A Little News

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.

Golf is a boring game. Golf is a quirky game. Golf is an exciting game. Golf is a frustrating game. Golf is difficult to shoot. Golf yields spectacular photos. All true and sometimes all at the same time for both golfer and photographer. I want to get back to the Positioned For Success series and do a few posts on shooting the game of golf. Since everyone reading this can pick up a camera and shoot pictures of a person swinging the club, lets look at the quirky side of the game and see how to shoot it, or at least how to make quirky pictures that are out of the ordinary golf coverage.

First of all, I have never shot anything bigger than the Spirit of America golf tournament in Decatur or a Hooters Tour Event. The Spirit tournament draws some of the best amateur golfers from around the southeast while the Hooters is a pro tour that is a couple of notches below the venerable PGA Tour. At least a few of the players in both of these tournaments will one day play on the PGA Tour and some have played and are working their way back. That said, the vast majority of our golf coverage comes from the high school and country club events and charity events that proliferate through the Spring and Summer.

This leaves us with the probability of shooting a whole bunch of golf that has no impact beyond the event itself and often it is a charity tournament that is more of a fun event than a no holds barred competition so making pictures that are not repetitive becomes a challenge. Enter the quirky element. A quirky photo can happen anywhere from the club house to the driving range to the 18th green so you have to be ready and actually be searching for something beyond the ordinary because if there were ever a sport that is very easy to be ordinary at photographing it is golf.

That is the secret. Don’t settle for anything ordinary. At least go out having the mindset that you are not going to settle for anything ordinary. You have to shoot the guys, or gals, swinging the club but look for different ways to do the shot. Can you climb a tree? Ahh, there is one I have never tried. Maybe this year. Can you do something with lights and shadows? Can you find a golfer doing something out of the ordinary like a golfer clowning around driving the cart? Who knows, some guy a little tanked up may put a golf cart in the drink. Now that would be a photo!

There are no real technical secrets to this post. You can improve your chances of getting a quirky photo by following someone around who has some personality. Look for them on the driving range or watch a few groups tee off and see who you think might yield the best chance at something a little off beat. Just a hint here, but the guy who has his Tiger face on is probably not your guy for a quirky photo. That is the guy you will just tick off by following him around. Find the guy who is all loose on the range or on the tee and hang with him for a few holes. Don’t make a nuisance out of yourself. Just hang back and watch. Golfers are a sensitive bunch when it comes to photography which will be the subject of a later post. For now, keep your eyes peeled for the offbeat and hang in there until you get something off the beaten path.

About The Photos: The top photo was shot on the driving range during a Hooter’s Tour Event. The golfer was using a portable mirror to check his swing on the range just as many people now use video cameras. It was odd, off the beaten path and made me happy. The only thing that was difficult was keeping my reflection out of the mirror and not getting hit in the head by the follow through. The second photo is from a charity tournament. These guys were sitting between the 9th and 18th greens heckling the golfers after they would putt out. Not exactly good golf etiquette but it was a heck of a lot of fun.

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.

Talk about your Cinderella story. Lubbock Christian University made an improbably run to the NAIA National Championship completing a sweep of University of Mobile yesterday in Decatur. Improbable because this is the first year that LCU has fielded a team and also, during the tournament, they fell into the loser’s bracket and had to win two games over an experienced Mobile team. Congratulations to LCU.

Shooting this championship, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is one of my favorite things and one of the things that makes working here nice. I love championships of any kind in any sport but the competition is so good with athletes at this level that it makes the experience even more enjoyable. Technically, there is not much to talk about. The only problem was the sun provided a high backlight on an absolutely clear day causing some harsh contrast but there was pretty much nothing I could do about it. I shot about three quarters of the time with a D2Hs using the 400mm f3.5 manual focus lens and the rest of the time using the D2H and an 80-200mm f2.8 lens. The exposure was around 1/3200 at f3.5, ISO 200. No problem with motion blur anyway.

I shot part of the games from a scissor lift that really got you up in the air. I don’t like to sway around all that much, especially while looking through a long lens. It causes motion sickness for me. It is a little like being out on the ocean bobbing up and down while looking through a lens. Most of the time I spent a little closer to the ground just getting high enough to shoot over the fence. Add the straw hat and a nice cold drink and all is right in the world!

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

For those of you who know your movies really well you will recognize that my title is actually the title to a song in the Sound of Music. Maria sings to comfort the children and she sings about her favorite things. Rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens… you get the idea. Anyway, The Sound of Music is one of my favorite movies so naturally, it ties in to photojournalism. There are a few things every year that simply make me smile.

