A Little News

Just about all your strobe work in the news world will involve mixing your light sources.  Frequently this will be some combination of strobe and daylight.  Being able to control your ambient to strobe raito is what command and control is all about.  What works at high noon will look awful inside and what works inside may be completely wrong at sunset.

You probably already know this but sometimes a bit of a reminder will trigger something and give you a really good idea so hang in there.  In a mixed strobe and ambient situation, your shutter speed controls the ambient exposure and your aperture controls your strobe exposure.  I know this is photo 101 stuff but hang on anyway.  This gets important because in a mixed light situation you will need to decide how you will blend your lights.  Will the ambient be dominant and the strobe fill or will you allow the strobe to dominate and the ambient to fill or will you just balance the two as nearly as you can.  There is no right or wrong answer just what you decide for a given shot.

When I am shooting outdoors during the hours from about 10am to around 4pm I will usually try to knock down the ambient and allow my strobes to be the dominant source because down here in Alabama there are few worse shooting situations than those hours of high sunshine.  The atmosphere is frequently hazy here in the summer, especially in the middle day hours so being able to knock down the ambient a little helps deal with the haze and saturate the sky.

Conversely, when I am shooting indoors, especially in an incandescent environment, I tend to allow the ambient to dominate and the strobe to accent or fill.  The only time I really try and overpower the indoor ambient is in a tight portrait shot or in a florescent environment.  I hate florescent and balancing with those little green filters has never worked for me.

My technique is maybe opposite what you might think of as normal and it may not be normal for you.  Like I said, there are no right or wrong answers.  You decide what to do and do it.  The key is in knowing how and that is something that took me a while to stumble onto.  Both of the portraits in this post were done using exactly the same strobe technique but with exactly opposite ambient techniques.  Both shots are done with an SB800 off camera with an 8 inch home made snoot.  (I make the snoot out of a flexible mat that I buy for about 89 cents at Hobby Lobby.  I attach velcro strips to both ends so I can roll them as tight as I want to form the snoot.)

The difference in the two photos is the portait of the quarterback was shot in the middle of the afternoon in August which is nasty hot, hazy and humid weather while the portrait of the cowgirl was done inside a barn that was very dark and also very hot.  Shooting inside barns in August in the South is just not smart unless you need a rapid weight loss plan.  The Alabama sky in August frequently turns a very lovely shade of brown due to the haze and dust in the atmosphere.  By dropping my ambient exposure just about one stop below what I metered I was able to saturate the sky and underexpose the subject.  When I added the flash I was able to make that nice light on the face while allowing everything else to fall back.

Going into the barn, I purposely dropped the shutter speed to the lowest speed I could easily hand hold.  This allowed the light coming in through the slats to become a visual element itself and it provided needed fill light.  The strobe then fills in the face creating a nice balance of light between the strobe and the ambient.  BTW, the heat and humidity in a barn filled with hay is impressive.  I sweat pretty easy anyway and I walked out of there after about five minutes absolutely soaked.

So then, you take a buck and a half, a little knowledge and a little imagination and make pictures.  I seldom get it right on the first try but I usually dial in it in just a couple of pops.  It helps when you start with an idea.  That way you are not fumbling around looking like you don’t know what you are doing even if you really don’t know what you are doing.

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.

We talked all about being ethical with light in the documentary situation and that is all serious and necessary.  Now it is time to have a little fun and let the light do the talking.  For a long time I didn’t really pay all that much attention to lighting.  I was an available light guy unless there was just no other way to do it.  When I had to add strobe I just popped one in the hot shoe and used it in bounce mode.  That was about all there was to it.  If I wanted to get really fancy, I used an off camera shoe cord.

