Football photo day!

I blogged awhile back about having a two day span of shooting that I was excited about. A fashion shoot one day, and two of the top quarterbacks in the nation the next. As you may have seen, the quarterbacks were published on the front of today’s college football preview section. It is always a task thinking up good ideas for sports preview covers and then trying to organize the shoot, and get the people on board who I need to help me. This usually includes Sports Information staff at UK and sometimes other schools.The last few years Louisville has figured into my cover shoots with star quarterback Brian Brohm. I began shooting Brian when he was a senior in high school at Trinity. It was a fairly quick shoot that day and the photos I got from the shoot went over great. Brian loved the shot too and we got to be friends over the next few years. It always helps to have whomever you are shooting working with you, and being a part of the process. Whether it be a certain expression you are working to get, or pulling them to a location that is out of the norm.This may sound fairly simple but getting two of the nations top quarterbacks to get together takes a little planning. No school wants to go too far, or to the other school for example so some neutral ground is sought out. Luckily for me this was not a hard thing this year as the Governor’s Cup luncheon was in Simpsonville, Ky. this year so we all agreed the shoot would take place there.Soon after we were asked if we minded sharing time with the Courier-Journal who wanted to shoot the same thing. THEN we were told that ESPN was doing a shot of Brian Brohm that day too. I was not concerned about the extra photo shoots as long as it did not cut into my shoot time, which is usually limited to under half and hour. I took our intern, Tricia Spaulding, with me to help with the light set up, and transport, and since she was going our photo director, Ron Garrison, thought it would be a good time for her to shoot her first video. Here it is for your enjoyment as a record of a condensed photo shoot featuring photographers from other publications, some golfers who were at the site that day seeking autographs, and even the re-emergence of the old Crown Graphic camera I break out for special assignments!

Evolution of a picture

Photos can be moving, inspirational, amusing, touching and heartwarming.

When you’re the photographer, they can also be dangerous as all get-out.

You don’t have to be in a war zone or a major metropolitan disaster area to put it on the line for that one really good shot that makes it worth it all. It can just be the beautiful fury of Mother Nature flying overhead.

Yesterday I was on my way back to Lexington from an assignment in Shelbyville when I ran into a monstrous thunderstorm just inside the Fayette County line. I actually beat the storm back to Lexington and wanted to photograph lightning along the downtown skyline.

We all know lightning is dangerous and I really wasn’t looking to get myself fried, but I figured that the storm would be far enough north that I would be reasonably safe. What I didn’t know was that another storm had popped up directly west and was barrelling right for me. I didn’t get anything from the first storm and ended up retreating into one of the lower levels of Parking Structure #5 on the University of Kentucky’s campus, whose roof is my favorite spot for shooting thunderstorms in Lexington.

Once the storm had passed, lightning was flying fast and furious, but there was too much light for an exposure with a longer time length and I didn’t have a tripod. Instead, I opted to just shoot a whole slew of frames and pray that lightning would strike in one of them.

After about 150 or so frames, it did. Here’s the original picture (click for the whole thing):

This photo really doesn’t look like what ran in the paper, though. That’s where editing and the imaging technicians come in.

The job of the folks on the imaging desk is to take a picture and make sure it’s properly toned. This largely applies to making sure the color settings are correct for the print edition of the paper. For online, it can also mean correcting for the camera’s natural color deficiencies and white balance problems. They can also crop the photo for maximum effect.

The end result?

Voila. Well worth the danger.

 

Technical details: This photo was shot with a Nikon D100 at ISO 200, F20, 1/60th of a second and at 35mm.

— Dariush Shafa | dshafa@herald-leader.com

Some Errors We Can’t Correct

Note: It has come to the photographer’s attention that the light stand leg intrudes into the extreme right of the photo.  The photographer regrets the error, but won’t use the computer to remove it.

This wide-angle photo above was run in the newspaper June 2.  I was lighting room interiors with an on-camera bounce flash, and added a bounce flash on a light stand in the hallway.  The hallway was through the opening at extreme right.  I wasn’t too pleased when I discovered, back at the office, a light stand leg (top photo enlargement) poking through the opening.  Cropping tightly, I eliminated most of it.  But what I didn’t, and ethically can’t do, was to eliminate the intrusion with our Photoshop software.  The feeling at the Herald-Leader is, once we start with something “innocuous” as this, the public just won’t trust us not to alter photos.
(Canon 5-D, 16-35mm at 19mm;  400 ISO;  1/50th sec. at f3.5;  Strobes:  Canon 430EX at 1/4 power, on camera.  Nikon SB-26, 1/4 power, on stand.)

The “V” Word

For the past two weeks, I’ve been shooting with a new camera. It’s always nice to get a new piece of equipment to update the old stuff that been used to the point of falling apart. And the technology is always better.

