A Little News

This will be the easiest reader profile yet since Jonathan and I work together at The Decatur Daily. Jonathan is a graduate of the University of Kentucky where he was mentored by legendary photojournalist Dave LaBelle. You guys bear with me while I take just a minute to brag on my friend. You will seldom meet a man with more energy than Jonathan. He always has a scheme running, and I mean that in the best way. He is always cooking up a photo project or working on some improvement to our photo site on The Decatur Daily’s web site which you can check out here.

Jonathan pushes me every day to get better and everyone needs a colleague like that. He also teaches me, especially about the internet stuff and he turned me on to SoundSlides. In fact, our online photo presence has been heavily shaped by Jonathan’s influence in terms of both the content and look that is on the site. Best of all, JP helps me bug our boss to buy us Canon. A man after my own heart! That is a plate full for a guy just a couple of years out of college.

I think that one of Jonathan’s greatest strengths, especially for one so new to the game, is his lighting skill. Usually lighting is one of the last things to develop so it is remarkable that his skills are as well advanced as they are. The photo of the fireworks is a good example of what I am talking about. If you have ever shot fireworks and mixed flash with it you will know exactly what I am talking about. The burst of fireworks all vary in intensity which makes a flash ratio nearly impossible to establish because each burst is different. Jonathan pulls it off nicely using an off camera strobe fired with a pocket wizard.

I chose the second photo because it shows another side of JP’s skill, this time in a spot news situation. This photo was actually shot the same morning as the devastating tornado I wrote about in some earlier posts. After shooting this fire which destroyed a historic home in Limestone County, Jonathan went to Pryor Field and hopped into an airplane and shot aerials of the storm damage. The thing I love about this photo is that it gets everything in the photo. You see the fire department’s ladder truck working, the burned out home and the ladies hugging. It pulls together the physical drama with the human drama and makes a really nice moment.

This is just an opinion, but it is one based out of a couple of years working with Jonathan, you should keep your eye on him. He has the perfect mix of skill, ambition, compassion and affability that makes a successful photojournalist. I hope he stays at The Decatur Daily for a long time but I would not be surprised to see him moving up in the photojournalism world rapidly, especially if some paper from his Old Kentucky Home comes calling!

For more of Jonathan’s work, check out his Flickr Photostream and his Sportsshooter member page. You can also visit Jonathan’s web site and blog and you will see first hand what I mean. Enjoy!

Photos copyright Jonathan Palmer, The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer (although they did hire Jonathan!)

For the reader profile this week I have come back across the pond and across the country to Corey Ralston who works in Selma and Kingsburg in California. Corey also happens to be the top contributor to the A Little News flickr pool. Corey comes from Olan Mills where he was a portrait photographer and, in his words, lucked into the job working for the newspapers. He is the only shooter for both papers which can be both a curse and an opportunity. I think Corey is seeing it as an opportunity.

The photos with this post are from a horrible accident on the interstate which was caused by
extremely foggy conditions. What follows is Corey’s description of the accident.

The wreck that I shot was caused due to extreme fog conditions on Highway 99. We have a horrible foggy season and accidents due to fog are nothing new. On this particular day there were over 10 vehicles invovled in this accident. My news office was about 5 miles from where the accident occured, my editor told me to rush out to one of the accident scenes. The fog was so horrible that I was unable to see any of the accident sites from the overpass, so I took an educated guess and parked on the side of the freeway and said a prayer and ran across the lanes and found the scene where this woman and two other passengers were pinned in a car. I was the first journalist on the scene for a good 45 minutes. Soon after two other newspapers showed up and every broadcast news station in the area. The woman was stuck in the car for over an hour and a half. There was limited space to stand without feeling like I was getting in the way. The fire rescue teams seemed very understanding of what my job was and I for them. They even kept their cool when the other news teams showed up and we all crammed together in a little space between a wrecked big rig and car and a passenger bus with Canadians watching the horrible scene.
I try to not get caught up in the emotion of the scene. I felt awful for the womans plight, and as you can see from the look on her face she was in horrible pain. And I know she was watching me at some point take photos of her. There was never a point in time where I felt excited about a shot. I just wanted her to be rescued safely from the accident and wanted to be there to capture it.

Corey faced the very tough ethical situation of whether to shoot or not to shoot and then, after deciding to shoot, he had to decide what to shoot. You can see by the horror on the woman’s face that she is scared and hurt. The photo conveys the message more than just bent and twisted metal can but photos such as these come at an emotional price for both the victim and the photographer. If the photo is published, you can guarantee calls to the office canceling subscriptions and protesting the judgment of the paper and the photographer. People will call you names and some may threaten you. It can be a very difficult place to be in.

Here is what you face when doing these kinds of jobs. First, is the photo necessary to tell the story? Second, if the photo is necessary, how can I tell the story without unduly infringing on the victim who is already hurt? In other words, is my taking the photo and publishing it going to cause more harm than good. Every situation is different. Many times I look for a way to tell the story without causing more trauma; however, there are times and places where I will go for the highest impact image regardless of the victim. Some of these situations would be a wreck in a particularly dangerous place where wrecks happen regularly or when there was a chase or drunk driver or some other important factor. Where I shy away from shooting the victim is in the everyday accident situation because there is no compelling reason to shoot the victim. It would just look like exploitation.

Why go for victim shots in the situations I mentioned above? Why not just do a scene shot and avoid shooting the victim at all? The primary reason to shoot the victim is because showing the human aspect of the tragedy gives the photo more impact and the more impact the photo has the greater chance that someone with the ability to make changes will do so. Will a photo of a victim get the highway department to make needed changes? Will the photo cause the police to be more diligent patrolling for dui drivers? Will the publication of the photo raise public awareness of dangerous places on their highways? If by shooting a controversial picture I can hope to save one other life then it is worth doing in my opinion. There may be some heat. It may be uncomfortable. If you are in the news business you just have to be prepared to deal with those things if you ever want to produce change.

Photos copyright Corey Ralston. The opinions expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect those of either my employer or Corey Ralston’s employer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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