A Little News

We all know that everyone can shoot a picture. It is, after all, pretty simple to press a button. All of us who make a living doing this know that it is a bit more complex than that and that there is a huge gulf between a photographer and a snap shooter. There are several things that create that gulf aside from the obvious one which is talent. My friend Jonathan Palmer whom I featured yesterday has a friend at the Lexington Herald Leader who was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He has done a series of pictures and put them on his web site that he shot with his Iphone.

Now that is just ridiculous because his Iphone shots are better than what some folks are doing with gear costing many thousands of dollars. It just goes to show that a great shooter is a great shooter regardless of the gear he is using so put away the Canon vs Nikon debate and just focus on what works for you, even if it is an Iphone! The focus of this post and this series of posts is on helping us all get better fast so lets take the next step. Fortunately it doesn’t require the use of an Iphone.

One of the legends of photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson pretty much coined the whole concept of the decisive moment. He is legendary for many things but this is perhaps his greatest legacy and it is the one thing that can make you better in a real hurry. Concentrate on THE MOMENT. Although I don’t find THE MOMENT in every assignment I am convinced that every photo assignment has the one moment when everything comes together. This is even true of the mundane stuff. This is true of portraits, of ribbon cuttings, of sports events, fires, natural disasters and kids playing in the street. The key is staying mentally sharp throughout the coverage of an event so you don’t miss the moment. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I have missed the photo because I saw it happening but I was not ready. The camera was not at my eye or I had the wrong lens or I was just not paying close attention.

Sometimes just the slightest little change in expression makes the difference in a great picture and just another shot. If you really want to get better fast, dig your heels in and get determined to find that moment in every job you shoot. Here are some tips to help you do this.

First, keep your gear ready at all times. Have the exposure mode set properly, and if you are shooting manual, make sure your exposure settings are correct. Think enough in advance to know whether a long lens or a short lens is the one to use. If you are using strobes, make sure your batteries are hot and ready.

Second, maintain your mental focus on what you are doing. That doesn’t mean to be rude to folks who come up to talk to you but keep your conversations as short as possible so you can focus on why you are there. The other side of this coin is you have to not allow yourself to fall asleep mentally and this is tougher than being distracted by people talking to you. I almost missed a very important photo while covering an awards banquet one evening. Two of our most prominent citizens, both over ninety, one black and one white, got up and danced together briefly. The photo was a metaphor for these two pillars of the community and symbolized much more than the actual event itself meant. I had been just sitting at a table thinking how I wished they would just move it along and get this over with. Then they started to dance. Fortunately, people around me began reacting and I was able to get a couple of frames off before they sat back down. Hey, ninety plus citizens don’t typically spend a whole lot of time dancing. Anyway, I got the shot and it now hangs in a new elementary school named for both of them. Ironically, both of them passed away not long after that and they died within hours of one another. Life is amazing and we can shoot it if we are alert.

Third, and this is a result of the first two, predict what is going to happen and where it will happen and be ready. This increases your chances of a great photo exponentially. I know this sounds difficult but you would be surprised how easy this actually is when you are mentally awake and tracking with the event you are covering. Everything you shoot has a flow to it. When you are in the flow you can make nice photos with relative ease. It is tough when you just want to get it over with or when you are rushed to shoot and move on to the next job. Find the flow of the event and go with it. You will find even boring events more interesting and much easier to shoot. As you develop this skill in the boring events you will find it becomes automatic when things are really hopping.

About the photos: The portrait is of an outgoing county commission who had served faithfully for years but in his last year had run into some stormy waters. I though this frame captured his spirit and that final turbulent year very well. Nikon D2H with an 80-200 f2.8 and lit with a single monolight fired using it’s optical slave. I used a very low powered speedlight to trigger the monolight. The second photo is from an assignment on a guy who has taught in the same Sunday School class for fifty years. The little girl seemed unimpressed by his trick of winning the kids over with slices of apple. This was shot available light with a Nikon D1 (what was I thinking?) and a 14mm f2.8 Sigma lens which I find impossible to focus. The final photo is from a golf tournament putt off. The lady looking away is one of the competitors reacting to the crowds reaction to her opponent’s putt. I shot this with a 17-35mm f2.8 on a D2H and wished I had used some fill flash.

