A Little News

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.

Believe it or not, making beautiful people look beautiful in photos is not as easy as it would seem. I have found it far easier to make people look ugly than to make them look beautiful no matter what their eye appeal is. Basically, it comes down to light. Everyone has seen the difference in Hollywood stars when they are on the cover of a magazine with a well lit portrait and when they are caught in the glaring light of on camera strobes in those tabloid moments. Lighting makes the difference. Okay, makeup artists, stylists, art directors and those cool fans they use on fashion shoots make a little difference too!

Every year, we do a send off party for the reigning Miss Point Mallard as she is getting ready to leave for the Miss Alabama pageant. During this party, the beautiful young lady models her gowns for us to photograph. There is no set, no stylist, no cool fan to blow her outfits around and the lighting is usually just what you carry in with you which, in my case, means a trio of SB strobes. The party is always held in the private home of one of the pageant coordinators so the backgrounds can range from really good to very difficult to work with. Space limitations are always the biggest problem because about all of these folks have nice homes. So there we have the challenges.

Katie Boyd is the reigning Miss Point Mallard and they tell me she has a good chance to become Miss Alabama. I photographed her in three outfits during the send off party this year and I got a couple of shots that are worth talking about. Both are three light photos but there are two different approaches which I will contrast for you. The first photo is my favorite. The red dress, the excellent background and the lovely young lady just make this a really appealing photo for me.

The main light is an SB800 in an umbrella positioned to the camera left, high and at about 65 degrees left of the camera to model line. I had Katie turn slightly toward this light so the angle of the light on her was actually closer to a classic 45 degree position. There is a light positioned very high and behind her to the camera right. It was placed a ceiling level and aimed down to give some separation from the background. Then there was a problem. The high light separated her upper half from the background but the lower portion of her dress blended in and we were losing the foot and leg extended through the slit in her gown.

To solve this problem I positioned a third SB800 on a chair slightly ahead of her and aimed from her waist down. I was getting spill onto the background which was very bad so I used my bag to scrim this light so it was not impacting the background at all. The result you see here.

The second set up was with a different gown and in a different room in the house. With the owners permission we pretty much moved the furniture from her dining room so we could use a small cove in one wall for our background. Katie’s gown featured a low scooped back and I wanted to highlight this feature. The electric blue gown made a nice color combo with the wall color but I needed to light the cove to bring out the color.

The lighting setup for this one uses two umbrellas with SB strobes. The lighting ratio is not quite 2:1 but is comes fairly close with the main light being on the camera left. I collapsed the umbrella on the right so the light fall off was somewhat controlled. You can control how much of the umbrella you collapse by moving the umbrella shaft in or out relative to your flash. This helps you control how much the umbrella closes. You have to be careful with this technique because the light fall off can be fairly dramatic causing you to under light portions of your frame. The third light is just laying on the floor and aimed up. It was set to about 1/32nd power and zoomed to the 85mm setting. This lit the cove with some control on the beam spread.

I left with two photos I was very pleased with and they fed me dinner on top of all that. Very nice indeed!

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

No one really likes problems but when you come up with a solution and overcome the problem you are better for it. This was the case when I photographed pro bikers Seth Kimbrough and Corey Martinez. These guys are fantastic bikers and I was totally amazed at their skills. Had I tried even one of the tricks they were doing I would still be in a cast, a full body cast!

Seth and Corey both grew up in and around Hartselle, Alabama and they became pros the hard way. There was never a skate park or any official place for them to practice. Both of these young men have helped to set up a skate park in Hartselle so kids growing up and idolizing them will have a place locally to go and bike or skate. Many of the ramps in the park were built and then donated to the park by one or both of them.

I had know about Corey for some time but we had never met. He and my oldest daughter are friends and my oldest daughter’s best friend is married to Corey. We finally connected to do this shoot but the only time available was mid-afternoon with a high blue sky. That was fine for action photos but not for the portrait. I really wanted some late afternoon, even dusk, light to do the portrait with. Since none of our schedules worked and Corey was leaving town for a pro event we had to shoot when we had the time available.

I had seen the guys pause on top of this flat topped concrete pyramid in the middle of the park several times while they were riding and it seemed like a great spot to pose them for the portrait. The problem was the light was far too contrasty to shoot anything but a back lit portrait which meant I had to light them. I had three Nikon SB strobes at my disposal. My basic lighting plan was to set two strobes on stands at roughly 45 degrees relative to the camera position. The concrete ramp slanted in such a way that I could not set the light stands anywhere on the slope. This meant putting them on the ground with a flash to subject distance that would be somewhere between six and ten feet from the subjects. Not good.

