Life is short, take pictures

2011 - Best of Cute Kids Edition

2011-12-18T11:56:00.003-05:00

These are the cutest kid pictures I took for the paper this year.

Tristan Veney (left) and 5-year-old Kayla Giles race to the finish line of the race for bikes with training wheels in the annual Tour de Creek bicycling event in the Willow Creek community of Clinton.

Three-year-old Jacob Bechetof Upper Marlboro swings on a rope over the foam pit at the Gymnastics Workshop for children up to 12-years-old at the Sports and Learning Complex in Landover on Tuesday. Workshops are held most most Tuesdays, Wednesdays and certain Fridays and Saturdays in January and February.

Nine-year-old Joshua Ojuolapa of Springdale, 6-year-old Cameron Green of Lanham, Pamela Leftrict, Dionna Green, 6-year-old Markel Hickman of Bowie and 6-year-old Christopher McGraw of Bowie dance at the Mother/Son dance at Thomas Pullen Arts School in Landover.

Jairo and Anna Parra, who are stationed at Andrews Air Force Base, drop their 5-year-old daughter Nicole off in the kindergarten classroom for her first day of school at the Hope Foundation Charter School in Morningside.

Martial arts instructor Dennis Brown helps 7-year-old Charis Childs of Cheverly during a class at Brown's studio in Largo. Brown and his studio are hosting the upcoming Capitol Classics, an annual martial arts compeition, at National Harbor.

Annette Field says goodbye to her 5-year-old daughter Alyssa Field as she begins kindergarten on the first day of school at the Hope Foundation Charter School in Morningside.

(All photos copyright The Gazette. Used with permission.)

Year End Review - Sports (part 2)

2011-12-08T20:02:00.001-05:00

Some more sports photos from the past year.

(Upper-left photo) Brother John Paoletti of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception order watches his teammates on the DC Padres from the dugout as the play a game against Bowie high school and college players at Baysox Stadium. Area priests and seminarians organized the baseball league to draw more young men into the seminary and into the priesthood.

Top: Bowie High School's Yaje Ngundam (left) jumps to reach a shot from Arundel High School during the the 4A State Semi-finals match held in Ritchie Colisseum at the University of Maryland College Park.Bottom: Riverdale Baptist High School's Jonathon Smith slides in safely for the steal as Pallotti High School's third baseman John Maloney jumps up to catch the throw from first.

(All photos copyright The Gazette. Used with permission.)

Time flies

2011-12-04T22:00:00.001-05:00

Can it be that it's almost the end of 2011. I have not been blogging much this year. Life has a way of getting in the way. But there's always next year....

If you were, say, my editor, and you were to ask me to do a job performance evaluation for myself for the last year, I would probably not give myself an A+, or 4 stars or whatever. Our staffing has gone down, our number of assignments per day have gone up and, like I said, life outside of work has been, er, getting in the way. At least, that's how it feels to me this December, looking back over the last 12 months. But, I happened to be archiving some files at work when I started reviewing some of what I've shot this year and I have to say it made me feel better. Good enough that I decided to pull out some of my fav's and share them with you, my loyal readers.

Today:

Sports - Part 1

All-County Baseball Player Ryan Burbrink of DeMatha High School and All-County Softball Player Tiffany Harvell of Bowie High School

Gene "Pop" Meacham of Bowie hits the ball as Richard D'Ambrisi of Cockeysville serves as umpire or "arbiter" and Joe Stanik of Arnold pitches, also known as "hurling" in the 1864-era version of baseball that the Chesapeake and Potomac Baseball Club play, during an exhibition game at Huntington South Park sponsored by the Bowie Museum.

The next few images were from a photo story and video package we did on two local Olympic boxing hopefuls.

D'Mitrius Ballard (right) spars at his training gym Monday in Capitol Heights as they both prepare for the Olympic trials later this month.

I couldn't decide which of these two photos I liked better, so I'm just putting them both in here.

Jerry Odum stands ringside at his training gym Monday in Capitol Heights as he prepares for Olympic trials later this month.

D'Mitrius Ballard (left) spars with Jerry Odum at their training gym Monday in Capitol Heights as they both prepare for the Olympic trials later this month.

Jerry Odum spars in the ring at his training gym Monday in Capitol Heights as he prepares for Olympic trials

Busy Saturday

2011-11-20T21:01:00.001-05:00

Busy (and pretty typical) Saturday

Saturday, especially in the fall, is my busiest day of the week. News editors want us to hit all of the local events and happenings--everything from 5k runs and charity walks to historical reenactments. And sports editors want us to shoot as many football games as they can cover. (Friday night lights? Not in Prince George's County, where many of the schools don't have properly lighted fields.) This Saturday was pretty typical:

10 a.m. - Local farmer's market/Christmas bazaar/environmental outreach in Cheverly.

11:30 a.m. - "What's in Your Attic?" - Antiques experts help you discern trash from treasure at the Marietta House Museum in Glenn Dale

Noon - FOOTBALL!

2 p.m. - 3-on-3 basketball tournament for charity in Bowie

I'm getting tired just blogging about it.

All photos copyright The Gazette. Used by permission.

Happy Halloween!

2011-10-31T16:58:00.002-05:00

Halloween seems to have grown from just one night of trick-or-treating to a week-long festival of costumes and candy hording. I had a couple of holiday events this week and caught one photo that I thought was pretty funny.

Happy Campers

2011-06-27T14:07:00.002-05:00

I spent the morning at a unique summer camp in Southern Maryland for a story to appear soon in the Gazette. The camp is called Camp Accomplish and it is run by Melwood, a local agency that supports people with disabilities in the DC region. They provide support and job training and placement services. One of their guiding principals is to help people with disabilities to become fully integrated into their communities, rather than being sidelined or warehoused or otherwise discriminated against.

This summer camp for children and teens fits right in with that ethos. The campers are evenly split--half have disabilities and half do not. Maybe "split" is not the right word, because in reality they are most definitely not split up at all. All of the campers do all of the activities together. There is no separation by the staff, and more interestingly, amongst the campers themselves.

The campers completely accept each other. They cheer each other on as their fellow campers face challenges like the ropes course, where they scramble 15-feet or more in the air on nothing but ropes tied between trees in the forest. They enjoy more traditional summer camp fare like games of "Sharks & Minnows" and tag and help each other make crafts with beads and glitter and such.

It was really heart warming to see that these kids ignore the labels placed on themselves and their fellow campers and just have fun together. The way all kids (and adults) should.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Sharks and Minnows

Campers cheer after a game.

Half of the campers have disabilities, half do not. No one seems to pay attention the differences.

Campers take horse riding lessons in the training barn.

Campers take their horses out for a riding lesson. All campers are encouraged to do any and all activities they are interested in.

A counselor helps a camper on the high ropes course. Counselors are recruited from all over the world, representing 11 countries this summer. Melwood also made an effort to recruit several counselors with disabilities.

A counselor watches as a camper attaches himself to the safety line at the ropes course.

All photos copyright The Gazette 2012. Used with permission.

Barber Shop

2011-01-14T14:55:00.005-05:00

(all images copyright The Gazette, 2011. Used by permission)

Got to take pictures of an old-school Italian barber shop yesterday. The owner, Carlo, has been cutting hair and lowering ears in that shop for more than 50 years. And it seemed like all the other barbers--Joe, John, Vince, Tino and Nino--were somehow related. It was a great time.

Ro, the Body Builder

2011-01-04T16:10:00.004-05:00

While searching for a feature photo for this week's paper in Landover. I stopped by the huge gym/pool/indoor track/community center in Landover near the stadium. The place is huge. I asked the person at the front desk if there was anyone in there working on keeping their New Year's Resolution to get fit. She thought about it and shouted out across the weight room, "Hey, Ro! Come here!" Over walked a woman who had obviously been working out for more than three days.

Her name is Ro (short for Rotunda) and she is a competitive body builder. She just started competing last August but she is preparing for her third (or fourth?) competition in April. The more I talked to her the more I thought her story would make a great package. Here are some photos from my first take today. Tune in this April for the full story.

(all images copyright The Gazette, 2011. Used by permission)

Strange Swearing-in Ceremony

2010-12-10T17:13:00.005-05:00

Things have been a little weird in local politics lately. As I reported earlier in this blog, the Feds arrested the then-county executive Jack Johnson and his wife Leslie, who herself had just been elected to a seat on the county council. That same federal investigation has resulted in further arrests of several county police officers for running untaxed alcohol and cigarette rings.

Federal agents raid Tick Tock Liquors in Hyattsville as part of a widening federal corruption probe in Prince George's County.

On Monday, the new county executive Rushern Baker was sworn in along with several new council members including the aforementioned Leslie Johnson. There was a larger than normal media presence and it was bitter cold, but I was pretty happy with what my take.

A newly sworn in County Executive Rushern L. Baker speaks during the inauguration ceremony in Upper Marlboro on Monday. (12/06/2010)

Council Member Leslie E. Johnson and out-going County Executive Jack Johnson listen to remarks by the new County Executive Rushern L. Baker at the swearing in ceremony on Monday in Upper Marlboro.

A newly sworn in County Executive Rushern L. Baker speaks during the inauguration ceremony in Upper Marlboro on Monday. Earlier in the day Baker announced the removal of several agency heads, including Police Chief Roberto Hylton following a federal investigation and arrests of county officials and police officers in recent weeks.(12/06/2010)

County Executive Rushern L. Baker (right) and his wife Christa Beverly listen to speakers at the swearing in ceremony on the steps of the County Administration Building in Upper Marlboro on Monday.

County Executive Rushern L. Baker (right) shakes the hand of a supporter after being sworn in at a ceremony in Upper Marlboro on Monday.

County Executive Rushern L. Baker answers questions from the press about his decision announced earlier in the day to replace several agency heads including Police Chief Roberto Hylton.

Min. Jacquelyn Hawkins sings a musical selection during the swearing in ceremony of new County Executive Rushern Baker and several new county council members on Monday.
(all images copyright The Gazette, 2011. Used by permission)

Oh, did I mention that the newly seated Clerk of the Court, former council-member Marilynn Bland was recently charged with assaulting a county employee? Sheesh.

Scoop!

2010-11-15T16:43:00.003-05:00

The past few days have been a bit crazy in the county that my newspaper covers, where our outgoing county executive and his wife were both arrested by federal authorities. I happened to be on assignment a few miles away from his house when the FBI and IRS showed up at Jack and Leslie Johnson's home in Upper Marlboro. When I arrived there was a TV cameraman and a reporter and a lot of unmarked government cars parked out front. After about 40 minutes with just the occasional federal agent wandering in or out of the house, both of the Johnsons were led out of the house separately and in handcuffs. I got the shots giving the Gazette the scoop on still images of the arrest for the day's news cycle.

*The copyrights for all of these images are held by The Gazette Newspapers. Do not reproduce them without permission.

Marching Bands

2010-10-23T08:28:00.002-05:00

I recently did a video on a high school marching band exhibition. It was fun, if hectic, shooting this as the bands marched around the field in their formations and their brightly colored (and sparkly!) uniforms. The drum major I interviewed really caught my attention with his incredible dance moves, and I was glad that he did a great job in his interview so I could focus on him. All in all a fun evening of shooting.

