A Little News

The members of Flower Hill Primitive Baptist Church honored Oquilla Clay with a 100th birthday celebration Sunday, December 28 at the church in Hillsboro. Family members from all across the country along with many former pastors of the church returned to honor the Hillsboro resident. Clay sits and prays during the service Sunday. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 12/28/08

I plan to do one of these posts from time to time and it is especially for you who are in journalism or for those hoping to get into journalism.  Not that it won’t help the rest of your guys, it is just that our business is in a bit of a tight spot right now and becoming more valuable to your company is a good way to remain employed.  There are many ways to do this and today’s post is only one of those many ways.

I was given an assignment on a recent Sunday afternoon to shoot a birthday portrait of a lady turning 100.  Our newspaper publishes the photo of anyone under five or over ninety on their birthday and we shoot many of these.  Obviously, there are a bunch more five and unders than there are in the over ninety crowd.  These assignments are traditionally a thumb nail size photo with a bio for the babies and a bit larger one column by three inch photo with bio for the elders.  My job order said the church where this lady attended was having a special celebration honoring her so they might run a little bit larger photo if the situation merited it.

Knowing I was going to an all African American church, I wasn’t too worried about being exactly on time.  I have been in several serivces in black churches and the clock tends to be irrelevant.  I arrived just about 2:15 with an assigned time of anywhere from 2:00 to 2:3o thinking I might have to wait a few minutes to make the photo.  Upon arrival I found a church full of people and the honoree sitting in a special chair right up front.  One of the lady’s relatives escorted me down front and I realized quickly that it was going to be more than a few minutes before this service ended.  The man speaking was in the middle of a full tribute to the birthday girl and there were several others waiting to speak.

The atmosphere was relaxed so I could move about a little bit without disturbing anyone so I found a place next to the church organ and knelt down and began shooting.  As the tribute continued I realized that this needed to be way more than a birthday portrait.  The little lady in the chair had influenced several generations of family, friends and church leaders and they were singing her praises, one guy literally singing to her.  The longer I stayed the more happy I was to have the photo assignment.  Sometimes you are around great people who are famous like actors or politicians or pro athletes.  This day I realized I was around a great person whom no one knew about outside of her small community.

I shot for almost an hour before the service ended and the tributes stopped.  When I got back to the office I went immediately to the assigning editor and told them about the experience and how I felt the lady’s story needed to be told.  A week later we ran a Living centerpiece on her and it would never have happened had I only gone there and shot my portrait and left.  I was able to add value to our photo assignment and hopefully contribute to this wonderful woman’s legacy by being a little more patient than normal and by shooting a lot more than my actual assignment required.

Yeah, that is a little thing but let me tell you about little things.  Even a big building is made up of little pieces and each piece contributes to the strength and stability and even the beauty of the whole.  When you are known for contributing a lot of little things that add value to your publication you are actually making your job more and more secure and your career more and more successful.  Everyone is always looking for the big thing.  Be the guy who nails the big things but don’t ever ignore doing that little bit extra every day.

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

Christie Raney watches while Carolyn Burgess comforts Raney's mother Connie Patterson who is battling cancer. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 12/19/08

Okay class, this is what it is all about.  You will shoot literally thousands of assignments in your photojournalism career and your degree of success will depend on how many times you come back with “the moment” from that assignment.  And I am not just talking about the big football game or huge fire, I am talking about every day, every job getting the shot.  Sometimes that moment will not look all that dramatic and I have chosen photos for this post to illustrate that concept.  Most people will never even remember these pictures and certainly no one will remember them like they would a photo from a dramatic fire or big football game.

That said, the essence of the job is finding that definitive moment in your every day assignments.  This job was one of those you look at and think to yourself, “there may actually be something here!” The job was not a set up thing.  They were actually having a Christmas meal for a family that was struggling through some hard times.  The African American lady in the main photo is comforting a lady who is fighting through cancer.  The younger lady at left is her daughter and the story centers around them.  (That is why I didn’t crop the photo tighter.)  The moment is genuine and I had already just about given up on getting a genuine moment when this one happened.   The African American lady reached out to comfort the one suffering with cancer and there it was.  I don’t even want to think about how many photos like this I have missed over the years because I just wasn’t ready to shoot when it happened.