I tried it anyway with predictable results. The strobe exposure was more than a full stop under. I was shooting a Nikon D2Hs and a full stop underexposure with strong back light was just too much. What to do? I had used my Bogen Friction Arm to set up a remote camera on top of one of the ramps earlier so I grabbed it and used an SC17 shoe cord to attach another strobe to the camera platform on the Friction Arm. Then I clamped the strobe onto the stunt peg on the front tire of Seth’s bike. He is the one of the left. I set this strobe to fire via the SU4 optical slave function on the SB800. I also pointed the strobe straight up and extended the built in bounce card to give some fill.

The problem that I could not solve with the equipment at hand was the direction of this third light. Since it was lower than the faces it created hot areas on the neck and made some crazy shadows. I would have preferred not to do this but I could not use a larger bounce device and keep the strobe invisible. In the end, the lighting kind of creates a funky feel that goes along with the whole trick bike scene so it works okay for me. Basically, you run across all kinds of situations in photojournalism that require problem solving skills. You probably won’t ever solve them perfectly; however, the more problems you solve the better you get at solving problems. You can also take the solutions to those thorny problems and use them in other situations so the general quality of your work gets elevated. Everybody is gonna have problems. Applying creative solutions, a little hard work and some sweat will make you better and that means better pictures. Hey man, in everything give thanks, even for the problems. They make you better!

About the photo: You already know I shot with a Nikon D2Hs. I used the 17-35mm lens and obviously shot from below the guys and directly into the sun with an ambient exposure of approximately 1/250th sec at about f16. My ambient exposure is about 2/3 stop under the strobe exposure. The two strobes on stands were fired with Pocket Wizards and the third strobe was fired via its built in optical slave.

Photo 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.

There is an old saying that says necessity is the mother of invention. Necessity drove me to this little flash get up while assisting my friend David Higginbotham shoot a wedding. We were in a very large, dimly lit church shooting some pretty large groups. The Vivitar 285s bounced into umbrellas were not giving us enough light. In the blinding flash of a flash, inspiration struck and man did it hurt.

I quickly grabbed a pair of Nikon SB800s and set them to the SU4 setting so they would fire on optical slave. I then strapped them to the light stand just below the Vivitars. As you can see, you can also strap them to the umbrella itself using the other flash as a prop. This doubles your power per umbrella. If you are shooting with two umbrellas you are then getting four full power strobes bounced into umbrellas. You don’t lose the nice light an umbrella provides and you get basically double the power.

Since I first did this on the spur of the moment I have been able to use it for my photojournalism several times where I would have had to use direct flash in the past. The photos I have included in this post are not real good examples of photojournalism but they were shot for an education magazine we publish for the city school system and this is the photo they requested. It did need to meet the higher repro standards that the magazine has relative to the newspaper so some fill lighting was essential. The umbrella light was necessary so the double strobe set up was the perfect alternative. I am giving you an example with the strobes and without to show you the difference. Like I said, it is not the greatest example of portrait lighting I have ever done but the assignment and time of day conspired to make this pretty difficult.

You will find several situations where this lighting technique will help save your bacon. Maybe you need monolight power but don’t have a monolight budget. Maybe you have those precious lights but they are back at the office. Whatever. Give this a try. I am sure there are better ways to secure the second strobe and I know I have seen a double strobe bracket but, like the strobes you don’t have, it doesn’t help you if you don’t own one.

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

PS. Both photos are untoned so you can see the difference without any image manipulation from Photoshop.

Okay, maybe this one isn’t so fast unless you are one of those people who are instinctive photographers. I am not one of those truly gifted individuals. They simply stick a camera in front of their face and magical things happen in the viewfinder. For the rest of us, getting better is an exercise much like growing. It doesn’t happen all at once and it sometimes involves a lot of repetition and hard work. This is certainly one of those areas for me.

Layering is a visual term that basically means that you are creating various layers of visual interest in the frame. It can be done with lenses, composition and light and sometimes all three of them combined. There can be a couple of layers or there can be many layers. Frankly, in the newspaper business, layering is not always well received by folks who deal in words until it is fully explained. Too often, we simply want a photo that slaps the reader in the face and yells, “Hey, wake up and look at this!”

