A Little News

To say I am a little juiced would be an understatement and it is not what you think by reading the headline.  By juiced, I mean excited, pumped up, psyched!  The only bummer on the whole thing is I can’t really show you the whole project yet.  I am working on a multi-media package on a family who bought an old log cabin and reconstructed it on their property.  It is going to be a very nice project and last night I put the cap on it.

I wanted to do a multi-light shot right at dusk with the owners in the photo to pull the whole project together and put a nice bow on it.  I had planned to use all my personal gear and all the company gear to set up several strobes to light the house and the people without it being over strobed.  In other words, I wanted it to look as natural as possible even though it would be lit to high heaven.  (Sorry about tossing yet another drinking reference into the post and I am not even a drinker!  I really must be psyched.)

Click on the image to see a larger version.

What I ended up with was a six light configuration and the only reason it was six lights instead of seven was I ran out of Pocket Wizards.  I could have really used one, or even two more strobes.  Still, I was so very happy with the outcome I will not get too critical of the final shot.  I arrived at 4:30 to begin my setup and the property owners had already lit the oil lamps hanging under the eaves of the porch and built a fire in the fire place.  I began by assembling my buddy David Higginbotham’s Octobank, which I have on semi-permanent loan, and then placed it on a Lumedyne head.  This would be the key light for the people.

I then began attaching Vivitar 285 HV strobes and Nikon SB800 strobes under the porch and in the dog trot so I would have my background lighting.  I then took another Lumedyne strobe and set it upstairs so I could get some light coming out the top windows.  As it turned out I would have been better served by using this strobe in one of the downstairs rooms but I didn’t realize it until it was too late.  At any rate, I used a variety of power settings on the small strobes.  The one clamped to a rafter in the dog trot was bounced off the wooden underside of the roof so I set it to 1/2 power.  The ones under the porch were set to 1/16 power.  I spaced these roughly at even intervals to cover most of the porch.

The dog trot strobe had no gel on it since it would be bounced off of wood that was roughly the color I wanted the light to be anyway.  The three strobes under the eaves of the porch all had warming gels to more closely resemble light coming from the lamps.  Here again is a small error I would fix if I could but the gels made the flash a bit more yellow than I wanted.  If I were doing it over I would go with more amber and less yellow.  Oh well, live and learn.  The Octobank was unfiltered but that did not matter because most of what it was illuminating was either wood, ground or dark green roof tin.  I also did not want too much yellow/orange lighting spilling onto the people.

So, there we have it.  I shot with my EOS 5D knowing the colors would just sing and if I needed some higher ISO numbers I could get them without grain and too much contrast buildup ruining shadow detail if I decided I needed it.  Obviously, that handsome fellow in the photo is me.  When I finished shooting, the family asked if I would like to have my photo taken and I said sure.  That is not my usual MO but in this case I thought it would make a nice photo of me.  My mom and dad still think I am handsome and want an occasional photo of me.  Go figure!  Hey, they are my parents.  When I publish the whole story in a week or two I will get back to you with the entire show and then you can see the whole deal.  I am absolutely thrilled with the way this project is turning out and I can’t wait to share it with you.

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

Christie Raney watches while Carolyn Burgess comforts Raney's mother Connie Patterson who is battling cancer. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 12/19/08

Okay class, this is what it is all about.  You will shoot literally thousands of assignments in your photojournalism career and your degree of success will depend on how many times you come back with “the moment” from that assignment.  And I am not just talking about the big football game or huge fire, I am talking about every day, every job getting the shot.  Sometimes that moment will not look all that dramatic and I have chosen photos for this post to illustrate that concept.  Most people will never even remember these pictures and certainly no one will remember them like they would a photo from a dramatic fire or big football game.

That said, the essence of the job is finding that definitive moment in your every day assignments.  This job was one of those you look at and think to yourself, “there may actually be something here!” The job was not a set up thing.  They were actually having a Christmas meal for a family that was struggling through some hard times.  The African American lady in the main photo is comforting a lady who is fighting through cancer.  The younger lady at left is her daughter and the story centers around them.  (That is why I didn’t crop the photo tighter.)  The moment is genuine and I had already just about given up on getting a genuine moment when this one happened.   The African American lady reached out to comfort the one suffering with cancer and there it was.  I don’t even want to think about how many photos like this I have missed over the years because I just wasn’t ready to shoot when it happened.

