A Little News

I just wanted to say thank you to Donald Winslow, editor of the NPPA Magazine, for running the photo I shot of the tornado aftermath in the March issue of the Magazine. I am deeply honored. For any NPPA members who are dropping by to view the post you can see Tragedy In The South here. There are a few other posts that are related to the tornado coverage. You can view The Power of Wind Versus The Human Spirit and Back To Normal Assignments.

Feel free to stay and visit a while and come back and see us again.

Up to this point, I have done all my posts based on photos that I have shot.  When I come back from vacation in a couple of weeks, I am going to begin using some of your excellent submissions to the A Little News flickr pool and bounce some new ideas around with you, some critiques and just show off some nice shots.  It might be a good idea to plop a few new images in the pool over the next couple of weeks and show off a little.

While I am in the frosty north you guys will be reading at least four blog entries from friends I have conned into helping me out.  I hope they inspire you and motivate you and give you a different perspective on this great job we have or aspire to.

Sometime next week, I am going on vacation for a couple of weeks. Now most normal people take the opportunity to head south for some warmth on the gulf coast. But not us. Nope, we are heading north to the great state of New York to visit some family. So if any of you guys are up that way, try and warm things up a bit for us.

During the time that I will be away, I have lined up a few guest bloggers to keep things fresh. My friend Corey Wilson from the Green Bay Press Gazette you already know from his post about shooting in the deep freeze at Lambeau Field during the NFC Championship game. He has a great post about covering the legendary Packers quarterback Brett Favre. My friend and coworker Jonathan Palmer is crafting a post on what should be required reading for a photojournalist. He will be sharing some of his favorite photo books with you and setting up a kind of suggested reading list which we will turn into a page on the site and add to from time to time. Another friend, David Higginbotham, whom I worked with at The Decatur Daily for a number of years is going to write a post too. He is no longer in photojournalism but works for a government contractor shooting a lot of space related stuff for the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. David is also an excellent wedding and portrait photographer, an accomplished musician and all around great guy. He is kind of enough to drag me along to help him shoot a wedding every now and then. The final guy, for now anyway, is AP photographer Rob Carr. Rob has become a good friend in a fairly short period of time. He worked in the Alabama bureau before transferring to Baltimore, MD. I have no idea what either he or David will be blogging about but we shall see.

I have a couple of other folks that I hope to con into doing posts for me while I am away. I know that these excellent photographers will bring something to you that will be very inspiring and enlightening. For some of you younger shooters out there, one of the great things about the photojournalism community is the other photojournalists you meet and form friendships with. One of the very best things about shooting college sports for me is renewing acquaintances in the photo workroom before and after the games. Those relationships are priceless. Just to give you an example, every year after the Iron Bowl between Alabama and Auburn, the photographers from the Mobile Press Register host a shrimp boil in the media parking lot. It is a great time of just hanging out and building friendships. Hopefully you guys will all get the chance to have a group of friends like that during your career.

It appears that everyone who responded would like a group photo pool on Flickr so here it is. Go to A Little News Flickr pool and post away. Make sure you read and understand the group rules. Also, when you post a photo please write a caption in the description field and add tags like news, portrait, sports, feature or whatever your photo falls into. We may use the tags later and it will help define your images for now.

This is very important. Only post images you hold the copyright to or images which you have permission from the copyright holder to publish. What I did in starting this blog was to go to our publisher and explain what I wanted to do. He gave me approval so now I make sure he gets a copyright notice with every post. You can waterwark the image itself or you can put a copyright tag line in the description field. Just make sure the copyright is visible.

To post to the Flickr pool you will need a Flickr account. They are free and can be set up in a very few minutes. You can set up your account here in just a few moments and begin uploading. When you have images uploaded, go to the A Little News site on Flickr and join our group. Then you can post to the group directly from your account.

Lets all remember that the site is set up to help us get better. I strongly encourage everyone to participate in giving feed back to other members that will help them get better. Please don’t get nasty. I have had that happen with editors before and it is not pleasant or very constructive. Use your comments to make suggestions or build up the shooter. Don’t use comments to drag the other guy down.

Finally, and this should already be obvious since we are a photojournalism site, but nudity is not acceptable unless in those rare cases where it is part of the story like some poor, starving person in Africa trying to breast feed a baby. I think you are all big boys and girls and understand what I mean. Other than that have a great time and you can start using the pool right away.  Who will be the first to post?

The last day of the year is a good day to stop and say thanks. First of all, I am alive and well and that is really something to be thankful for. I have a great family and that is the next best thing to be thankful for. Amid all the ups and downs of 2007, I was blessed to be able to start this blog. I am having a blast doing this.

Many, many people have helped me in this profession and there is nothing I can do to repay them except to pass along to others in the same way they passed along to me. So thank you to all who have helped me along in my career, especially Dave Martin, a former AP staff photographer who worked in Alabama for many years and gave me excellent advice over and over again and helped me get through some of the bumps in my career.