The problem is that photojournalism has grown more complex over the years.  A typical newspaper photojournalist now shoots food, fashion, portraits, sports portraits, environmental portraits and illustrations of all sorts.  Some of us even have to shoot advertising jobs.  Lighting skills are a must.  Why, you ask?  I am sooo glad you asked.  Have you picked up any magazine lately?  Our readers do all the time.  What are they seeing?  I am sooo glad you asked.  They are seeing highly stylized food photography, well lit portraits of the famous and infamous, action portraits of sports figures and well lit architectural work.  Why does that matter, you say?  I am sooo glad you asked.  It matters to the daily newspaper guy because our readership is dwindling, our readers have limited budgets of both time and money, the internet and TV show them thousands of top quality images a day and we have to compete in that environment.

Now you can see how important developing good lighting skills is.  The great news is that you can do this with a couple of battery powered strobes and Pocket Wizards or some of other form of wireless remote.  Once again, allow me to recommend Strobist where you can get one of the best primers available and all for free.  What I want to do is just point you in the right direction, not reinvent the wheel, or the strobe.

So, you ask, when is it right to just cut loose and blast the dark right out of a subject?  I am sooo glad you asked.  Let’s start with the portrait.  There are varieties of portraits we get called on to do all the time.  The most common is a portrait of a person who is a newsmaker for one reason or another.  We mostly end up shooting portraits of these folks when the story being written is about some event that has already taken place or about and event that has not yet taken place.  You may also be doing a profile story on the person where a portrait is the best visual option.  We will call this the news portrait.  My personal approach to this is to use fairly straightforward lighting.  By this I mean that I avoid using color gels and funky light setups.  I try to highlight the person, not my lighting skills.  I want the light to talk and help tell the story and not become the story.  This is the first step beyond the documentary lighting already talked about.  I try and keep this straightforward because it is still a news situation.

The next level of portraiture, and my favorite too, is the sports portrait.  You can really move away from anything standard and just go nuts here.  Use gels, funky angles, all kinds of light modifiers and just have some real fun.  Many times you will be shooting someone in uniform which adds a great color element.  You can add action or movement to the portrait, maybe even using a panning/blur technique here if your paper is cool with sort of technique.  You can do some really different stuff with posing here.  Many athletes, be they high school, college or pro, will work with you to make a really interesting photo because they are still young enough to be willing to take some chances in the posing and setup.  This is just a wide open field.  Go check out Spots Illustrated or ESPN Magazine and see how accomplished pros use light and posing in those shots.

The last area is what I would call a feature portrait.  We do a bunch of these for our Living section.  They are usually and environmental style portrait of someone who is having a light, feature story done on them.  This opens a whole lot of possiblilities too.  It is second to the sports portrait as far as how funky you can get.  We have done these on everyone from chefs to stay at home moms.  Again, this is a wide open area where you imagination is the limit.

Let me just close this post with a word about imagination.  When you get a job order for a subject that will work as a portrait, kick the big imagination into high gear, even if it is only while driving to the assignment.  Previsualize what might look good and see if you can work that angle when you get to the job.  The final shot will seldom look exactly like what you imagined but it will give you a good jumping off point to work.  That’s the way I worked the Blue Angels shoot.  I do this all the time and it really helps when you get to a job to have an idea in mind.  Even if you find it won’t work you can modify quickly to fit the situation.  Remember, it is easier to turn a idea that in the works than it is to start from scratch when the pressure is on.

About the photos: The top photo is actually one of the Living section portraits I did about a guy who had made a psychotic/horror movie so the lighting could be absolutely over the top.  I used two strobes.  The background light is behind the girl in the back with a red gel.  The light on the subject is a snooted strobe to camera right just lighting his face.  The second photo is about my first successful off camera strobe photo.  The man was prominent in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s and was shot with a Vivitar 283 using an off camera sync cord.  The final shot is a two light sports portrait of a football player.  I used one strobe direct and high right.  The other strobe was laying on the floor aimed straight up.  All these shots were done with a Nikon D2h or D2hs and a 17-35mm zoom except the news portrait which was shot with a Nikon F3 aand a 24mm f2.8.

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.