The family invited me to eat with them and I am always reluctant to eat on a photo assignment because of the possibility to miss a photo.  But this day there was no way to say no.  So I ate and ate as quickly as I could so I could be ready because I knew I didn’t have the moment yet.  This actually played into my hands, as well as my stomach, because eating with the family caused them to relax a bit and get used to me being there.  By the time I picked up the camera again no one was really paying attention to me and that is the situation you want.  I was able to shoot freely now with no one noticing my presence.

I also lit the room with a pair of Vivitar 285 HV strobes fired with Pocket Wizards.  I just wanted to mimic room light so they were both bounced off the ceiling.  I laid both strobes on a low freezer which was out of the frame and mostly behind me.  I used two strobes rather than one because that gave me more power with a quicker recycle time compared to using a single unit.  Now I am free from technical details and just focused on shooting.  This is really important because if you are fussing with equipment you are dealing with a distraction that can hurt your mental focus.  Staying mentally awake and free of distractions is a really important key to being able to nail the moment especially in these every day situations.  When the moment finally did happen I was ready for it and was able to get the shot.  Unfortunately that is not always the story.  You can see all the photos I turned in from this assignment in the gallery.

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.

Y’all tired of football updates?  I thought I would change things up a bit and revert to my commercial photography education.  Really, I didn’t learn much of this stuff in college.  I actually learned most of it by trial and error.  You know, if you see something in a magazine story or and advertisement and you know you can’t duplicate it with your current skill set you basically have two options.  First, you could just say, “Well, that is beyond me.  I don’t have the tools or the knowledge so I am just moving on.”  OR, you could decide to learn how to do it.  That is what happened to me.  I was shooting some table top stuff for a company I worked for and my stuff wasn’t looking like the high dollar magazine shoots I saw in magazine ads.

I could have just bagged it and said I don’t have the gear.  That is the easy way out.  Instead, I really wanted my small product work to look professional.  Now, at The Decatur Daily, I have to shoot advertising as well as editorial.  That is the curse of the small newspaper world.  I could complain about it and do a crappy job or I could take pride in my work and make it the best I can regardless.  I took the latter approach.  Several years ago, our business manager decided that the jewelry ads in the newspaper were not good enough and he wanted the photo staff to do the shots.  Now you have to understand, the jewelry shots he was rejecting were done by a professional ad agency.  This did not look promising.  Did I mention that we were not given any budget to buy additional equipment or get additional training?

I began by setting up a basic table top light tent completely home made.  I used a piece of 3/4 inch mdf board for a base and then used PVC pipe to construct a frame work over that.  I then hung a white fabric over that frame and had a light tent.  Not what the big boys use, but hey, it worked.  The problem was it was fairly complicated to set up and required a lot of time.  I have migrated away from the light tent and now use a basic overhead light source, usually and umbrella quite close to the product and directly overhead.  I then use white fill cards placed around the object as necessary.

One of the most important things to remember when doing shiny objects is that they “see” whatever you show them.  You don’t want the shiny metal to reflect you, your camera, the walls, another person standing nearby or pretty much anything to distract from the piece itself.  Using white reflectors is a great way to help the jewelry “see” what you want it to.  And what you want it to see is a blank, white surface in almost every case.  I usually use a sheet of white foam that is available at the Hobby Lobby for under a dollar.  I lean my light stand against the table so that my umbrella is over the set and use the foam sheets to create the nice white surface I want the jewelry to see.  The white foam also acts like a fill card to give me a more well rounded light.  So what I get is a result that is similar to what a high dollar ad shoot would yield and I get that with a set up time of less than five minutes and a financial investment that is pennies on the dollar to what the big boys are doing.

The results are very nice and only someone with a very discerning eye will know the difference between mine and theirs.  This basic concept can be modified to a multiple light set with no trouble whatever.  You can add colored foam reflectors to add a bit of warmth to the shot and you can use black to accomplish subtractive lighting.  (That is basically taking away highlights and fill light rather than adding them.)  You will be able to go in and produce great results with nothing more than what you have in your bag right now.  It is cool, cheap and produces great results.  It just takes a little practice.  And the concept can be applied to any static set all the way up to automobiles so you can shoot anything from a diamond ring to a Ferrari using this basic concept.  Cool huh!

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.

Halloween is just around the corner and rather than show you what I shot after the fact I thought I would let you see it ahead of time and maybe help get your juices flowing.  Shhhh! If you are a reader of the Decatur Daily you haven’t seen this in print yet so keep it quiet!  The assignment was to follow a paranormal investigation team to a spooky, old house in Lawrence County near the town of Moulton.  I had done one of these “ghost busting” expeditions before so I had a certain level of expectation regarding the equipment they would bring.  Unfortunately, this group was a bit more low tech than the one I had done before.

