Changes Coming For A Little News

I have some changes in the works for the site and I just wanted to give you a quick heads up.  In the near future I am going to move the blog to self hosted server.  The only change will be a slight change in the address line which I will give you when we make the change.  You may not have to do anything to your browser or RSS feed because it will be a minor change.  This will allow me to do a few things that WordPress does not permit.  One of the major reasons I want to make this change is to be able to use Soundslides on the site.  There is some issue with coding on WordPress and Soundslides won’t work.  One of the things I want to do during this year is show you projects done with sound and perhaps even a bit of video.  Another reason for moving to a self-hosted site is to enable me to put advertising on the site.  I had a recent inquiry about someone wishing to place a small ad and I would like to be able to accommodate this in the future.  Alittlenews is actually growing a bit and I want to be able to expand the sites capabilities along with the growth.  For now I just wanted to give you a little sneak peak and when the time is right I will make sure every one gets a heads up so you can make any changes necessary to keep up with the move.  I certainly don’t want to lose anyone.

This is also the season for photo contests and I can’t see any reason for us not to have a little photo contest ourselves.  It’s not like I can give you any prizes or anything but just think of the prestige of being an award winning photographer.  Oooh’s and aaaah’s are appropriate here.  I am working out the details but I believe we will use the Alittlenews Flickr pool for the contest.  There will be traditional news photography categories so be sorting out your images and lets see how it goes.  I will notify you next week how to proceed with contest entries so be looking forward to that too.

Hopefully we will have a lot of fun this year and learn something here and there too.  Blessings to all.  GC

Lighting High School Hoops

Bounce flash in a very small gym with lots of white surfaces to bounce light from.

Did I fail to mention that it is basketball season again?  This is my least favorite sport to shoot and I guess I am lucky that I don’t cover too much of it any more since I am working mostly day shifts now but over the years I have covered hundreds, if not thousands, of basketball games.  It seems to be the season that never ends.  It does have its moments though and you get some of the best, funniest and even ugliest faces in photos during basketball games.  Way more than in other sports where faces are often obscured and you are very close to the action which increases your chances of good facial expression.  On top of that, if you shoot a lot of high school hoops like I have always done, you are most likely strobing the gym so you have great light on those expressions.

Well, you  have great light assuming that you can position your strobes in good locations and not end up with garish shadows crossing those great facial expressions.  So maybe now is the time for a little lighting primer.  Back in the day I used to always shoot with on camera direct flash which partially explains why I never really liked shooting high school hoops.  No amount of Photoshop can cure on camera flash in a dark gym.  It just is what it is.  Then one day my friend Corey Wilson came to work for The Decatur Daily.  He owned his own set of White Lightning strobes and he used them for every basketball game.  His stuff looked great and my stuff looked like I didn’t care.  I bummed strobes off of Corey every chance I got but that was not a good solution.  I finally convinced the boss to buy us a set of mono-lights we could use and then Corey left us to go to Green Bay and he took his lights with him.  I spent the next season and a half lugging in those AC powered mono-lights, stands and endless extension cords climbing all over the patrons trying to get everything hooked up, taped down and out of the way.

Finally one day, the light came on.  My boss bought me an SB800 to go with the SB28DX I was already carrying and just like that my shoulder began to recover from heavy mono-light syndrome.  Never heard of it?  That is an obvious deformity of the left shoulder leaving a deep indentation between the neck and shoulder joint which results from carrying that ever loving heavy bag in and out of crowded gymnasiums all winter long.  About that same time I discovered Strobist, God bless David Hobby, and my life was transformed.  Now I was going into those same gyms with about forty pounds less gear and getting essentially the same results.

I have made one more evolution in my lighting gear.  Now I am using a pair of Lumedynes I picked up used and they are wonderful.  They have more power than the SBs and are less bulky than the mono-lights.  A great compromise and they work wonderfully.  So how do you position the lights and yourself to make the most out of those small, dark high school gymnasiums.  I am so glad you asked.  Tonight, for instance, I worked in one of the two or three smallest gymnasiums in our area and it is not well lit either.  What it does have is that white padded insulation stuff all over the place in the ceiling and even on the walls above the concrete blocks.  So I could bounce my strobes into the ceiling and shoot basketball in a giant softbox.  Nice!  And it is almost compensation for shooting in a “cracker box” gymnasium.