Ag Report

2010-09-29T15:57:00.007-05:00

I grew up on a chicken farm. And while I did not really appreciate it at the time, it was a great way to grow up. Of course, now I'm a city boy, but I still love farms and farm animals and learning about where our food comes from (or should come from) and I love to see farmers who are keeping it real--growing food in the ground with organic techniques. Part of me wishes I had the fortitude and dedication to do what these people do, but being realistic about my other hobbies (traveling, watching too much TV and sleeping in late), none of which are conducive to being a farmer, I am going to stick with making images of these great people.

Recently, it seems I've been put on the farm beat at the newspaper, at least unofficially. A few weeks ago I did a video about one of the county's first vineyards taking in it's first official harvest.

This week I put together a video about a program that pairs young farmers with experienced mentors for one year, allowing them to pass on their knowledge to a whole new generation of farmers. A recent "graduate" of the program was giving a tour of her new veggie farm to this year's class, showing them how she has implemented the things she has learned while working on other people's farms.

The videos we put together for the newspaper's web site are generally limited to 2-3 minutes. There was so much more I wanted to include in the video from the great interviews I got, but, I ran out of time and b-roll. My greatest disappointment, though, was that I did not get to include my footage of the new farmers' chickens. So I decided to include them on my blog.

New camera, new movies

2010-09-19T06:49:00.000-05:00

I was recently issued a new Nikon D300s digital SLR at work. We are doing video stories for the paper's website now and we were hoping that a camera that shoots HD video and stills would make our jobs easier. Frankly, I was dubious. And now, after having lived with the new device for a while, I was right. It does not make our jobs any easier.

It has made the job harder. At least twice as hard because we are doing two assignments (stills and video) rather than one (stills OR video). But, I love them both and I am enjoying the process--learning, creating, shooting, editing--immensely.

I'm really glad that I got the camera in the summer when things were a bit slower paced around the office and I had some vacation time to take the camera and just get used to shooting video with it. I took it to my parents' house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and spent a few weekends with my nephews just shooting videos of them. Here are three little videos I made, in order. You can see in the first video, which has a lot of shaky footage and goes a little in and out of focus in parts, that I was just getting used to the awkward form factor of the camera. But I think you can see that by the third video I was starting to get the hang of it.

I'll be honest, it is not comfortable to shoot video hand held with this camera. It has to be focused manually using the preview screen on the back of the camera, so you have to hold the camera body at least 6 inches away from your head. To experience this for yourself, grab a five or ten pound weigh and hold it at eye level six inches in front of your face. It is not a pleasant experience. So, I'm definitely learning to love my monopod again. It gives me the stability I need to prevent my video from getting the shakes and the flexibility to move where quickly.

In these videos I didn't really even worry about the sound, I just through some music on top and let the video images speak for themselves. I'll talk more about sound some other time.

Canoe Ride

Pool Time

Day at the Beach

Election Returns

2010-09-15T10:38:00.007-05:00

Prince George's County, where I work, is a solidly Democratic territory, so the primary election is the big one for most Congressional and state and local candidates. Tuesday was the primary in Maryland, which meant a long day at the office and a late night standing around waiting for results to come in after the polls closed. I spent a few hours in the afternoon at a polling place in rural Upper Marlboro where two candidates for sheriff were trying to catch the voter's eye as they went arrived.

I spent the evening at the party for the campaign of one of the county executive candidates. The candidate, Michael Jackson, trailed in the polling results throughout the night, despite having received the endorsement of the outgoing county exec., Jack Johnson. Jackson didn't arrive at the party until nearly midnight, and told the crowd of supporters that they believed they still had a chance because the precincts in which he had the greatest support had not released their results.

Since it was too early to know who would win or lose that race, I had to get images that could be used if he won the election or if he lost. Jackson ended up losing the race to Rushern Baker.

Go-Go lighting

2010-06-08T12:31:00.004-05:00

I recently shot the cover of our Arts and Entertainment section, which was a story about Go-Go music. Go-Go, a musical genre native to Washington, DC, is a mix of funk, hip-hop and dance music that has to be experienced to be understood. The assignment was to go to a local record store that sells a lot of Go-Go music, especially recordings of live shows known as “PA tapes”. It was weekday mid-morning, so the store—PA Palace—was rather empty except for the guy behind the counter and his friend who was mostly window shopping and hanging out. They were both really funny and the guy behind the counter seemed excited when I suggested that I photograph him to be in the newspaper. After about 10 minutes of having his picture taken, his enthusiasm began to flag a bit, but he was a trooper and I got some good stuff.

As for the lighting, I knew I wanted something really flashy (pun intended) so I set up some lights. Most of the light comes from two Vivitar 285s on radio triggers. They were set up a bit behind the subject on either side of him, creating a sort of rim lighting effect on both sides of his face and body. I also used a flash to fill in the resulting shadows on the front of his face and light up the CDs on the counter in front of him.

Bowie Training Center

2010-05-01T06:30:00.002-05:00

Recently I made a video about a racehorse training facility in Bowie. It's a very general informational video about what goes on there to accompany a larger print story about the possible sale of the property to a housing developer.

I had to get up before the sun (literally) to be there when the trainers were there, but it was worth it to get that beautiful early morning light.

Also, I love horsies!

Immigrants protest crackdown

2010-04-29T06:38:00.002-05:00

Florinda Faviola Lorenzo-Desimilian (above, at left), a married, 26-year-old mother of three was arrested for selling phone cards from her home in Langley Park. While in the county jail, officials sent her fingerprints to federal immigration authorities, who identified her as having over-stayed her work visa and flagged her for deportation through a federal program known as Secure Communities.

Florinda has since been released and is awaiting a deportation hearing, but she and her family returned to the jail on Monday along with about forty-five people organized by CASA de Maryland, an immigrant advocacy group, where they protested the county's participation in the Secure Communities program.

For a link to the Gazette story, click here.

The protest began when a busload of protesters in red CASA de Maryland shirts showed up at the county jail with signs in hand. They marched towards the jail entrance as organizers lead call-and-response chants in Spanish and English. Some covered their faces when a camera got too close.

Jail administrators were visibly displeased with the location of the protesters--right in front of the main entrance. But, after some negotiations, the picket line proceeded without incident.

Eventually, the protesters gathered in front of the news cameras to hear the speakers articulate their opposition to the policy. Florinda spoke briefly in Spanish and was obviously emotionally upset by the ordeal. Her husband Rafael spoke after her. He was also upset by the situation and his speech was so rapid-fire that the interpreter couldn't break in to translate his words. With or without translation, his point was clear.

We have a winner!

2010-04-27T13:54:00.003-05:00

The Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association held their annual awards banquet last week. They released the names of the winners several weeks ago and the email announcement that made it's way around the office did not include me. On the day of the banquet my coworker called me from the banquet to tell me that I had won. What a surprise!

My photo illustration for the annual dining guide won, which made me very happy because I really enjoyed making the image and I was very pleased with the final product.

Slow photos

2010-02-17T23:07:00.004-05:00

You've heard of the slow food movement. I'm into the slow photo movement. I bought a Mamiya 7 medium format camera. It is a lot of fun to shoot film, especially when it is on (relatively speaking) giant 6x7 film. Mostly I keep it loaded with Delta 3200, a black and white film from Ilford that is really high speed, but also very flexible. I frequently pull the film, shooting it at 800 outside on a cloudy day or in a brightly lit room. Or just shoot it at 3200 in really low light situations. The great thing is that when you shoot on such a large format, the size of the grain becomes less of an issue than it is when you shoot 35 mm. Also, I kind of like grainy black and white.

Anyway, I finally scanned in a roll of film I shot last fall during Thanksgiving. Mostly I shoot photos of my niece and nephews. Which allows me to have a constant supply of birthday and Christmas gifts for my siblings and the grandparents (and great-grandparents). Thought I would share a few since it was such a nice surprise to see some photos I forgot I had taken.

Pie a la (layer) mode

2010-01-05T17:28:00.006-05:00

This year I shot the annual end of the year dining guide for the paper, which is a compilation of the year's restaurant reviews. We always try to spice it up with big cover art, of which I've done my fair share. This year I wanted to keep it simple but a little edgy so I decided on an overhead shot of a mostly finished pie at a local diner. We always try to integrate some of the text into the image. In the past I've done meatballs and spaghetti to spell out the year, for example. This time I wanted to have the year written on one of the classic diner guest checks. I didn't want to limit myself in terms of where how the check was positioned in the image or what the text on the check said so I used photoshop to "do it in post." I got some questions about how I did it in the office, so I thought I would share that here.

The food and the plates and cups and silverware, etc., were all shot at the diner. I ended up shooting the guest check at the office, mostly because I forgot to shoot it at the diner.

I used the lasso tool to select the check and remove the background and cut and pasted it into it's own layer over the table image. I used the "Warp" resizing tool to change the shape and make it a little less square to try to suggest it was hanging off the plate.

I used the drop shadow effect from the Layer Style drop down menu to give it a little separation from the table and plate below and make it look a little more realistic.

The dialog box for this allows you to control how far away the shadow is, how dark and diffuse it is and other details.

To add the text on the check, I scribbled various versions and possibilities in felt magic marker on paper and scanned it in. This allowed me to pick and choose what text I wanted. It didn't need to be perfect on the paper because I could pick the best letters and numbers, etc., and put them together digitally.

I used the lasso to select the text I liked and cut and pasted it as a new layer on top of the check layer.

As you can see, the white paper is covering up the check below and it looks pretty lame.

To remove the white paper background and leave just the black marker text, I just changed the mode of the layer from "Normal" to "Darken." In darken mode, Photoshop compares each pixel of the layer with corresponding pixel of the layer below it. If the pixel of the top layer is darker than the one below it, the top layer remains visible, if it is lighter than the layer below, it is masked. Since I wrote the words on white paper, it magically disappeared when I changed the layer mode.

When I first started using Photoshop with layers, could never figure out what those layer modes were for. Whenever I clicked on them it just made the image disappear or look weird with no seeming rhyme or reason. I finally learned that it does pay to read the manual.

This is the final image:

P.S. - My favorite part of the image is the coffee ring on the table in the upper right corner.

Best of 2009 - Sports Edition

2009-12-27T17:05:00.003-05:00

Here is the best I could get from the sidelines.

Above, left: Cheverly's Justin Welch swims in the boys 15-18 50-meter breaststroke event at the Prince Mont Division C championship swim meet at the New Carrollton Recreation Pool.

Clockwise from upper-left: Travis Thomas runs the ball for Bowie High School during a game against Flowers High School. Laurel High School's Keaun Fitzpatrick grabs the helmet of Suitland High School's Kevin Williams. Quarterback Deandre Smith does push-ups at a preseason practice at Wise High School. Laurel High School's Lafayette Matthews (right) chastises teammate Jacques Noel (center) after a fight broke out between their team and High Point High School on the field during the second quarter. Wide receiver Trevon Butler reaches for a pass during practice at Wise High School. Johnathan Clark runs the ball for Flowers High School during a game at Bowie.

Clockwise from upper-left: Bowie High School's Amanda Clark is safe at third base during the 4A South Region final softball game against Flowers High School. St. Vincent Pallotti High School catcher Kevin Murphy tags the Boys Latin School runner Sam Friedman for the out at home base. Greenbelt runner Jeff Meekins steals second as Bowie second baseman Tony Cerverizzo catches the ball. Gaithersburg Post 295 baseball team's second baseman Spencer Pearman jumps over Bowie runner Rick Cash as he steals second during the summer league baseball game at Bowie High School.