The family invited me to eat with them and I am always reluctant to eat on a photo assignment because of the possibility to miss a photo.  But this day there was no way to say no.  So I ate and ate as quickly as I could so I could be ready because I knew I didn’t have the moment yet.  This actually played into my hands, as well as my stomach, because eating with the family caused them to relax a bit and get used to me being there.  By the time I picked up the camera again no one was really paying attention to me and that is the situation you want.  I was able to shoot freely now with no one noticing my presence.

I also lit the room with a pair of Vivitar 285 HV strobes fired with Pocket Wizards.  I just wanted to mimic room light so they were both bounced off the ceiling.  I laid both strobes on a low freezer which was out of the frame and mostly behind me.  I used two strobes rather than one because that gave me more power with a quicker recycle time compared to using a single unit.  Now I am free from technical details and just focused on shooting.  This is really important because if you are fussing with equipment you are dealing with a distraction that can hurt your mental focus.  Staying mentally awake and free of distractions is a really important key to being able to nail the moment especially in these every day situations.  When the moment finally did happen I was ready for it and was able to get the shot.  Unfortunately that is not always the story.  You can see all the photos I turned in from this assignment in the gallery.

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.

Bounce flash in a very small gym with lots of white surfaces to bounce light from.

Did I fail to mention that it is basketball season again?  This is my least favorite sport to shoot and I guess I am lucky that I don’t cover too much of it any more since I am working mostly day shifts now but over the years I have covered hundreds, if not thousands, of basketball games.  It seems to be the season that never ends.  It does have its moments though and you get some of the best, funniest and even ugliest faces in photos during basketball games.  Way more than in other sports where faces are often obscured and you are very close to the action which increases your chances of good facial expression.  On top of that, if you shoot a lot of high school hoops like I have always done, you are most likely strobing the gym so you have great light on those expressions.

Well, you  have great light assuming that you can position your strobes in good locations and not end up with garish shadows crossing those great facial expressions.  So maybe now is the time for a little lighting primer.  Back in the day I used to always shoot with on camera direct flash which partially explains why I never really liked shooting high school hoops.  No amount of Photoshop can cure on camera flash in a dark gym.  It just is what it is.  Then one day my friend Corey Wilson came to work for The Decatur Daily.  He owned his own set of White Lightning strobes and he used them for every basketball game.  His stuff looked great and my stuff looked like I didn’t care.  I bummed strobes off of Corey every chance I got but that was not a good solution.  I finally convinced the boss to buy us a set of mono-lights we could use and then Corey left us to go to Green Bay and he took his lights with him.  I spent the next season and a half lugging in those AC powered mono-lights, stands and endless extension cords climbing all over the patrons trying to get everything hooked up, taped down and out of the way.

Finally one day, the light came on.  My boss bought me an SB800 to go with the SB28DX I was already carrying and just like that my shoulder began to recover from heavy mono-light syndrome.  Never heard of it?  That is an obvious deformity of the left shoulder leaving a deep indentation between the neck and shoulder joint which results from carrying that ever loving heavy bag in and out of crowded gymnasiums all winter long.  About that same time I discovered Strobist, God bless David Hobby, and my life was transformed.  Now I was going into those same gyms with about forty pounds less gear and getting essentially the same results.

I have made one more evolution in my lighting gear.  Now I am using a pair of Lumedynes I picked up used and they are wonderful.  They have more power than the SBs and are less bulky than the mono-lights.  A great compromise and they work wonderfully.  So how do you position the lights and yourself to make the most out of those small, dark high school gymnasiums.  I am so glad you asked.  Tonight, for instance, I worked in one of the two or three smallest gymnasiums in our area and it is not well lit either.  What it does have is that white padded insulation stuff all over the place in the ceiling and even on the walls above the concrete blocks.  So I could bounce my strobes into the ceiling and shoot basketball in a giant softbox.  Nice!  And it is almost compensation for shooting in a “cracker box” gymnasium.