Normally I have to use direct flash.  Most gymnasiums are a bit larger and less accommodating of bounce flash with ceilings that are either too high or simply not white.  Most high school gyms use the same basic layout.  They have bleacher seating down the sides and open ends with varying amounts of space between the baseline and the wall.  Some gymns have balconies or even tracks around the court area.  Some have full balconies running all the way around the gym and others have balconies just on the sides.  There is even one gym with balconies behind each basket, no baseline area at all and stands down both sides right up to the court.  Setting up strobes then becomes a work in gymnastics.  (Yeah, I planned that one.  Did you enjoy that little pun?)

The basic lighting scheme I use in almost every case where there are no balconies is two lights on light stands in the corners of the gym on either side of the basket I am shooting under.  I place them as high as I can get them and aim them to cross in the lane or at the top of the key.  It depends on how far back I can get the strobes.  The more distance behind the basket I can get the strobes the further up the court I aim them.  In those gyms where there is only a few feet between the basket and the back wall I cross the lights more toward the center of the lane to prevent light loss under the basket.

If there are balconies then I am very happy.  I can get my strobes much higher and I can get them out of the way of the majority of the foot traffic in the gym.  It is a constant worry that someone will trip over the light stands and knock them over or even hurt themselves.  I usually secure my light stands to something stationary with ball bungee cords or even tape.  An alternative to light stands are super clamps that allow you to physically clamp your strobe to something like a rail or a bar.  The gym usually dictates what you can do.  Nine times out of ten I have to shoot my strobes direct but every now and then I get to use bounce and it is really nice light.  Since I will never have the luxury of really setting a lighting scheme like you see in the big arenas I am not worried about darkening down my backgrounds so the bounce light is really nice.

I do not try and totally kill the ambient light in the gym.  A lot of people do and that is fine.  I like to have my ISO up around 800 and in most of our places this gives me a bit of illumination in the background to balance the lighting from the strobes.  I usually aim for an exposure of 1/250 at f2.8 ISO 800.  About 90 percent of all my high school hoops is done this way.  It is my preference and not any rule.  When I began shooting SBs in gyms this worked really well and I have continued it using my Lumedynes.  It all comes down to whatever works for you.  I just don’t like my backgrounds to be real dark because then it looks like photos are over strobed.

The photos with this post area combination of shots done with both bounce and direct flash.  Strobe positions are very similar with the difference being the size of the gyms and the ability or lack of ability to bounce.

Direct flash in a fairly large high school gym with strobes on side balconies.

Bounce flash in a very small gym with lots of white surfaces to bounce light from.

Bounce flash in a very small gym with lots of white surface to reflect from.

Direct flash in a mid-size high school gym.

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.

2009 – Will Newspapers Survive The Year

Now there is an uplifting title to start the year.  I was swapping email with an influential blogger friend and he told me that it is time to develop an exit strategy from the newspaper world.  His reasoning is that the newspaper industry has so dated itself that the survival of the industry is in serious question.  For instance, both Chicago daily newspapers are in danger of folding.  Detroit Free Press is going to web only with an actual newspaper published only 3 times a week.  Even small newspapers are under tremendous financial pressure.  I think the newspapers that survive 2009 will have come through the worst of the financial crisis and will probably survive because those papers will have adapted very quickly to the climate in their readership areas.

I am talking about both the business climate, which will take some creativity of an unprecedented nature, and the news climate which will have to undergo massive change to keep readership.  What this means is there will have to be almost wholesale changes from the top to the bottom of the newspaper industry and it will never again be like it was in the old days.  I really have no expertise to speak to the business/advertising side of things so I will leave that to the folks who I pray do have and with a good portion of boldness to go along with the creative ideas.  I really can’t speak to the publisher side of things either.  I know more about that side but lets face it, I am still a grunt in this industry so let’s just focus on news gathering because that is all I can really affect anyway.