In the last post on adding light I was talking about using light ethically in the hard news environment. One of the things I said was when I add light while covering news I try to use the same angles as the existing light. In other words, I am trying to honestly show the readers what was there and still create an image that can be reproduced well on a printing press. Yesterday, Governor Bob Riley was in town to give a press conference on the new robotics center that will locate at Calhoun Community College just outside Decatur.

I brought in two light stands, strobes and pocket wizards. The room the press conference was in has a high ceiling, and I mean thirty plus feet high, and is painted black. The room has the odd combination of filtered daylight which is somewhat blue, incandescent spots all along the wall about fifteen feet up and some variety of sodium vapor lights in the ceiling. As you can image, this creates an interesting variety of light. This makes my decision to strobe pretty easy. Lighting angles were not a problem since light was coming from so many directions so I set one light stand at about 45 degrees to the podium left and another about twenty degrees to the podium right. Both strobes were a good fifty feet from the podium. I set the strobes on 1/4 power and my ISO on 800. The color balance worked best on Auto or on incandescent.

In a press conference you don’t usually have to worry too much about being unethical with the light. TV people usually bring lights and the assortment of still photographers will be shooting flash too. In the conference yesterday there were at least five still photographers and all of them were using on camera strobes except me. Most of them were using some form of bounce. The TV guys just used room light. The reason I am talking about ethical use of strobes in the news environment is because it is really easy to get to fancy with lights. Since I found STROBIST I could easily be tempted to do something “extra” with the lights.

In many situations you simply have to add light. It is unavoidable. An on camera strobe is not more ethical than an off camera one. The main thing you are looking for is to document honestly what you are shooting. That means using light and all your other photographic tools ethically.

For instance, if I added a background light or put a gel on a strobe to do something other than color balance I have effectively changed what I am photographing. Then I am going to be presenting a picture that I created rather than a picture that I recorded. That’s okay in some environments but not in a documentary environment. Now this photo of the Governor during a campaign stop is a nice image but this lighting just didn’t exist. In all honesty, I wasn’t thinking about lighting ethics when I shot this photo. It was dusk, there was virtually no available light to work with and I hate on camera strobes. I had my son stretch an SC17 off camera shoe cord around behind some folks and aim the flash directly at the governor while I framed using several other people. Now, no one is going to jail over this photo but it is not really and accurate representation of what I saw. No reader standing beside me would have seen this light because it simply did not exist. I created it.

Like I said, it is not the end of the world but there is one thing my dad taught me a long time ago about life. He said, if you will give in to the small temptations now it will be much easier to give in to the bigger ones later on. Lesson being, if you are honest in the use of light it will be far easier to be honest in your use of your other tools such as Photoshop and we have seen quite a few people get in trouble there.

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

Smoke

Some who read this blog are working photojournalists who are trying to get better or they are established photojournalists trying to get better or they are aspiring photojournalists who are trying to get better. Perhaps you see a theme here. But not all readers are photojournalists. Some, like Will Nickelson simply love photography. Will is a local guy. Well, he is local to me. We probably don’t live more than thirty minutes apart here in North Alabama and have even been at some of the same events; although, we have never met. I had been thinking about profiling Will for some time seeing he is from my neck of the woods but it was the photo of the Blue Angels’ Hornet on the runway that tripped the switch for me so lets get to know Will.

Will says he is a nobody, a stay at home dad to a 15 month old little “monster,” (his words) who writes, does gaming reviews and loves photography. Being a dad myself, let me tell you there is no such thing as a nobody if you are a father. You instantly are the most important person in the world to at least one other human being! Now, on with the show. Will is a hobby shooter who is turning his hobby into something a little bit more. Will said he shoots just about everything but action is where his passion lies. He loves airshows, hockey (yeah, I know, North Alabama should not have hockey), and about anything else where there is movement. Will said his wife is a hockey player. Uhhhh, hello Mrs. Will. Please don’t high stick!