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

This will be the easiest reader profile yet since Jonathan and I work together at The Decatur Daily. Jonathan is a graduate of the University of Kentucky where he was mentored by legendary photojournalist Dave LaBelle. You guys bear with me while I take just a minute to brag on my friend. You will seldom meet a man with more energy than Jonathan. He always has a scheme running, and I mean that in the best way. He is always cooking up a photo project or working on some improvement to our photo site on The Decatur Daily’s web site which you can check out here.

Jonathan pushes me every day to get better and everyone needs a colleague like that. He also teaches me, especially about the internet stuff and he turned me on to SoundSlides. In fact, our online photo presence has been heavily shaped by Jonathan’s influence in terms of both the content and look that is on the site. Best of all, JP helps me bug our boss to buy us Canon. A man after my own heart! That is a plate full for a guy just a couple of years out of college.

I think that one of Jonathan’s greatest strengths, especially for one so new to the game, is his lighting skill. Usually lighting is one of the last things to develop so it is remarkable that his skills are as well advanced as they are. The photo of the fireworks is a good example of what I am talking about. If you have ever shot fireworks and mixed flash with it you will know exactly what I am talking about. The burst of fireworks all vary in intensity which makes a flash ratio nearly impossible to establish because each burst is different. Jonathan pulls it off nicely using an off camera strobe fired with a pocket wizard.

I chose the second photo because it shows another side of JP’s skill, this time in a spot news situation. This photo was actually shot the same morning as the devastating tornado I wrote about in some earlier posts. After shooting this fire which destroyed a historic home in Limestone County, Jonathan went to Pryor Field and hopped into an airplane and shot aerials of the storm damage. The thing I love about this photo is that it gets everything in the photo. You see the fire department’s ladder truck working, the burned out home and the ladies hugging. It pulls together the physical drama with the human drama and makes a really nice moment.

This is just an opinion, but it is one based out of a couple of years working with Jonathan, you should keep your eye on him. He has the perfect mix of skill, ambition, compassion and affability that makes a successful photojournalist. I hope he stays at The Decatur Daily for a long time but I would not be surprised to see him moving up in the photojournalism world rapidly, especially if some paper from his Old Kentucky Home comes calling!

For more of Jonathan’s work, check out his Flickr Photostream and his Sportsshooter member page. You can also visit Jonathan’s web site and blog and you will see first hand what I mean. Enjoy!

Photos copyright Jonathan Palmer, The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer (although they did hire Jonathan!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yesterday provides a perfect example of the weirdness of the photojournalism life. I began the day with an assignment to photograph a baby duck a lady found swimming around in her ornamental pond in her back yard in a very nice part of the city. I was not terribly excited but the photo turned out quite nice as you can see. Then, life in all its weirdness, struck with a shooting that was literally less than a mile from the lady with the duck. The neighborhood was one of the city’s less attractive and a guy was in an argument with a friend and the argument led to gun play. One man was left lying in the street with a bullet hole in his leg. He will live and be fine but how weird is it to go from a photo a little baby duck to a grown man laying in the street with a bullet hole in his leg in the matter of a couple of miles and a couple of hours?

This also plays nicely into the discussion we started yesterday with Corey Ralston’s reader profile. I did not hesitate to photograph the victim of the shooting. First of all, shootings are normally pretty uncommon. Secondly, the man’s life was clearly not in danger. The Decatur Daily has a policy where we do not run photos of people from accidents/fires/shootings when their life is hanging in the balance or where they have already perished. It is just one of those things our paper does out of respect for the community. The third reason for shooting the victim, no pun intended, is because this happened to be the third day time shooting in the city in the last month. That is extremely uncommon.

Whenever you roll up on these situations there is nothing but your gut to guide you. You will have to quickly determine what the situation is, how it feels to you and if you feel safe in taking the picture. I have been in situations where people were watching me to see what I did and when I mean watching me, I mean they were waiting for me to do something that would piss them off which would give them an excuse to do something to me. You just have to listen to that little voice inside. It is seldom wrong.