This time was a bit different, though. With the booming trend of online video, newspaper websites are trying to jump on the bandwagon. So shooting video is now part of my, um, arsenal. And it’s a bittersweet start to a new way of journalistic storytelling.

On Saturday, during coverage of the Rolex Cross County jumping event, I had a minute to talk to veteran Sports Illustrated photographer Bill Frakes. As we were both shooting the traditional digital stills, I mentioned that the next time he saw me at the Kentucky Derby, I’d be shooting video. The look on his face was one of disbelief. He honestly looked like someone had died. I’d gone to the dark side.

Now, Frakes is never one to shirk new technology, so I was a bit puzzled by his reaction. Every still photographer will argue the merits and the power of a single image. And Frakes is a perfectionist. He, like many of us, want our work to be held to a high standard no matter the medium. And he, like many of us, aren’t seeing a whole lot of good video coming out of newspaper websites around the country. I’m pretty sure that he figures that my work with a video camera won’t be nearly as good as my still photography. And I’m pretty sure that he’s right.

Fast forward (yikes, a did I just say that?) to Wednesday morning: I’m working on the backside of Churchill Downs (shooting video for Kentucky.com and heraldleaderphoto.com) and have a moment to talk to veteran Associated Press Photographer Ed Reinke. The first time I saw Ed this week, I was carrying the video camera and he just shook his head at me. It was kind of a "I’m sorry" and "I wondered when that might happen" kind of a look.

Wednesday morning, though, Ed was gracious enough to compliment a photo of mine he saw printed in the Herald-Leader Tuesday morning. Then I had to tell him the bad news (it’s all a matter of perspective, you know): The photo he loved so much was what we call a frame grab - an image taken from the video (see above photo). The look on his face was the same one I had seen on Bill Frakes’ face only days before. It was a look of disbelief, surprise, and kind of a sadness.

The ability to shoot photojournalism on video has opened up a whole new world for newspaper photographers. It is so, so, different than what many of us have been doing for years and years (nearly 20 for me). It’s hard to embrace. But it’s curiously challenging. It’s frustrating, but liberating, too (heck, I can shoot video AND stills at the SAME TIME???!!). Until now, the technology behind frame grabs has been so poor, that we’ve never considered using it this way. But with the new high-def mini digital video recorders, it’s sometimes possible now to use video frames in the paper and on the web and most people can’t tell the difference, including the professionals in the business.

The debate among photojournalists regarding the best use of video on websites (journalistically speaking) will continue indefinitely. That’s how we’ll get better. The technology will also continue to improve. And hopefully, the pendulum will swing away from the trend-induced, must-have frenzy that encourages mediocrity. My guess is that video will just become part of our tool kit and in a few years will be a normal part of our routine.

But for now, I’ll learn the new technology, learn the software, learn the new shooting and editing techniques and surely make a few mistakes along the way. I’ll do it because I have to, and I’ll do it because I want to. I won’t kid myself that online video will save our industry, (which, for the most part, is dreadfully shortsighted, under the thumb of Wall Street, and looking for anything and everything to stop declining readership).

And hopefully I won’t disappoint our readers, Bill Frakes, or Ed Reinke along the way.
______________________________

Now for the technical stuff for those of you who care:

All of the above photos by me are examples of the video frames. I’ve posted them at 1000 px wide, but the originals are about twice that size. They have not been sharpened, toned, or manipulated in any manner so you can judge for yourself the image quality.

My new video camera is a Canon XH-A1 HDMiniDV

I use a MacBookPro and Final Cut Pro for editing. I use Flash video encoding for the videos I’ve posted so far on heraldleaderphoto.com.

And here’s a shot of me at work on the backside at Churchill this week (photo by Bill Luster).

Strikes at the ball game

Handheld Canon EOS-1D Mark II, Lens (mm): 300
ISO: 1250, Aperture: 2.8, Shutter: 1/20
What’s a photographer to do during a Lexington Legends rain delay? How ’bout try his luck at catching a bolt of lightning over the Lexington skyline.

I use the word luck because there is an awful lot of that involved here. But it also took a little patience. I spent about 15 minutes on the balcony at Applebee’s Park with the Canon 1D Mark II and 300 f2.8 glued to my face waiting for lighting strikes to hit near or behind the Lexington skyline. I caught a couple of other flashes, but they didn’t line up nearly as nice as the one above.

One problem I made for myself was using the 300mm lens. I didn’t give myself any latitude for cropping. Lightning was everywhere but I took a gamble and stayed on the skyline. The image above is nearly full frame (probably 95% of the original frame).

Here are a couple of other strikes. The difference in color is accurate - the fast moving storm darkened the sky quickly. The image above was taken about 12 minutes after these below.

– David Stephenson

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