The traditional model for news gathering has always been words first and then visuals supporting and it has worked for decades, a century really.  Even the vaunted New York Times which was traditionally known as the “Gray Lady” for her dependence on the written word has made massive strides in getting more visual.  Newspapers are going to have to turn to their photography departments to take a lead role in news gathering and not merely look at them as service departments.  The reason being is that the web is a highly visual place.  Photographs, and even video on some occasions, need to lead the Internet coverage.  The one thing that many newspapers have missed either partially or entirely is the importance of being, not simply visual, but visually dominant.  Any readership survey will tell you that people are reading less and spend far less time on any site or with any newspaper than they did even a decade ago.

What this means is that newspapers must put an emphasis on strong visual storytelling in print and online or readers simply won’t stay.  Stories, in most cases anyway, will have to become shorter and much more local.  Anyone can read national and international news online up to 23 hours before they can read it in a printed newspaper.  Obviously, this also means that the Internet and not the printed product must lead the way in 09 and that shift has been underway in one form or another for a long time.  With this in mind, the Internet can be used to fill niche readership markets that the newspaper really can’t accommodate.  For instance, in our market we have a booming military and technology sector that is hard for us to cover in print.  The Internet provides a great opportunity to do this and do it very effectively.  Most of the folks in that industry will probably never pick up a newspaper but the Internet is always at their fingertips.  That, by the way, describes a huge portion of our potential readership growth market.  It will have to be online because many Americans are so Internet conditioned they will never buy a newspaper again.

As a visual reporter myself, I have to look in the mirror and ask myself what changes I am willing to make.  We don’t do video yet at The Decatur Daily and I really don’t believe video is the answer but am I ready to do video, and not just do video but do video well.  You see, it won’t do any good for the newspaper to lean more heavily on visual storytelling if I am not willing to do my job with excellence whether it is video or stills or even both.  And that really is the question because to survive we either have to work very hard at being the absolute best or we need to find another industry to work in.  The other thing is am I willing to become a lead storyteller?  We have been treated as a service department for so long in many newspapers am I really willing to jump out there and develop stories on my own and be a reporter with a camera rather than depend on a reporter to give me photo assignments?  These are the two biggest issues the photo departments will have to overcome to be newsroom leaders.

And what if you newspaper has no vision for any of this?  Well, you have two options.  First you could polish up your resume and start shopping yourself around and try and find a new job.  Since the newspaper industry is in the shape it is in, you might want to try a fast food chain.  They are always in need of cooks and counter help.  OR, you could work from within your newspaper and show through your aggressive pursuit of stories and the use of the technology available what is possible through visuals.  If you present editors with a finished product that is ready to publish and you do that several times in a row you will gradually develop an expectation for that kind of work.  This may not produce the rapid change that your newspaper needs but it will be doing what you can to affect the direction your newspaper is going.

I have heard it said that great opportunities often come disguised as huge problems so 2009 should be a great opportunity for those willing to see it that way.  If you are tempted to keep on doing things the way you always have and leave it up to someone else to produce change then this may not be a very good year for you.  Keep in mind that one definition of insanity is continuing to do the same things over and over again and expecting different results.  Don’t be insane my friends.  Push every day to do the job better than you have ever done it before and even if your paper folds you will have done all that is within your ability to keep it afloat and you will have put yourself in a better position to move on to the next opportunity.  God bless and keep you in this year.

20 Moments – The Flip

Alabama linebackers Dont'a Hightower and Rolando McClain upend Auburn running back Mario Fannin. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 11/29/08

This is it.  The final of my personal 20 Defining Moments from 2008.  A drum roll please maestro!  The final edition is from the Iron Bowl where Alabama quite literally stood Auburn on their heads ending a streak of six straight Auburn victories and vaulting Alabama into the SEC Championship game ranked 1st in the nation.  The game was an Alabama romp and this play was quite early in the first quarter.  Never the less, it was the moment that I think defined the whole game.  The picture kind of symbolizes Alabama turning the tables on Auburn who fired, or forced out if you like that better, their head coach Tommy Tuberville just a few days later.