That brings me to an interesting question. Is there a photo worth dying for? Well, probably not in Decatur is my usual answer. In fact, there are situations where I will take some extra risk to get a photo and some where I definitely will not. Again, listen to your gut. It is seldom wrong. Don’t get so caught up in shooting that you fail to notice what is going on around you, particularly at shooting scenes. When I first came to work here, I was told that in certain neighborhoods I was to leave as soon as the police did. Most people never think about it, but you have several thousand dollars worth of gear around your neck at any given moment. That gear is not worth my life or my health so I will be very conscious of my surroundings. If you are working with a reporter, watch one another’s back.

With the amount of drugs and alcohol out there, you never know what is going on in people’s heads. Keep your eyes and your ears open and listen to your gut. I keep saying that but it is one of the most important things when you are in a touchy situation. There is actually a second nervous system in your gut that operates both independently from and in cooperation with your central nervous system so it is a real thing. Pay attention. Be safe and live to shoot another day.

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

A little PS here. I will not be posting this weekend. We are going to Orange Beach for the Associated Press Managing Editor’s convention to collect a few awards! Hoorah! Awards mean somebody out there agrees with you!!!

For the reader profile this week I have come back across the pond and across the country to Corey Ralston who works in Selma and Kingsburg in California. Corey also happens to be the top contributor to the A Little News flickr pool. Corey comes from Olan Mills where he was a portrait photographer and, in his words, lucked into the job working for the newspapers. He is the only shooter for both papers which can be both a curse and an opportunity. I think Corey is seeing it as an opportunity.

The photos with this post are from a horrible accident on the interstate which was caused by
extremely foggy conditions. What follows is Corey’s description of the accident.

The wreck that I shot was caused due to extreme fog conditions on Highway 99. We have a horrible foggy season and accidents due to fog are nothing new. On this particular day there were over 10 vehicles invovled in this accident. My news office was about 5 miles from where the accident occured, my editor told me to rush out to one of the accident scenes. The fog was so horrible that I was unable to see any of the accident sites from the overpass, so I took an educated guess and parked on the side of the freeway and said a prayer and ran across the lanes and found the scene where this woman and two other passengers were pinned in a car. I was the first journalist on the scene for a good 45 minutes. Soon after two other newspapers showed up and every broadcast news station in the area. The woman was stuck in the car for over an hour and a half. There was limited space to stand without feeling like I was getting in the way. The fire rescue teams seemed very understanding of what my job was and I for them. They even kept their cool when the other news teams showed up and we all crammed together in a little space between a wrecked big rig and car and a passenger bus with Canadians watching the horrible scene.
I try to not get caught up in the emotion of the scene. I felt awful for the womans plight, and as you can see from the look on her face she was in horrible pain. And I know she was watching me at some point take photos of her. There was never a point in time where I felt excited about a shot. I just wanted her to be rescued safely from the accident and wanted to be there to capture it.

Corey faced the very tough ethical situation of whether to shoot or not to shoot and then, after deciding to shoot, he had to decide what to shoot. You can see by the horror on the woman’s face that she is scared and hurt. The photo conveys the message more than just bent and twisted metal can but photos such as these come at an emotional price for both the victim and the photographer. If the photo is published, you can guarantee calls to the office canceling subscriptions and protesting the judgment of the paper and the photographer. People will call you names and some may threaten you. It can be a very difficult place to be in.

Here is what you face when doing these kinds of jobs. First, is the photo necessary to tell the story? Second, if the photo is necessary, how can I tell the story without unduly infringing on the victim who is already hurt? In other words, is my taking the photo and publishing it going to cause more harm than good. Every situation is different. Many times I look for a way to tell the story without causing more trauma; however, there are times and places where I will go for the highest impact image regardless of the victim. Some of these situations would be a wreck in a particularly dangerous place where wrecks happen regularly or when there was a chase or drunk driver or some other important factor. Where I shy away from shooting the victim is in the everyday accident situation because there is no compelling reason to shoot the victim. It would just look like exploitation.

