A Little News

So, what does a photographer do on vacation? Shoot pictures, of course. Just not photojournalism. Now some of you may not consider driving 1,200 miles one way with wife and five of the eight kids anything like a vacation. I happen to enjoy my wife and kids; although, I admit that there are times when it can get a little testy when everyone is all cooped up like that. Makes one wish for a motor home except for the diesel prices. I also really enjoy driving and seeing the country. Probably I would have made a good over the road truck driver if things had turned out differently.

Any trip to New York to visit my wife’s family involves copious amounts of food. I packed on somewhere between three and five pounds and enjoyed every morsel. And this wasn’t even a big feast trip like some have been. Then, during the cold months, there is usually snow. For a boy born and raised in the South, snow is a rarity that I can savor and enjoy for a week then drive away from. It is a bit like playing with someone else’s kids. I can have a good time with them but at the end of the day they go home to momma and I just go home. Cool!

The other part of the New York visits is the chance to soak up the wonderful landscape that central New York state presents. I suppose the mountains are part of the Adirondacks and the area is absolutely beautiful. The landscape gets down in my soul like nothing in Alabama ever has. I guess I would feel differently living there but it certainly is refreshing just for a visit. I had the rare opportunity to spend some time alone in the snowy woods, just me, my camera and God. Let me tell you, two out of three ain’t bad. I think I was the bad part in the equation.

On this trip, for the first time in my life, the portion of Psalm 23 that says, “He restores my soul,” became a reality to me. Those walks in the woods either by myself or with my children were refreshing in ways that I cannot even begin to explain. But, when the last evening of vacation rolled around and I began to reflect on those quiet times, I began to realize how badly I had needed to have the batteries recharged. It made me thankful for a trip that at first glance didn’t seem like something I wanted to do.

The one thing in photography that has always appealed to me without fail is the natural world. I love to shoot nature. I love to shoot landscape both small and great and I love to shoot animals. Oops, I mean, photograph animals! I guess I keep going back to food. Kind of a one track mind, or stomach. Back to photography, my first magazine published image was many years ago in Popular Photography. I won second place in a contest for a picture I took at a natural spring along the Natchez Trace Parkway not too far from my home. Now, whenever I need a good refreshing, I get out into the woods for a good photo adventure.

This post may seem to be a bit off topic for a photojournalism blog but let me tell you, photojournalism has a way of wearing you down from the inside out. Whatever you do to get refreshed is as important to your career as any piece of equipment you will ever own. So chill out, take a hike or do whatever makes you happy and get a good soul restoration

About the photos: I found this beautiful little patch of ice along a creek bank in Russell Park in Ilion, NY. The creek ran beside a cross country ski trail which I was hiking with three of my little kids. I shot the photo with a Canon EOS 5D (love that camera!) and a 24-70mm f2.8 lens. The other photo is from a marsh that is right behind my sister in law’s home on Route 5 in Frankfort, NY. It was shot with the 5D and a 70-200 f2.8 with a 1.4x teleconverter. For more photos, check out my Flickr page by clicking the link in the right column.

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

While you are out there being ethical and compassionate and dealing with all that heavy emotional stuff, don’t forget to have some fun. We are getting paid to shoot pictures! Today I had a cool assignment to shoot a couple of professional bikers, Seth Kimbrough and Corey Martinez. Talk about a couple of great guys who do amazing things on a bike. Wow!

So I had a remote camera set up on top of one of the ramps and my mind was doing flips that my body would never tolerate. Still, I had to do something so I decided to do a ramp jump sans bike. Running a near top speed, which is not very fast these days, I scaled the ramp and leaped into space camera in one hand and remote in the other and fired a sequence of my aerobatics. I am catching some serious air here!