Will’s gear is from the “redheaded step child” collection by Pentax. Okay, I didn’t say that so if any of you folks from Pentax are out there take it up with Will but be nice cause his wife plays hockey and she knows how to use the stick. He shoots with a K10 digital body with zooms and Vivitar 285 HV strobes and the eBay wireless remotes. (If you have a question about these devices, check on Strobist and search for them. He has done extensive reviews on the product.) Will said that he is aware that the equipment is not the final arbiter of good photography and he did his homework before deciding what equipment to buy. Not ever being one to bow to the gods at Nikon or Canon, Will shot Minolta gear before the digital era; although, at 31 years old he may have been like 7 or 8 at the time. Dang youngsters! And he is gunning for my job. Double dang! Will said he would like to be a newspaper guy somewhere down the road and he would like to have his own studio. Trust me Will, go for the studio!

Back to Will’s wife, she plays on two hockey teams in Huntsville including the Huntsville Blast which is the only women’s hockey team in the area. Sorry Mrs. Will but he didn’t tell me your name. Anyway, Will shoots her games and the University of Alabama Huntsville’s games and they are quite good. UAH Chargers have a National Championship level hockey team in the NCAA Division I. How a really quality hockey program took root in Huntsville, Alabama may be one of the great mysteries of life. We grow up here in Bama playing ball, wearing cleats or basketball sneakers. Anyway, Will has taken his love for the game and turned it into photo opportunities and, in some cases, money making opportunities.

For a guy who is not a photojournalist, Will is pretty well grounded in ethics. Let me give you a quote from his email to me: “As great as the instant gratification of digital is, especially compared to the nail biting agony of waiting on a roll to be developed only to discover that you didn’t get the shot, I often feel that many use the ease of digital as a crutch. It is far too easy to correct everything in post and not worry about the fundamentals in this digital age. Composition, correct exposure, color balance, and so many of the other things that you had to really give thought to on film are so easily manipulated that few give credence to actually knowing how to take a photograph. I personally try to fight against this and always strive to remind myself that it’s not a chip in a camera or a processor in a computer that makes a photo, it’s the monkey behind the viewfinder that does.” I know a few guys who should have read that before making some image adjustments that have cost them their jobs and reputations.

Please check out Will’s Flickr Photostream . You can also go to his blog Gaming With Baby , especially if you are into online gaming. Will does some work for heavyweights like a little company called Nintendo. Last but not least, Will is a member of the North Alabama Photographer’s Guild. Hope you have a chance to get to know him. For that matter, I hope I get a chance to get to meet him since we live in the same part of the world!

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

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.

DeltaQueen1

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.

DeltaQueen2

DeltaQueen3

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.

Some days are just cool. Today was one of those days. I had the privilege of shooting the leader of the Blue Angels, Captain Kevin Mannix, to promote an air show in Huntsville. I day dreamed a shot on the way over to Huntsville thinking that I would have to shoot a portrait because I would not have time to stay and see the Blue Angels do their practice run through before I had to leave.

In my mind’s eye I could see a low angle shot of the pilot standing in front of his plane with side lighting. The sky was full of puffy cumulus clouds and could see a nice photo taking shape. The only problem was I didn’t know if we would even be allowed to see the airplanes much less photograph the pilot with the plane. Upon arrival at the airport, I found that, indeed, we would be interviewing the pilots directly in front of their aircraft. Ronnie Thomas was the reporter doing the interview and he and I were assigned Captain Mannix, the squadron boss.

Captain Mannix is an excellent man and very enthusiastic member of America’s armed forces. He has flown many combat missions the Middle East and hopes to return to carrier aviation when his tour is over with the Blue Angels. As he and Ronnie talked, I set up and tested my lights. I set two light stands about 10 feet apart with an SB28DX on one stand and an SB800 on the other with Pocket Wizards to fire them. I banged off a couple of frames to check exposure while Ronnie continued to talk with Captain Mannix. Realizing that I would need to light a full length portrait of the Captain, I decided to add a Vivitar 285HV with Pocket Wizard at the base of each light stand to illuminate the lower half of the man. These strobes I just laid in the cradle formed by the leg supports on the light stands.