Amanda Kelsoe, Keith Duncan and Denise Duncan pose in front of an old house near Moulton that they are investigating for paranormal activity. photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 10/18/08 Copyright The Decatur Daily, All rights reserved.

This translated into shooting in pitch black darkness with absolutely no artificial light except for the flashlights we were carrying.  The night was clear and a bit nippy with a beautiful star lit sky.  The house was not too remarkable from the outside but I knew my best, and perhaps only chance, to get a picture of the team was to do it outside before we went in.  I had a couple of strobes with me but did not want to use them because I had a ghostly image in mind.  I carry a small, pocket LED flashlight and wanted to use it to do the light painting.  I was able to do two exposures on the team before we had to go in.

Technically speaking, the portrait was done at 30 seconds, f4 at ISO 1600.  Oh, and I didn’t have a tripod.  Figures!  Instead of the tripod, I just opened my camera bag and nestled my camera on top of some other gear.  I anticipated having very little light so I brought my EOS 5D to the shoot.  The portrait was done with the 20mm lens.  I light painted for about 15 seconds moving the light continuously.  The first frame came out a bit overexposed on the people for the effect I wanted.  On the second frame I had just begun painting with light when the owner of the house pulled up in his pickup truck bathing the scene in his headlights.  I figured the shot was blown so I asked them to just get up and walk out of the frame.  I chimped the shot and realized it had worked exactly as I wanted so I didn’t even do another frame.

Now for the really hard part.  We went inside and all gathered in a room and then everyone killed their flashlights.  Now I am really in trouble.  Even a 30 second exposure is not going to produce and image in this ink.  I am a bit mystified as to why a ghost would not manifest itself with some light on but, ehhh, what do I know.  All my ghosts are Holy ones and He works in the light!  So there I am with nothing, NOTHING I SAY, to work with but dungeon darkness.  Then there is the owners girl friend who keeps feeling something tug at her jeans and then her sweat shirt.  And our ghost busters keep talking to the darkness asking any ghostly presences to manifest themselves in some way.  My skepticism is now palpable and I still have pretty much nothing.

Desperation.  I was ready to start making ghost noises just to get someone to turn on a flashlight!  Eventually, after about an hour of waiting and working, the flashlights came on enough to make a few pictures.  Barely!  These photos have too much motion blur in them for my taste but at least it is the type assignment where motion blur actually adds something to the ghostly effect I was hoping for.  I have one photo I like a lot and another couple of images that are okay but the rest are just, oh well, why mince words, the rest are just crap.

As I look back on the whole thing I realize that I am the one at fault for not planning better.  I based my equipment selections on a past experience where the paranormal group used some fairly decent video equipment including monitors which produce light.  They also “wired” the building which meant they used light to set up.  These factors biased me to expect some things that this team did not do so I was a bit under prepared.  I would have taken multiple flashlights and just worked them in as I could if I had been thinking right.  No strobes.  No, no.  Strobes would have just flooded the scene with light and that would have been the wrong feel.  It had to have some blur but it certainly needed some more light.  I was happy to leave there with at least a couple of usable frames and that is the bottom line.  Next time, should there be a next time, I will take multiple small flashlight I can set up around the room or have people hold and turn on and off for me.  Live and learn my friends, live and learn.

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

I can’t even begin to tell you how often I am rushed while shooting an assignment either by external forces like having another assignment or by internal forces like a football coach yelling, “Are you done with that kid yet? I need him for practice.” In times like that you need to have a really dependable lighting scheme you can fall back on so you don’t have to think about technical stuff while your creative clock is running out.

Football practices are one of those times when you are just about always rushed. Coaches need their players and I need a picture. We do a feature for our preview special every year that focuses on one player per team. We try to do a nice portrait of the kid that is well lit and posed. That’s really great if you can be there after practice when there is no rush. Normally, that is not normal. Usually the jobs are set at the first of practice and you are being rushed to get the kid back to the field. That means I don’t have time to fiddle with the lights.