Corey and Seth at least got a big laugh out of it and I am pretty sure our reporter thought I had wigged out. Maybe it was hanging out with the biker crowd. Maybe the sun had baked my brain. Or maybe I just wanted to be a little crazy. Some folks say I can be a little intense every now and then. The point of this little ramble is we have a job where you can have a really great time. Next time your are out with the biker crowd, take a leap yourself. Hey, maybe you can do one of those cool reverse flips they do. If I tried that, well, there wouldn’t be any more blog posts for sure. Until next time, be cool and have a little fun.

This one is all on my own. I won’t burden The Decatur Daily with this copyright and I am pretty sure they knew I was a little crazy already.

One of the great things about photojournalism, and perhaps the greatest draw to me personally about this job, is its tremendous scope. In the very limited discussion so far in the Flickr Pool for A Little News there have been a couple people saying they don’t really have photojournalism type images. I know our rep is that “if it bleeds it leads,” but photojournalism now encompasses such a broad variety of topics it really spans life itself.

For those of you working in photojournalism, think about a month’s worth of assignments. Did you do the same thing over and over again or did you get spread all over the place. At a small newspaper like The Decatur Daily, we get spread all over the place. I could be out shooting in a chicken house (God save you from such torture) to an executive boardroom where I am setting up lights for a portrait. I could be on the sidelines of an NFL game or a little league game. I may go from a construction site where I am wading around in ankle deep mud to a church sanctuary where I have to take off the nasty shoes just to go inside.

Now think about all the pictures that come out of those assignments. Yeah there are some traffic accidents, the occasional shooting or stabbing or something like that, but there are also pictures of birds, little kids, happy people, mad people, butchers, bakers and coffee makers. Just off the top of my head, this week I have photographed a teacher and an inspirational speaker, an organist, two basketball games and a park playground renovation. And this has been a fairly light week so far. Tomorrow I am going to shoot, among other things, a house that was originally built from discarded crates that contained howitzer shells during World War II. So, don’t just limit your ideas about photojournalism to the bleeding stuff.

I shot two stories last year on tea parties! For crying out loud, photojournalism is really wide open. That is why I like my job. It is seldom the same thing twice. There is no Groundhogs Day in photojournalism. And there is no assembly line. If you start thinking like that please refer back to the posts on breaking out of a slump. This is one of the jobs that is truly whatever you make it. There really are very few jobs where the product for the industry that day is whatever the employees happen to create but that is the essence of photojournalism and aren’t we thankful that we have such a privilege.

So, what are you going to do today? What are you going to make out of your job? Back in the old days before the world turned digital, I used to tell myself, especially on the bad days, that each roll of film I shoot may produce a Pulitzer Prize. Was that unrealistic? Slightly, but you understand that we walk out every day to a world waiting to captured in a slice of time about 1/125th of a second thick. That slice of time you catch today very well may become an iconic image in your community or in your world. Don’t take that for granted. Use that thought to pump you up because you just never know. Tomorrow may be your Pulitzer. Will you be ready to capture it?

These three photos represent my day today. I went from an Martin Luther King Jr. memorial to a classroom to a city park being renovated. Three jobs, three techniques but no Pulitzer. At least not yet!

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

I love this job because of the people you meet every day. You meet good people, bad people and indifferent people but you seldom meet anyone uninteresting. Just a couple of days ago I had an assignment in neighboring Cullman County where a couple of guys have cannon aimed at one another. It is a playful thing. Andy Thomas, the guy on the left, has a Union cannon aimed at Mack Carter, the guy on the right, who returns the favor with a Confederate cannon aimed back.

In 1863 a battle raged along the Old Corn Rd. where the men live today. Union forces ranged along the hill where Andy lives. They ambushed a confederate force moving along the Old Corn Rd. where Mack Carter lives about 300 yards down from Andy. The moving battle involved about 1,600 Union troops under Colonel Abel D. Streight and somewhere between 5oo and 1,000 Confederates under General Nathan Bedford Forrest. The real reason Andy got the Union cannon though, and this is agreed on by both Mack and Andy, is that Andy married a Yankee. Such is the South!