When we are dragging through January and February, my two least favorite newspaper months, I can always smile when I think of late May when the NAIA National Championship Softball Tournament is played in Decatur. The city has hosted the tournament for about ten years now and it is my favorite athletic event of the entire year. Don’t tell the boss, but I would even choose this tournament over the vast majority of the College football schedule. Really, don’t tell the boss. I do love shooting college football.

This tournament embodies to me much of the reason that I love photojournalism, emotion, action, sports and the human drama of victory and defeat played out on a scale that is at once grand and unpretentious. It is the national championship in the sport but it retains the flavor of pure competition. None of these young ladies is going on to play professionally. They are playing with all the passion and pride and little of the pretense. There is the pure thrill of victory and the pure agony of defeat. Still, it is played in a city of just over 50,000 with nary a TV camera in the house and precious few still photographers. It is a game. Better, it is still a game and has not been corrupted by TV money and dictates. Thank God!

Then there are the young people who play. They are really student athletes. Like I said, they won’t be going pro in sports. They will be professionals in life and they all know it. That makes them real and accessable. They are competitive but it tends to make them more human. I was in Wal-Mart picking up a gift for my wife’s birthday a couple of days ago and ran into three players who were in picking up some food. I asked them how things were going and they had not done well that day. The competitive fire was there but it soon faded into good natured laughter as we talked. Real people. Nice.

Photographically, the event carries the potential for great pictures almost any time. The action is top notch and there is usually some good reaction. My only complaint is the park where the games are played does not present good backgrounds. Store fronts and traffic are the backdrop if you shoot from ground level. There are scaffold towers that get you about fifteen feet up in the air but I can never get comfortable on them plus I can’t move around. It does clean up the background though. Then there is the normally nice weather in late May. It is the last, fleeting moments of spring time weather before the long march of hot, hot summer kicks in. Love it. You should come sometime. And don’t forget to bring a camera. I will be the guy with the straw hat and the beat up old 400mm.

About the photos: The top photo was shot with a D2H and an 80-200mm f2.8 through the fence behind home plate. You have to get real close to the fence and usually it is more reliable to prefocus than to autofocus because the fence can interrupt the AF. The lower photo was shot with a D2Hs and the old reliable 400 f3.5. The player lost the ball while looking directly into the sun. It was a foul ball but would have been an easy out under normal conditions.

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 it shows how young some of you guys are or how old I am, but someone left a request for a manual focus primer in the comments to an earlier post. It really hasn’t been all that long ago that there was no such thing as autofocus. Or has it? Maybe I really am that old! I know that some of my beloved children think I am older than Noah and a whole lot more conservative. But they are teenagers.

Back to manual focus. I sometimes think that the actual craft of sports photojournalism has been changed/diluted/ruined by the advent of autofocus. There was a time when a person who shot sports was truly gifted, especially with the fine art of focusing. I have been on the sidelines at big football games and shot near a Sports Illustrated shooter and wondered how the heck he was able to focus when he was blazing through a roll of film on every play. Now the AF handles all that pretty close to flawlessly. That means almost anyone can shoot sports action now, at least in theory. There are still truly gifted sports shooters and the truth is that AF does not make a great sports action photographer. Like any other feature on your camera, AF is just a tool. A skilled shooter takes a good tool and makes great photographs. An average shooter takes the same tool and makes average photographs. So, AF opened the door to more and more people being able to shoot sports but the truth is that AF didn’t really transform everyone into a sports shooting guru.

Rant over. Now back to our regularly scheduled post. Manual focus actually has some advantages over AF. The prime advantage to manual focusing a sports event is that manual focusing causes you to concentrate. The biggest difference I notice, aside from the number of sharp frames, is the difference in my concentration levels. When I manual focus an event I tend to be much more sharply focused on what is actually going on in my viewfinder. AF allows me to relax a little and that is not always a good thing. I do better work when I am sweating a little.

Another advantage manual has is it frees you from that center spot AF mark in your viewfinder allowing you the freedom to actually frame an image rather than being dependent on your subject staying in the designated focusing area. Yes, I know, there are several AF settings that purport to actually track a subject as it moves out of the center AF sensor but I have never learned to trust them when a real picture is on the line. I notice that my photos are framed better when I shoot manual. I can see equally well in the edges of the frame as I can the center so I don’t have to worry about the AF spot.

Obviously, AF has its own set of advantages which I don’t really need to go into since we all know and love them already. Suffice it to say, both Nikon and Canon cameras AF better than I can focus manually. It is no contest especially at night. I do okay in daylight events but night events are much tougher and always have been.