Clockwise from upper-left: DeMatha High School student Pete DeSouza picks up goalie Ryan "Nugget" Brant after the team won WCAC lacrosse championship. Dhovuta Glover drives the ball towards the goal for Flowers High School during a game against Laurel High School. Jose Leiva fires the ball into the goal for Laurel High School during a game against Flowers High School. Laurel High School's Jose Leiva kicks the ball past Flowers High School goalie Jabari Campbell.

Best of 2009 - Kids Edition

2009-12-18T22:34:00.003-05:00

As 2009 winds down, it's time to take a look back at what I've shot over the last 12 months and take stock. I've picked some of my favorites and grouped them into categories so I can spread them out over the next few days. First up: my best photos of kids. I spend gobs of time shooting in schools, parks, summer camps, people's homes, etc., etc. This is the best I could come up with this year.

Above, clockwise from upper-left: 1)Students from Bond Mill Elementary School prepare for a school musical about 1950's rock and roll. 2) Joseph McAllister, 6, of Charleston, West Viginia, gets a closer look at one of the classic cars on display at the 4th Annual Cruzin Main Street Car, Street Rod and Bike Show to benefit the Marlboro Volunteer Fire Department and the Lions Cluby. 3) Glenn Morgan, 6, of Clinton, participates in the portion of the "Tour De Creek" bikes with training wheels at the third annual youth bike event to raise funds for Willow Creek community park improvements.4) Jesse Kittrell, 11, of College Park, skates as fast as he can around the Herbert Wells Ice Rink in College Park.

Above, clockwise from upper-left: 1) Marta Nkar, 3, of Takoma Park, eyes a display case while her mother shops for her school uniform at JC Penny's in the Prince George's Mall. 2) (from left to right) Makayla Bowen-Longinno, 7, Megan Jones, 9, Tiarra Swan, 9, Shomari Hall, 7, and Tijan Glover, 9, walk for one mile around the Robbert Goddard French Immersion school in Seabrook for the school's Turkey Trot to encourage physical fitness. 3) Madison Payne (center), 5, of Upper Marlboro, gets a close look at a snake during a wildlife lecture by the Maryland-National Capital Parks and Planning Commission at the Park your Arts book sale and arts festival in Upper Marlboro. 4) (From left to right) Larry Lewis, Kabuki Caternor and Tialeia McCorkle wait as Ben Lagnes takes his turn jumping rope to raise money for the American Heart Association in the Jump Rope for Heart program at Marlton Elementary School.

Above, clockwise from upper-left: 1) Melijah Hamilton, 3, of Laurel, jumps into the arms of his uncle Donny Hamilton, also of Laurel, at the Laurel Municipal Pool. 2) (Left to right) Rumar Williams, 11, of Brentwood; Steven Williams, 10, or Riverdale; Chase Washington, 7, of Greenbelt; and Madison Wilson, 10, of Korea, cool off with water guns at the Berwyn Heights Community Center summer camp. 3) Jordan Plater, 10, of Lanham, dribbles the ball for the Metro Sixers of Bowie during their game against the Cardinals of Alexandria, Va., at Bowie High School as part of the Metro Sixers Summer Breeze tournament. 4) First-grader Jessica Womack, 7, tells Tulip Grove Elementary School principal Brian Baudoin about her science fair project. Jessica's project examined the way sugar dissolves in various liquids.

Video and Audio Slideshow

2009-11-23T13:00:00.004-05:00

Last week I put together a few multimedia pieces, and I thought I'd post a few links to them here.

The first is a video that is part of a weekly series we are doing with our sports department in which they choose the high school football player who gave the best performance on the field.

The second is a slideshow with audio about a group of very talented young musicians who study with the National Symphony Orchestra as part of their Youth Fellows program. Happy viewing!

Mother-Daughter murders video

2009-09-17T14:47:00.002-05:00

I've been working with a couple of reporters at the paper on a special multimedia feature about a pair of double murders in Largo that have been unsolved for more than six months. This is one of the longer video pieces I have worked on and it involved a doing numerous interviews and putting it together with new photos and file photos as well as submitted photos from the families.

Football returns

2009-09-12T16:13:00.007-05:00

Fall is here, the cool weather has moved in (quite abruptly, I might add) and high school football is back in session. The sports editors at my paper decided that they wanted to interview three of the the top players in our county and create a web video and photo package for the paper to accompany it. I got to shoot the portraits, which allowed me to play studio photographer for the day. Here are some of the photos we made.

Summertime

2009-07-11T08:57:00.007-05:00

Above: (From left) Kenrick Rilee and his brother Alexander line up backstage before the Eleanor Roosevelt High School graduation ceremony at the Comcast Center. The Rilee twins graduated at the top of their class and will be attending Princeton University

It's been so long since I updated my blog I'm almost embarrassed to start writing again. But, I figured I better get some of these graduation photos up before school starts again!

Every springs photogs in my office spend about a month going from one graduation to the next. I think I probably shot a dozen or so. It is a long month. The weather is usually great, and your stuck in a gymnasium or indoor arena listening to another valedictorian speech. But, the kids are having the time of their lives. And the parents are going crazy. (Hey, that's a good idea for next year... get some photos of those parents going crazy in the audience.) Any way, here are a few:

Above: People get ready... Students at Woodstream Christian Academy prepare for graduation. Below: Bishop McNamara High School students line up in the crypts of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception before graduating.

Above: Garrett Wenger adjusts his cap before giving the valedictory address at the Bishop McNamara High School graduation at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. Below: Oxon Hill High School graduation.
Below: Corey Campbell-Murga delivers his commencement address at the Croom Vocational High School graduation at Flowers High School. This was a very cool graduation because some of the students just didn't fit into traditional school but you could really tell that they found their place at this small vocational school. Some of them end up with jobs in construction trades with starting salaries higher than ... let's just say higher than some newspaper employees.

Making it official

2009-03-27T09:35:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, my partner Hampton and I went down to the city office of Vital Records and had our union "blessed" by the District of Columbia. We filled out some paper work, got it notarized at the lovely FedEx office on K Street and signed on the dotted line in a cramped administrative office with overhead fluorescent lighting on Hamp's lunch hour. I have photographed many wedding ceremonies, but this one took the cake for low budget (although ironically there was no cake, we had fish tacos afterwards). And our wedding portrait was done by one of the nice ladies who works in the office. It really captures the ambiance of the setting. I think this wedding photography is definitely an example of the cobbler's children having no shoes.

Hamp and I are registered by Ms. D. Watts at the DC Vital Records Department.

So, after only 11 and a half years, my partner and I finally made things official, sort of. The District of Columbia offers Domestic Partnership registration, but it provides only the most meager of benefits/protections for couples (we are guaranteed hospital visitation, as long as we only get sick in this city). But it's something. We'll take what we can get and just hope that a new administration and a more friendly Congress will soon give us the same basic rights that all of our straight friends enjoy.

Jen's headshots

2009-03-09T14:15:00.002-05:00

I spent last weekend in Brooklyn with one of my dearest friends, Jen, who is an actress in the big city. She needed some new headshots, as working actors always do, so I came up for the weekend and we got to hang out, catch up on gossip and make some great photos. It was so much fun.

I shoot at least three or four portraits a week in my job, so I'm used to doing portraits, but I don't get to do portrait sessions with actors very often. When I photograph a business owner or a community activist--you know, civilians--I have to tell them (or more often show them) how to position their body. I have discovered that this requires a great deal of tact. You can't say to someone you just met, who is not a professional model being paid to be photographed, that their smile looks forced. It is a forced smile because I'm there taking a photo. Instead of saying, "You're slouching,"you have to say, "Try sitting up a little straighter."

It is so much fun working with someone who knows how to control her facial expressions and the position of her body. And of course it's great working with someone you've known for 20 years, who you can laugh with if one of you does something silly or if a picture looks goofy.

Oh, baby

2009-03-08T09:24:00.003-05:00

Last weekend I got the chance to photograph something that I don't have a lot of experience with--a baby. I photograph children all of the time for the newspaper, but I can't remember ever photographing an infant before. A friend of mine from college called and asked if I would photograph his one-month-old son, and I said, "Sure."

I thought I could get all of my location lighting set up in the few minutes while Ezra was getting dressed and then I would be ready to shoot and it would go very quickly. It turns out that infants do things on their own schedule and can not be told when to pose and how. (Any parent is probably thinking, "Well, duh.") So I had to let go of any preconceived notions of how exactly a photo would look and allow the scene to unfold. It was a sort of zen experience.

This photo was one of those photos that didn't end up exactly as I had imagined it in my mind, but I loved the outcome none the less. Initially I conceived of the baby being cradled in one of the parent's arms, sleeping peacefully. There was no peaceful sleeping at this photo shoot. But once Ezra found a spot he was comfortable in, the photo just happened. I especially love the contrast between the skin tones and the material and the texture of the skin and of course just the lovely way his mother is cradling and comforting him with her hands. I am really happy with this one.

I was also surprised by the way his face would change as he moved from one expression and emotion to the next. Sometimes he would look like a bleary-eyed baby that just woke up from a nap and then within an instant his face would relax, his eyes would widen and you suddenly see a different person. Also, I love his little arms. He looks like a baby Popeye.

We changed the settings a few times to get a variety of photos and Ezra eventually ended up in his bassinet. The blue color and the great texture of the bassinet was a great contrast to the warm tones and smooth texture of Ezra's skin. I think it made for some really nice photos.

Good Hair

2009-02-24T15:25:00.004-05:00

The other day I had an assignment to shoot some performances by local students, one of which was a step dance team. As soon as I started shooting I noticed a couple of girls who had hair that was really flying around and--since I was using a flash that could stop the action of the hair flying through the air--I thought it could make some dramatic photos. I thought they ended up looking pretty fun so I decided to share them.

Good news

2009-02-11T15:32:00.006-05:00

This week has brought plenty of good news. First, I am now the proud new uncle of two new Andersons, Kariso and Telisho, who arrived with my brother and his wife and her mother from Ethiopia on Saturday. I shot some video during the few minutes we had together greeting them at the airport. I had to work later that day so I didn't get to spend much time with them, and of course they were tired after 16 hours of air travel so they wanted to get home right away. But they were adorable and I can't wait to spend more time with them.

In other good news, I won second place in the Best Photojournalism category in the Suburban Newspapers of America 2008 editorial contest for the photographs I made of the dancers at the University of Maryland who recreated a 1937 piece created for the WPA. I blogged about shooting the photos at the time. I was gratified that a project that I put a lot of time and effort into was recognized. And, of course, I'd like to thank the academy.

Waste not, want not

2009-01-30T08:14:00.002-05:00

I spent the better part of the morning at the county landfill, recently. And, frankly, I'd love to go back and spend some more time there.

Of course, it smells pretty bad, but the high school that I went to was less than a mile from a county landfill, so it wasn't totally foreign to me. (The smell of rotting garbage naturally makes me think of high school.)