At any rate, I learned about a battle that happened about 15 miles from my house that I didn’t even know about. I got to meet some really cool people and I walked on land where history happened. All in all, very cool.

As always, the photos are copyright The Decatur Daily and my opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

7)  Stand on your head.  It will give you a different perspective from the everyone else.

Okay, this is a metaphor.  I don’t really mean to stand on your head, at least not most of the time.  Every once in a while it might do you good.  For the first photo in this post, I did, almost, follow my own advice.  Actually, I laid down on my back and shot straight up from the ground at this brother and sister golfing duo.  As a technical note, there are two flash units used, one firing from the top and one from the bottom of the frame.  The point is, everyone can see standing up and that is the problem.  If everyone sees standing up, you have to do something different or your pictures will end up looking like everyone else’s.

The photo of the girl holding the golf ball on a tee is an example of standing on your head mentally rather than physically.  When I was a kid playing baseball, we used to chant, “He can’t hit what he can’t see” to our pitcher.  That works photographically too.  If you can’t see the photo you can’t shoot the photo.  Okay, this is still obscure.  Use your imagination.  See the photo in your mind and then make it happen.  This little exercise will make you stand on your head mentally.  In this case, I had a willing subject and a few extra minutes to experiment and the result was something a little outside the box. 

What would a stand on your head post be without a good mirror shot?  Reflections, shadows and mirrors are all excellent ways to do something that the readers don’t see every day.  All three of these assignments were ones that I had to set up when I got to the job.  Every one of us has shown up to an assignment where the reporter has done an interview and the subject asks the dreaded question, “What do you want me to do?”  Hey, you are setting up the shot anyway so why not set up something excellent rather than something expected.  Please notice here that all three of these shots are portraits and are not simulating a news situation.  Dealing with that ethical dilema is a post for another day.  Standing on your head will help you come up with something that is different, maybe even a little edgy.  Hey, they are paying us to do this job, right!

There are too many ways to make this happen.  Lenses, perspectives, lighting, but the best way by far is you putting your gray matter to work.  Stand on your head; it makes the blood rush to your brain faster!

All photos copyright The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.

6)  Be a proactive member of your newsroom. 

This doesn’t work all the time, BUT, when it works for you it will make your photojournalistic life more rewarding.  Sometimes you are just to bogged down with your assignment load to think much beyond the moment.  There are, however, many opportunities for you to be proactive in the newsroom.  The two photos in this post are the result of an idea I had for our annual football tab.  Our sports editor had the idea to do the theme “Heroes of Friday Night.”  So I proposed the idea of a portrait series styled on some excellent work I was seeing on sportsshooter.com. 

As you are out in the community, do your first job as a journalist and listen.  When someone is talking, even casually with you, they are dropping good ideas about stories all the time.  Stay attentive and take the ideas back to an editor.  Whenever I do this, I make sure they know I want to shoot the project.  The most important thing in the newsroom is communication and the thing we most complain about is poor communication between news and photo.  If you have this problem, take an active approach to the situation.  It won’t fix itself so you fix it.  Talk to reporters and editors and try to add your visual influence to assignments before they are made and it is too late.  This is an area I need to work on myself.  Sometimes, I am too laid back about this and I need to talk to the writers and editors more.  This is a quick and easy fix to some of your bad assignments and it is free.  That’s a good combination.

Photos Copyright The Decatur Daily, 2006  The views expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

5)  Every day, every assignment, push yourself to get better.

This may seem like a no brainer.  Isn’t this what we are supposed to do anyway?  They say honest confession is good for the soul but bad for the reputation, never the less, here goes an honest confession.  I fell into a rut a few years ago and I went from pushing myself to just going through the motions.  I turned in good photos but I was not getting better.  I was not pushing the envelope.  I was just going to work and getting paid.  That is a terrible way to shoot news.