The question remains, how do you develop your manual focus skills? Tip number one: don’t try. The harder you try to manual focus a sporting event the worse you will do. If you need to practice, go out to a street and shoot sequences of traffic moving toward you. (Don’t stand in the street to do this or someone will be taking your photo as you are loaded into an ambulance!) A street where the traffic is moving a 35-40 mph is about right. Slower might even be better. Basically you want to disengage your brain and just react to what you are seeing in the viewfinder. It is a bit like a major league hitter who is trying to hit versus a major league hitter who just steps to the plate, sees the ball and smacks it. The more you think about it the worse you will do. In other words, “trust the force Luke.”

Tip number two: Make sure all your lenses focus in the same direction. I once carried a Tamron 180 that focused the reverse of the rest of my Nikon lenses. Drove me nuts! Sounds dumb but make sure they all work the same. It will save you mega grief.

Tip number three: Have a plan. If you think a play may be made in a particular area, prefocus in that area and then just tweak the focus as the players move there. I love to do this in baseball because the action can be somewhat predictable especially if you understand the game. This is also known as zone focusing. Zone focusing used to save my bacon shooting basketball in the days before AF.

Tip number four: Use lenses designed to be manual focused. The Nikkors of yesteryear, ie: the ones before AF, were wonderful lenses. They focus like a dream. I can’t even begin to follow focus with an AF lens in manual mode. They are simply not made to do that. I usually don’t even attempt to manual focus an AF lens. It is just no fun. If you have an older Nikon manual lens, it will work on your AF body in aperture priority and manual exposure modes. Try it.

Tip number five: You can do yourself a favor by limiting the photos you will have to shoot following focus on players moving directly at you. You can improve your odds by making the plane of focus more shallow by shooting at angles where the action moves parallel to your position as opposed to perpendicular to it. It is much easier to shoot a player moving across your field of view than it is to shoot a player moving straight at you.

Beyond those tips, you just have to practice and be persistent. Most of my best sports images have come from that beat up old 400mm f3.5 manual focus lens. I use it all the time and that is the key. I don’t have to think about it. I just pop it on and go.

About the photos: The top photo is from a Hartselle High school baseball game. The ball was hit to the right fielder and was fading away from him. He is diving to make the play on the ball. I shot with a Nikon D2Hs and the 400mm f3.5 manual lens wide open. The photo is just a tad soft and requires a bit of sharpening in Photoshop to make it workable. The second photo is from a tennis match and the focusing here is mostly incremental rather than a large differential so it is relatively easy to focus. This is also a D2Hs and a 400mm f3.5.\

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.

I am back from vacation in the snowy north and fully recharged. I am going to begin a new feature on the blog by doing a critique on a photo from the A Little News Pool and Richard Hamm is my first victim. Richard is a college student, prime target audience for this blog and I asked him if he minded being first. He graciously agreed so here we go. By the way, the rest of you may not be so lucky. I may just nab your photo and slice it up without telling you! HA!

Actually, there is very little slicing to do on this photo. Richard is the photo editor for The Red and Black, the student produced newspaper at the University of Georgia. There are a few things I want to highlight in this photo because they showcase excellent visual thinking. The first thing that Richard did that is excellent, especially in one so young!!, is he previsualized the shot. To do a photo like this you have to see it in your head, or at least see it somewhere else and apply the technique to your own work. You will notice the excellent use of the track’s lighting to add depth to the image. This is another aspect of seeing. The track’s lighting provides a sense of the scale of the track that would be missing if the back corner were dark. Richard saw this and took advantage of it.

Another of the very nice touch is the serpentine nature of the race course which gives us the nice little wiggle in the trailing lights. Finally, and this can’t be overstated, Richard used the right lens for the job. The photo has enough compression to hold together evidencing the use of at least a short telephoto, in this case a 70 mm. A wide shot of this would fall apart and the light trail would diminish too much to be of any visual use. The longer lens slightly compresses the foreground/background relationship and holds the image together. All in all, a very nice job of photojournalism. You can see more of Richard’s work plus his portfolio at www.rahphoto.wordpress.com

Photo copyright Richard Hamm. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer or of Richard Hamm.

Dedicated readers of this blog will recognize Corey Wilson right away. Corey did a post for us about shooting in the deep freeze at Lambeau Field for the NFC Championship game between Green Bay and New York. Corey is a graduate of Eastern Kentucky University and has been my friend for about seven or eight years now. We worked together in Decatur for two or three of those years and he has worked in Green Bay for five years. Corey is one of many photojournalists whose work inspires me. He is a wonderful shooter and a good man to top it all off. I hope you enjoy his musings on covering one of the NFL’s true legends.

History. When does it become such? As soon as Father Time ticks to the next second? Months later? Years later? As far as I know photography is the only way to stop time. Every photograph represents a slice of history. Is it your child’s first steps? A birthday? A war? A sports feat?