I was there to get some pictures for a story we were doing on a proposed solid waste transfer station in the area. I didn't have a lot of time for this assignment and I wasn't entirely clear on what the focus of the story was at the time, which isn't unusual. So I just kind of showed up, got in a pick up truck with one of the workers at the site and started taking photos. The man who showed me around told me all sorts of things about the technology they use at the landfill to control pollution of ground water and the air. Apparently, this landfill was one of the first in the country to collect the methane that is a natural by-product of rotting garbage, convert it into electricity and sell it back to the grid. It's pretty fascinating if you think about it.

It's also rather disturbing when you see it. The amount of trash being generated by all of us on a daily basis is staggering. It makes you wonder how long all of this--our disposable culture--can last.

After driving up what seemed like a small mountain range of yesterday's buried trash, we came upon a the site where today's garbage is dumped and buried every day. The second thing I noticed, after the smell, were the seagulls. I remembered a lot of seagulls at the dump near my high school where I grew up, but that was only a few miles from the ocean so I didn't expect it in suburban Maryland. If you look closely, you can see bulldozers through the throngs of seagulls in this photo.

This was the photo I submitted for the paper. I wanted to try to show the immensity of the amount of trash there by including the people in the scene for a sense of scale. What you don't get from the picture is that they are literally standing on the peak of a mountain of trash.

It was very muddy that day and the driver didn't want me to get out of the truck we were in because he said there would be places where I might sink into the mud and garbage.

Heart Warming

2009-01-16T08:00:00.000-05:00

It's pretty cold outside, in case you hadn't noticed. That's why I was so glad to work on a story about a local woman who collects donations to buy and give away sleeping bags to homeless people in the Washington, DC. Venus Baucom, of Upper Marlboro, distributes the sleeping bags to homeless people, many of whom will not use the shelters for whatever reason. Baucom said she collects donations of money from people in her church group and family and friends and buys the sleeping bags in bulk, at a discount. The idea came to her one day several years ago as she drove to work through downtown Washington. She thought it was a crime that people should be sleeping in the street in the nation's capitol and wanted to do something to help them. She does this every year between Christmas and New Year's and distributes dozens of sleeping bags.

I've covered a lot of homeless stories over the past few years and I think it is one of the most interesting, challenging, heartbreaking and frustrating issues of our time. This story was another example. It was great to watch Baucom do her thing and the people we spoke to who received the bags were very grateful. But it is frustrating to know that there are resources for homeless people but many can't or won't use them.

Bellydancing (oh, my)

2009-01-14T10:00:00.002-05:00

Over the weekend my assignment was to photograph a bellydance performance. It was quite an eyeful. There were people of all ages and walks of life really enjoying themselves and having a great time enjoying their friends and family (a sizeable crowd, I might add). They danced in a number of styles to all different kinds of music. Some dances were traditional Middle Eastern style with the Queen of Sheeba music and lots of flowing scarves and jangley jewelry. There were hip-hop belly dancers and flamenco belly dancers and even an Eartha Kitt inspired dancer. It was something.

News... Actual News

2009-01-13T15:04:00.004-05:00

Working at a weekly community newspaper, I don't get a chance to photograph many breaking news stories. Mostly we shoot feature stories and portraits and local sports. We don't publish daily, so car accident stories and house fires, which are often the bread and butter of a daily newspaper photographer are not something I see a lot of because by the time they come out in out paper several days later they are old news. We might run a story about the community response to a house fire or something along those lines. But recently I photographed a "perp walk," when the county police arrested a man for the brutal assault of an elderly man in a church parking lot on Christmas Eve. The police were proud to show off their catch and made sure that the assembled members of the media had an excellent view of the suspect as he was taken in handcuffs and shackles to a waiting car.

Hard Times

2008-11-19T21:10:00.004-05:00

It looks like it is going to be a long winter for many people in this country. My friend Rev. Bobbi, who runs a street ministry helping homeless people and others in need, called me to see about getting some press for the work she is doing. It has been a while since we worked on anything together, but I did write about her in one of my first blog entries.

This time she said she had been contacted by a family of four who were on the verge of homelessness and who needed her help. I agreed to tag along with Rev. Bobbi as she went to meet them in person for the first time to find out more about their situation and their needs.

We met at a cosmetics store in Bowie where mother-of-two Carmen Stark works full-time. She and her husband Phillip explained their situation to Rev. Bobbi as I listened. One thing I noticed was that Carmen's boss was very welcoming to us. Even though their whole family and Rev. Bobbi and I (and all my camera equipment) were filling the entire store front, she said we should stay, and she broke down in tears herself listening to their predicament.

Here is what I learned about the Stark family:

	Rev. Bobbi Troyer of Streetlights of Bethany (upper right) comforts Carmen Stark, who along with her husband and two children are in jeopardy of becoming homeless.

Phillip and Carmen Stark (left) hug each other as Rev. Bobbi Troyer hugs their two boys, 8-year-old Cesear and 12-year-old Ro'mel. The Starks came to Maryland from Michigan after Phillip took a buyout offer from Chrysler, where he worked for nearly 15 years. Phillip thought he would be able to start a new career outside of the dying car industry, but after six-months the family's savings are running out.

	Carmen Stark and her 12-year-old son Ro'mel stand in the cosmetics store where Carmen works full-time. Carmen's husband Phillip hasn't been able to find a job since leaving Detroit. The family can't find affordable housing on just Carmen's salary and they have just been told they will have to leave the place where they have been staying.

Phillip and Carmen Stark found Rev. Bobbi Troyer (left), who ministers to people in need, through a mutual friend. Rev. Bobbi's Streetlights of Bethany ministry helps families and individuals in need by connecting them to government agencies and charitable organizations to give them the help they need to become self-sufficient again. Rev. Bobbi serves as an advocate for the people she helps, as well as a counselor and, of course, a minister.

	Carmen Stark makes a list of things that the family needs in the short term like medications and winter clothes for the children.

Their older son Ro'mel (right) has asthma but his medications alone cost more than $300 a month without insurance.

Happy Halloween

2008-10-31T17:57:00.004-05:00

Today was a beautiful day, perfect for a Halloween costume parade. The light was perfect at the one I covered today in Greenbelt, so I thought I would share some photos. (I also threw in one from a parade yesterday.)

I love the monkey at the end, with the great backlight from the setting sun. Imagine the lighting possibilities with that light!

Layer up

2008-10-21T15:59:00.003-05:00

Today I was shooting an assignment about local farmers feeling the pressures of suburban sprawl as developers eye their land, and I found myself in a tricky lighting situation. The farmer I was shooting was walking to his tractor, parked in deep shade, but in the background were his fields, in full sun. In this case, I wanted to show both, but the variance in the lighting made impossible to do. Thankfully, we have Photoshop for easy correction of this kind of problem and I thought I could use it as an example of how I frequently use layers when confronted with this kind of situation.

Here is the original image. I shot the image so that the background was properly exposed and the farmer was underexposed. In general, it is easier to recover underexposed images inPhotoshop then overexposed. The only risk is extra noise or grain, but I was shooting at the lowest ISO setting on my camera, which minimizes noise.

It's important to note at this point, I shot this, as I do almost everything, in RAW format. Once I got back to the office, I opened the image up in Photoshop as you see it above.

Then I opened a second copy of the file, using the Camera RAW dialog box settings to expose it for the farmer and tractor in the foreground. As you can see below, this leaves the background way overexposed. Also notice that I was able to correct the white balance using Camera RAW, removing the "blue" color cast caused by shooting in shade.

Then I put them together using layers in Photoshop. Most people are familiar with cutting and pasting, and that is certainly one easy way to do that. I use another technique that does basically the same thing, but can come in handy in other situations. In this case, I want to make the second (lighter) image a layer on top of the first (darker) image, so I open the lighter image, go to the Layers window, right-click on the "Background" layer and click "Duplicate Layer..."

Then I chose the darker image as the destination for the duplicate layer.

That made the darker image Layers look like this:

Then I added a layer mask to the second layer (the lighter image), by clicking on the little Add Layer Mask button in the bottom of the Layers window.

Then I clicked on the Brush tool, selected the Layer Mask on the lighter image layer and used the brush to paint black over the areas of the image that I want the darker background layer to "show through."

You can see in the image above that the layer mask shows in black where the darker background image layer is showing through. By using the brush, and switching between black and white, you "paint in" the areas where you want to be masked out. I find that this is much easier to understand if you just try it on a few of your own images. Most people get tripped up when they forget to click on the layer mask before they begin using the paint brush tool and they start painting on the image itself rather than the layer mask.

Notice that since I used Camera RAW to correct exposure and white balance, I really don't have to do much more to finish editing this image.

County Fair

2008-10-16T09:41:00.004-05:00

The county fair is one of those things that one of the staff photographers on our paper ends up shooting once every year. It's tough to bring a fresh eye to an event that you shoot year after year. One of my photographer friends reminded me that while I may look at a scene and say, "Oh, I shot that last year;" no one else is going to remember what ran in our weekly paper a year ago. You shouldn't pass those opportunities up, even if you think you are repeating yourself. This year it rained on the Saturday of the fair, which would have been a big day. I went anyway, and I think that helped me get some different looking photos.

More Yoga Photos

2008-07-13T11:25:00.003-05:00

I think I may be finding myself in a photographic niche-market, doing photographs of yoga. My friend Jen asked me to do some photos of her doing handstands to promote her upcoming handstand workshop (people who don't do yoga are probably scratching their heads wondering what happens at such a workshop. Pretty much you just do handstands for two-hours. It's more fun than it sounds.)

I have always wanted to do a shoot at the National Arboretum, which is home to the original columns of the Capitol. When she mentioned handstands I thought of the columns and how it could be an interesting juxtaposition of a person standing straight and tall like a column (albeit upside down) and a bunch of old marble columns standing in a field.

Overall, I was happy with the final images. We went as early as possible to take advantage of some nice morning light. I think it was at least 90-degrees out, even though it was only 8 a.m. I brought my partner Hampton along to be my assistant, which in this case entailed holding the strobe light so that I wouldn't need to use a tripod. We used one of my Alien Bees lights with an 8-inch reflector dish and a homemade grid spot (which reminds me, I really need to blog about my homemade grid spots...). The light was placed opposite the sun and I used the shutter speed to balance the exposure of the sun with the strobe lighting.

I would have liked for the sky to be a bit more dramatic. I did what I could by effectively burning in the sky in Photoshop (another reason to always shoot RAW files, with the added latitude of RAW I was able to recover the data in the bright highlights of the clouds without loosing shadow detail in the backlit columns).

Underwater video

2008-07-09T14:12:00.003-05:00

About two weeks ago, I got a chance to use the waterproof case for my little plastic, rather toy-like video camera. My co-worker, Raffi, and I had been thinking it would be fun to do a video of a local public pool where they offer swim lessons to people of all ages. After a few weather-related delays, we finally got the filming underway. Raffi handled the big camera from on land and I shot the underwater footage. I was surprised that the quality of the little camera was so good. The video ended up being a little long, but the footage was so much fun to work with that we had difficulty cutting things.

One light - lots of possibilities

2008-06-30T21:27:00.004-05:00

Just looking through some recent assignments and noticed that I do a lot of portraits with just one light. It's not fancy or terribly original, but people look good with side light. It's just one of those things.

The photo above is really just a one-light-wonder, a basic flash with a shoot through umbrella off to the right side of the frame. There is a nice gradient of light on the wall behind her, which is the kind of thing you see a lot in formal portraits with a light set up behind the subject directed at the wall "just so," but in this case it is just light spilling over from the flash/umbrella onto the wall.