A layered photo can do this but as often as not a well layered image invites the viewer in deeper and deeper and allows him to stimulate various parts of his visual pallet much as a fine wine does for the aficionado. This is something that takes practice and patience to develop and patience is not one of my finest qualities. That means I have to consciously work at this. It is then easier to work on layering in situations where I am controlling everything such as the environmental portrait.

Now lets look at some photos and techniques. There are more than I am showing so don’t limit yourself to just these techniques. First, and to me, most obviously, use a wide angle lens and frame the subject using a framing device. This first photo is from the Downtown Criterium bike race in Decatur. There are three distinct layers in this image beginning with the bicycle tire which is the framing device. The second layer is actually the primary focus of the image which is the bikers followed by the third layer which is the buildings that form the background. This is the easiest technique to use and it is probably the one we all learned in photo school.

The next photo is one creating layers using the arrangement of the cheerleaders and their varying expressions. Theses two devices, the varying expressions and the foreground to background relationship of the way the girls are positioned, draws you in and invites you to look for a while seeing the varying degrees of reaction to whatever may be going on on the basketball court. The foreground element is dominant and it fills the bill for newspapers because it provides an immediate hook. Then the viewer slips into the photo to see the various reactions the girls are having. This is certainly not as common a situation for most of us but it works great when it is available.

The next photo combines two layering techniques, framing and light. The use of the gentleman’s hands serves as both a layer and a framing device leading you to his face. The lighting creates the second and third layers of the photo and helps center the viewers attention on his face. As a side note, this man was one of the first to go ashore on D-day in 1944 on Utah Beach in Normandy. He was a combat engineer whose job was to disable any mines and clear beach obstructions all while under fire. His company fared well unlike many others who were killed in their boats or on the beaches, especially those who landed on Omaha Beach, the other beach assigned to U.S. forces. I really liked this man and admired his courage.

Finally, the last photo is another using a combination of framing and lighting to lead the viewer in. This was shot while the Governor of Alabama was on a campaign stop in Decatur. I used a wide lens and an ambient light underexposure combined with flash to create the funnel effect that leads you to the Governor. My oldest son was with me this day and he subbed admirably for a moving light stand. I just told him where to go and who to point the flash at and we shot several varieties of the Governor moving through the crowd.

Now you have enough to get started so go knock your editors out with your new layering skills!

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

Joe Johnston, a staff photographer for the Tribune in San Luis Obispo in California, gets the nod as our featured reader photo of this week. Joe’s portrait of Cal Poly pitcher Eric Massingham has a lot going for it and I wanted to point out some of the strong points.

First, the lighting is excellent. If you look at the photo and do a little Strobist exercise you can see Joe used two lights. His main light is a Canon strobe shot through an umbrella about a foot away from the guy’s face. The second light is positioned about four feet out of the frame to the left and is direct and about a +1 stop hotter than the main light giving him the excellent separation.

The next thing you are going to see is how Joe used a low angle to give him a clean, and interesting background. When ever you have a poor background, go low angle. The sky is an endlessly variable background that is totally free. Use it liberally. The slightly overcast condition also gives him some depth and texture in the background which adds a layer of interest. Although Joe did not tell me this in his description, I suspect he has underexposed the sky by at least 1/2 stop allowing the strobes to set the key of the photograph.

I highly recommend you check out Joe’s Flickr photostream. It is a beautiful collection of photos that will inspire you. Also check out a story Joe did for the Tribune. The story details a kayak trip he and a reporter did along the Pacific coast covering 100 miles in six days. Okay, now he is just showing off but if you live on the California coast, why not? Joe is 34 years old and has been at the paper for the past eight years. He has been a working photojournalist for ten years total.

Photos copyright Joe Johnston, The Tribune.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent those of The Decatur Daily or The Tribune.

Not too long ago, my co-worker Jonathan Palmer did a super shot of a guy driving his classic V-Dub beetle. He did the shot in fairly low light and used a strobe inside the car to provide the illumination. You can check out JP’s shot in his November gallery on his blog. The only problem is the image did not run. Well, it was a problem for Jonathan but a great boon to me. I loved the shot and though that it would be good to use the concept some time in the future.

Low and behold, I had the opportunity just last week. We were doing a story on a man who uses classic Rolls Royce autos in his limo business. The day was miserable, in fact I did the shoot between covering the two tornadoes last Friday. The man lives in the country so his home had to be the setting. I needed to get a portrait of him and I needed to limit the background which was a plowed field. I used Jonathan’s internal lighting scheme with a Vivitar 285HV laid on the seat beside him. The ambient light on the field was about 1/2 stop below the strobe and the front of the car was at least one stop below the strobe.

