A Little News

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.

Once in a while I get an assignment that really allows some flexibility with light. I got a lifestyles assignment this past week that fit the bill exactly. The story is on a young man who wrote and starred in a low-budget, feature length motion picture. The movie was about a guy who was tormented by visions of a murdered girl but the problem is you never know for sure if the guy is really tormented by an apparition or if his over the top drug habit is causing his psychosis. My assignment was to get some photos while he was being interviewed; however, I saw an opportunity to make something a little different and a little more dramatic than an interview photo.

The reporter, Danielle Komis Palmer (the lovely bride of my colleague Jonathan Palmer), and I met the guy in the downtown area where they shot one of the scenes. The situation was not promising because it was an alley in the middle of the day. At night it would have been a great location. After asking a few questions we found that part of the movie was shot in his grandmother’s home a few miles away so we moved there. There was a hallway in the house that played a role the movie so we had our location. I recruited our reporter to stand in as the ghost of the girl and we have all the makings of a nightmare.

The only real technical problem now is I have a very limited number of gels in my possession. I chose red over either green, blue or yellow to use on the background light. I placed this light at the end of the hall facing the camera to provide a backlight for my ghost. You can’t have folks recognizing your reporter you know! I only used one other light and that was placed on a stand just about two feet from the subject and snooted with about an 8 inch snoot. This light was aimed to just catch his face. I tried it bare and gelled but I knew our printing press could not reproduce the gelled light so I went with an unfiltered source here. The two lights were fired with Pocket Wizards. The final touch is actually a happy accident. I did my test shot a 1/320th second instead of the camera max sync speed of 1/250th second. The faster shutter blacked out the top of the frame and I liked it enough to just leave it that way. I thought it added a brooding quality to the image.

The only trouble, if you want to call it trouble, was the guy had just gotten his hair cut. From the trailer I saw I knew he had really long hair and I could see those eyes staring out from behind strands of hair. Alas, he had gotten a hair cut just a couple of days before the shoot. After I nailed down the psychotic portrait, I shot a few normal interview type photos to round out the coverage but I didn’t think we would need them. Andrea Brunty, our Living Today editor, did a very nice job displaying the portrait with a six column photo. She extended the dark and red areas the full depth of the page and inlaid the article and additional art in that frame for a very nice package.

You can call this assignment an exercise in creative lighting. These things don’t come along too often but I love to do them whenever they do. The famous American landscape photographer Ansel Adams had a technique he called previsualization. This allowed him to see the finished print in his mind before he ever exposed the frame. When he had a good previsualization, he applied the appropriate technique to reach the final image that he saw in his mind. That is a good exercise for you to do too. Approach a situation like this one with a final image in mind and then pursue it until you either find it can’t be done or you find a better approach. See in your mind and make it happen. That is really cool. I must admit that what I first see in my mind is seldom exactly what I end up with but the process allows me to exercise maximum creativity and it forces me to think through the process from beginning to end before I ever shoot a frame. Obviously this works only when you are setting up a shot. For your normal photojournalism, you have to go with the flow a whole lot more.

Of the three photos with this post, the first one is the one we ran in the paper. I tried some Photoshop effects on the others and the last one shows the blue gel I used on the face. Bizarre effect with the PS stuff but still probably beyond the reproduction limits of the press. There you have the psychotic portrait although some may debate who was more psychotic, the photographer or the subject!

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

Last week we ran into a feature crisis. Okay, we pretty much have a feature crisis every day meaning that there are never enough stand alone photos. The search for stand alone art can be a weary one but not this day. I saw the excellent sky and clouds and knew that all I had to do was find someone I could stick in front of it and I would have a winner. The only problem was this was a pretty cold day and folks out playing around were pretty hard to find. It was already too late to use construction guys, the steady standby for all weather feature work. So I drove around for a while. Actually, I drove around for a long while just looking.

I had passed the boat harbor more than once and the light was fading and I was giving up. The I saw the guy. I was passing on the highway when I spotted him and had to go about a mile to turn around and get back and hope the whole time that I caught him before he left or the light left. Bingo, I made it back and grabbed a light stand and a strobe and hustled down to the pier where he was fishing. Turns out he fishes most every day after work and said that some years ago we had made a picture of him fishing. That didn’t bother me one bit. I had my feature.