To be fair, I frequently only set up one light, but since some of my portraits are outdoors, the sun acts as a kind of second light. Such as in this photo:

The ambient outdoor light is bringing up the left side of his face so it is not completely dark, as in the first photo.

Here is another one where I used some window light to fill in the side of the subject opposite the flash:

In this one, the flash is to the right of the camera and by adjusting the shutter speed, I was able to use the ambient light coming in from the left side of the frame to fill in the left side of the subject's face.

I've been doing lot's of video projects lately. Perhaps I'll blog on them soon.

Footloose!

2008-02-22T16:32:00.003-05:00

It's been too long since I posted. So, here is a fun one for you.

Today's assignment was to take pictures of a local minister who is collecting shoes for those in need. Their goal is 300 pairs by the end of the month. I thought it would be fun to show him buried in an avalanche of shoes.

I'm a winner!

2008-01-29T11:57:00.000-05:00

I finally redesigned my webpage. The previous iteration of my site was just embarrassing. Now, I've got a fancy, functional and cross-platform compatible website that is easy to update.

I used a program called Shutterbug. I really liked the program, it wasn't too expensive and it had the features that i wanted. There was a short learning curve, but I figured it out despite somewhat lack-luster documentation. The benefit of the site is that it allows you to keep the content (words and pictures) and the design elements seperate, so you can redesign your web page without having to retype everything or recode any HTML. I'll easily be able to update my site with new images.

And I finally have a link to this blog on my web site.

In other news, I recently learned that one of my photographs (above) won a second place award for sports photography in the 2007 Suburban Newspapers of America Editorial Contest.

Food Guide

2008-01-08T18:30:00.000-05:00

At the end of every year my newspaper publishes a food guide for our coverage area, which is basically a list of the restaurants we have reviewed over the last 12 months. For the last few years I've been developing and shooting the lead art for the dining guide, with the help of different photographers on the staff. It is a lot of fun to break out of the constraints of documentary photojournalism with its ethical prohibitions on any sort of trick photography or image manipulation.

Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, my editors and I start brainstorming ideas for the cover. Covers in the past have included an alphabet soup with the title spelled out in the soup itself, Chinese takeout with the fortune cookie paper having the headline and a giant bowl of spaghetti with meatballs for the zeros in 2006. This year somehow we came up with the idea of converting a few photos into a comic book. Borrowing a lot from a Photoshop turorial on this website, I made a couple of photos look like panes from a comic strip, and my editor put them together and came up with the text.

It took a lot of time and I am much more familiar with areas of Photoshop that I never new existed before this (I used to wonder: who ever uses the pen tool?). In future posts I'll share some Photoshop tips that I learned in the process of making this photoillustration that I have since incorporated into some of my daily photo processing.

Here are a few of the individual photos (before and after):

Lasertag (or The Least Fun You Can Have in the Dark)

2008-01-06T14:41:00.000-05:00

The thing about photography is that it really helps to be able to see something if you are going to take a picture of it. So, when I got the assignment to shoot a lasertag tournament, I had the sinking feeling that it was going to be one of those days. I've never played lasertag, but I was pretty sure the game was played in a place with very minimal lighting. It was basically a black room with almost no lights. In fact, I would say there were no lights. There were some objects that dimly glowed. Perhaps there was some phosphorescence involved, but there were no lights. I am constitutionally opposed to on-camera flash unless there is just no other way around it. Luckily, I had some time to between assignments on this Sunday morning, so I dragged my trusty radio slaves out and used some sweet new superclamps to attach my now remote-controlled flashes and started shooting.

In a fit of disgust I think I actually deleted the first few images I made with on-camera flash, but I did find this image to show you an example of what I don't like.
This image was made in the area where the competitors suit up. While the area was really dark, compared to the playing field it was positively luminous, but I still had to use flash. (Initially, I thought I might include some images of the players suiting up, but none of those images worked out.) I think this image pretty much conveys why I strongly dislike on-camera flash. Yuck.

Once I got my remote flashes in place, I started making some stuff that I thought might work. It was still really challenging to focus and frame objects I couldn't see. Even with very "fast" lenses (2.8) that allow a lot of light into the viewfinder, I couldn't really see what was happening in front of me, so I ended up shooting many frames without looking through the viewfinder so I could find a moment of peak action (or even just a moment where someone was in front of the camera--sadly there were frames without players in them--oi!)

Dance - update

2007-12-29T16:20:00.000-05:00

I thought I should finally post the photographs I made of my the dancers at the University of Maryland. I was holding off on posting the ones that were to run in the paper until after they were published. Here are a few that ran in the print edition that I really liked.

The first photo is of one of the lead dancers in the performance. She was very kind to do that incredible jump about a dozen times in a row for me. It was funny to have her look at the images of herself on the back of the camera with the director and criticize her technique. They ended up demanding that I take more so she could get it just right.

Living the dream

2007-12-28T16:27:00.000-05:00

Today's assignment was to photograph a guy who gave up his 9-to-5 office job with benefits to play video games full-time. I thought I would have some fun with lighting, since I had plenty of time. I wanted to use lighting to immitate the glow of a television screen, and I wanted to include as many other visual elements of the gaming culture as I could.

For the lighting I put a shoot-thru umbrella directly in front of, and below the subjects face. Above the umbrella I place a silver reflector to fill in the top of the subjects face to prevent him from looking like he was telling ghost stories in front of a campfire. I also put a CTO gel over the strobe in the umbrella and set the camera's white balance to tungsten/incandencent, which made the daylight sneaking in through the blinds behind him look very blue. I had the subject put on one of the video games in the background and say, "Cheese!"

Here is a photo of the lighting set-up:

You can see the umbrella in the bottom right corner of the photo and the silver bounce above it.

Viva Vieques

2007-11-22T17:00:00.000-05:00

After two days in San Juan we took a quick flight to the neighboring island of Vieques. The first morning, we grabbed some snorkels and headed to the beach. After a 15 minute drive down a bumpy dirt road with a very inaccurate map and some questionable directions, we found a beautiful beach (at right).

We decided to walk along the beach to find the "perfect" spot for our day of beach fun only to discover that the beach was just packed. There were two other people on the beach. So much for unspoiled beaches.

Have (no) turkey, will travel

2007-11-19T08:33:00.000-05:00

This year, my partner and our travel buddies C & J decided to skip Thanksgiving madness and go to sunny Puerto Rico. There will be no turkey, but there will be 80 degree weather and snorkeling. Because Thanksgiving came a little earlier this year, we were also able to celebrate my birthday during the same week, as an added bonus.

We spent two days in Old San Juan at the beautiful El Convento Hotel. Old San Juan is very beautiful, and as much as I really wanted to have a lazy, care-free vacation without worrying about taking a million photographs, I still ended up doing a lot of shooting, including this photo of some kids chasing pigeons along the city walls.

On my birthday, we rented a car and drove to El Yunque, which is a rainforest on the eastern end of the island. We spent a few hours hiking down the El Mino trail, which follows a little mountain stream and ends at a little falls where you can swim (if you don't mind sharing with 50 screaming kids). We skipped the main falls and swam in a deserted area a little bit upstream from the main falls. It was a little chilly, so after one quick dip, we scampered back up the mountain and headed for the beach. Happy birthday to me.

Next time... Viva Vieques!

Dance

2007-10-23T17:04:00.000-05:00

I recently got an assignment to shoot a large photo package to accompany a feature story we are doing on the University of Maryland's dance department. Immediately, I thought of some historical photos of Martha Graham that I came across a few months ago and fell in love with. The dance was originally choreographed in 1937 for a WPA dance project about the civil rights movement of the early 20th Century (strangely, while the dance was a celebration of the movement, it was performed by an all white cast at the time with just two African Americans singing the music; the dance company was not integrated).

I really wanted to emulate the look of some of those images, especially the ones shot on a backdrop (as opposed to on stage).

Last week, I shot some photos of a rehearsal, which is being prepared by one of the dance classes for their upcoming concert. The teacher agreed to let me come back later with a backdrop and shoot some of these dance portraits today. It was lots of fun, and I got to play with my lights

I'm really happy with the way the photos came out, so I thought I would post some of them.

Above is one of the two leads in the dance doing a jump. There is another jumping photo of her that will be the lead art for the newspaper story, so I'm not going to post it here until it runs in the paper.

Puria Jackson

2007-10-18T15:38:00.000-05:00

My newspaper recently started doing video, so I've been learning about a whole new medium. What fun!

I really don't know what I'm doing and we're taking the approach that we all just teach ourselves, as oppossed to going through formal training courses. But, I finally produced my first video. The story is about a local 10-year-old girl who can really sing. She was just adorable and I had a lot of fun shooting the portrait (above) and the video.

Candlelight vigil

2007-10-17T09:20:00.001-05:00

Nothing strikes fear in the hearts of photographers like those two words. Candlelight is very beautiful and creates an emotional feeling in every photograph, but trying to capture that lighting and the emotion is technically challenging. By definition, it's dark out, so it's very difficult to focus on your subject. You want the candle to be the light source, but a candle isn't very bright, so you have to shoot at a high ISO, which makes the image grainy, and at a low shutter speed which makes motion blur a problem. The other problem with candlelight is that while it's nice to make a photo of someone holding a candle, there usually isn't enough light to illuminate the surroundings and provide any sort of context for the image. It's just hard.

So, when I got Monday night's assignment to cover a candlelight vigil in one of the area's tougher suburban neighborhoods, I started thinking of how I could overcome these technical challenges. The location was a bit cramped. It was basically a sidewalk with a fence on one side and a busy road on the other. There were some streetlights in the distance, but they didn't provide much light in the area of the vigil. So, I had to fill in with flash. As the people were gathering for the vigil, I started making exposures with and without a flash, which I hand-held as far away from the camera as I could using a TTL-cord (SC-17?). I hate on-camera flash, so this was a compromise that would give me some light but not have that hateful flat lighting that I detest with on-camera flash.

Finally, I made this image.

I liked the way the streetlights and the headlights from the passing traffic provided some background lighting. The exposure was 1/6 sec. at f/2.8, which is why there is some motion blur in the background. Based on this, I started making some exposures of the event as it unfolded.

I liked the last one a lot. The motion blur makes everything in the background kind of crazy looking and blurry, but the flash freezes the image of the subjects in the foreground hugging. It's not the kind of thing that the paper would run, usually, because it's just too abstract, but I'm glad I could post it here and share it with all (both?) of my loyal readers.

What is it about firemen?

2007-10-15T16:09:00.000-05:00

In the last few weeks I've shot two photo assignments with firefighters and both have been scheduling nightmares. Coincidence? Probably. But I still thought it was worth noting.

The first assignment was a few weeks ago. It was supposed to be a quick one taking photos of the firefighters competing in various contests. The plan was to get in, take the photos and leave. Somehow the schedule of the day's events was not accurately communicated to my assignment editor and what should have taken an hour ended up taking four. Well, I still got some fun photos once the contests got underway (after the parade and a lunch buffet).

The best part was that the events had great names like "Standing hook-ups" which made for great inappropriate office banter.

Friday's assignment was supposed to be a quick portrait of a volunteer fire chief who recently have a truck dedicated to him after 40 years of service. Unfortunately, as I pulled up to the station, the bells started ringing and the truck I was supposed to photograph pulled out to go on a call.

