Okay, a lot less technologically advanced. The Holga is a plastic toy camera with minimal controls. The shutter is a simple wire spring and the film moves from one reel to the next and can’t be rewound without using a dark bag. Exposure and focus are mainly left up to guesswork. I’ve used it for one other story at the YHR, shooting dreamy images of the state fair in 2007, and explain what it brought to that process here.

For this shoot, I decided to shoot 35 mm film. Both because I’d never tried it before and because it’s easier to process. I could just take it to a photo lab. Because the Holga is designed to shoot 120mm film, I had to modify the film holders a bit, using the high-tech method of stuffing packing peanuts around the reel of film and jiggling it to make sure it will stay in place. I adjusted the 120 film reel with some rubber bands.

I did a little bit of research and found out that 1.5 rotations of the film winding knob will give plenty of space between exposures, and (after ruining a test roll), covered the red window on the back (used to wind 120 film) with a couple pieces of cardboard and lots of black tape. Then I just packed a dark bag and several rolls of film and set off to shoot.

One of the limitations of shooting with this was the limitations of exposure. 400 ISO film is great for daylight, but didn’t give me much indoors. I found myself wishing I had toted along my tripod to shoot the face of the reactor, which I could have “built up” an exposure by exposing the film over and over and over without winding the film or moving the camera. I also could have used a flash on some of the smaller spaces I shot inside and that would have helped the contrast of the image.

Lastly, I converted the digital files from the flatbed scan to black and white. I did this for two reasons — it seemed to fit the historic flavor I was trying to convey with the story and also the color bars on the bottom of the film, above and below the sprocket holes were too visually distracting. Converted to black and white, I felt they contributed to the image, but in color, they just dominated the image.

This was a fun way to tackle this story and a simple way to have some photographic fun. If you’re interested in giving it a try here are the resources I used:

I bought my Holga at Freestyle Photographic Supplies, the simplest version of the camera cost about $28.

You can buy film and get it developed at many local shops if you shoot regular color (not slide, not b&w) film.

I had the negatives scanned at ProPhoto supply. I just mailed them in a stiff cardboard mailer and paid over the phone. They scanned them and sent them back in about a week. Their price list is on their website.

There are also tons of Holga galleries out there and work on Flicker as well, so you can always find inspiration!

Top-quality digital cameras, the RAW format and really good press work here at the Herald-Republic has allowed me to cast off the lighting shackles imposed by shooting ‘chrome for many years (which should tell you how long I’ve been in the newspaper photography business).

I think photographs using natural light more accurately capture the mood of the scene than those lit by strobes. Of course, to use natural light  I may have to shoot at a higher ASA and have a more noise in the photograph or perhaps have a bit of motion blur but that’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make in order to use natural light. One example is this photo of a horse that was given up by its owner when he could no longer afford to keep the animal.

Kerrie Regimbal moves Beanie to finish removing the horse's blanket at Regimbal's Selah-area home. Regimbal took in Beanie when the owner's home was foreclosed upon and was unable to care for the horse. When Kerrie and her husband Bob took in the horse three weeks ago it was emaciated but has since regained some, but not all, of its weight.

I love the light here – dawn light lights the front of the horse while the tungsten bulbs in the barn illuminate the rest of the scene, including the protruding ribs of the horse. The woman is a bit blurry but not enough to matter.

Sometimes, though, natural light is, well, boring. Then it’s time to think of how adding light to the photo can make it more interesting.

For example, here’s a heavy equipment operator running a D9 Caterpillar. He’s working inside a tinted cab.

Without a flash the photo doesn't have as much impact. Plus, you've got to wait until the light shines in the cab to take the photo. And when the light is right, the dozer may not be in the right place.

Sure, the photo works but with a flash, a pair of Pocket Wizards, a small tripod and lots of duct tape you can make it better.

I mounted a Lumedyne flash on a cheap tripod and used gaffer's tape to hold it in place. It was triggered with a Pocket Wizard. And dozer operator Larry Ross supplied the beard and cowboy hat.

This was the finished product.

Larry Ross pushes garbage around at Yakima County's Terrace Heights landfill on March 12, 2009. He's been doing it for 18 years and plans on doing it a couple more before retiring.

The ‘dozer operator really pops in this photo with the strobe added.

Conditions sometimes force me to use a strobe (like dealing with the really midday shadows we get here in the central Washington summers) but it’s only reluctantly that I pull the strobe out of my fanny pack.

–Gordon King

The only problem, they can can be a little spendy. I found directions to make one on-line (there are many approaches out there, just search for DIY ring light). And with about $5 invested (less than $3 for cheap plastic bowls, another two for silver duct tape), I found a way to make my own. Simple, cheap, lovely!