Most photojournalists like myself are in this business because we can’t get enough of capturing time…in fleeting moments. I’ve been fortunate enough to cover the NFL, namely the Green Bay Packers, for the last five years. This has always been a dream of mine and it’s one I’m proud I’ve accomplished. Unless you’ve been living in Northeastern Siberia for the past two or three weeks you know one thing. Brett’s done. Brett Favre that is. He donned the uniform like no other quarterback has from 1991-2007. He NEVER missed a start during his entire Packers playing career! (That’s 253 for those of you who are counting). He’s a legend and everyone has heard of his magic feats on the field.

I did a lot of reflecting as I pulled file photographs for special sections, books and audio slideshow productions that my paper, the Green Bay Press-Gazette, would be publishing in the days after his retirement on March 4, 2008. Covering Brett Favre has been a once in a lifetime opportunity. You could go an entire career as a photojournalist and not photograph a legend like that. It’s an opportunity I’m extremely thankful for. Thumbing through all these hundreds of images over the past couple of weeks made me sentimental. Do we realize that we are literally photographing history at the time we’re actually shooting it? Or does that come much later? Does it ever come at all?

Have you ever been on an assignment when you suddenly realize that what you’re doing, in that very instant, is going to be documented as history for years to come? Does it take a monumental event to seem important? A career like Brett Favre? Or do other events like murder trials feel like live-history? I fall victim to feeling like lesser-scale events like plays, church services, portraits or city council meetings matter less. Aren’t they just as important? You bet they are.

I guess all the reflecting did one thing for me. It served as a wake-up call. It hit me that our smaller communities are not made up of Brett Favre grandeur. As photojournalists we have a tremendous responsibility to document everything around us as if it were just as famous. Don’t we? How do we not?

With that said I’ll never forget the moments I had covering Brett Favre. I’ll have the newspaper covers to remember it. I’ll forever have my spot in the new Sports Illustrated Commemorative Edition of Brett Favre. I’ll have the black & white picture I shot with my Holga 120 plastic film camera (retail $20) as he ran onto Lambeau Field for a game in 2005.

***If you would like a glimpse of my 2007 reflections of Brett Favre please copy and paste the following link to a first-person audio slideshow:

http://www.packersnews.com/includes/newspaper/assets/soundslides/2008/030408remembering4/

Be aware that everything you shoot as a photojournalist is important. In 10, 20 or 30 years, when memories begin to fade, it will be YOUR photographs that remind people of days-gone-by.

Photos copyright Corey Wilson. The opinions expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect those of the writer’s employer.

It’s a whole new ball game out there. Not just on the playing field, but in photojournalism. In 1986, when I started my first paying job in this profession, I was one happy guy if I could turn in three good black and white prints from a 7:30p.m. basketball game and still make my 9:45p.m. deadline.

Today, that mentality has changed. Today it’s not about quality, it’s about quantity. It’s common place for a photographer to turn in 20 photos from a basketball game, and still meet that 9:45p.m deadline. We have to “feed the online beast” is the new battle cry in a world where newspapers and wire services, mine included, are struggling to find a way to deliver their product and still make a profit.

Yes, we no longer have to drive like mad back to the office to soup film and make prints, those days are gone. Now we sit at press row filing like our pencil colleagues in comfort, pulling out the reading glasses to view the small type of the flip cards as we write our captions.

But, is more better? Does the reader/viewer really want more? Do they want to see your 20 so/so images from the basketball game or do they want to see your best work? Do they really want to see a slide show with pointless audio from the last night’s game? I can’t answer any of those questions. Perhaps a well paid survey company can, but I can’t.

But I can tell you what I think.

I think we need to get back to basics. Yes, photo galleries are great, but make them tell a story. Don’t put four different versions of the same photo in your slide show just to flush it out. Put in the best one, edit your stuff. I would much rather look at 10 really good photos that tell the story of the game, then twenty photos that are all over the map. It’s about quality.

As a former picture editor and Director of Photography at several newspapers, I can remember vividly some of the heated discussions we would have in news meetings over the lead photo for the next days’ front page. No matter the opinion on the photo, in the end, it was always about the content. Was it a good enough photo to warrant carrying the front page of the paper for the next day? That thought process doesn’t seem to carry over to the online world where more is better.

We need to get back to basics of good photojournalism and having that page one mentality. While it’s not 1986 anymore, we need to still think like we did then and put our best work out there.

Photo copyright Rob Carr, The Associated Press. The opinions expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect those of the Associated Press or of my employer, The Decatur Daily.  The basketball photo is one of a sequence of five frames which Rob edited down to the best frame presenting the essence of his theme; one well edited frame is better than several pictures that are just not the right moment.