They ended up not having to work the call, the chief told me, "They'll be back in five minutes." An hour later we were still waiting for the truck.

Finally, they returned (after a stop at the Wawa, I suspect) and we got to work on the portrait.
I made some nice photos and got to use my homemade grid spot, which I promise to blog about in more detail soon).

Looking at images on your Mac

2007-09-21T09:56:00.001-05:00

There are a lot of ways to look at and sort through gobs of images, which is something I have to do on a daily basis. Usually, I use some sort of software designed specifically for the task of sorting through hundreds of images at a time. The latest versions of Photoshop have a basic image browser built in. At work, I use Photo Mechanic and at home I use iView Media Pro. They all do similar things with varying degrees of complexity. But sometimes, I just want to look at a bunch of pictures really quickly without fiddling with software and applications and all that business.

Mac has a feature in its operating system that lets you view a slideshow or a group of thumbnails really quickly, but it's sort of hidden so I thought I would just point it out. It can be a time saver.

Here's the "how-to":

Select the image files you want to look at in the Mac OS finder window; hold down the Control button and click on one of the image files; select "Slideshow from the drop-down menu.
Initially, you are in a slideshow mode, viewing one image at a time. But, move your mouse and you see a controller (bottom-right of the image) that allows you to fast-forward, rewind, pause, and, best of all, look at thumbnails of all the images you selected.

Here's what the thumbnail view looks like. When you move your mouse over a thumbnail, the image filename appears. Handy for sorting images.

I use this feature a lot when I want to show someone some photos. I don't have to spend time making a slideshow in power point or opening up a any of the image viewing software. Just select, click and showtime.

Lifehacker also shows you how to use the Preview program (included with Mac OS) to look at multiple images.

Portable Power

2007-09-04T14:20:00.000-05:00

I got my new portable power source, which is basically a car battery on steroids, last week. And, I got a chance to try it out at an assignment this weekend. The story was about a local professor whose family from New Orleans came to live with her because of Hurricane Katrina. Two years later, four of the eleven family members are still there. I decided to photograph them out side in a little stand of trees near their house. I used a softbox to light the group seated on the bench and an umbrella to light the prof and her mom. I love mixing up flash lighting with available light outdoors because the lighting becomes more subtle. And, with this new portable power pack I'll be able to a lot more of it.

Poet

2007-08-17T14:57:00.000-05:00

Today's assignment was to photograph a local writer who published his first book of poetry. A lot of it was inspired by the death of his best friend. He was a really nice guy and we met at his father's house, which has a lot of barnyard animals, including ducks, pigeons, goats and chickens. He gave me the grand tour and I liked the look of the bird coop. A bunch a ducklings (is that a flock or a gaggle?) came out to watch us as I set up my lights and photographed him.

Based on the way the writer was dressed when he answered the door (he rated extremely high on the Urban Street-cred Quotient, or USQ), I was surprised that he wanted to be photographed with the farm animals. But, he said he really loved them and that he did a lot of writing just sitting and watching the animals. I think the contrast between his appearance and the barnyard architecture makes the images a lot more interesting.

For this shot I used a big diffuser disc to shade him, because the sunlight was a bit harsh. I also added a small flash to add little bit of rim light on the edge of his face.

...But it's a dry heat

2007-08-13T16:01:00.001-05:00

It's been a long, hot, dry summer here on the east coast, and six months of drought are taking their toll on area farmers. Recently, I was assigned to photograph a local farmer with his drought-damaged crops. My co-worker Raphi was also sent to photograph a farmer in another part of the county at the same time.

My farmer was very friendly and talkative and drove me in his pick-up truck to all of the fields he is growing. We had plenty of time to make a lot of photos and I learned a lot. Raphi's farmer was a bit more reserved, unfortunately, and he came back with just one or two photos to choose from. It really goes to show what a difference your subject can have on your images.

I Shot the (deputy) Sheriff... and some cadets

2007-08-08T10:40:00.000-05:00

Recently, I had an assignment to take photos of a sheriff's deputy who won an award for her work with teens. Yakeisha Hines works with teenagers who volunteer in the Explorer Cadet program, which gives them basic training to be able to assist the sheriff's department with things like crowd management at events and other basic tasks. The program benefits the cadets by giving them skills and beefing up their resume. It helps the sheriff's department by giving them a pool of trained people when they need extra help and hopefully will direct some of the cadets into law enforcement careers.

For me it was a pretty typical assignment. I show up at in the middle of the interview. Sometimes I can take pictures during the interview for the talking head kind of look. Other times I look around for a spot to make a decent portrait. The interview took place in the brake room and it seemed that no matter what angle I shot from there were vending machines clearly visible in the background. So, I started looking for some place for the portrait. The sheriff's office is more of an administrative building in a pretty nondescript office park setting. There are no dramatic cell blocks. Apparently, they have no prisoners and do no booking at this location.

First I had them stand in a hall with walls that were lined with large plaques in the shape of badges from the various local police agencies.

That was too boring by any standard.

I noticed the sky was clouding over with some pretty dramatic clouds so I dragged them outside and grabbed my basic light kit. I asked the deputy if we could use one of the cruisers, so she went and got one. I arranged them around the open door of the car with one light to the side (camera left) in front of them and one light off to the opposite side (camera right) sort of behind them and started shooting. (I really liked that even the officer sitting in the car has the rim light on her face because it is shining through the glass windshield.)

Overall I think it was a big improvement.

Cliff jumping = bad idea

2007-08-05T10:41:00.001-05:00

Recently, I went hiking with some friends in nearby Great Falls, Va., a lovely National Park Service site which offers kayaking, rock climbing, and trails with spectacular views of the Great Falls on the Potomac River. As you enter the park, you see sign after sign with warnings like, "Do not swim in the River."
"8 people drown in the river every year."
"You can die if you swim or jump in the river."

Most people get the hint, excluding those aforementioned eight people.

So, we hiked up to the lovely Cow Hoof Rock, with its unsurpassed views of Mather Gorge, and had lunch.

As we enjoyed our roast beef sandwiches (thanks, Cindy), we noticed a group of college students climbing along the rocky cliffs of the gorge across the river. On the opposite side of the river is Maryland and the C&O Canal Park, which also features prominent warnings about the fatal nature of swimming in the Great Falls.
We could hear some of their conversations across the river and we could tell they were going to jump from their perch 30 or 40 feet above the river into the water below, the depth of which they had no way of ascertaining. After the first two jumped, and survived, I got my camera out and started taking pictures. Other hikers came by and started watching, too. Everyone commented on how stupid it was to be jumping into that water.

Then two boys jumped and only one resurfaced (below, left). He started screaming for help and swam over to where his friend hit the water. Eventually, he found him, brought him to the surface and dragged him to the shore line (below, right).

Several kayakers came over to help. Once the jumper regained consciousness and was back on shore the kayakers started yelling at the teens, telling them how stupid it was to jump into the water like that.

It was rather harrowing to watch, but thankfully, no one was hurt.

The moral of the story is: don't jump in the river.

Why I hate baseball

2007-08-04T14:17:00.000-05:00

I was looking over some photos from a few weeks ago and I was reminded of my tumultuous relationship with baseball and how it started. At the start of baseball season this year I was covering a local high school baseball game. It was cold and windy and I was anxious to get what I needed and get on to my next assignment.

In all my years of shooting (five, to be specific), I've never been struck by a ball or a player. But on this day, my luck changed. I was standing in front of the dugout along the first base line when a foul ball made a line drive for my left knee, at which time I keeled over and let loose a stream of obscenities. Luckily, there weren't many parents in the stands and the wind was blowing pretty hard, so it was probably only the players who heard me and they were used to such foul language.

The players were surprisingly nice, I was fully expecting them to laugh at me but they all seemed genuinely concerned. The reporter who was there with me helped me hobble over to my car and I canceled my other assignments. My knee swelled a bit, but luckily there seems to have been no lasting damage.

Of course, I immediately thought of my first baseball experience when I was about 7 or 8 and my dad made me join a little league team. I didn't really like sports (still don't) and I was pretty shy so the practice was not my cup of tea. I was not pleased by the forced run around what seemed like a gargantuan field to start practice and trying to catch balls being thrown at me. What finally did me in was batting practice. The coach was pitching and when it was my turn at bat I learned that his aim was rather poor. I took a pitch right to the groin. That was my first and last little league practice.

So, I guess a line drive to the knee, by comparison, was not so bad.

The photo above is of a game much later in the season. It was a state championship game and the press photographers were all forced to stand in an unprotected area of the field behind either first or third base--basically the same position where I caught the line drive to my knee earlier in the season. I was photographing the third baseman throwing to first (#18) and I thought, "If this first baseman misses the ball, it could hit me."

Of course, the first baseman missed the ball and I watched it come right at me. At some point it passed out of my camera viewfinder and the next thing I heard was a thud near my right foot. The ball missed my heel by less than an inch.

Here are some more photos from that game.

Summer Vacation

2007-07-04T14:55:00.002-05:00

I just got back from a week-long vacation in Wyoming. My partner's family and I went to Yellowstone and then to a dude ranch in beautiful Dubois (pronounced DEW-boys). It was incredibly fun and gorgeous. We spent two days driving through the Grand Tetons and into Yellowstone, where we saw tons of wildlife and geysers galore. Then we headed about two hours east across the continental divide to the CM Ranch, where I finally learned how to ride a horse (named Toby, btw).

I grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, which is flatter than Misha Barton, so I'm utterly fascinated by any sort of mountainous environment. But the Grand Tetons (at left), which are the backdrop for the Jackson Hole Airport, are jaw-dropping by just about any standard.

There is something magical about the light out West. Between the perfect light, gorgeous landscape and abundant wildlife, making great images was almost like shooting fish in a barrel. I posted a rough edit of my take on my web site, broken up into three categories.

For photos of the Yellowstone adventure, go to http://www.chrisandersonphoto.com/yellowstone/

For photos of the CM Ranch, the horses, ranch hands, square dancing and the Friday night rodeo, see http://www.chrisandersonphoto.com/cmranch/

If you want to see the family photos, check us out at http://www.chrisandersonphoto.com/wyoming/

Grayscale Conversion

2007-05-21T19:54:00.000-05:00

More technical stuff...
I mentioned in my last blog that I use a channel mixer action to convert images from color to grayscale (black and white). I thought I would elaborate on that.

There are a lot of methods for taking an image from color to grayscale. I think that each one has its benefits and drawbacks and sometimes I change things up depending on my needs. But in general, I convert things to black and white realizing that it will end up being printed on newsprint, which tends to lose detail in the darker areas of an image and can easily become very muddy. Therefore, I like to end up with a grayscale image that is a bit lighter and more contrasty than you would find in a fine art print.

Another fact of life for me--covering a county with majority African American population--is that I have to make sure that dark skin tones do not get lost in the murky newsprint.

Also, I often have to shoot in terrible lighting conditions, which means I have to shoot at a high ISO resulting in noise--little flecks of color that shouldn't be there. Using Photoshop to lighten an image increases the noise, especially in the dark areas of an image.

Of course, you can always just click on the Image drop down menu, and choose Grayscale from the Mode option and get a black and white image, as I did to create the image below.

