Some stuff from last year (III) - a couple of portraits

This portrait was trickier than it seems. The sun was behind and to the left, and obviously, the water was several stops brighter than the boys' faces. I needed to capture the water (it was part of the story) and underexpose it to bring up the blue color. Problem was the only place to put the stand with a flash and umbrella was on top on a rock over the water, which was impossible. But then, my boss, who was driving home and knew I was taking a picture by the river, stopped and came down to se how things were going. He ended up on that rock, in a tricky balance, holding the flash and the umbrella. How cool is having your own photo editor working as your lighting assistant?
The National Council of Boy Scouts of America awarded Alex Standridge, left, a Medal of Merit after he pulled fellow scout Julian Lucky, right, to safety during a canoe trip on the Buffalo River in Tennessee last year.


We often receive calls, or they just show up at the newspaper's door, from people who have or caught big things: a 6-foot catfish, a huge cabbage, a monstrous pumpkin... Usually we take a picture in the parking lot, and that's it. One Sunday, I got a call from this man, Paul Hastings, saying that a tomato grown in his back yard was 18' 14" in circumference and weighed 2.5 pounds. I met him in the parking lot, but when I saw his hat and how photogenic he was, decided I wanted to take a portrait in the studio (I think I used 4 lights). Soon enough I had forgotten about the tomato and was concentrating in his face.


Angie Anders with her 2009 World Champion halter horse, Emmie, at Anders' farm in Hartselle.


I asked Daniel, an online editor at the Decatur Daily, to model in this photo illustration for a story about the Alabama and Auburn radio stations as part of our Iron Bowl previews. I've got to say he's a great actor.

Some stuff from last year (II)

Can't even remember what this was. I just like the excitement and the colors...


That kind of picture that I've tried to take so many times, but there's always something that makes it wrong. Not that this time I got it, but at least I came pretty close.


It was real hard to keep shooting while witnessing this man's pain.
Keith Barber moans in pain as his son, Joey, and his mother, Faye Barber, loosen the bandages on his left arm Monday, July 6, 2009. Barber, 49, has been paralyzed and unable to talk since a traffic accident almost two years ago.


I saw these guys playing on the street on my way to an assignment. I decided to stop and then hanged out with them until I got something I liked. Needless to say I got late to wherever I was going to.

Some stuff from last year (I)

While sorting out archives, burning CDs, throwing away crappy work, and, in general, those things that we usually do earlier in the new year, I came across some pictures that I like for one reason or another, but I never posted here. So here it comes the first batch of those.

The woman on the left is the wife of the guy in the ambulance. He was the victim of a hit-and-run. Fortunately he recovered.


One of the many fires I photographed last year. I just like this one picture. The way the firefighter is framed, I guess.


An osprey bringing a dead fish to the nest built on an electric power tower.


This lady, Harriette Rost, has been caring for her husband, Tom, since he had a stroke in May 2006. Harriette` invented and then marketed a simple device for pulling him up and turning him in bed.

PROMOS

In our newspaper (like any other newspaper, I guess) we shoot a lot of promos for upcoming plays and musicals. Who would have ever thought that this area of North Alabama was so rich in cultural events?
Anyway, we are sent to "take pictures of a rehearsal" (that's what the photo request says), and, at least for me, nothing beats the actors/singers movements and expressions combined with real stage lighting. But more often than not, what happens is that there's no rehearsal, the lights are not on (and nobody knows where the switch is) or simply they're not meeting at the theater, but at someone's house or, even worse, at a school gym. Invariably, the conversation goes more or less like this:

They: So, how would you like to take our picture?
Me: Oh, you just start your rehearsal and I'll be shooting. You do your thing, and I'll do mine.
They: Rehearsal? Oh, no, no... We came here just for the picture. There's no rehearsal today.

I used to get very upset by this kind of situations, but recently I've changed my approach to that. If this is going to happen over and over again, there's no point in getting upset. So, one fine day, I decided that is these are just promo photo shoots (not documentary photojournalism) I was going to take it easy and treat them as promos, using my own lighting (usually two off-camera flashes with shoot-through umbrellas) and trying to give the final product a rather magazine/poster look. I'm now having more fun doing it, trying new stuff everytime and, most important, learning something new each time. Here's some recent pics:

From a Burt Bacharach revisited show


From a Decatur Civic Chorus musical



From the original Athens, AL musical "We interrupt this program... Pearl Harbor remembered"

SUNSET IN THE LAKE

PEERING OUT

Trying to get something a bit different out of the countless christmas parades we shoot every year.

THANKSGIVING LUNCH (another year...)

Like a year ago, this year I had to work on thanksgiving day, too. Again, I wasn't allowed to show recognizable prison inmates' faces. Obviously, I didn't want to take a picture similar to last year's (it's somewhere on this blog). I saw this little girl who was helping her mom to serve soda to the inmates and decided to follow her and see what happened. The light was coming from a window very high up behind her, so her face was very dark most of the time. But then she came next to that inmate and the light reflected off his orange/white jail suit onto the girl's face. I focused on her and hoped the guy turned his face so it wouldn't be recognizable... And it actually happened.
I think the girl's facial expression is priceless.