The real key to making this happen was to position the car so that some dark foliage was strategically blocking the light from the sky so I could see him inside the car. He had some tall evergreens in his yard that allowed me to have the area of windshield where he was seated to be free from the reflected sky light. Keep in mind that shiny objects will reflect whatever they “see.” This applies to a table top product shot just as well as it does to a car’s windshield. You can see my slacks reflected in some of the chrome on the front of the car. There was just nothing I could do about that.

The shot has real nice contrast because the paint is dark which creates a low key feel but the chrome gives some really nice highlight and, combined with the strobe, makes the shot really work from the lighting standpoint. I did the two versions you see here and we ran the tighter shot which was my favorite. The photo ran with a couple of other images that showed more of the car. For those of you reading this in the English Isles, the Rolls Royce is no big deal and you see them all the time. Let’s just say they are pretty rare in North Alabama so showing the car was a major part of the assignment.

Now when you check out Jonathan’s shot, you should know that he did his while driving down the road in front of the other car with his Canon D1 and a 300 2.8 hand held, out the window, backwards and without looking through the viewfinder. And he nailed it on the first frame. Jonathan is known by some around here as a legend, or just J-Ledge for short. By the way, he and I are partners in a real estate venture selling ocean front property in Arizona so drop us a line if you are interested. The prices are incredible!

About the photos: Both shots were done using a Canon EOS 5D with a 24-70 f2.8 lens, pocket wizards and a Vivitar 285HV. I believe the Vivitar was set to 1/4 power and was aimed at the roof of the car on its widest zoom setting. The exposure for ambient was about one stop under the metered exposure to ensure the car would drop down to a true black allowing the chrome and the guy to shine.

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

This post is by David Higginbotham whom I worked with for several years at The Decatur Daily. David is now a contract photographer for NASA and a freelancer shooting weddings, portraits and bands. In addition to his photographic skills which are considerable, David is an excellent musician. He is also a good friend. I assist him from time to time on weddings and am continually amazed at his ability.

I got my first job as a photographer at a small newspaper near by hometown called The Athens News-Courier when I was 16. I Freelanced basketball games for $25 a pop. They would give me hand rolled canisters of T-max and in return I would give them sub par photos. However the photos were good enough to get me hired on permanently the month after I graduated high school.

The Courier gig led me to The Decatur Daily in 1998 and I was a full time shooter there until 2003. I was learning all I could from 3 other photographers who had been in the business for as long as I had been in the world (Sorry guys…I know that hurts a little). It didn’t take me long to fall in love with photojournalism. Even in a small market it was awesome! My Noon-9:00pm shift yielded me everything from hostage situations to used cars. In my opinion nothing does more to sharpen the skills of a young photographer than newspaper work. It’s a baptism by fire that makes you learn to deal with more of life’s experiences in a week than a cubicle jockey will in a career.

But much like many photojournalists, I reached a crossroads in my career where I had to make a decision about my future. I had an opportunity to leave the world of photojournalism and venture into a government job. I would still be a photographer….but I would leave the newspaper world behind. I would be more of a cube jockey than I had ever been.

I became a photographer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). It’s hard to describe to people what I shoot at Marshall but to say it is diverse is an understatement. From something as mundane as an awards ceremony to something as exciting as a shuttle launch….we shoot it all.

Here’s the story of one of my most published images. About 3 years ago I was sent to Sandusky, Ohio to photograph prototypes of something called a solar sail. It works on the theory that objects in space can be propelled with a large super light material opened up much like the sail on a boat. Except that instead of wind it used photons from the sun (somewhere an engineer is shaking his head at my poor explanation.) I was taken to the largest vacuum chamber in the world where my job was to take a “glamour shot” of what was basically a Mylar balloon spread over several trusses.

I setup 8 remote flashes underneath of the sail. At the time I didn’t have access to any pocket wizards so I was using a couple of Quantum Instruments radio slaves. The rest of the flashes were firing using their optical slaves so I had to do a lot of playing with angles to make sure everything was “seeing” the other flashes. The vantage point that I used for the first image was from a crows nest type area 123’ above the sail.