But it is a bit dark, especially her skin tones and that information would look a bit murky on newsprint. I could just adjust the curves or levels, but that can really increase noise. This image is shot using a low ISO, but were this shot in a high school gymnasium at 1000 ISO, it would look quite nasty if I tried to lighten it significantly, trust me.

So, with that in mind, I've found that using a channel mixing method to create grayscale images often works well. Here is how and why.

First, you have to know what a channel is. If you've worked in Photoshop, you probably know that all digital color comes from the combination of Red, Green and Blue. In fact, a color digital image is actually three images, one in each of the colors above smushed together. You can see this when you look at the channels window in Photoshop, which most casual users never do, since it has no apparent use. But if you were to look at it, this is what you would see:

A closer look at the image shows that the Red channel is pretty light, the Green channel is a little darker, and the Blue channel is really dark.

An even closer look reveals that the Blue channel is not only darker, it also has a lot of noise. The image below is an extremely magnified look at an area of the skin tones in the image. You can see the blue area on the right has lots of dark blobby areas that would not be very flattering if there were readily apparent in one's skin tones. The Red and Green areas are comparatively smooth and blob-free.

Since the channels are already grayscale versions of the image, why not use the best of the channels to make the black and white. As the name Channel Mixer implies, that is exactly what you can do.

If you click on Mode > Adjustments > Channel Mixer, you get the following window.

You can use the sliders to add or subtract the strength of each of the channels in the final image. I like to use one part red, one part green and a pinch of blue. In general, you want the totals to add up to 100 percent or close to it. Be sure the "Monochrome" option is checked.

It makes a real difference. There is less noise from the blue channel to start off with, and less need to lighten the image with curves or levels, which would increase the appearance of noise also.

Compare the straight up Grayscale mode change on left with the channel mixer version on the right. See the difference?

Oh, and don't forget, once you've got the image looking the way you want it, you still have to click on Image > Mode > Grayscale to get your black and white image file.

So, long story short--if you're fighting noise in your image and trying to keep dark skin tones from getting too dark in a grayscale image, give the channel mixer a try.

Lights, Camera, Actions

2007-05-20T09:31:00.001-05:00

I've been wanting to write about some of the aspects of photography besides making images with the camera. Since my first "career" was doing technical support, I'm pretty familiar with computers and that knowledge has really come in handy in my second career, as all my work photography is done with digital cameras and edited on computers. (In case you haven't heard, digital photography is getting really popular these days.)

Photoshop is the one of my main tools. I spend a lot of time tweaking images to take them from what I see on the back of my digital camera to what you see in the newspaper. In fact, I really felt like I was spending a little bit too much time in Photoshop. And a lot of that time was spend doing the exact same thing to every photograph, like printer settings and converting images from RGB color to CMYK color and converting color images to greyscale. And there was a lot of mouse clicking. A computer mouse is a great interface, but it's not the most efficient one for some tasks.

So I started creating a series of Photoshop actions, which are sort of like macros you may have used in word processing software, and assigned them to the function keys. Now editing photos is as easy as F1, F2, F3.

Sort of.

So, for those of you who are editing tons of images every day and want some way to make things easier, here are some tips:

Create an action folder for yourself. Photoshop provides a bunch of predefined actions. I don't think I've found a use for any of them myself. So, I just leave them in their own little folder and created one of my own. Less clutter. To create your own folder, click on the little folder icon in the bottom of the Actions palette.

Start recording. Let's say you always like to have a thin line around your image when you print it from Photoshop and you're tired of always having to click on "File, Print Settings...Blah, Blah, Blah." This is the perfect candidate for an action. Once you've created a new set or folder for yourself in the actions palette, click on the "New Action" button (the weird little square between the folder and the trash can) at the bottom of the actions palette. You will get a dialog box where you can name your action and, most importantly, assign a function key to it. Click record and do your thing, er... action.

When you're done, click the stop button in the action palette.

Congratulations! You've been automated.

There are some things your should note:

Not everything thing is recordable. For example, Photoshop does not record an action when you select a new tool like the eyedropper or the paintbrush. As you record your action, you'll see each step appear in the action palette. If you don't see it being added, it's not being recorded.
Some actions can be made to stop at dialog boxes like the "Save" and "Image Size" windows to allow you to customize your input or settings for each image. There is a very strange icon between the check mark and the name of the action that indicates where that action allows you will pause at the dialog box.

For the rest of my fellow Gazette Photatheletes (and you know who you are), here is my Photoshop workflow

Tag and bag in Photo Mechanic.
Open in the RAW image converter. Do a basic white balance and crop.
Open in Photoshop. Resize for print using crop tool. (You could automate this with actions)
Set Print Options (border, caption, 75%) using an action.
Fine tune the image toning using adjustment layers.
Once it looks perfect (ha, ha), output a CMYK file, using an action
Output a RGB JPEG file, again, using an action
Convert to grayscale using adjustment layers and Channel Mixer, with an action
Flatten image and output the black and white image, with, you guessed it, an action.

The best part is you can import your actions (or someone else's) into Photoshop. So I actually save a my actions to my network folder and when I have to use someone else's computer in the office I just important my actions.

Martha Graham

2007-05-07T10:01:00.000-05:00

My boyfriend recently brought home some great photos from his office. He was reviewing some grant proposals from a group that deals with modern dance. The group had included some reproductions of photographs in their collection of Martha Graham and her modern dance company. Knowing that I'm a huge fan of Martha Graham and modern dance, he brought home some of the extra images. Many of them will be familiar to anyone who has ever read anything on the history of dance or Martha Graham. I thought I'd share some of them with you because they are just so cool. I know I'll be using them for inspiration next time I shoot a dance performance.

Photo...om

2007-05-05T09:53:00.000-05:00

Two of my favorite things are photography and yoga, which made Saturday a great day for me. The yoga studio I go to is just finishing up the expansion of its space and wanted to revamp their web site as well. The owner knew I was a photographer and asked me to do portraits of all of the teachers. The staff at Flow Yoga is really great. The instructors know a lot and are just great and keep everything fun even when you are sweaty and twisted up like a pretzel, or worse, working your abs. The place has a great vibe.

Needless to say, shooting was just a blast. I had about three hours between work assignments on a busy Saturday to do the shoot. Most of the staff showed up, about 10 in all.

At first the teachers were coming in one by one while everyone waited in the hall. I think they thought we needed privacy. But by the end, everyone was in the studio together laughing and giving suggestions and assisting each other in their poses.

Above, Tazima laughs as she falls out of her titibasana and onto her butt, very delicately.

Left, Ian gets an assist from Alise in a bound tree pose.

This photo ended up being one of my favorites. Angela wasn't feeling great and would have preferred to be sleeping at home, but she was a real trooper and did some photos. I don't think this is even a real pose (maybe a modified flipped down dog?), she's probably coming out of a pose, but I think the way the light strikes her face and her expression is very cool.

A Day at the Races

2007-04-13T17:10:00.001-05:00

Today's assignment was to shoot a cover story on horse racetracks for our Lifestyles section. After shooting a lot of one-shot assignments--portraits, sporting events, press conferences, and school events--it was a great change of pace to shoot a full picture package. And with a subject like a racetrack, it seemed there would be plenty to shoot.

Of course, no assignment is ever as easy as it seems. The challenge here is that the story doesn't seem to have a strong focus. It's not a story about one horse or jockey, or a particular track or event. Since we're a "family newspaper" the editors didn't want to focus on the gambling or drinking. The idea of the story was to show horse racing as wholesome entertainment. Okaaay.

Another challenge was that they sent me to a racetrack in Laurel on a rather chilly spring Friday afternoon. There weren't many people there. Actually, it was downright empty when I first got there.

I'll admit, I was frustrated. The track was very helpful. They said I could shoot anything I wanted except for the faces of placing bets (huh?). So access was not a problem. I just wasn't sure how to give my editors what they wanted.

First, I shot the basics. Horses racing.

I shot it up close and tight...

and wide...

and from above.

I also spent a lot of time in the paddock (above), which is a holding area for the horses before they are taken to the track at race time. The jockeys get weighed in there and horses get saddled there.

It also gives a chance for the public to take a look at the horses as they are walked around the ring.

After I got what I wanted in the paddock, I headed to the stands. Like I said, they were mostly empty (below), but I did find a few images that I liked.

I really like the image of these two people reading through their programs (below). I doubt the editors will use it in the article, but I couldn't pass by without shooting it.

Then I headed up to the press box, which is perched above the viewing stands, about five stories up. Five stories, that is, up an old elevator. Old as in, still requires an elevator operator old. From there I found some more fun shots. These two really stood out for me.

The image on the left is a photo of the benches on the "apron," an outdoor viewing area between the stands and the track. Did I mention they were empty? The image at right shows a winning horse being photographed with the owners in the winners circle at the bottom of the frame.

Old School

2007-04-11T23:08:00.000-05:00

Today I was assigned to do a portrait of a person and a building. The building is a historic structure in Capitol Heights, Md., that is currently being used by the county as a school bus depot. It was one of the thousands of such "Rosenwald schools," built with money donated by the president of Sears Robuck and Company and with money raised by African Americans themselves. It's a pretty interesting story. The building was listed on a state-wide historic preservation society's top-ten most endangered buildings.

The person is Joanna Smith, a local woman working to save and restore the building.

It gave me a chance to work on my outdoor portrait lighting skills. Nothing too fancy, but I thought it looked pretty good.

Joanna Smith is working with the county to convert the historic Ridgeley Rosenwald School into a museum. The two-room school house was once a school for African-American children during segregation but is now a county school bus lot.

Pitching Pols

2007-04-03T14:46:00.000-05:00

This is the opening of baseball season and politicians everywhere are warming up their pitching arm and heading out to the mound to toss ceremonial first pitches. The President was busy vacationing at Camp David, so Mayor Fenty threw out the ball at the Nationals' season opener. I didn't get to cover that. Instead, I covered a local congressmen at one of the county high schools. Not as glamorous, perhaps, but a much funnier photo.

Rep. Al Wynn throws out the first pitch at Wise High School in Upper Marlboro

More fun with the 4x5

2007-03-31T19:06:00.000-05:00

As my loyal readers may recall, my first post to this blog was about using my 4x5 camera to make photographs of a house plant. I recently returned to this same format, but in a slightly different way. I borrowed a 4x5 field camera from a friend and coworker (that's Rafi, at right, carrying his cool, secret-agent-like camera case leaving the office after a long day) and went for a hike along the C&O Canal. My 4x5 camera comes in a case that is more accurately described as a trunk. There is no way you could go hiking with it. Rafi's camera fits into that cool-looking silver briefcase. Have field camera, will travel.

I ended up hiking about 4 miles along the old canal tow path. The thing about shooting with one of these cameras is that you really have to think about what you want to photograph before you even take the camera out. Opening it up and putting it on the tripod takes a good 10 minutes, and that's if you know what you're doing. With a modern camera there are a million decisions to make about framing the subject, what film to use, the camera shutter and aperture settings and focus. With a 4x5, you have all of those same decisions PLUS you have the ability to shift, tilt and swing the lens at the front and the film at the back of the camera. Also, the image you see to focus the camera is upside-down and backwards. It really is like mental gymnastics. But it is a lot of fun. I don't get to do a lot of landscape photography in my job. Generally speaking, if there isn't a person in it, the photo won't run in the newspaper. So it was really fun to focus on a different aspect of photography.