How you ask, does one get himself out of a rut.  I’m glad you asked!  This post has three photos that demonstrate how to do it.  For the most part you are still going to be shooting the same jobs so you have to do something else different.  The first way is the best way.  Learn something new and start doing it until you have mastered it.  This first photo is a result of having found a blog about off camera lighting.  I had already made up my mind to get better at lighting and a friend recommended this site:  www.strobist.blogspot.com  It is the best off camera lighting site I know of.  Read it and do it. 

The next thing you can do is vary the way you approach an assignment.  This photo from a youth baseball game where I shot from behind the outfield fence.  Get you a reliable shot from your normal spot then challenge yourself to find another way to shoot.  Do this on every assignment.  Use a remote camera.  Use multiple flash.  Or just use your manual zoom (your feet).  Try anything.  Try everything.  Just do something.  Remember that a rut is just a grave with the ends knocked out.

Finally, this photo of the fire is a bit more of a challenge.  Try to find visual metaphors in your work.  This one is a bit obvious if you know your Bible.  The rainbow is a symbol of God’s promise.  This was a church fire so the rainbow forming over the firefighters represents a visual metaphor symbolizing the promise that the church will rise again.  Nice, huh!  The basic idea is to challenge yourself.  Most of the time the people you work for are not the ones who will challenge you.  If you don’t challenge yourself, you simply will stagnate and not get better, ever.  I once had a pastor who said that living things grow and growing things change so change some things and keep your career alive and well.

All photographs copyright The Decatur Daily, 2007    The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

1) Be an educator rather than a complainer.
The very best way to alienate yourself from the copy editors who lay out the pages is to continually complain about how they are doing it. Bad assignments, bad crops, bad photo edits and poor play in the paper just happen. They happen to everyone. I remember hearing a story about W. Eugene Smith’s Country Doctor photo essay in Life Magazine. A full page ad featuring aspirin was positioned opposite a photo of the fatigued doctor. Smith was so mad he quit the magazine. I for one, don’t have the option to walk out on a job. Even if I did that would be a bad choice. So, how do you handle the bad, whatever, that happened to you today.

Photo copyright The Decatur Daily, 2007

The best option, especially when you have a problem with crops, play and things related to the use of your photos is to wait until a time when no one is under deadline pressure and talk to the “offender.” Use the moment to try and explain what you were trying to do with the photo and why the way it was run changed the message or flat out ruined the image. Here is a cool tip for trying to help editors pick the dominate photo. Tell them to imagine a lead paragraph based on nothing but the photo. If they are able to write a dynamic, descriptive paragraph in their minds then there is a good chance they have their dominate art. If the mental paragraph reads something like, “Johnny got an award from the XYZ club Monday,” the they might want to rethink the choice.

Photo Copyright The Decatur Daily, 2007

The two photos in this post are good examples of photos that could get lost in the shuffle during the editing process. Both were from the Downtown Criterium where we shot hundreds of photos. Neither one of these photos ran in the printed edition but both made it in an online slide show from the race. Because these photos are not “straight” images, editors may tend to overlook them. They were two of my favorite images from the race. We as photographers understand the techniques used in both photos but our “word” colleagues may not. Someone may ask, “Why should we use this photo. It is all blurry? Or, why did you stick that bicycle tire in the picture?” Many times, especially in smaller newspapers, “word” editors will be making the visual choices. If you can win over the “word” people by speaking their language and not freaking out over their edits you may be able to open a line of communication that will help cut down on the stuff that drives you nuts. Even if you don’t win the battle this time, you have given your editors the idea that you are a reasonable, well prepared and thoughtful journalist. That opens all kinds of possibilities for the future.

The opinions expressed in this blog are mine and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Decatur Daily.

3) Whistle while you work. A good attitude means more than good photos.

For those of you who have little kids and watch videos over and over and over and over again, you will immediately recognize the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (or is it dwarves) reference. Those little guys go off to the mines every day and dig, dig, dig, dig, dig and all the while whistle. Apparently even Grouchy gets into the whistle mode and makes it through the day. Any of you ever worked with a grumpy, or grouchy, or just plain mean co-worker? Not very pleasant is it? Now you have to ask yourself, am I that grump that everyone hates to work with? If you have to say yes, then give a little whistle, and change your attitude. Refer back to the first post, hey, you are still being paid to shoot pictures!