I was just standing there listening to the interview when the Lieutenant managing the media tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Time’s up.” Now I just about freaked out because I had not yet taken one for real photo. I begged for just a minute and that was about all I had to shoot. Fortunately, I had my lights already set and tested. I literally shot five frames before I had to move. I had hoped to go through about three different set ups. Now I was stuck with just five frames! Had I not set up and tested while the interview was going on, I would have had nothing, literally.

Follow the Boy Scout motto and always be prepared. You just don’t know when that tap on the shoulder will come and you have to leave. In my few, brief seconds, I adjusted the Captain, set my camera on the tarmac and tilted it up with a 14mm lens and squeezed off three frames. I managed to stand up and get close with the 17-35 for the final two images and then I had to move so a TV guy could do an interview. I wasn’t happy but there was nothing left to do. If I could have a do over, I would certainly vary the pose and my angle of view. As it turned out, I was pleased with what I left with, especially considering the circumstances.

Then, to my absolute delight, the Air Force A-10 Warthawg began its practice session. The A-10 is my favorite military aircraft. It has no glamor but it is a beast with wings. The A-10 is designed for close air support and sports a variety of devastating ground attack weapons including the incredible 30mm cannon in its nose. The aircraft was designed to even the odds on the European battlefield where the Soviet Army would have had a vastly superior armored force to allied troops. The A-10 was to be the great equalizer. Thank God that it did not have to perform that role but it has proved entirely effective on Middle Eastern battlefields and in other deployments in the Balkans.

To cap off the time I had at the event, A P51 Mustang of World War II fame flew in formation with the A-10 and I was able to shoot two of my favorite planes flying side by side. What an excellent day!

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

There is something about the human brain that likes shapes. A crafty photographer will use all kinds of shapes to help grab a reader’s attention. If you have ever studied composition, you know that triangles are your friend. The triangle does not have to be literal of course but the elements in the photo that form a triangle tend to hold the eye. Well, we are not going to talk about triangles. That was just free with admission.

We are going to deal with using some naturally occurring shapes to help you make some pictures. Shapes can come in geometric forms, amorphic forms and even alphabet or numeral shapes. Any or all are just fine. The point is that shapes help keep the reader where you want him and that is staring all google eyed at your photos. (Apologies to the now famous search engine!)

You can define shapes within the frame using any lens in your bag. The real key is in seeing the shapes yourself. Many times when I am searching for a feature photo I will look for shapes to help carry an image. When I find a cool shape, I will just hang out until I have a photo or come back repeatedly, even for weeks or even months, until I get a situation that yields a nice photo. Perhaps now would be a good time to review the post on developing photographic patience. Anyway, why waste a good spot when nothing is going on. Other times I just blunder into a good shape and, BANG!, the photo practically slaps me in the face.

Sometimes you can spot a good shape and bring a subject back later for an interesting portrait. Keep a file, either mental or written down somewhere, of locations where you can check up on when you need a good portrait location or a good feature photo. These can be lifesavers when you have to have a shot really fast. Let’s talk about the photos now.

The first image is one that really appeals to me. There is something in my brain that just really digs the inverted horseshoe shape made by the ceiling which frames this stairwell on the Delta Queen Riverboat which used to dock in Decatur. The boat is now either in its final year of service or has been retired due to a government regulation barring wooden hull boats from carrying over a certain number of passengers. The Delta Queen is a truly historic boat and I have personal fond memories of seeing in lock through Wheeler Dam as a child. My grandfather was lock master at Wheeler for many years and we would go down and see him and see the riverboat going through. It is one of those warm, fuzzy childhood memories that have stayed with me over the years.