Why go for victim shots in the situations I mentioned above? Why not just do a scene shot and avoid shooting the victim at all? The primary reason to shoot the victim is because showing the human aspect of the tragedy gives the photo more impact and the more impact the photo has the greater chance that someone with the ability to make changes will do so. Will a photo of a victim get the highway department to make needed changes? Will the photo cause the police to be more diligent patrolling for dui drivers? Will the publication of the photo raise public awareness of dangerous places on their highways? If by shooting a controversial picture I can hope to save one other life then it is worth doing in my opinion. There may be some heat. It may be uncomfortable. If you are in the news business you just have to be prepared to deal with those things if you ever want to produce change.

Photos copyright Corey Ralston. The opinions expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect those of either my employer or Corey Ralston’s employer.

When I was a young photojournalist, I religiously avoided shooting with the normal lens. In fact, I did not really own a normal lens. I had a 55mm micro but I never used it for my everyday assignments. I used my 24mm and my 180mm all the time. These were the most extreme lenses I had at that time.

Fast forward to the present day and I am still inclined to shoot with the extremes in my bag. However, it is not really avoiding the 50mm that I am talking about; although, I still have an allergic reaction to that lens. What I am really talking about is avoiding your normal. If you normally are a wide angle shooter, stretch yourself and shoot with long lenses every time you can. If you are normally a mid-range lens guy, then go to either extreme but get out of you middle ground. If you shoot mostly with the long glass, break out the wide angle and shoot as much as possible with it.

Breaking out of your normal routine literally forces you to see differently. It forces you to visualize photos that you were not even thinking about in your normal shooting mode. You have to think differently. You have to shoot differently. You have to leave your comfort zone and step outside of that proverbial box. This is good. Change is good. What will eventually happen to you is growth. You will grow as a shooter. You will get better. You can still get your money shots shooting the way you always have but after you have your safety shot, break your mold and go to an extreme.

Lighting is another area where you can fall into a routine, otherwise known as a rut. If you normally light everything, shoot a couple of projects documentary style and use no supplemental lighting. If you normally shoot everything available, jump the fence and do some stylized lighting on a few jobs. What you will find is that you will actually learn to see light better. You will learn to see natural light with new eyes. You will learn that lighting an assignment gives it an entirely new look.

Eventually you will learn to blend light in ways that are absolutely seamless. Mixing natural light and some form of supplemental light is a skill that is more valuable than just about any other you can acquire as a photographer. Unless you are a strict documentary journalist, just about every other form of photojournalism, and photography in general, require good lighting skills to advance your career.

When you break out of whatever your normal is, you will discover something has happened to you. You will have gotten better. You will have grown. You will look back at the way you used to shoot and wonder how you could have been stuck there. Your work will be full of a new energy. You will be reworking your portfolio or whatever material you use to promote yourself. Mostly you will just wonder how you had been stuck in normal mode and had not even realized it.

About the photo: For this photo of a brother/sister golf tandem, I broke several of my conventions. I used a wide lens which is not really my strength and I used a two light set up to augment the daylight. I also used an unexpected perspective on the photo. Essentially, I had a thirty minute drive to the assignment which was at the kids’ home. I used my imagination to come up with something out of my normal range and tried that first. It worked great but I also had a fall back photo just in case.

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

Faces at an Auction II- He wan’ts how much?, originally uploaded by Chris Frear.

A Little News reader Chris Frear lives in Scotland and freelances for the local farming press. What follows is Chris’s description of his shoot on a sheepdog sale where he captured this captivating image of farmer’s watching the sale. Last year, I did a post on shooting the edges of an event, not just the event itself. This photo is a perfect example of a photographer keeping his eyes open for photos outside the main event. Nice work!

The “faces” photo was taken at a sheepdog sale over in Moffat last September. The basic gist is that farmers turn up in a muddy field and watch a series of young sheepdogs being put through their paces with a small flock of perhaps five or six sheep. After each dog is run, it is auctioned to the highest bidder. The better it runs, the higher the price. The whole thing lasts about 4 hours on a good day. I was there covering the event on a freelance basis, selling some action shots to the farming newspapers.