I have a lighting scheme that is my ‘old reliable’ that I use in all kinds of situations both hurried and relaxed. I set two lights opposing one another and place my subject in the middle. This works great for so many applications. I can usually just set my lights up, pop a quick test frame and I am ready to shoot. Set up time is under five minutes and I have the kid back to practice or the executive back to work after another couple of minutes of shooting. The only thing I have to do is vary the pose or the subject position relative to the lights and I can have two, or even three looks in just a couple of minutes.

If I have more time I can go back and vary my light positions and even my location. But, if I don’t have that luxury, I have my shot and the person can be on their way. Admittedly, this is not a fail safe method that works every time but it is reliable and I trust the set up and I can shoot it in my sleep if I have to. I shot two different football portraits you see in this post and one is far more successful than the other. Both use the same lighting technique. The difference is in the quality of the clouds in the background and the ambient light. I love using the sky as a backdrop for portraits. In this case, one sky is perfect and my strobes are able to knock it down. In the second scenario, the sky is really hazy and the ambient light is really high and it just doesn’t work as well. I still pulled an acceptable portrait and I could have done better but this is one of those where the coach was calling for his player after just a couple of minutes.

You can dramatically change the look of this lighting scheme by adding umbrellas, softboxes, snoots, grids and gels in any combination. Change the subject position relative to the lights and you can go from the straight side lighting I am using in both of these portraits to a three quarter look and even a front back set up that will give you rim lighting. Vary the power ratios on the flash and you can also affect the look of the image. In the top photo there is a one stop difference in the strobes. I believe the main light is at 1/2 power and the secondary light is at 1/4 power. Another way to change the look of the light is by varying the height of the lights. In both these portraits, the strobes are at exactly the same height. There is not an absolute as far as the way you set this up but it does give you tremendous flexibility.

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

Now that I have your attention… What a great job that allows so much flexibility. You may be shooting a traffic accident, a ball game, a city government meeting, a chicken house, or you might be shooting a piece on a romance novelist. I had an assignment last week to do just that. Now how cool is that?

Lynn Raye Harris is a novice novelist, okay, I just had to say that. She is actually an accomplished writer with published work but she has not yet been published as a novelist. Our story was based upon her recently winning a contest sponsored by Harlequin. I went to the assignment not knowing anything more than where she lived and that she was a romance novelist. Not much to go on. Fortunately, she was very easy to work with and she was fascinated by the photographic process. So basically I went in with a blank slate. All I knew for sure was that I wanted to do a “romantic” portrait if she was at all a candidate for that treatment. That is a nice way of saying I would shoot a romantic portrait if she was not an old hag wearing the pink feather boa and the fru fru pink house shoes with the fuzzy rings around the top. I know, enough of the stereotyping already!

Fortunately, Lynn was not an old hag and she was very agreeable to doing any kind of photo we could dream up. We began the shoot attempting a romantic portrait. My lighting set up was a basic three light set with a bit of a twist. I had an octobank that I had borrowed from my friend David Higginbotham and I used it for my main light. The octobank is a large, soft light source that is amazing. I mounted a Lumedyne 200ws head in the octobank and we started with it very, very close to Lynn. Keep in mind that the closer a light source is to your subject, the softer it will appear and the octobank is a double diffused light modifier so it is really soft when used up close. I also used another Lumedyne head with a snoot for a hair light.

I was shooting at about f11 so the ambient light was essentially nil leaving me with nothing but darkness in the background. This was a mixed blessing because I was able to use that darkness in another photo but it killed me on this one. To cure the problem, I took an SB800 and set it on the mantle behind her and aimed it down on about 1/4 power to give me a little fill. This created the specular highlight behind her and added to the rim lighting. Now the snooted Lumedyne was not getting it done so I took off the snoot and added a red gel. Actually, I did not have a red gel so I borrowed a kitchen hand towel from Lynn and draped it over the second Lumedyne and moved it very close behind her. The towel was thick and really knocked down the strobe. This gave me a soft red fill light completing the first photo.

While Lynn was being interviewed for our story, I moved the octobank to a position exactly beside one of the windows in her living room and jacked up the power and raised the light stand to about 8 feet. This approximated the window lighting but with enough power to shoot with. I used the other Lumedyne as a bounce light off the ceiling and set it in the adjacent kitchen to provide some secondary fill. This also mimicked the direction of some available light. This set up allowed me to accomplish the second photo.