I spent a lot of time around this little pond of water along the side of the tow path filled with rocks and tree limbs. The water was smooth and glassy and I liked the reflections in it. I really liked this big rock sticking out of the middle of it (left). It looks like a mini-mountain or something.

The pond

In all, I spent about 2 hours walking around and making photos. My feet hurt, my back hurt, my hands were frozen, but it was tons of fun. Thanks, Rafi.

Spelling Bee Style

2007-03-29T10:09:00.002-05:00

I was recently assigned to cover the county spelling bee. Most of the kids were very calm, cool, and collected. No nervous breakdowns on stage or weird home schoolers talking into their hands. Everyone was pretty cool... unfortunately. Such premature maturity can make for boring pictures.

Even though there wasn't any jumping up and down or other outlandish behaviour, I did detect some stylistic differences among the spellers.

Many looked up. That was a very popular approach.

Some smiled nervously.

Some were thoughtful and contemplative.

Some looked right at the host.

Others looked away.

#25 was just trying to reach the microphone.

In the end, just one student took home the trophy.

He really liked that trophy.

Limiting Access to State High School Athletic Tourneys?

2007-03-24T16:25:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago Maryland had its state high school basketball tournament. I'm not a huge sports fan, but I like tournament time because it gives me a chance to shoot in a nice arena with good light (University of Maryland's Comcast Center). There is usually a lot of emotion and excitement. All of this adds up to good photography. Just before the tournament started, I came across this article on the National Press Photographer's Association website. The article talks about a troubling trend in states around the country where the state public school athletic associations are signing exclusive and restrictive contracts with photographers for coverage of the events. For a long time the schools have hired their own photographers to cover their tournaments and provide the athletes with images they can buy. Usually, there is no conflict between their work and the work of press photographers covering the games. But these new contracts contain language restricting the ability of newspapers and other publications covering the games to resell their images to families. The contract photographers want a monopoly on sales to the general public of images from the tournaments they cover. Needless to say, that is not good news for cash-strapped newspapers who are looking for new ways to generate income from their work. The newspaper I worked for just launched a new website where anyone can post and share their own photos, and, hey... what do you know?, you can also buy photographs from the paper!

We didn't experience any such thorny contract issues this year in Maryland, but I'm won't be surprised to face it in future tournaments.

Here are a few images from a game I covered this year.

Jesse Jackson Revisited

2007-03-23T13:18:00.001-05:00

Picture it--Washington, 1991. The United States was threatening to go to war with Iraq (the first time around). I was the editor of my high school newspaper with big dreams and a small 35mm Pentax K1000 camera. My mother decided it would be fun to join a protest against the looming war in front of the White House. I went with her hoping I could make some great protest images. It was a rude awakening to the drudgery of nighttime photography, but I was managing. Then the crowd started buzzing because Jesse Jackson was going to show up. Shortly before midnight, Jackson appeared and I mobbed him along with the rest of the press photographers and fired off as many photos as I could. We were surrounding him and moving with him like a human bubble as he walked along Pennsylvania Avenue. I got back to school the next day and excitedly told my journalism teacher about the news. When the film came back from the lab, I was elated that I had something of Jackson for the paper (at right). It ran on the cover. Two things I learned that night: 1) Night photography isn't easy, and 2) the DC Metro police department uses horses for crowd control during protests, watch where you're walking.

Fast forward--Friday, Capitol Heights, Md. I get an assignment to cover Rev. Jesse Jackson. This time, he's speaking at a local high school. The kids were rambunctious but excited to see Jackson. He gave a long speech, but the students were pretty attentive. At the end he asked all of the students who were eligible to vote to come down and register on the spot, which they did. It was a fun assignment, overall. The best part--no horses.

Rev. Jesse Jackson greets students at Central High School in Capitol Heights, Md.

The Wrestlers

2007-03-21T09:58:00.000-05:00

At the end of each sports season many newspaper sports editors like to pick the best student athletes from each sport around their coverage area and feature them and their accomplishments. At my paper, we call it the "All-County" team. Photographing the All County team is a lot of work and sometimes a bit of a pain. Let me paint a picture for you. Imagine getting 12 to 15 of your favorite teenage friends to show up at the same place to have their photo taken. Once they have all finally arrived, everyone gets to have their individual photograph taken with the rest of their friends, teammates and sports rivals watching. Then we have to do a group photo of all of the team members. A lot of the students are uncomfortable having their photos taken. Their not sure how to pose for their individual portrait. Even when I tell them how to pose, sometimes they just say, "No, I'm not going to do that." (I've got to admit. Some of these kids have hutzpah. I couldn't imagine refusing a legitimate request from an adult when I was a kid, but they'll do it.)

Before

The group photo is always surprisingly challenging. Just getting 15 kids to sit down or stand in rows shouldn't be too difficult, but the guys never want to sit close enough to the person next to them. And once you get them all standing or sitting in three boring rows, what do you have? A photo of a dozen or so really uncomfortable teenagers looking sullen.

I have been wanting to do something more interesting with this for a while. Last week when I got the assignment for the wrestling all county team photo I decided this was my time. I grabbed my white seamless back drop and headed out to the meeting point.
I have always found that lighting a big group of people is really hard. To have flattering light that's interesting and lights everyone evenly is really challenging, especially on a budget. Since we shoot individual portraits of all of the athletes, I decided to do a full length portrait of every person and stitch them together in Photoshop. The result was pretty good.

After (much better)

Friends of the family

2007-03-18T15:29:00.000-05:00

I had an assignment Tuesday to make a portrait of a local woman who has done a lot of digging into her own genealogy. I met her in a church cemetery about a mile from the office, one that I took mental note of as I drove past a couple of weeks ago and thought to myself, "I bet you could make some cool photos in there." As I was setting up my equipment for the portrait, I asked the my subject, Nancy Matthews Daniels, what she learned about her ancestors and why we were at this particular cemetery on the border between Beltsville and Laurel, Md. She told me she had traced her ancestors back to the 18th century to a fellow whose grave we were standing on. The headstone was there until about five years ago when it was vandalized and destroyed. She talked about him and his descendants. Then she mentioned a name I recognized--the Clark family.

My mother was born in a prisoner of war camp in Germany after her mother was taken by the Germans from their home in Ukraine and put in a work camp. Eventually, they made their way to the United States, sponsored, in part by the Clarks. One of my mother's family's first homes in the United States was on the Clark family farm.

So, without her family, my family wouldn't be here. It was a great connection to make.

Nancy Matthews Daniels sits on the steps of what was once a log cabin-style church in Beltsville, Md. Amidst the graves of her ancestors. In the background is Queens Chapel United Methodist Church.

Nancy Matthews Daniels sits in the Queens Chapel United Methodist Church cemetery where many of her ancestors are buried. Daniels has spent the last 10 years researching her family back to the 18th century through state archives and other resources.

Daniels believes there are many graves dating back to the 18th and 18th centuries in this graveyard, but many have been erased by time and weather or damaged by vandals.

River Dance, Here We Come

2007-03-17T15:23:00.000-05:00

St. Patrick's Day is upon us, which means that community newspaper photographers around the country will take photos of anything green, red-headed or drunk. Preferably, all three. Of course, there is not a huge Irish community in our coverage area, but we will find them.

I had the good fortune to be able to cover an Irish dancing class in Bowie. These kids were NOT drunk, but they were giving it their Michael Flatley best.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

Lensbaby, baby!

2007-03-15T17:49:00.000-05:00

There is this cool thing called a Lensbaby, which adds a the ability to shift and pivot the lens on an SLR camera around, sort of like on a 4x5. It creates that selective focus look of 4x5 camera photography where one section is really sharp and the rest is blury and out of focus. I have been very good and not indulging in a lot of photo-related purchases, which keeps the boyfriend happy. But, I saw this thing advertised on the web or in a magazine or something (can't remember now) and I really wanted it. So, the tax refunds came in and I thought, why not?
This lens is a lot of fun. I'm not sure how or if I'm going to be able to use it for my work at the newspaper, perhaps a feature story or portrait. But the test pictures were fun to make.

Teasa

2007-03-15T09:24:00.000-05:00

I'm posting this today even though it happened last month because I've been wanting to do something with it, but haven't found the right place. -CA

Teasa Jones was being treated at Prince George's Hospital for an infection resulting from her IV drug use. After a few days of treatment, the hospital threatened to discharge her because she didn't have health insurance. She also didn't have shoes or a coat (it was 30 degrees outside), or a place to go. What she did have was an addiction to heroin.

I got a call about Teasa from Rev. Bobbi Troyer, who runs Streetlights of Bethany, a ministry to people in need. She ministers to and works with people who are homeless or are having other crises, connecting them with the resources they need to get out of trouble, whether it's housing, government programs, drug treatment, etc. She met Teasa in the ER waiting room. Rev. Bobbi was getting someone else admitted for heart trouble. They started talking and Rev. Bobbi thought she could help. Later, when the hospital told Teasa she had to go, she called Rev. Bobbi.

Rev. Bobbi and I have worked together on stories and other projects before, so she called me, thinking that some pressure from the local press may help convince the hospital not to discharge Teasa without proper care. That's when I made these images. They were hoping Teasa would get a referral to a residential drug treatment facility and program once her open wounds were healed. From there she could go into a half-way house program Rev. Bobbi worked with in the past.

The next day I called to check up on the progress. Rev. Bobbi said that when she came back to the hospital with a pair of shoes for Teasa (Teasa only had slippers when she came to the hospital, it was February), the floor nurse told her they had discharged Teasa to a homeless shelter, but they couldn't give Rev. Bobbi any more information.

Teasa probably left because she was undergoing withdrawal from her drug addiction and wanted a fix. Her wounds probably will require further treatment, which she may or may not get. If she's lucky, she'll end up in the ER again and the cycle will repeat itself.

Teasa talks to me about her life as she looks out the window of her room in Prince George's Hospital. At right, Rev. Bobbi Troyer of Streetlights of Bethany makes calls to try to find a treatment program for Teasa.

Fun with 4x5

2007-03-14T10:29:00.000-05:00

I bought a 4x5 view camera about a year ago from ebay and I almost never use it. So, I decided to start using it again. I had some old Polaroid Pos/Neg film (type 55, I think), which is great because it gives you an instant print and a negative. Since I have an orchid in bloom I figured I might as well use that as a subject. Given how long it takes to for me to set up and focus a camera, I figured I needed a subject that wouldn't complain or move around a lot, as my boyfriend tends to do. I had some problems with the polaroid back for the camera. At first, it seemed to be working fine, as I was making some test prints to check for focus and composition. My bright idea was to process final exposures all at a later time, preferably in my makeshift darkroom (a.k.a. guest bathroom). Unfortunately, something seems to have screwed up the polaroid back, because I started getting completely black prints, which suggested that the film wasn't getting exposed at all, and at least once, when I went to take the film out of the film holder, the dark slide came up leaving the film exposed. It was very frustrating. After about an hour and 10 sheets of film I put the camera away and went downstairs to process the film. All the film came out blank. I thought I had nothing. Then I remembered that I still had the negatives from the test prints I made. I sifted through the debris I left in my living room, where I photographed the flowers, and found the negative for this image.

First post

2007-03-14T10:16:00.000-05:00

I'm a photographer from Washington, DC. Here are my photographs.