Since this is not a post about the relative sanity of whomever is running things down at Auburn I will leave my personal opinion on Tuberville’s firing out but I guess you can see how I feel by what I have already written.  Now back to the post.  A whole bunch of other shooters also got this shot.  I saw several of them and everyone’s is good.  It is a hard play to go wrong on.  I think that I had one of the best angles on the play and was very pleased with the shot.  There is just nothing like a good camera with a 400mm lens for sports photography.  I had the D700 and 400mm f2.8 on loan from NPS and man was it ever a sweet combination.

I love shooting sports and it was very difficult for me to not include more sports images in this collection.  Sports helps define my year every year and this year was no exception.  Still, there were so many exceptional events going on this year, the sports just had to take something of a back seat.  Sports helps keep me in a good shooting rhythm year round.  If I ever get out of sync I just try and do a few sports assignments and that helps me tremendously.

Some folks probably think that sports photography is all about autofocus and blazing motor drives and not doubt about it, those things do help.  But what sports photography really is all about is finding that moment in a game that defines the game.  I don’t always do it.  Even great sports photographers don’t always do it.  Finding that moment, that literal split second that defines something, be it in life in general or in sports specifically, is really what good photojournalism is all about.

I hope you have enjoyed the 20 Moments series.  I had fun putting it together and it was also a challenge to pull out 20 photographs that I felt defined my year.  Try it sometime and see how it works for you.  If you do this and can post your images somewhere, on your site or on Flickr or whatever, drop us a line here so we can all go check out what you did.  I hope you all have a blessed, happy and prosperous New Year and I hope that 2009 turns into a year of unprecedented prosperity for you in all areas of your life.  Blessings and peace to you and yours.

Photo 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.

20 Moments – Election Night

Ernestine Robinson is interviewed in her home in Moulton on election night. Robinson has fought the political battles all her life having marched with Dr. King and never thought she would see the day she could vote for a black president. photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 11/4/08

Ernestine Robinson is a woman of class and dignity who fought her way through the Civil Rights battles in Alabama with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  On election night we interviewed her in her home in Moulton, Alabama.  The only photo was going to be a portrait of her.  I wanted it to be a really good portrait.  I had photographed her once before several years ago and remembered her being a very forceful person.  She said something during that interview that really struck me and made me realize what a huge event the election of Barack Obama really is.  She was once arrested with Dr. King during a protest march and she said that during those days she never dreamed she would have an opportunity to vote for a black man for President of the United States.  Something in that statement really woke me up to the history that was being made right before my eyes.

To me the election was a choice between candidates that did not appeal to me so I was not very excited about it.  What she said and what I saw in the celebrations around the country and even around the world, told a different story.  This election was a very big deal to a great many people.  Once again I found myself in a situation where the actual event didn’t move me but the consequences of the event were profound for the person I was photographing.  This happens fairly often but not usually on the scale of a presidential election.

As I listened to Ms. Robinson talk I wanted more and more to make a really nice portrait of her, something that would honor both her and the moment.  To be honest, I don’t really feel that I got there.  I struggled during the entire assignment with lenses and light.  I finally got about what I wanted with the light but the lenses never really came together.  I was either too tight or too loose and nothing I did seemed to work.  This was the image we chose to run and it works okay but I am still unsatisfied with the results.  Still, it does seem to communicate something of her struggle which was at least part of the goal of the photo.

Photo 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.