The farming press usually only require a single photo of the highest priced dog. But four hours doing the same shot of the higher priced dogs over and over is mind numbing. To keep alert I would often photograph candids of the people in the audience during the bidding. Once I get home from an event, I download the cards into the PC, emailing off the pictures for the papers. I had forgotten taking this image until that point. I found it and several other candids, which from my point of view I liked much better than one of a dog.

The event is held every six months, and the Farmers were grumbling at the recent sale in April as it was being held during lambing season. It was also bitterly cold. The reporter standing next to me disappeared to warm up in the nearby cafe, coming back about an hour later asking if she’d missed anything. She had, the highest priced dog had fetched over 2,000 Guineas! All livestock auctions across the UK are still done in guineas, a guinea is worth £1 and 5 pence, or about $2.10

Being a country/rural photographer is different from being a photographer for a London newspaper. You still have to earn a living wage. But you’re considered part of the community first and a photographer second. You have blend in but be remembered. And most importantly you have to be prepared to get mucky and to help out. If you can manage these requirements you’re going to be OK.

I get invites out of the blue to events or requests to photograph a family gathering from people I may have met once weeks or months ago. The “joke” in the family is that if I come home mucky and/or wet through then I’ll have got a super image. I broke my foot last year in a local river trying to get a shot and ended up, up to my arm pits in freezing water. There was no point in getting out as I had no icepack, so I stayed there in the water for 20 minutes, got the image I was after. By the time I got out, the cold water had minimised any swelling in my foot! I was lucky not to get hypothermia, but hey I was having fun! I had to help wrangle a flock of sheep last autumn. The shepherd and his wife I was photographing just couldn’t do it on their own, they needed a third person (me) to help move the flock up the pen so the shepherd could man handle the sheep one at a time through a footbath. A week ago I had a call late on a Friday night asking me if I was busy on Sunday, I said no (I really should learn), so there I was last Sunday in waterproofs covered in mud, in the rain getting action shots of dogs at an agility day. Did I enjoy it? You bet. It was also great for marketing/networking. This is dog, rather than cat country.

Please check out Chris Frear’s web site and his Flickr photostream.
On his main web site you will see some of the most magnificent panoramic landscapes you could hope to see. It is beautiful work and I highly recommend you check it out. Chris’s entire site is very nice but don’t miss those panoramas.

Perhaps you have been reading this blog for a while and the question has come across your mind, “Who is this guy anyway?”  Well, you are in luck.  I have decided to answer the question.  There is now a page about me in the column at the right.  Scroll down to just below the link to my Flickr page and you will see the link.  So, if you are curious you can go there and read all about it.  And if you are not, and I certainly don’t blame you, just go on reading the posts and have fun.  Viva la anonymity!  Or something like that.

Okay, maybe this one isn’t so fast unless you are one of those people who are instinctive photographers. I am not one of those truly gifted individuals. They simply stick a camera in front of their face and magical things happen in the viewfinder. For the rest of us, getting better is an exercise much like growing. It doesn’t happen all at once and it sometimes involves a lot of repetition and hard work. This is certainly one of those areas for me.

Layering is a visual term that basically means that you are creating various layers of visual interest in the frame. It can be done with lenses, composition and light and sometimes all three of them combined. There can be a couple of layers or there can be many layers. Frankly, in the newspaper business, layering is not always well received by folks who deal in words until it is fully explained. Too often, we simply want a photo that slaps the reader in the face and yells, “Hey, wake up and look at this!”

A layered photo can do this but as often as not a well layered image invites the viewer in deeper and deeper and allows him to stimulate various parts of his visual pallet much as a fine wine does for the aficionado. This is something that takes practice and patience to develop and patience is not one of my finest qualities. That means I have to consciously work at this. It is then easier to work on layering in situations where I am controlling everything such as the environmental portrait.

Now lets look at some photos and techniques. There are more than I am showing so don’t limit yourself to just these techniques. First, and to me, most obviously, use a wide angle lens and frame the subject using a framing device. This first photo is from the Downtown Criterium bike race in Decatur. There are three distinct layers in this image beginning with the bicycle tire which is the framing device. The second layer is actually the primary focus of the image which is the bikers followed by the third layer which is the buildings that form the background. This is the easiest technique to use and it is probably the one we all learned in photo school.