I set up my Vivitar 285HV on a light stand about ten feet away, snapped a 20mm on my Canon EOS 5D and quickly set my ambient then adjusted my flash/ambient relationship quickly. Just as I am ready to shoot the guy snags his line on the bottom and can’t get it loose. My vision of him casting a line into the sunset sky suddenly vanishes and now what. He snaps his line trying to free it and is talking about leaving rather than setting up a new hook. Finally, at the last minute, he kind of inspects his gear and I have my photo. The whole episode last five minutes or so and the guy is happy because he gets his photo in the paper and I am happy because I beat the sunset and the odds on a cold day to get a nice stand alone.

Whew!

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

I got an assignment two days ago to shoot a town meeting about beautifying the city. Already it seems like a pretty dry assignment. It gets worse, technically speaking because they want a photo of the speaker in front of a power point show he is presenting. It will take place in a really large, historic theater in town and they will not be spotlighting the speaker meaning that I have to light him. That is no big deal but the trick is to get enough light onto the speaker so he is properly exposed, the flash can’t be close to him and there can be no spill onto the screen where the show is projected or you won’t see the image on screen.

The only thing working in my advantage is there is some distance between the speaker and the screen, say twenty feet and the screen is huge so I will have a nice image to work with if I light it properly. Anyone who has shot in a completely dark room and tried to light it in as non-disruptive a manner as possible knows what a challenge this will be. I will also need at least one shot that shows the crowd attending the show which requires an entirely separate light setup.

Here is how I tackled the problem. I set one strobe on an 11 foot stand to cross light the speaker. I put a homemade 8″ snoot on this strobe and fired it with a Pocket Wizard. I had to use cross light to make sure no light spilled onto the screen. I set this strobe a 1/8th power which is very low for the distance to the subject which was about 25 or 30 feet. This meant I would be shooting at about ISO 800 at f 2.8 to f4 with a shutter speed of not more than 1/60th but usually about 1/30th to make sure I had a good exposure on the projected image. I used the low power setting on the strobe to keep from blinding the speaker in the darkened environment and to not disrupt the proceedings any more than necessary.

To light the crowd, I took a second strobe to the balcony and set it on a light stand there. I would have preferred to use about a 6″ snoot here too but I had only one with me so I zoomed the flash to 105mm and hoped for the best. This strobe, because it had to do more work, was set to between 1/4 and 1/2 power and fired using the optical slave and a third flash on camera to fire it. The Pocket Wizard was attached via the camera’s pc connection. Normally I would have just used a second Pocket Wizard on the other strobe but I didn’t have the other Wizard on this job so I had to improvise.

Controlling light is not too difficult when you can use snoots and gobos with your strobes and you can learn all you need to know about these techniques at Strobist without me trying to reinvent the wheel for you. The final result for me was a pretty well lit photo that did not disturb the event and ended up being the lead photo on page 1 the following day. You will encounter a bunch of jobs where light control will be important so mastering this technique will serve you well in a bunch of situations. Learning how to light really separates the pros from the amateurs so spend some time on this. If you are hoping to move on in your career, lighting is one of the edges that will help you distinguish yourself from the pack so light em up.

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

I don’t know if any of you play golf so this may not makes too much sense. I don’t play much any more. I just have too much else going on but from the days when I used to play I draw this analogy. Golf can be an extremely rewarding game. You make a nice shot, drive the ball straight down the middle 300 yards or sink a long putt and it is very gratifying. Unfortunately, for a duffer like me, those were too few and far between. However, I would usually make a few really goood shots in any round of golf and that kept me coming back for more.

Photojournalism is a lot like that. We have to shoot all kinds of pictures in all kinds of light and under a wild variety of circumstances and that can make for some frustration. But, I make a shot every now and then and just go, “Ahh!” And I come back to work again and look for the next Ahh! moment. Right now, we are mired in a very involved tab section for advertising that we do every year. It takes the better part of January and February and this one will contain more than 80 profiles of different folks and the jobs they do. I shot three of these today. In two of the three jobs I came away with photos that I really like. One photo because I worked the light and one photo because I happened to be in the right place at the right time with the camera ready. I’ll take it either way. These shots help me get ready for tomorrow when I will probably have three or four more of these jobs to shoot.

Here is the rundown on the portrait. The guy is a funeral home manager so I can’t really shoot him working. Directing a funeral is a delicate business and having some guy chasing him around with a camera would just be inappropriate. Ergo, the portrait. This could be pretty pedestrian stuff. Guy standing in chapel looking at camera. The light saved the day and I came away very satisfied. I know it looks like something you might see in a brochure but that is not necessarily a bad thing in this case. He looks sharp and professional and that is what he is supposed to look like in the bereavement business. I was very happy with the result. The main light is an SB8oo fired into an umbrella at 1/8th power. The background light is an SB800 fired direct at 1/2 power and aimed right at him from the back of the chapel. I used a 17-35mm lens and a Nikon D2Hs.