Now for the practical stuff. Having a good attitude speaks volumes to your boss. If he sees enthusiasm in your attitude he will probably end up giving you the good stuff. If there is a choice between giving good jobs to a happy person versus a grumpy person, guess where he is leaning. Everyone gets junk they don’t like to shoot. What you do with said junk determines whether you are a whistler or a complainer. If you take that sows ear of an assignment and bring back a gem you will earn the never ending gratitude of your superiors. Then the boss will begin to think, hey, that cat can really shoot. If he can take that piece of junk and turn something out, imagine what he can do with a real assignment. There is an expression that says your attitude determines your altitude.

Good attitude translates into good pictures. I think that the photos a photographer shoots reflect something that is inside the photographer. I hope the photo of the little kid with the fish says something about me. I know for sure that I hope it says something about me. I want to believe that this kind of delight is at the core of my being, that even on my bad days there is a delighted little kid lurking somewhere inside me. I have always believed that we are expressing who we are when we shoot even more than we are recording an event.

The other thing that happens when someone has an attitude, especially a bad attitude, is that it drags down the whole department. A good attitude lifts the department and a bad one sinks it. A great deal of your future depends on your attitude today. If you have long term career goals the best way to attain them is to do today what is put in front of you and do it with excellence. No one just leaps from obscurity to the penthouse of the photography world. Even the really skilled shooters have to do things that they find distasteful. What separates those in penthouse from those in the basement is attitude so, go ahead, whistle while you work.

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

2) Dont’ Worry, Be Happy – Focus on your work, not on things that are beyond your control.

Photo Copyright The Decatur Daily, 2006

The time will certainly come when something that is completely out of your hands really torques you off. Consider yourself warned. Okay, now that you know it is coming, what are you going to do about it? Once upon a time, I got really mad at some photo editing decision and was really blowing some smoke back in the darkroom. (The darkroom is a place where we used to crawl into a chemical infused cave where it was really dark and work dark magic and make images appear mystically on paper.) Fellow photographer Scott Trigg said, “Man, you’ve got to calm down or your going to stroke out!” I heard the voice of God that day. It suddenly struck me that the world would not come to an end because a photo editing decision that I didn’t like. The public was not being deprived of a Pulitzer Prize winner. The only thing that was happening was my pride was being stepped on.

Now, I made a decision then that I have tried to do ever since; I would only worry over things that were in my control. If it was not something that I could control, or even influence, I would leave it alone. That means, for me at least, to let the editors do the job they were hired to do and I would do the job I was hired to do. I will still make suggestions, tell them my preferences and even argue my position. I will not get all twisted around the axle about it. This little bit of wisdom could have saved me some headaches if I had learned it sooner. Trust everyone to be a professional. If you find someone that is just truly terrible, don’t worry about it because people who are truly terrible at their jobs usually don’t last. When things don’t go your way just remember it is a daily newspaper. If it didn’t go your way today, chances are it will go your way tomorrow. This business is so fluid and so fast that even the very best don’t get it right day in and day out. Cut your co-workers some slack and they might just return the favor when you are the one screwing up.

Photo Copyright The Decatur Daily 2004

There is also one more thing you can do. Sherlock Holmes said something like, “the best rest is a change of work.” Go out and shoot something just for yourself. Find the thing you most like to do and then do it with no other purpose in mind than to make yourself happy. I do this with sports sometimes. This Tennessee Titans photo was shot at a time when I was really unhappy. You know, bad assignments, bad edits, bad stuff in the office. However, this self-assignment was a turning point that kind of relaunched me. I talked to some guys who shoot in Washington, D.C. and they said to chill out. The problems they face were the same problems I faced and they had to deal with Beltway traffic. Enough said and good advice.

The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Decatur Daily, or any other person, living or dead.