20 Moments – ALS Pain

Gladys Burgess kisses her daughter Paula Standridge during a birthday party for her at SunBridge Care and Rehab in Decatur. Standridge suffers from ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease. photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 10/29/08

This one breaks my heart.  ALS, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, is a merciless killer that seems to strike rather randomly.  Unlike a car wreck or heart attack that kill quickly, ALS is more like Alzheimer’s in the way it kills, slowly and painfully.  I have had more than one photo assignment covering people and their families who are suffering through this disease and have only one possible outcome in sight and that is death.  I am not even sure how to describe ALS except that it slowly debilitates the sufferer until it basically shuts them down completely.  I hate cancer but at least there is some hope for those with cancer.  To this point, ALS is a hopeless disease which makes me hate it even more.

My photo assignment did not excite me very much.  I was to go photograph a birthday party for Paula Standridge at a local nursing home.  I don’t think the assignment said anything about her having ALS.  It was just another assignment at a nursing home where birthdays don’t seem like much of a celebration some of the time.  This party was different.  Paula did not know about the party and a large crowd had gathered to celebrate with her including family and many people from her church.  Each one was telling me the wonderful things Paula did for them and I was deeply moved even before they wheeled her in.

When you have a large crowd of people like this, and especially when they all want to be around your subject, it can be a little difficult to find the moment or to be in the right place to shoot the moment.  One of her siblings told me who her parents were and I could see the pain they felt inside written on their faces knowing the pain their daughter was going through.  I thought that might be the place to get my photo.  Still, maneuvering around in that crowded room without being rude was a little difficult and no photo was worth being rude for in that environment.  Sometimes you just have to miss a moment so that you don’t mess up what is going on for the people actually participating in that moment.

Still, I was able to edge around to the side of the bed as her cake was presented and the crowd sang happy birthday.  Paula started to cry and her mom bent over to kiss her and I was in the right place at the right time and got what to me is an extremely touching photo.  It speaks to the love and the pain they were both feeling.  No one ever wants to find themselves in this situation and I am continually amazed at the grace and dignity people handle these difficult times with.  When I am photographing them that is exactly what I want to communicate.

Photo 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.

20 Moments – Ghost Busters

Now we come to creepy time.  These guys are paranormal investigators and I knew that I had a golden photo opportunity if everything played out right.  I anticipated all kinds of funky equipment that would provide all kinds of moments inside the creepy house.  I could set some strobes at odd angles and get some cool shots while they were setting up then I could go home.  Well, none of that happened.  We did have a creepy house but their equipment consisted of a camcorder and a little, hand-held detector of some variety or other.  Having no equipment meant there would essentially be no photo because these folks were literally going to stand around in the dark and try to communicate with the “spirits.”

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

The fall back position on any assignment is the environmental portrait and that is what I had to do here.  Not just any portrait would do though.  I wanted something that would communicate the ethereal nature of what they were up to so I had the idea of doing a time exposure and using my pocket flash light to paint in the subjects.  Well, that almost worked.  I had no tripod so my camera bag subbed for a camera support and the pocket flash light sort of worked.  In fact, it worked too well and I over lit my first attempt.  I set up for the second go round only to have a truck unexpectedly come up the drive and bathe them in head lights.  I told them half way through the exposure to just get up and walk out of the frame because, honestly, I thought the image was ruined.  But when the image recorded I saw that I had exactly what I wanted in the frame.  Bang!  Nailed it by accident in two tries with 30 second exposures and the camera literally sitting on my camera bag.  Hey, it worked.

I won’t go into how I felt standing in the dark for the next hour or so while these folks tried to coax out a ghost.  Let’s just say that I was skeptical and thought we were about as likely to communicate with a ghost as we were to be hit by an asteroid.  Okay, well, actually I thought we were more likely to be hit by an asteroid.  I did get my photo though and I didn’t get hit by falling space debris or get scared out of my socks by any apparitions.  All in all that makes for a pretty decent night!

Photo 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.

20 Moments – Happy Fishermen

Wow!  Two fishing photos make the 20 Moments list in one year.  I know, I can’t believe it either but there it is and there is no fish to be found in this one.  These guys finished first and second in an FLW tour event on Wheeler Lake and there is not a fish in sight.  In fact, that is the reason this photo makes the list.  A fishing tournament picture with not a sign of a rod and reel, a boat or a fish and yet it is still one of my favorite moments.  There are a couple reasons beyond the obvious.