The next photo is one creating layers using the arrangement of the cheerleaders and their varying expressions. Theses two devices, the varying expressions and the foreground to background relationship of the way the girls are positioned, draws you in and invites you to look for a while seeing the varying degrees of reaction to whatever may be going on on the basketball court. The foreground element is dominant and it fills the bill for newspapers because it provides an immediate hook. Then the viewer slips into the photo to see the various reactions the girls are having. This is certainly not as common a situation for most of us but it works great when it is available.

The next photo combines two layering techniques, framing and light. The use of the gentleman’s hands serves as both a layer and a framing device leading you to his face. The lighting creates the second and third layers of the photo and helps center the viewers attention on his face. As a side note, this man was one of the first to go ashore on D-day in 1944 on Utah Beach in Normandy. He was a combat engineer whose job was to disable any mines and clear beach obstructions all while under fire. His company fared well unlike many others who were killed in their boats or on the beaches, especially those who landed on Omaha Beach, the other beach assigned to U.S. forces. I really liked this man and admired his courage.

Finally, the last photo is another using a combination of framing and lighting to lead the viewer in. This was shot while the Governor of Alabama was on a campaign stop in Decatur. I used a wide lens and an ambient light underexposure combined with flash to create the funnel effect that leads you to the Governor. My oldest son was with me this day and he subbed admirably for a moving light stand. I just told him where to go and who to point the flash at and we shot several varieties of the Governor moving through the crowd.

Now you have enough to get started so go knock your editors out with your new layering skills!

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

In the last post on backgrounds, I approached the subject of backgrounds with the idea of eliminating distractions that hurt your photos. Now, let’s look at how to make your background work for you. We don’t have total control over the background in most photojournalism situations. In most breaking situations you don’t have the time to even worry about the background. When you have time to work a photo you should really try to get the background to help tell the story.

Sometimes you just get lucky, or unlucky, with the background; however, like the old saying goes, luck favors the prepared. When you first approach a situation look at backgrounds. What will you shoot your subject against, even in an action situation. Is there a background that will contribute to the photo and also, is there a background you want to avoid? This is also a good time to figure out the best lens choice. Now, when the moment happens, you are prepared.

I have three photos with to show you here. The first is a stand alone photo of a kid fishing. I was able to make use of a high embankment and get above him which allowed me to isolate him against the water which was also reflecting the sunset clouds. By the way, this photo is also strobed. I set an SB8oo on a light stand and put it in the edge of the lake to give me a little bit of separation and a nice little kicker. I used a D2h and an 80-200 lens and fired the strobe using a Pocket Wizard set. Adding the strobe allowed me to go a little under on the water without losing detail in the boy.

The next photo is from a mud volleyball tournament held every year in Athens, Alabama to raise money for the elderly and homebound. I was waiting for someone to go header into the mud hoping that they would come up facing me. That never happened but when this girl did her own version of a face plant I was able to use the people watching to get a nice photo where the background helps tell the story. You can’t see the front of the girl but you can see the other people reacting to what they see. This photo was shot available light with a D2h and a 17-35mm lens.

The last photo is also a D2h and 17-35mm shot. Decatur hosts the NAIA National Softball Championship Tournament and it is one of the highlights of my year. I love to shoot that tournament. This was the championship day and I actually had to leave before the game ended to go shoot something else. Hoping that something would still be going on when I got back, I hustled through the job and found that the tournament had ended by the time I returned. Fortunately for me there was still some celebrating going on. The girl hugging her father turned out to be the tournament MVP and her teammates in the background are holding up their championship banner for a photo. I probably could have done no better even if I had been there at the end of the game. The foreground shows the emotion and the background tells you why. I love it when things come together.

When you are out shooting, plan and prepare as much as you can but be prepared for change. Don’t over focus on the background because you run the risk of losing site of the main subject. Keep your eyes open and work your angles and lenses to maximize the background. Some of the time a wide zoom will be appropriate and other times a long zoom will be the better choice. You have to make that determination on the scene. After you have done this for a while, you won’t even be thinking about the background consciously. You will simply develop a “sixth sense” for backgrounds and you will be shooting instinctively.

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