Normally I have to use direct flash.  Most gymnasiums are a bit larger and less accommodating of bounce flash with ceilings that are either too high or simply not white.  Most high school gyms use the same basic layout.  They have bleacher seating down the sides and open ends with varying amounts of space between the baseline and the wall.  Some gymns have balconies or even tracks around the court area.  Some have full balconies running all the way around the gym and others have balconies just on the sides.  There is even one gym with balconies behind each basket, no baseline area at all and stands down both sides right up to the court.  Setting up strobes then becomes a work in gymnastics.  (Yeah, I planned that one.  Did you enjoy that little pun?)

The basic lighting scheme I use in almost every case where there are no balconies is two lights on light stands in the corners of the gym on either side of the basket I am shooting under.  I place them as high as I can get them and aim them to cross in the lane or at the top of the key.  It depends on how far back I can get the strobes.  The more distance behind the basket I can get the strobes the further up the court I aim them.  In those gyms where there is only a few feet between the basket and the back wall I cross the lights more toward the center of the lane to prevent light loss under the basket.

If there are balconies then I am very happy.  I can get my strobes much higher and I can get them out of the way of the majority of the foot traffic in the gym.  It is a constant worry that someone will trip over the light stands and knock them over or even hurt themselves.  I usually secure my light stands to something stationary with ball bungee cords or even tape.  An alternative to light stands are super clamps that allow you to physically clamp your strobe to something like a rail or a bar.  The gym usually dictates what you can do.  Nine times out of ten I have to shoot my strobes direct but every now and then I get to use bounce and it is really nice light.  Since I will never have the luxury of really setting a lighting scheme like you see in the big arenas I am not worried about darkening down my backgrounds so the bounce light is really nice.

I do not try and totally kill the ambient light in the gym.  A lot of people do and that is fine.  I like to have my ISO up around 800 and in most of our places this gives me a bit of illumination in the background to balance the lighting from the strobes.  I usually aim for an exposure of 1/250 at f2.8 ISO 800.  About 90 percent of all my high school hoops is done this way.  It is my preference and not any rule.  When I began shooting SBs in gyms this worked really well and I have continued it using my Lumedynes.  It all comes down to whatever works for you.  I just don’t like my backgrounds to be real dark because then it looks like photos are over strobed.

The photos with this post area combination of shots done with both bounce and direct flash.  Strobe positions are very similar with the difference being the size of the gyms and the ability or lack of ability to bounce.

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.

Y’all tired of football updates?  I thought I would change things up a bit and revert to my commercial photography education.  Really, I didn’t learn much of this stuff in college.  I actually learned most of it by trial and error.  You know, if you see something in a magazine story or and advertisement and you know you can’t duplicate it with your current skill set you basically have two options.  First, you could just say, “Well, that is beyond me.  I don’t have the tools or the knowledge so I am just moving on.”  OR, you could decide to learn how to do it.  That is what happened to me.  I was shooting some table top stuff for a company I worked for and my stuff wasn’t looking like the high dollar magazine shoots I saw in magazine ads.

I could have just bagged it and said I don’t have the gear.  That is the easy way out.  Instead, I really wanted my small product work to look professional.  Now, at The Decatur Daily, I have to shoot advertising as well as editorial.  That is the curse of the small newspaper world.  I could complain about it and do a crappy job or I could take pride in my work and make it the best I can regardless.  I took the latter approach.  Several years ago, our business manager decided that the jewelry ads in the newspaper were not good enough and he wanted the photo staff to do the shots.  Now you have to understand, the jewelry shots he was rejecting were done by a professional ad agency.  This did not look promising.  Did I mention that we were not given any budget to buy additional equipment or get additional training?

I began by setting up a basic table top light tent completely home made.  I used a piece of 3/4 inch mdf board for a base and then used PVC pipe to construct a frame work over that.  I then hung a white fabric over that frame and had a light tent.  Not what the big boys use, but hey, it worked.  The problem was it was fairly complicated to set up and required a lot of time.  I have migrated away from the light tent and now use a basic overhead light source, usually and umbrella quite close to the product and directly overhead.  I then use white fill cards placed around the object as necessary.