Anyway, I used a Nikon D2Hs with a 17-35 zoom with the camera placed on the floor. The only thing I could wish for would be a little less exterior light shining in the bottom of the frame and for a lady in an old fashioned southern ball dress to be on the stairwell instead of a guy in shorts and flip flops. Oh well! The low angle and the wide angle provide a nice combination that emphasizes the curvature of the lines and, like I said, causes the photo to really appeal to me. It is one of my favorites. Architecture is a great source of shapes and every place has architecture so keep your eyes open and your idea file handy.

Next we have a photo on the opposite end of the visual spectrum. This one was shot with a D2H and a 400 f2.8 S lens. I don’t remember for certain but I may have used the 1.4 teleconverter with this image. I was out near Pryor Field, a small airport in southern Limestone County and they had relocated the road to create a longer runway. The new road formed this nice, lazy “S” from a certain point of view and the telephoto compression really helps the image. All I had to do was wait for a vehicle to come along to give some perspective and I had another arresting image. It is just really cool to see these things. You can go back there now and not see this image at all because the grass along the sides of the road obscures the edges enough to make this shot impossible. Right time, right place, right lens.

The last image was made with a 17-35 on a D2Hs in Point Mallard Park’s Aquatic Center. We do a bunch of photos in the Aquatic Park so it is always a challenge to come back with something a little different. I walked up to one of the water slides just trying to see differently and suddenly I noticed this big number “6″ formed by the slide. I wish I could have been a little more elevated but there was no way to do that but the shape is still visible. Really, life is full of shapes when we take a step back from the daily routine to recognize them.

The best way to do some compositions using shapes is to go out looking for them. You drive around your city every day and never really see it. I remember reading a Sherlock Holmes story once when Holmes asked Watson if he knew how many steps led up to their flat. Of course, Watson didn’t know. He had never paid attention but Holmes knew exactly because he did pay attention. Shapes are everywhere. So, are you Holmes or are you Watson?

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

I don’t know how fashionable it was to be emotional before Tiger came along with his famous fist pumps and yells, but it has certainly become more of an emo sport since he came along. I think Tiger shattered a whole lot of long standing golf idols while still managing to respect the game and its history. For all of us who have played golf as duffers, we know all about emo golf. Our golf is usually punctuated by negative emotion since few of us hit shots like the T man. We are more likely to spice our shots with thrown clubs, words our moms would not approve of and those looks of knowing disgust.

For photographers who have never covered golf, this may come as a surprise. Golf, the buttoned down game of knickers and funky plaid pants, has emotion. Looking for emotion on the course without, of course, becoming a target for someone’s thrown club, can really spice up your photography of this grand old game. Obviously, by far the most common emotions you will see are negative emotions. The grimace after a mishit drive or the bending over backwards lean after a missed putt. Sometimes the emotion shows up while players are waiting to hit. Sometimes it comes like a storm after they hit.

Like every other aspect of photography, being in the right place at the right time with the right lens and actually looking for those moments makes it much easier to shoot. You can get emotion at any time on the course but around the green you will be able to see more emotion than anywhere else. Golfers watching the ball roll to the hole are a great place to snag an emo picture. The reaction to a good putt or a bad putt are your best chance at emotion photos. Another place you will see plenty of emotion is on and around the tee box. When golfers, especially amateurs, hit poor shots they can really put on a show. You will see them drop clubs, make faces and yell things to the ball which don’t really matter to you or to the ball but it is good theater.

One thing to keep in mind when shooting the negative emotion stuff is not to overdo it. Get your shot and move on. Don’t go nuts over it because that can really irritate the competitor and most of my tournaments are the local variety where nothing other than a little pride is on the line. Most of these guys aren’t pros and won’t ever be. If I am shooting the boys who are getting paid then I would be more inclined to press the matter but that won’t help you any with your local club tournaments. Be sensitive to the situation and shoot accordingly. Of course, no one gets worked up over you shooting positive emo. You can just lay on the shutter and bang away. It all evaporates quickly anyway.

