Chris’s description of his shoot on a sheepdog sale where he captured this captivating image of farmer’s watching the sale. Last year, I did a post on shooting the edges of an event, not just the event itself. This photo is a perfect example of a photographer keeping his eyes open for photos outside the main event. Nice work!

The “faces” photo was taken at a sheepdog sale over in Moffat last September. The basic gist is that farmers turn up in a muddy field and watch a series of young sheepdogs being put through their paces with a small flock of perhaps five or six sheep. After each dog is run, it is auctioned to the highest bidder. The better it runs, the higher the price. The whole thing lasts about 4 hours on a good day. I was there covering the event on a freelance basis, selling some action shots to the farming newspapers.

The farming press usually only require a single photo of the highest priced dog. But four hours doing the same shot of the higher priced dogs over and over is mind numbing. To keep alert I would often photograph candids of the people in the audience during the bidding. Once I get home from an event, I download the cards into the PC, emailing off the pictures for the papers. I had forgotten taking this image until that point. I found it and several other candids, which from my point of view I liked much better than one of a dog.

The event is held every six months, and the Farmers were grumbling at the recent sale in April as it was being held during lambing season. It was also bitterly cold. The reporter standing next to me disappeared to warm up in the nearby cafe, coming back about an hour later asking if she’d missed anything. She had, the highest priced dog had fetched over 2,000 Guineas! All livestock auctions across the UK are still done in guineas, a guinea is worth £1 and 5 pence, or about $2.10

Being a country/rural photographer is different from being a photographer for a London newspaper. You still have to earn a living wage. But you’re considered part of the community first and a photographer second. You have blend in but be remembered. And most importantly you have to be prepared to get mucky and to help out. If you can manage these requirements you’re going to be OK.

I get invites out of the blue to events or requests to photograph a family gathering from people I may have met once weeks or months ago. The “joke” in the family is that if I come home mucky and/or wet through then I’ll have got a super image. I broke my foot last year in a local river trying to get a shot and ended up, up to my arm pits in freezing water. There was no point in getting out as I had no icepack, so I stayed there in the water for 20 minutes, got the image I was after. By the time I got out, the cold water had minimised any swelling in my foot! I was lucky not to get hypothermia, but hey I was having fun! I had to help wrangle a flock of sheep last autumn. The shepherd and his wife I was photographing just couldn’t do it on their own, they needed a third person (me) to help move the flock up the pen so the shepherd could man handle the sheep one at a time through a footbath. A week ago I had a call late on a Friday night asking me if I was busy on Sunday, I said no (I really should learn), so there I was last Sunday in waterproofs covered in mud, in the rain getting action shots of dogs at an agility day. Did I enjoy it? You bet. It was also great for marketing/networking. This is dog, rather than cat country.

Please check out Chris Frear’s web site and his Flickr photostream.
On his main web site you will see some of the most magnificent panoramic landscapes you could hope to see. It is beautiful work and I highly recommend you check it out. Chris’s entire site is very nice but don’t miss those panoramas.

Feature photos are a staple of the small newspaper world. If you work in this world then you know that editors are constantly looking for local faces in local places to put in the paper. The challenge is not making feature pictures. It is making GOOD feature pictures. What I mean is, you can usually find a little kid out doing something somewhere but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have a GOOD feature. It just means you made a picture. Admittedly, little kids do make for some excellent feature photos but I try and avoid them like the plague. Its not that I don’t love kids its just that I use them only as a last resort because you could shoot a feature of a child almost every day of the year. So what makes a feature you ask? Almost anything and that is the good news. Color, light, shadow, wildlife, children, somethings borrowed and some things blue all make for feature possibilities. What you see in this show comprises everything from stand alone cruise art, photos we find just out driving around and looking for them, to photos made on assignment. Some assigned photos went with stories while others didn’t. Sometimes a stand alone even generates a story. The feature is a pretty broad category and covers a wide range of photos. I hope you enjoy the pictures and I hope you are having an excellent holiday.

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