– Sara Gettys

1) cheap plastic bowls

2) silver tape to line the inside of a larger bowl, the outside of a smaller bowl, to reflect the light.

3) The set-up, about half an hour later. Scotch tape used to suspend the smaller bowl inside the bigger one, which has a hole cut out in the back to slip over the strobe. I also used some cardboard to make a little tunnel to slip over the head of the strobe so it would be easier to secure.

4) pretty light!

–Sara Gettys

In developing my idea for the column, I was struck by two ideas. The first was that whenever I tell my physically distant friends and family that I live in Washington state, I always get the same reaction. “Wow, I bet it’s wet there.” Their only concept of Washington is of western Washington: lush, green, and urban. I wanted to begin to describe the Washington I live in, its quirks, its character, its landscape and people. To try to describe, in pictures, my community – sageland and hops, rather than orcas and Microsoft.

My second thought was that I should start this exploration soon. I’ve lived here now for just over two years. Things that used to surprise me are slowly becoming comfortable and mundane. Places that are new, surprising and interesting slowly become so much a part of my everyday experience that I hardly notice them any more. I want to continue to look at my home with the eyes of a newcomer, to be fascinated at the commonplace.

So over the next 12 months you’ll be seeing the Yakima Valley through my eyes. The column will appear in the “Life in the Northwest” section monthly in print, and will also soon have it’s own home on the photo department’s website, which I hope to update more often.

Some entries will be a single photo, others will have video or slideshows. Each entry will explore the link between place, THIS place, and the people who live here. In the next 11 months, I want to paint a portrait of the Yakima Valley.

In picking situations to photograph, I am sketching out the shape of her. In editing my photos and videos I am choosing the nuance of line, here ragged as the ice along the river’s edge, here soft as cherry blossoms falling to the ground. And in the faces and stories of the individuals I will meet, I hope to discover the colors of life here: the earthy brown of everyday struggles, the brilliant glitter of a child’s sudden laugh.

It will be my portrait, painted with my experience.

I also welcome any suggestions for people and stories to photograph as part of this column. Please leave a comment below or email me with contact information at sgettys@yakimaherald.com.

–Sara Gettys

– Sara Gettys

Camera straps are very much an individual thing. For some, the strap doesn’t make any difference – it could be a piece of rope so long as it works. For others (like me) it’s got to be just right. Being “just right” means it has to comfortably carry the camera and distribute the weight when I carry it around my neck. The strap has to be kind of “grippy” so it won’t slide off my shoulder and yet it can’t be too “grippy” when I want to slide it off my shoulder or adjust the position of the camera around my neck. I don’t like it too wide or too narrow. It needs to be a dark color – lighter colors call attention to the strap. I like my straps plain – no company or camera logos. No sense giving a multi-billion dollar camera company a free ad on my camera strap.

I’m now using a one-inch-wide black Domke strap on one camera and a very well-worn stock Canon strap on the other. It’s this Canon strap I’m replacing. Besides being worn out, it’s got a big Canon logo on the strap (see above) so it needs replacing. Over the years the Domke straps have been my favorite but I have always been willing to try another type in my never-ending quest for the perfect strap. My main complaint about the Domke straps is the grippy stuff seems to wear out pretty quickly so they start to slide around.

The new strap is from Think Tank Photo and it looks a lot like the Domke strap. Hopefully it will last longer, especially since the strap cost the company $25.

–Gordon King

While most of my daily work involves juggling a photograph’s content with the technical decisions about lighting, depth-of-field, and speed, the Holga gives me little choice and, paradoxically, ultimate freedom. What I get is what I get. It will likely be technically “flawed,” in exposure or focus. But in return, I get to shed everything from my thoughts except looking for the right subject, the right light, the right moment.

I love the fair, its’s so different from anything else. I love walking through the barns and looking at the cows and checking out the largest local zucchini. Although I don’t ride many rides, I like to stroll through the midway, watching kids swirl in the swinging chairs or bump into their reflections in the fun house, laughing all the while. Like most folks, I find the smell of a funnel cake, an elephant ear, or the sight of a hand-dipped chocolate ice cream bar irresistible. For me, the fair is an escape, a short trip to another world where it isn’t surprising to see Elvis riding a unicycle and juggling for a small group of enthralled viewers, some younger than five, some older than eighty. It’s somewhere we can all go, and seems to have a little something for everyone.

The Holga, with all of its flaws, conveys this sense of the otherworldly. The unpredictable images it captures is as unpredictable as the little surprises that make the fair, especially for the young, so exciting.