I also want to say thanks to Clint Shelton who, with his father Barrett Shelton, own and operate The Decatur Daily. Without Clint’s permission and indulgence to start with, this blog would not have happened. As you have noticed, it has been populated with photos from The Decatur Daily almost exclusively. So to the Shelton family, many thanks, not just for this blog but also for keeping me on the payroll.

Finally, thanks to all of you who read this blog. It is so much more fun and satisfying to write something and know that people are reading it than it is to just be writing it to cyberspace. I hope this blog continues to be a blessing in your life and I hope that I can continue to impart something to you that will be useful in your career. I am glad we have all arrived at the end of this year. I look forward to what 2008 holds in store. From my family to all of you, have a blessed, happy and prosperous new year. And like they used to say on Hill Street Blues, lets be careful out there!

I am a Christian and I make no bones about it. I love Jesus! That makes this a very special season for me. I have recently been contemplating the concept of worship and I want to tell you something that I have discovered and it actually does relate to photojournalism. Maybe you remember the three magi who came to visit Jesus either at his birth or within a couple of years of his birth. They brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. I am sure there is some great theological reason why they did this but they brought them to this little baby who the Bible says was born king. He surely didn’t look much like a king being born in a manger and, at best, living in a normal little house in Bethlehem when these magi arrived. Yet they found the baby and gave him extravagant gifts and bowed in worship to him.

My problem was I couldn’t figure out what I should give to Jesus in worship. It is pretty popular to think of singing as worship but I can’t seem to carry a tune in the proverbial bucket. Not very promising. Then I heard a story about the composer Joseph Hyden. He had a tough youth. Eventually he pioneered a new style of music he called a symphony. When he felt death about to grip him, Hyden sat down at his piano and played his composition, The Creation, then said something to the effect that he had been of use to his generation. May other be useful to theirs. Then he died.

Somehow, the Lord spoke to me through this story and I realized that what Joseph Hyden had done was worship God in his music. That reminded me of the Little Drummer Boy. The little drummer boy is poor and doesn’t really have anything but he decides to give the Baby Jesus what he does have. He plays his drum for Him. Now I don’t have any gifts worthy of a king, much less The King of Kings. What I do have is the gift he has given me. With my camera and the talent He has given me, I’ll worship him. The book of Colossians says that whatever I do to do with all my might, not unto men but unto God. I’ll play my drum for him too, it’ll just be with a camera.

Be blessed in this special time of the year and if you don’t know this one who was born King drop me a line and I will be happy to introduce you to him.

Merry Christmas to all and may you be exceedingly blessed. Gary Cosby Jr.

I guess you could call me indecisive.  I am changing my theme again.  I really liked the first theme’s look but not its performance.  Then I went to a theme whose performance I like but not its look.  I am trying this theme to see if I like both the look and the performance.  I really love the minimalist look of the basic black and white design.  Hopefully, the performance will be equally delightful.  We will see.  Eventually I will learn to do the CSS code for the blog and I will make the theme do exactly what I want it to.  Until then, there may be more experimentation.  If you could only see me here behind the scenes doing all that CSS test tube, bunsen burner stuff with the vapors rising and swirling in my best mad scientist mode you would be really impressed.  Or confused!  Anyway, we are going to give this theme a try and see what happens.  Hope you like it.  Blessings and Merry Christmas.

Sometimes you have an assignment that simply clicks. Everything comes together in one of those moments you will remember for a long time. Some of those moments are the great events of life, a presidential visit, a huge fire, a big ball game. Then there are the quirky moments. This is just such a moment. I had an assignment a couple of weeks ago we just published and I wanted to share it with you. This young woman’s mother found a squirrel near death and brought it to her daughter who nursed it back to health. We went to the young woman’s home to shoot pictures as she was getting the animal ready to release into nature again. As it turns out, she probably won’t release the squirrel until spring so we went ahead with the story.

Suffice it to say that it was the funky story of the year for me. The pictures turned out so well I wanted to post them here. I have one of the pictures in my flickr stream and it has become extremely popular in just a couple of days. There is nothing all that technically challenging about these pictures except that the squirrel moves incredibly fast and doesn’t stay still very long at all. As the saying goes, this little guy is so quick he is even fast asleep. (chuckles) I lit the room with a single SB800 on a light stand bounced into a wall and ceiling and used a D2Hs with both the 17-35 and the 80-200. This is one of those jobs you come to work for. It makes it worth all the negatives that photojournalism can sometimes serve you.

The photo of the cat and squirrel is extremely funny, or ironic, to me. The cat doesn’t mess with the squirrel but you can look in the cat’s eyes and see the predator very near the surface. I am not sure if the cat and the squirrel were left alone in the room together that the squirrel would survive the encounter. As long as the girl is there she kind of refs the deal and the squirrel can play safely. It was a cool assignment and I hope you guys enjoy it seeing it as much as I enjoyed shooting it.