The other shot was done in a restaurant in the same town an hour or so later. Same camera and lens but this one is unposed. She is really working and that makes it much easier to get spontaneity but much harder to get good light. I used an SB800 on camera in bounce mode with the little plastic diffusion dome on top. I think it was set manually to 1/8th power. I seldom use a strobe in any auto mode because I have been burned too many times. Anyway, the light is not so good but the expression and movement make the image. I came away pleased from two out of three jobs that could have really been sows ear assignments. But hey, that’s what we get paid the big bucks for, right? Turning the proverbial sows ear into a silk purse is the job about half the time.

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

From time to time someone will ask me to talk to a group about photography. My wife and I home school our children and I have done several photo workshops for home school groups. My first job was as a technical rep for a company that represented Canon gear to the Army and Air Force Exchange Service and Navy Ships Afloat Stores and I conducted several workshops for them and for our company. Everyone always wanted to know and still wants to know what kind of gear I use and what kind of gear they should buy. This question now irritates me a little bit. When I was a tech rep the question was totally normal but now the question carries the implication that a particular camera system will make the person a better photographer. I can’t tell you how many times people see my 80-200 hanging from a body and say some variation of, “Wow, that is a huge lens. I would love to have one of those. How much does it cost?”

What I would like to say to most of those folks is it wouldn’t matter if they spent ten zillion dollars because a camera, or a lens, does not a photographer make. So what is it that makes a person behind the lens a photographer if it is not equipment? I can tell you that I use a hammer once in a while but the ability to swing a hammer does not make me a carpenter any more than the ability to press a button makes a person a photographer.

I believe without any doubt that the most important ingredient to becoming a successful photographer is imagination. Ansel Adams is one of my photo heroes and his imagination was the fuel that fed the photographic flame in his heart. Adams’ imagination was funneled through an amazing grasp of technique and the images he produced through the marriage of technical excellence and imagination still stagger me. Adams would look at a scene and previsualize it combining his technical knowledge with his aesthetic ability. But how does this apply to photojournalism you may well ask? One cannot go out there previsualizing news can he? I am so glad you asked.

Of course, you can’t make stuff up in a news or breaking news situation. Imagination in this situation is a bit like Adams’ previsualization. You try and anticipate where the best photo may take place and position yourself to get the shot. This requires you to see angles in your mind and move to exploit those angles. It may require you to see light and move to take advantage of the light or it may just be thinking about what might happen and setting yourself up to get the shot that you think could happen. Whenever you do this you are taking a risk so don’t depend exclusively on it. Make sure you get a usable shot before you begin exploiting the other stuff. We are working in a daily news environment and getting the picture sometimes outweighs getting the most creative picture.

Most of our daily assignments are not breaking news and do require a bit of effort on the part of the shooter to come up with a creative idea on the fly. Lifestyles assignments, most of your subjects who have been interviewed or are being interviewed for news stories and some of our sports features all require some level of effort in placing the subject in the environment, lighting the subject and finding the best angles to shoot from. A good example is the first photo in this post. The story we were doing was about a 16 year old artist. Her work was basically complete and she was in her bedroom studio just to be interviewed. This calls for a portrait and I wanted something funky to express her artistic soul. Looking around the room, I was able to see the colors she lived in and the idea for a mixed light portrait presented itself. I borrowed a pillow case and fired my flash through it to create the magenta side and used the incandescent color balance setting on the camera which balanced the background. By adding a second, unfiltered flash, I had a secondary blue light source and had my funky portrait.

The photo of the guy with the hands is another example of using imagination on an assignment. Our reporter was there interviewing this man who was one of the first to go ashore on D-Day. He was a combat engineer and he is describing the moment when the ramp dropped. I set up the lighting for some drama and chose my angle to give accent to the character of the man. When he lowered his hands to simulate the ramp dropping, I was already in the right place with the right light. I didn’t know he would do this but I had an idea that I could use his hands to frame his face as he talked. When he did, I was there because I thought it might happen. It was just a bonus that he was describing the moment when the ramp on his landing craft dropped.

The key to creative photography is not nearly as much about the equipment in your hand as it is about the equipment between your ears. Don’t forget to exercise this most important photographic tool. You may not have a bunch of gear to use and you will always want some piece you don’t have and probably can’t afford, so make sure you use your brain because it is always with you and it is free.

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