One of the most important things to remember when doing shiny objects is that they “see” whatever you show them.  You don’t want the shiny metal to reflect you, your camera, the walls, another person standing nearby or pretty much anything to distract from the piece itself.  Using white reflectors is a great way to help the jewelry “see” what you want it to.  And what you want it to see is a blank, white surface in almost every case.  I usually use a sheet of white foam that is available at the Hobby Lobby for under a dollar.  I lean my light stand against the table so that my umbrella is over the set and use the foam sheets to create the nice white surface I want the jewelry to see.  The white foam also acts like a fill card to give me a more well rounded light.  So what I get is a result that is similar to what a high dollar ad shoot would yield and I get that with a set up time of less than five minutes and a financial investment that is pennies on the dollar to what the big boys are doing.

The results are very nice and only someone with a very discerning eye will know the difference between mine and theirs.  This basic concept can be modified to a multiple light set with no trouble whatever.  You can add colored foam reflectors to add a bit of warmth to the shot and you can use black to accomplish subtractive lighting.  (That is basically taking away highlights and fill light rather than adding them.)  You will be able to go in and produce great results with nothing more than what you have in your bag right now.  It is cool, cheap and produces great results.  It just takes a little practice.  And the concept can be applied to any static set all the way up to automobiles so you can shoot anything from a diamond ring to a Ferrari using this basic concept.  Cool huh!

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.

Dr. Charles Elliott photographed with a D2Hs, 17-35mm lens and lit with a lumedyne 200ws strobe bounced in an umbrella.

We are frequently shooting portraits of people being honored for some reason or other and these are great opportunities to do what I call a dignified portrait.  This is a totally made up phrase and I just like the way it sounds.  You can see a lot of this kind of portrait work in corporate publications such as annual reports and that kind of thing.  For photojournalism I would avoid the soft look that a lot of those style portraits use because that is just not what we do; however, the lighting styles are things that can be copied and employed for these type portraits.

This lighting style is something that I actually learned while watching people work who are real portrait photographers.  By that I mean they make their living shooting portraits.  They learned a long time ago how to make a person look dignified and it has a lot to do with the lighting style employed.  If you look at a fine portrait done in the dignified style you will notice one thing for sure.  The lighting is very simple.  You don’t want to be throwing all kinds of gelled strobes around on these shoots.  I usually try and employ only one strobe and an umbrella.  You could just as easily use a soft box but they are pretty expensive relative to the umbrella so I carry and use the umbrella.  The only other light is ambient.

The ambient light can be very strong, directional light or it can be soft, almost unnoticeable light from a window.  You can even do this with no ambient and a single light.  This is a bit risky at my paper because our press does not handle dark really well so I usually don’t do the really low key style portrait because it tends to turn into an ink blot on the press.  That said, dark areas in a portrait can carry some heavy psychological weight but that is a post for another day.

The essence of this style portrait is to convey the honor of the event.  I have done several of these portraits recently and I have used a single Lumedyne in an umbrella for all of them.  The exception is when I shot a pair of brothers back lit by direct sunlight.  I shot that one direct with only a 1/2 stop diffuser in place but the lighting style worked well.  It was for a profile story and doesn’t fit this mold exactly but I am including it to illustrate the uses for a single light in this portrait style.

There was a time when I didn’t like doing portraits all that much.  I felt like that was for studio photographers to do so I basically tried to avoid them.  I thought a portrait was just something you shot with your subject on a posing stool so I was kind of turned off by the whole thing.   Then I discovered the environmental portrait.  No studio.  I like that.  As I got better with my lighting skills I found portrait photography to be quite engaging.  Then I discovered how much you can show about a person in a portrait, their character, their nature, even their interests.  Suddenly the portrait took on a new life for me.  Now I look forward to shooting portraits.  I have found that I can bring out so much about a person through the portrait.  Portraiture has become a fascinating field of photography for me as I have discovered what so many other people already knew.

No doubt, you guys will experiment with your own portraits and your own style and develop your own way of doing the dignified portrait.  Let us know when you’ve got a good one and share with class. You can see a beautiful example of this style of portrait by Jay Janner who is a photojournalist for the Austin American Statesman in Austin, TX. If you have not already discovered his excellent work through the blogroll, take a minute to check him out now.

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.

Ernestine Robinson

Ernestine Robinson is a forceful woman.  She is a woman whom I admire and enjoyed photographing.  Decatur Daily writer Deangelo McDaniel and I went to interview her on election night as Barak Obama was about to become the nation’s first black president.  Robinson marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights wars, and they were wars in Alabama, and she knows what it cost to see a black man standing before the nation as president elect.  She was one of those who helped pay that price.