Lastly, like the fair, working with the Holga seems to ground me in a long tradition. I can imagine people a hundred years ago walking through livestock barns and playing games. And while digital cameras have become my main tool as a photographer, as I pull the film off the developing reel, still wet and smelling of fixer, and hold it up to my kitchen window, I still feel the magic as the ghostly, reversed scenes appear in the film’s fine grain.

– Sara Gettys

video cameras and related accessories.

Their arrival marked the start of a new era in photography at the Yakima Herald-Republic, an era in which photographers and reporters will be shooting video as well as our usual still digital photographs. The video will be posted on this website as well as the newspaper’s main website, www.yakimaherald.com. The inclusion of video into the visual mix will be one more way of bringing more information to the reader and making our Web sites the place to go for both written and visual information.

Those two boxes included more than just video gear – they included both an opportunity and no small amount of angst. I, along with the rest of the photographers and reporters at the Herald-Republic, will now have another way to tell stories. We can use the power of those moving pictures to bring the stories of people, places and events to our readers. Truth be told, there are some stories which can be told better with video than still images. Now, with video cameras, we have the opportunity to tell the story in the best fashion possible. I’m very excited about that.
I’m pretty sure that Roberts Imaging (the place we bought the cameras) didn’t mean to, but they included anxiety in those boxes along with the cameras. We now have to learn a whole new set of skills to take advantage of the power of video. Shooting video includes many of the same techniques we’ve learned as still photojournalists so that part shouldn’t be so hard. But editing video is something most of us have never done and it’s going to take some serious study and work to get it right (and that’s where the anxiety comes in). I’m going to make some mistakes and shoot some bad video but in time I’ll learn how to do it and do it right.
Video has been coming our way for the last couple of years. As its arrival neared over the last couple of months I’ve been doing some hard thinking about my job as a photojournalist and how I view myself in that job. I’ll admit it — I’ve been a journalist longer than some of our reporters have been alive. My first professional camera was a beat-up Nikon F2 with a motordrive that used AA batteries. And I shot film — all black and white Tri-X. With that camera and a Domke bag full of fixed focal-length lenses (all manual focus — there was no autofocus in those days) I embarked on my professional photojournalism career in the early 80s. Since then I’ve been a still photographer believing in the power of the single image. I have always worked to make that one single, powerful image that tells a story and connects with the reader. For me, still photography has always been the most pure, most honest imagery. It has taken me years to learn how to make those decisive images, years to learn exactly when and how to push the shutter button to capture the best photograph.

Video? That was what we all saw on the evening news. There was the very occasional story-telling piece but most news video seemed to be B roll and a stand up by a news person. I never got a real sense of the people and their stories. The video camera vacuumed up all the images, not focussing on any one decisive moment to tell the story. It simply wasn’t powerful in the way a still image can be powerful.
I never envisioned carrying a video camera and I am still having some difficulty with that image. But cameras, after all, are just the tools (albeit they are really cool tools) we use to tell the stories. Video cameras will be just another addition to our visual tool kit.

I continue to fervently believe in the power of the single still image to capture the emotion of a moment in a way that no video can capture. But video can and will play an important role in my job to tell the stories of Central Washington. I am still a photojournalist, just now a photojournalist with a different type of camera. And I’ll just have to get used to carrying a video camera.

–Gordon King

This is an illustration to disprove the sentiments I (and my fellow photographers) have heard many times about how having a long lens must make for great pictures. It does — as long as you’re in place before the action, have a nice, clean background, and (at least in my case) a fairly quick and accurate autofocus.

Where a long lens sings is stopping action with a minimal depth of field, making a subject “pop” in focus against a background that’s intentionally left out of focus. We want to see the jubilation of victory or the sweat of exertion on the athlete’s face, not the spectator eating a hot dog behind her. What goes into making that great picture is knowing what’s going to happen before it does — where the play is headed, which player is likely to react when she scores a point, who’s in position to dive for the ball. A moment too late means the ball is out of the frame and the picture is unusable. A moment too late and that foot of focus is misplaced, caught on the net or a player’s arm that’s swung into the frame, or the crowd behind the player.

In this case, the camera first focused on the high contrast of the advertising behind the player and was slowly moving to the players when the peak action, the moment I was hoping for, happened. Two frames later, I have a nice sharp frame of these two young women, watching as the ball sails toward the net.

A long lens is definitely a great tool for shooting sports, but equally important, I’ve found, is practice. It’s knowing the game well enough to know where to point and focus that lens before the action happens. It’s knowing the limits and strengths of the tools you work with and how to use them to capture the moments that are meaningful, no matter the setting. It’s not making great pictures because of the tool, it’s making great pictures with the tool.
–Sara Gettys