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

Evaluating your own photos objectively is about the toughest thing you will ever do. You fall in love with pictures because of the situation or the difficulty you went through in getting the shot or it is a photo that just appeals to you on some level you can’t define. This makes assembling a portfolio pretty challenging.

Still, you don’t want someone else putting your portfolio together because you are representing who you are with your images not who someone else is or even worse, who someone else wants you to be. In that statement lies a real key to evaluating your portfolio and one of the real traps in assembling a portfolio. The key is you should assemble a portfolio that is an expression of your soul. That sounds all metaphysical but my contention has always been that you can evaluate who a person is if you see enough of their pictures because something of who you are goes into everything you shoot. In other words, your portfolio should express who you are.

Here is the trap. Many people assemble a portfolio based on what they think someone else will want to see. I have done this so I am guilty too. Don’t try to be someone you are not. One of my favorite photographers is the National Geographic’s William Albert Allard. I assure you, I am not Mr. Allard even though several of his images resonate within my soul. I can see clearly in my mind’s eye the image of the little shepherd boy crying on the side of the road after a motorist had just run down his sheep and killed them. That image stirs me deeply and has for years but I can’t be him. Be yourself. Your editor is not hiring Bill Allard he is hiring you.

It is great and highly motivational to look at images by other great photographers. It is even okay to take some of their style and develop your own, just don’t try to become someone else. Be who you were created to be. That is good advice for life not just photojournalism. Take the divergent elements that fall into your mind to craft your own style and ultimately your own portfolio. Your portfolio will also change over the years because you will change over the years too. You won’t simply become a better photographer but you will become a more complete human and this will be reflected in the way you shoot.

The two photos I have selected for this post are two of my favorite images. The photo of the football players was shot following the 1A state championship game a couple of years ago. The Addison High team was celebrating as they ran onto the field to receive their championship trophy and the look on their faces is just pure enthusiasm. The other image is a feature I found a couple years ago and it just speaks to me. I think there is something in me and in many other people that this image just speaks to, perhaps a ripple of memory from our childhood. Plus it has something of the Norman Rockwell feel to it so that even if we didn’t have this kind of childhood we really wish we did. Anyway, these images both connect with me on an emotion level that raises them above the crowd of images in my files. That is what you have to do. Compose your portfolio so that the images express what you want to say about yourself and your abilities. When you send it out don’t worry too much over it. Some editors will like it and some won’t. That is just life. Unfortunately, not everyone likes my images as much as I do (wink, wink).

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

Last post, we started talking about shooting wide on sports. Shooting wide angles for sports action is the toughest thing to do due to your position relative to the action in most sporting events. You can have some nice photos you just have to be willing to fail more than you succeed which means you can’t totally depend on shooting wide. It is a tool, just not the only tool. Exploit it whenever you can but don’t depend on it exclusively. Most sporting venues, in fact, practically demand a telephoto so you have to be somewhat selective when and where you use them for action photography. Unless you have the ability to hang remote cameras all over the place, you really have to pick your spots. But, when you hit the spot, it can be really sweet.

Lets talk about some of the advantages of using wides on sports action. First, you can get far greater depth of field and a much better sense of the environment using a wide lens as opposed to using a tele. Secondly, you have the option of actually framing and composing a photo rather than just depending on the action to “happen” within your field of view. Finally, you can get different perspectives and angles of view. You are probably familiar with Sports Illustrated’s low angle, wide angle shots of basketball games. The wide lens also gives you the ability to include more players, cars, horses, whatever, in the frame than you can get with a telephoto. Once in a while, you can also make use of some good light and long shadows to create an interesting composition.

On the top photo, the Downtown Criterium again, I was able to use my 17-35 to frame a shot through the spokes of a tire stacked in the pit area. Races are always great for framing a shot because you have the opportunity to scout an angle and set up a shot or come back to a shot later in the race. Foot races, bike races and even car races can be great opportunities to use some framing. The good thing about using the wide angle in these sports is that the sport itself does not automatically demand a long lens so the wide angle shots are more easily accepted by editors. The second shot is from the Aaron’s 499 at the Talladega Super Speedway. In the turns you can get unbelievably close to the action. This is again the 17-35 using the panning technique. I like to pan using the wide lens and I did some stuff on the Criterium that worked out okay but I don’t want to bore you guys with shots from the same event. The last shot is the most traditional use of the wide lens for action. In many cases, this shot is done with a floor remote. Since I did not have a floor remote setup, I just hand held the camera down on the baseline being very careful to stay back from the area where the ref runs back and forth. It is a blind shot and it just happened that all the elements came together to focus your eye right to the shooter who is the most distant from the camera. Leading lines really help and you can exploit them using you wide lens. Believe it or not, this shot is a f2.8 aperture setting. As you can see, the depth is still nice and is yet another benefit of using your wide lens.

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