FLW winner Russ Moran laughs with Jack Poindexter whom he edged out for the win the FLW tournament held on Wheeler Lake during the weigh in Saturday afternoon at Wal-Mart. photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 10/11/08

If you don’t know fishermen then you won’t understand the whole idea behind the statement a bad day fishing is better than a good day at work.  It is not my thing but I get where they are coming from.  So if your work is fishing what does that make it?  If you finish second in a fishing tournament, what is that better than?  Questions, questions and who knows the answer?  Maybe it is these guys.

On the surface there appears to be nothing whatever to this photo technically.  Actually this is just about the most demanding technical situation you can run into shooting available light.  What you don’t see is that the stage faced east and the sun was setting directly over the top of the trailer meaning that any shooting position allowing you to actually see the stage had you shooting into the harsh, setting sun with the people on stage being in open shade.  Must have been a dozen stops of difference plus dealing with the lens flare from the setting sun.  Not fun but hey, I am a professional right!?  I finally found a shooting position that was low enough to allow the stage to block at least some of the setting sun and gave me a fairly clean view if I shot tight.  The photo actually came together when the first place finisher and the second place finisher came together to congratulate one another.  Then the great smiles and laughter as they met and I have my photo.  Don’t you just love a happy ending!

Photo 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.

Top 100 Photo Blog

Alittlenews has been included in a listing of the Top 100 photo blogs by Photography College, a site dedicated to helping people find a suitable institution for a photographic education.  I got an email this morning from Kelly Sonora notifying me of the inclusion.  While this may seem like a bit of patting myself on the back, and I am sure there is a little of that going on, the list is a tremendous resource for you to explore.  Alittlenews is included under the heading of Photo Genres, blogs catering to a specific area of photography.  In our case that is, of course, photojournalism.  There are several different categories to check out including business, equipment, general, news, resources, you get the idea.  Stop by and check out the list.  I think there must be something for every reader on the site.  Check it out here.

20 Moments – Red Hat Ladies

Several years ago I shot my very first Red Hat Society photo assignment.  I had no idea what I was walking into.  That is the craziest group of women on the planet and they readily admit it and revel in it.  Now I relish those assignments like a glass of perfectly aged wine that has great flavor and a lot character because that is a great description of the Red Hat Society.  To be a member you have to be 50 years old and come up with the most outlandish red hat and purple dress possible.  Already you can see the possibilities for photos are endless.  Top all that glitz off with the idea that these ladies are there to have fun, and that really is about all they do, and you have a photo assignment where you would have to be dead not to get a great photo.

Sharon Beach helps new Red Hat Society member Kathy Taylor inther her purple robe outside Cafe 113 in Decatur Wednesday. Taylor had a "Reduation" which signified her move from being a Pink Hatter to a full member of the Red Hat Society. photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 8/20/08

This Red Hat assignment was a little different for me.  The club was welcoming a new member on her 50th birthday.  This is called a “Reduation” because the new member had been coming to the club but could not be a full member.  So the club assembled in front of Cafe 113 in Decatur with kazoos in hand to welcome the newbie.  Then they put her in a purple robe and gave her a multiple kazoo salute.  If you have never heard women tooting on kazoos on a public sidewalk, well, you have just missed out on one of life’s great moments.  Kitty Taylor, the new Red Hat member, said it was her life’s goal to become a full fledged member of the Red Hat Society and she really wasn’t joking.  It was just a cool moment to share.

One of the greatest privileges we have as photojournalists is to be part of some of the greatest moments in a person’s life.  We get a lot more pub for being there in the darkest moments and that is part of the job.  What people don’t remember is that we are also there in some of the peak moments.  Graduations, election victories, sports championships, plays, awards and yes, reduations, are all documented and celebrated in the media.  Sometimes we take these moments for granted.  Don’t!  It may not be a big deal to you but it is certainly a big deal to the person in the picture.  Remember that next time you are out there shooting another award, graduation or retirement.

Photo 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.