I wanted to do a really dignified portrait of her and I had done some previsualization on my drive down to Moulton.  As often happens, my ideas had to be tossed out the window as soon as I got there because there was no location in her house where I could do what I had envisioned.  Situation normal.  I still had a basic lighting scheme in mind and this I was able to apply.  You have heard me say it before, have a lighting scheme or two that you are comfortable with and can fall back on.  That way you want be stumbling all over yourself when you actually go on location.

I knew I wanted to use the Octobank for a big, soft light and I knew I wanted to use a second light as a background fill or, if needed, as a secondary light on the subject.  What I wanted to avoid at all cost was a front light of any sort.  I wanted a dramatic quality to the portrait because I already knew something of her story.  What I ended up doing with my lighting scheme was not too far off what I had previsualized.  Instead of a portrait in the classic sense, I ended up doing and interview portrait which is sometimes better than a strictly posed shot and sometimes not.  I managed to squeeze in a couple of images of her looking at the camera near the end of the shoot.

The problems I faced in her home were mainly ones of spacing and background.  Her home is pretty normal, no big open areas and the collections of a lifetime around her in the form of photos, nick knacks, and quite a number of indoor plants.  I initially decided to just set up and use the window with a blind as the background.  She was already in place doing the interview there so it made sense.  I placed my main light in the kitchen doorway to the camera left and almost in a side light position.  This light was a Lumedyne strobe in the Octobank.  The background light was an SB800 on about 1/8th power aimed straight up the blind.  After a few shots I decided this simply was not working.  I was also struggling with my lens choices.  I didn’t have my full frame Canon with me and was using a Nikon D2Hs which I sometimes have trouble with because I don’t have a mid-range zoom leaving me with a feeling of never having exactly the right lens.  I tried the 17-35, a 50mm manual and the 80-200.  Nothing felt totally right.

After deciding that the background wasn’t working, I moved a little to the right and used the wall where I was getting a nice light falloff from the Octobank and now moved the SB800 behind her and off her shoulder to give a little separation.  I turned that strobe down even more to about 1/32nd power.  Now I felt a bit of a visual groove and she was animated while speaking to Deangelo.  The pictures flowed from this angle and I was able to use  the 50mm and the 80-200 effectively.  I was getting a nice rim light which worked well but decided to move the main light a bit more to the front because I was afraid of going too dark for our printing press.

Mrs. Robinson said one thing that really struck me while we were working with her.  She told Deangleo that she never dreamed there would be a day in her lifetime when she would be able to vote for a black man for president of the United States.  As I considered all she had been through to be able to vote for Barak Obama that day, I found a new appreciation for the courage it took for her and for all those who put so much on the line to just obtain the basic rights afforded to the rest of society.  I am about as conservative as it gets and Mr. Obama was not my choice but as I sat there and talked with Mrs. Robinson I decided that we would be alright as a nation especially if we can look across the table at one another and see more similarities than differences.

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.

Once in a while you will need to light two people from opposite directions and maintain similar lighting quality on both subjects.  This is a little how to that may help you when you run across this situation on one of your assignments.  Now, honestly, I created this problem for myself.  I didn’t have to shoot the photo this way.  This was, in fact, a desperate attempt to create an interesting photo from a situation that simply lacked visual zip.  Ronnie Thomas writes a weekly people featuer called Real People and I love working on these assignments with Ronnie.  We have met so many interesting people over the years and I have made more really nice pictures working on Real People assignments than on any other regular assignment I can think of.

Rosemary Hodges talks with fellow professor Tina Sloan at Athens State University. Sloan wrote a book about about her childhood growing up in Detroit, AL while Hodges spent much of her life in Detroit, MI. The two have become friends and educate one another on the finer points of life in their respective home towns. photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 10/15/08

This particular feature was on two ladies who were both from Detroit, one from Detroit, MI and one from Detroit, AL.  Just listening to the interview was excellent and very entertaining especially having a “yankee” wife myself.  So many of the crossing culture stories were familiar to me and funny too.  Anyway, the photo was just of the two ladies while they were being interviewed.  Keeping Ronnie out of these photos is always a challenge because he really gets into the interview and he ends up edging closer to the subject all the time and getting into my frame.  Like I said, we have been doing this for a long time so I can just tell him to step back without any problems.  I had shot several front and side view setups and the photo just wasn’t clicking for me.  We were on the front porch of Founders Hall on the campus of Athens State University where they are both professors and there are beautiful columns there so I really wanted to work in the columns but there was just no way to make it happen.