Another thing to keep an eye on is body language. A lot of golfers can play all poker faced but they will usually give away their feelings in the body language and this can be seen from a long way off. Watch the way they are walking and you can sometimes see joy or anger and that will give you a good clue where to find the emotion. Some players are just naturally more expressive than others anyway. Find one of these players and just mine them until you have some good stuff. Many times at club tournaments you are not really too worried about the leaders, especially in the early rounds and finding emotion will give you some nice photos to work with and it will keep you away from having the always present club swing photo in the paper for three or four days. It is just double eagle territory when the leaders are the ones who are giving up the best emotion. Where are you anyway Tiger Woods? Want to come play in Decatur?

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

I’m not Emily Post but here goes a little lesson in golf etiquette. Golf is the most peculiar sport I have ever run across when it comes to dos and don’ts while shooting the game. One would think that the clicking of a camera shutter would not even register on a golfer who was intensely concentrating on his game but any little noise seems to cause problems. Since this is a fact of the game you have to be particularly conscious of not being obtrusive in either positioning or in decibel level.

I was shooting the Spirit of America golf tournament one year at the Burningtree Country Club and legendary PGA golfer Jerry Pate was there to watch his son. Of course, I had to get a picture of Jerry watching his son so I introduced myself to him and we conversed briefly. The last thing he said to was, “Just make sure you don’t shoot during his back swing.” You may have seen Tiger Woods on TV dressing down a photographer for shooting when he wasn’t supposed to. It seems that the back swing is taboo.

The best safe guard is to just shoot with long glass. Sound, especially on a windy day, doesn’t carry very, particularly if you are down wind from the golfer. The other advantage to long glass is that golfers are fairly sensitive to your proximity to them. The long glass gives you a nice buffer and keeps you “out of their face” while still allowing you to get tight shots. You are still going to get some golfer who is just camera conscious and he will give you anything from an evil eye to some verbal abuse to even calling a course marshal on you for just pointing a camera at him. Fortunately, not all golfers are Princess and the Pea sensitive.

There are really two sets of rules when covering golf. There is one set for professional and serious amateur events and another set for club and charity tournaments. When I have covered the Hooter’s Tour, they have passed out a set of media guidelines which you are asked to follow. They are specific but very much common courtesy and common sense. You are expected to behave just like the photogs covering the PGA. Hooter’s is a bit like AA baseball is the the Major Leagues. These guys are serious and are trying to make the tour. The second set of rules are much more relaxed and apply to the fun events such as best ball charity tournaments. Most of your high school and college tournaments should be treated the same as a pro event.

No matter which kind of tournament you are covering, there are some basic things you should do and not do. Obviously, don’t be disruptive, especially when a golfer is in his back swing. Once he has made contact with the ball, fire away. Remain at a respectful distance from the golfer while he makes his shot. If you are unsure, ask someone such as a course marshal or even another golfer who is not involved in making a shot. Stay out of the golfer’s line of sight unless you are really quite far away. When you are shooting from a position ahead of the golfer you can use a low shooting position or use a tree or bush to help shield you from the golfer’s view.

Be conscious of your movements and don’t move around while the golfer is making his swing. It is also important that if you are driving a cart not to drive in the immediate area of a golfer making a shot. Many times you will have a driver or an escort of some kind who is a golfer and they will be mindful of this anyway. When you are around the green, you can usually get closer to the golfer but it is important not to move around while he is putting. Movement is very distracting while a person is standing over a ball. In a big tournament, the golfer can be very tense and even more sensitive than normal. Keep in mind that the people you are photographing may be playing for money or standing or both. You don’t want to be the cause of a bad shot that could cost him money.

Finally, put your cell phone on silent or just turn it off. There is really nothing more distracting than having a cell phone ring while you are shooting pictures. Imagine how much more distracting that is to a golfer trying to make a shot. You can sum up the etiquette of shooting golf with two guidelines; keep quiet and be invisible.

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