Now, I still wanted something of a more sensual, dramatic quality if I could. Remember the darkness I had to overcome in the first photo? I used that here to my advantage. I turned off the second Lumedyne and just used the one in the octobank and shot in profile against the dark mantle. Now I had a rim lighting effect by doing nothing but shooting in profile against a dark background. The octobank did all the work. I just tuned my exposure a bit to get the rim lighting like I wanted it and then waited for the right moment. I had several photos where she leaned forward and brought her chin up giving me a somewhat sensual look without being over the top. Since I was not posing this part of the shoot, I just watched while she was talking and noticed that she would do this from time to time when she was either thinking about something or talking about something that she was really into.

I shot all these photos with a Canon EOS 5D and either the 24-70 or 70-200. The strobes were fired with Pocket Wizards. The octobank is not something I am going to use frequently. It takes several minutes to assemble the thing and it is bulky and it is not appropriate for every situation but man, where it is appropriate it really is nice. Unfortunately, I have to give it back to Dave someday. Hopefully Lynn gets published soon and she hires me to take her photo for the book jacket and we both get filthy rich! Right! Well, here’s hoping anyway and good luck to Lynn on her novel.

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.

If you have paid any attention at all over the past few years you will be aware that photographic ethics have become a huge issue. Photographers of some renown have lost jobs for Photoshopping images to make them look like what they wanted rather than what they actually saw and shot. That’s the tip of the iceberg. The part most people don’t see comprise the greater part of photographic ethics.

Let’s just start with what is and is not appropriate for a photojournalist to do with Photoshop or your image editing software of choice. The first step in any discussion of visual ethics must be the determination that you will not do anything beyond what is needed to make the photo look in print as much like what you saw in your viewfinder as is possible. That means whatever tool you use from a traditional darkroom to a computer program must be done with the end result being accuracy.

The most important part of that opening statement is this. I may do some things at my paper to prepare an image for print that are peculiar to the requirements of my paper’s printing plant. You may not need to do some of those things. I do them and I will show you what I do and why it is needed at The Decatur Daily. Some of you guys may work for papers where the prepress work is done by an imaging technician. We don’t have those at The Daily. Photographers are the imaging techs so bear that in mind as we go forward.

Almost all of my Nikon camera images require some degree of manipulation in Photoshop and it is a fairly rare image that doesn’t require the use of the history brush tool. That is my most common PS tool. I use it all the time to add contrast in shadow areas. Our press tends to run very flat and very blue so I have to tone accordingly. That includes really working the shadows and mid-tones. This is not as much a problem shooting with my personal Canon because Canon tends to do more in-camera processing than Nikon. For those not familiar with history brush, I use it essentially like a dodge and burn tool. It is just more accurate and easier to use.

I begin with a baseline toning of the entire image. Then in the history section of the pallette I create two snapshots. I do the toning on the first snapshot that I want to do for a particular area of the picture then click on the history brush and “paint” in the area I toned up or down. You can go on doing this as long as needed. Each new snapshot uses the last snapshot you worked as the baseline to build from. I usually don’t do more than two sets of snapshots and about ninety percent of the time I only do one set.

There have been some unfortunate uses of Photoshop that have resulted in some prominent photographers being fired over the last couple of years and it has become fairly routine for images coming out of governments that control their media to Photoshop images to meet their propaganda needs. The Iranians just did this to cover a botched missile test launch. One of four failed to launch so they simply cloned one of the others over the failed launch vehicle. I am not naming names of the photojournalists who have been caught because most of them have been adequately roasted already. Here is a summary of some of the ethics pits they fell in. One guy cloned out a person’s legs in a photo, another combined two photos (from a war image) to make it more dramatic and another lost his job for violating a specific policy regarding over saturating/toning photos. All three were failings, not of Photoshop, but of personal ethics.

When you leave home every day, and this is not just about photojournalism, you make sure you put on your ethics just the same as you put on your clothes. You end up naked if you omit either of them.