This is a view showing the same set up but with front lighting by a single umbrella.

Then the light came on.  You know, that cool little bulb above your head that you see in cartoons.  Hey, with 8 kids I still have an excuse man!  I was fortunate to have my EOS 5D with me which has a full frame sensor.  I snapped on a 20mm and got behind the ladies shooting out.  Only problem, I couldn’t get them both in the frame while looking through the viewfinder because I was too close to them.  I didn’t want to move them and break the mood because they had a really nice exchange going.  And I noticed my light was not going to cover both ladies especailly with one being dark skinned and the other light skinned.  I had only one of my Lumedynes and it was set up in an umbrella.  So I used my voice activiated light stand and fired a second, hand held Vivitar 285HV.  (The voice activated light stand is my reporter!  They need something to do, right?!)

I positioned by umbrella mounted strobe behind the lady on the left aimed at the lady on the right and had Ronnie take up a similar position behind the lady on the right with the strobe aimed at the lady on the left.  Still with me?  Now it was only a tweak or two to balance the lights.   I held my camera against the brick wall behind the ladies to get enough coverage and just chimped until I had my framing right.  What I ended up with is a well lit moment that actually looks pretty natural in terms of the lighting and really nice interaction between the two ladies so the photo has a nice feel to it.  I was pretty happy with the outcome and it resulted from just not settling for another photo but pushing a little here and there until I found the picture within the situation.

By the way, there usually is a picture buried somewhere in just about every assignment and digging it out is most of the challenge of any job I shoot.  It is just too easy to walk away with an average shot.  A real pro will seldom settle for just another photo.  Push, dig, elbow, furrow your brow, bang your head against a wall, whatever it takes until you get the photo.  Then you can go home at night and know you earned your money but more importantly, you will know that you got just a little bit better.

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.

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.

Halloween is just around the corner and rather than show you what I shot after the fact I thought I would let you see it ahead of time and maybe help get your juices flowing.  Shhhh! If you are a reader of the Decatur Daily you haven’t seen this in print yet so keep it quiet!  The assignment was to follow a paranormal investigation team to a spooky, old house in Lawrence County near the town of Moulton.  I had done one of these “ghost busting” expeditions before so I had a certain level of expectation regarding the equipment they would bring.  Unfortunately, this group was a bit more low tech than the one I had done before.

Amanda Kelsoe, Keith Duncan and Denise Duncan pose in front of an old house near Moulton that they are investigating for paranormal activity. photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 10/18/08 Copyright The Decatur Daily, All rights reserved.

This translated into shooting in pitch black darkness with absolutely no artificial light except for the flashlights we were carrying.  The night was clear and a bit nippy with a beautiful star lit sky.  The house was not too remarkable from the outside but I knew my best, and perhaps only chance, to get a picture of the team was to do it outside before we went in.  I had a couple of strobes with me but did not want to use them because I had a ghostly image in mind.  I carry a small, pocket LED flashlight and wanted to use it to do the light painting.  I was able to do two exposures on the team before we had to go in.

Technically speaking, the portrait was done at 30 seconds, f4 at ISO 1600.  Oh, and I didn’t have a tripod.  Figures!  Instead of the tripod, I just opened my camera bag and nestled my camera on top of some other gear.  I anticipated having very little light so I brought my EOS 5D to the shoot.  The portrait was done with the 20mm lens.  I light painted for about 15 seconds moving the light continuously.  The first frame came out a bit overexposed on the people for the effect I wanted.  On the second frame I had just begun painting with light when the owner of the house pulled up in his pickup truck bathing the scene in his headlights.  I figured the shot was blown so I asked them to just get up and walk out of the frame.  I chimped the shot and realized it had worked exactly as I wanted so I didn’t even do another frame.