The flashes were placed under the sail inside looking out with 4 gelled with blue and 4 gelled with red. The light for the top of the sail came from the ambient light in the room. This worked out great considering that at this point I was completely out of flashes. The next image was shot from something called a spider lift that crawled us up the side of the room. The company who produced the sail wanted to put their people under it to give it scale.

This image actually got published double-truck in Popular Science. This started a chain reaction that wound up in this image being published in several magazines worldwide. Oh and for all of you FotoQuote junkies out there….don’t bother asking the circulation of all these magazines…images I shoot for MSFC are usage free….public domain….free. That’s normally not hard to stomach….but when several magazines give you that kind of play…you start crunching those potential numbers!

Working as a photojournalist in my early years prepared me for all of the amazing opportunities and challenges that I have faced in my career thus far. The things that all of you are learning on Cosby’s blog are invaluable to you especially if you are just getting started in this field. You may not always find yourself shooting the most exciting things but if you take pride in your work you can keep yourself entertained and provide the best possible product for your client/customer/editor.

A special thanks to Gary Cosby Jr. for allowing me this opportunity to write on his blog.

If you are interested in seeing some of my other work, please visit my website at www.davidhphotography.com.

NASA is the source of all images in this post. David Higginbotham’s words
are in no way endorsed by NASA nor do they reflect the views and opinions of
NASA. These words do not reflect a NASA endorsement of any commercial
product, service, or activity.

If you ever want a good challenge in life just teach someone else a principle and see how quickly you have to live it yourself. After writing a post last week about not cheating yourself on any assignment, no matter how meaningless it may seem to you, I had the chance to employ my own good advice a couple of days ago. There are a couple of things that our newspaper is positively fixated on and crepe myrtles are one of those things. I have shot more photos of crepe myrtles than I care to remember, much less count. I am not sure why we are so in love with this bush, or tree, or shrub or whatever it is, but we certainly pay an enormous amount of attention to it. Now if I were a maple tree, for instance, I think I would write a letter to the editor to complain that the crepe myrtle was dominating the news coverage but, alas, I am a mere human and not a maple tree.

I got an assignment on Thursday to shoot a picture of a well trimmed crepe myrtle in one of the city’s parks at sunset. They wanted a beautiful picture of one of the bushes to go with a story about how to properly trim them. Apparently there is such a thing as crepe murdering which happens when someone gets a bit carried away with the shears. I have never actually heard of charges being filed but, you never know. We do seem to love our crepe myrtles here. I digress. My photo assignment was to shoot a pretty picture of one of the bushes that had been properly pruned. Thursday was a gray, rainy day. Friday too was a gray rainy day. I planned to wait until Saturday to shoot the picture but it turns out the editors wanted to see something by late Friday to plan Sunday’s page. Now I am stuck with a bad day with bad light and when I get to the location, there is no place to shoot one of the bushes against a sunset sky even if there had been a sunset sky to shoot against.

This would have been a real easy assignment to just do a drive by on and and hand in a proof. However, remembering that I had been preaching to you guys about not cheating yourself, I found myself trapped by my own instruction. Having no other options, I pulled out all three strobes that I have and decided upon an artistic approach with the lighting. Sometimes, light can really save your bacon when you have no other options. I decided on a side light/back light set up with the back light at a low angle to get it behind some other plants to screen the lens from flare. I worked three or four different set ups altering my basic lighting scheme a little to accommodate the various angles I had to shoot from. I actually came away with a photo that I was fairly proud of and had three usable options to turn in for publication.

Technically, I set my strobes on full power for most of the shots. I kept one strobe down on 1/2 power to vary my lighting ratios and I also varied the strobe to subject distance to help break up the ratios as well. I used a -1 compensation on the available light to help the bushes pop from the background which was not helping me at all. I actually left the assignment satisfied that I had given it my very best effort and that was worth the whole process of doing the job. What shooting something like this does is actually hone my skills when I have to set up outdoor lighting on an assignment down the road. If you remember what coach Brown said in the earlier post you may not see the results this season but in the years to come you hard work will pay off. Now if I can just get some pub for those maple trees……

About the photos: These are two of the variations I was most pleased with. On the first shot, I had one strobe to the camera left at full power and two strobes to the camera right. The strobe closest to the camera was toned down a bit to 1/2 power and the strobe to camera right farther from the camera was on full power and aimed more toward the background. On the shot with the red bench, the foreground light was toned down to about 1/8th power while the two strobes illuminating the bushes were both on full power.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my, especially about the crepe myrtles versus the maple trees, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.