This is exactly what the Nikon NEF looks like. (Click on the smaller images to see a larger version) In the first screen snapshot you can see I create two snapshots of the raw image. I click on the first snapshot and tone the image not worrying about what the clouds are doing. I am toning to bring the values up in the lower third of the frame where the cyclists are. I then use the history brush tool to “paint” in the new values. This is just like dodging used to be in the darkroom for you old timers. Dodging was, wait, the darkroom was, oh, just forget about it and I don’t want to hear about how old I am either. Darn pups! Next I create two more snapshots. It is important to remember that the last snapshot I worked in needs to be the one highlighted before I create these next snapshots because I want them to based off the work I have just done. Now, in the new snapshot which will be the third overall, I will retone the image to get the clouds to look like I want them to then I will click in the fourth snapshot and “paint” in the clouds using the history brush tool. When I am satisfied that I have the image that will reproduce I just save the image and I am ready to caption, proof and print the image. Some of you will notice that this image is a bit over toned and it is. As David Hobby at Strobist likes to say, we in the newspaper industry are printing our photos on toilet paper. This means I have to hype my tones and exaggerate the values just a bit to make up for the loss of contrast and saturation in this medium. My goal is to get an image press ready that will replicate what I saw as closely as I can get it. Clouds are particularly tough because their tonal range is short and generally dark so I have worked these clouds more than you would if you were just making an 8×10 for the wall. That short, dark tonal range is really tough on our printing press. Like I said earlier, some of the things I do are a bit exaggerated because of the age of our printing press and because of its color reproduction tendencies. That said, the history brush is a wonderful tool to use for dodging and burning and it is much more accurate and easy to use than the dodge and burn tools themselves. No matter what tool you use just remember to use it ethically. Of course, if you are a reader who is not bound by the ethical standards of photojournalism and are just creating work for yourself, have a blast. The rest of us like to eat so we will mind the ethics shop.

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

Cruising for features is about the most time honored method of finding those stand alone gems that our editors believe fall from trees like ripe fruit. Yeah, there is a bit of hyperbole in that statement but from the outside point of view you should be able to find a feature pretty much at will, right…..right? Not so easy if you are the poor guy laboring under those expectations now is it? So when the editor comes back with the dreaded, “we need a feature for our local front,” you need some kind of plan of action to find the photo and save the section front.

Cruising is the most common thing I do for finding features but I try not to just roam randomly around in circles. That is counterproductive most of the time and it wastes fuel all the time. With fuel costs what they are now, having a cruising plan is very helpful. First of all, have some idea where you want to go. I have places in most of the towns we cover that I depend on to give me features in those crisis moments, you know, when you have to have a feature and have it now. Those are my go to locations and they center around parks and water and both parks and water when possible. To find a for sure feature the first ingredient you need is people to photograph so parks and water are two places where you will most reliably find features. Another good place to keep an eye on is you local landmarks. They are landmarks for a reason so hang with them from time to time and you will get pictures.

After you have a game plan as far as place, figure out the best times to cruise. For me, it is almost always a waste of time to cruise between about 1 p.m. and 5 p.m.in the summer. People are at work or in school or just indoors. The cool parts of the day are best but the lunch hour is good too. You can usually nail someone having a picnic in the park during a work lunch break. The light is also better later in the day so that makes cruising more productive visually in the late afternoon too.

I remember back in the old days before video games, (I know, I know, try not to run screaming from the room with your ears plugged) people used to actually go outside. They sent their kids out to play too. Finding features was almost easy. I could find one every day. It is a bit more difficult today than it used to be but you can still increase your chances by knowing the neighborhoods where there are a lot of children. Kids do still ride bikes and play sports in empty lots so having some idea where you might find a pick up game can help narrow your search and increase your odds. Since video games are so popular, you might even talk to some folks and find out where the kids get together to play video games. Usually there is a popular gaming house just like there used to be popular yards where all the kids hung out.

The final suggestion I have for cruising is to know where new home construction is going on. This is an all season go to feature that will bail you out of a deadline jam year ’round. You can pop on a wide lens and frame some carpenter in the rafters in a geometrically pleasing configuration that will put a smile on the face of the most demanding editor. The only time this doesn’t work is when it is raining or snowing. I have found that carpenters are pretty easy folks to work with and don’t mind allowing you to shoot their picture just as long as they are not in any legal trouble, and that does come up from time to time. That should at least get you started on the feature trail and there is more coming. In the mean time, you might get a copy of the book The Great Feature Hunt or The Great Feature Hunt 2 by Dave LaBelle, the true world champion of the feature. His stuff will help you more than anything I can think of.

About the photos: I found the top photo one evening in a city park. I had gone there to take my meal break and I was sitting facing the river reading my Bible if memory serves and when I got up to go to my car, bang!, there they were having an anniversary candlelight picnic. I shot with an D2H and 80-200mm lens all available. The second photo I found while cruising a beautiful private lake in Decatur. The family was having a great time and let me shoot their photo while they just had a great time. I go to this lake several times a year and usually come out with a couple of really solid features each year.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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