Now for the really hard part.  We went inside and all gathered in a room and then everyone killed their flashlights.  Now I am really in trouble.  Even a 30 second exposure is not going to produce and image in this ink.  I am a bit mystified as to why a ghost would not manifest itself with some light on but, ehhh, what do I know.  All my ghosts are Holy ones and He works in the light!  So there I am with nothing, NOTHING I SAY, to work with but dungeon darkness.  Then there is the owners girl friend who keeps feeling something tug at her jeans and then her sweat shirt.  And our ghost busters keep talking to the darkness asking any ghostly presences to manifest themselves in some way.  My skepticism is now palpable and I still have pretty much nothing.

Desperation.  I was ready to start making ghost noises just to get someone to turn on a flashlight!  Eventually, after about an hour of waiting and working, the flashlights came on enough to make a few pictures.  Barely!  These photos have too much motion blur in them for my taste but at least it is the type assignment where motion blur actually adds something to the ghostly effect I was hoping for.  I have one photo I like a lot and another couple of images that are okay but the rest are just, oh well, why mince words, the rest are just crap.

As I look back on the whole thing I realize that I am the one at fault for not planning better.  I based my equipment selections on a past experience where the paranormal group used some fairly decent video equipment including monitors which produce light.  They also “wired” the building which meant they used light to set up.  These factors biased me to expect some things that this team did not do so I was a bit under prepared.  I would have taken multiple flashlights and just worked them in as I could if I had been thinking right.  No strobes.  No, no.  Strobes would have just flooded the scene with light and that would have been the wrong feel.  It had to have some blur but it certainly needed some more light.  I was happy to leave there with at least a couple of usable frames and that is the bottom line.  Next time, should there be a next time, I will take multiple small flashlight I can set up around the room or have people hold and turn on and off for me.  Live and learn my friends, live and learn.

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

I can’t even begin to tell you how often I am rushed while shooting an assignment either by external forces like having another assignment or by internal forces like a football coach yelling, “Are you done with that kid yet? I need him for practice.” In times like that you need to have a really dependable lighting scheme you can fall back on so you don’t have to think about technical stuff while your creative clock is running out.

Football practices are one of those times when you are just about always rushed. Coaches need their players and I need a picture. We do a feature for our preview special every year that focuses on one player per team. We try to do a nice portrait of the kid that is well lit and posed. That’s really great if you can be there after practice when there is no rush. Normally, that is not normal. Usually the jobs are set at the first of practice and you are being rushed to get the kid back to the field. That means I don’t have time to fiddle with the lights.

I have a lighting scheme that is my ‘old reliable’ that I use in all kinds of situations both hurried and relaxed. I set two lights opposing one another and place my subject in the middle. This works great for so many applications. I can usually just set my lights up, pop a quick test frame and I am ready to shoot. Set up time is under five minutes and I have the kid back to practice or the executive back to work after another couple of minutes of shooting. The only thing I have to do is vary the pose or the subject position relative to the lights and I can have two, or even three looks in just a couple of minutes.

If I have more time I can go back and vary my light positions and even my location. But, if I don’t have that luxury, I have my shot and the person can be on their way. Admittedly, this is not a fail safe method that works every time but it is reliable and I trust the set up and I can shoot it in my sleep if I have to. I shot two different football portraits you see in this post and one is far more successful than the other. Both use the same lighting technique. The difference is in the quality of the clouds in the background and the ambient light. I love using the sky as a backdrop for portraits. In this case, one sky is perfect and my strobes are able to knock it down. In the second scenario, the sky is really hazy and the ambient light is really high and it just doesn’t work as well. I still pulled an acceptable portrait and I could have done better but this is one of those where the coach was calling for his player after just a couple of minutes.

You can dramatically change the look of this lighting scheme by adding umbrellas, softboxes, snoots, grids and gels in any combination. Change the subject position relative to the lights and you can go from the straight side lighting I am using in both of these portraits to a three quarter look and even a front back set up that will give you rim lighting. Vary the power ratios on the flash and you can also affect the look of the image. In the top photo there is a one stop difference in the strobes. I believe the main light is at 1/2 power and the secondary light is at 1/4 power. Another way to change the look of the light is by varying the height of the lights. In both these portraits, the strobes are at exactly the same height. There is not an absolute as far as the way you set this up but it does give you tremendous flexibility.

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.