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!

Sunrise Outreach members lay their hands on and pray for Gideon Merchant Thursday, April 9, 2009, during their morning stop at Naches and Chestnut Avenues in Yakima, Wash.. From left are Jeff Brooks, Jackie Archibald, Frank (who asked his last name not be used) and Debra Harrington. Merchant said he has been looking for a job and "in desperate need of spiritual healing" when he by chance walked up upon the group and asked for them to pray for him. "This photo is a powerful, genuine and meaningful moment that I was lucky enough to witness and then be able to share." --Andy Sawyer

In each caption the photographer has written a comment about the photograph. Look, read and enjoy.

–Gordon King

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I’m starting on a story about the players of the Yakima Bears and the life of a minor-league ball player. During the team’s second practice, the hitting coach was warming up his players and evaluating their hitting skills by having them hit ground balls. When everyone had had a turn he pointed to me and told me I was up. I set my gear down and picked up a bat.

Sad to say, I hit one of maybe six tries. Enlightening, yes. A surprise? Nope. Just another confirmation that my hand-eye coordination is best used in the service of photography! And gave me even more appreciation of the skills of the young men I’ll be documenting this summer as they play baseball and reach for the major leagues.

It’s judging time for a couple of the country’s biggest photo contests, and on a slow afternoon I like to cruise through the winners. The pictures offer fresh glimpses of news events, from the Olympics to the presidential campaign, and also a look at great work that hasn’t had a large circulation yet — stories like women victims of acid burning in Pakistan, female circumcision, and the story of people bringing their relatives’ body from L.A. to Mexico for burial. For me, it’s a reminder that there are a million stories out there to tell and that an individual vision can make a difference. When the daily grind wears me out, the contests offer both inspiration and a reminder that there is a larger photographic community out there and that the bar of excellence is high, and worth reaching for.

Pictures of the Year international (POYi) has already been judged and the winning images are posted here.

Best of Photojournalism (BOP) judging of still images will take place March 22-27. You can see this year’s winners after that date and until then, go to the BOP website for last year’s still image winners as well as this year’s video winners.

NPPA monthly clip contest is just kind of a nice way to see what daily newspaper shooters all over the country are shooting, month to month. We are region 11 and it’s also nice to check out what “local” photojournalists in Seattle, Portland, Wenatchee, Tri-Cities, and Spokane are up to.

One photo immediately after the event (within 15 minutes, like an appetizer) to use on the TourneyTown site on the game summary story that goes up as soon as the game ends.

2-4 photos for print.

10+ photos to be used on the sports blog and TourneyTown.

1-2 feature photos for the print photo page that will run Sunday after the tournament. This can be fans or non-action moments.

1-3 photos for other papers. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll have some help from other papers covering the tournaments in Spokane and Tacoma. In return, if we’re shooting a game of a local team against one of their local teams, I’ll get some action shots of the other team to send to other papers if they’ve called to request photos.

So, to get all this cookin’ this is how I’ve ended up shooting most of my games. I’ll shoot the first half of the game from a couple different angles. If I need photos for another paper, I’ll shoot those photos then, so I can focus exclusively on the home team near the end of the game. I’ll dump those photos into the computer during half-time and do an edit during the third quarter. If I have time, I’ll pull out and caption and tone the photo I’ll send first to TourneyTown.com. If I need a feature or want to try a different and more risky angle, I’ll shoot this in the third quarter. Sometimes I’ll shoot from my spot at my computer, making pictures when the team is on my side of the court, toning and saving images when they are on the far side of the court.

Lastly, I’ll shoot the final quarter, which usually has a lot of emotion and the reaction of the local team, whether they’ve won or lost. I’ll quickly put these into the computer and add that edit to the half-time edit. These are all saved to a folder that I can work out of. TourneyTown.com gets its first photo, if I didn’t get it done during the third quarter. I’ll figure out which four photos I’m going to send to print and caption and tone these. The rest of the photos get a generic caption. Once every photo has a caption and has been toned, I’ll copy and save a set of these photos for both TourneyTown.com, then the sports blog. I’ll send those off. Then I’ll finish toning my print photos and send those off. Imagine plates of delicious food being set up under the heat lamp and being whisked away for ever-voracious diners.

Lastly, I’ll work on any feature photos or send off any photos to other papers. By this time, the buzzer is starting the next game or I’m already into the first couple minutes of the first quarter and grabbing my cameras and getting back to the floor for the next round!

To decode this for you — the neatly written list of name in blue are the wrestlers I was assigned to photograph, in order of their weight classes and with their classifications (B/2A/3A/etc.) written out beside them so I could easily find the mats where they were wrestling. The red dots beside those names indicated the wrestlers I needed to be absolutely sure I got a publishable photo of. The short list in red below them was a list of Scott Spruill’s stories and which wrestlers / images would likely serve as the main images for the story and which would run secondary. The sloppy blue writing is then my notes to myself and the names of some of the coaches I photographed, scribbled hastily as I followed them off the mats after the matches.

Let me say, I love working with Scott. He is one of the most organized and helpful reporters I’ve worked with. When I walk into the event, his list has everything I need to hit the ground running. He knows the back story to most of the wrestlers and knows who we’ve run features on recently. He knows how my coverage will likely be used, which helps me plan how to shoot photos that will look good when they are run smaller or bigger, and also get a variety of shots, from action to reaction. Scott also knows which wrestlers are likely to win and how they’ve been wrestling so far in the season, so I can position myself to capture the jubilation shot at the end of the match. All of these factors play into how I approach covering matches that last about 6 minutes. And during several of the matches we covered, I needed to run between mats and make sure I had pictures of different local wrestlers who were wrestling at the same time — that means covering each wrestler for 3-4 minutes. It also means knowing where I need to get to and the shortest route to the next mat. Scott’s classification notes let me know where to get to, fast. Knowing which photos to prioritize, being able to anticipate what reactions were likely to happen at the end of which matches, and knowing where I had to be next all helped me work quickly and efficiently to make the six photos we needed for print and a gallery of online images.

While I can’t control which direction the wrestlers moved (to get shots of faces) or how the matches went (one wrestler was pinned and lost just as I was moving over to his mat to make pictures), being prepared meant that I got the best images I could out of each situation. I was able to focus fully on each situation, focus on the photography, rather than navigating the whirlwind of other factors that any big event brings. Although it has nothing to do with the f-stop, the lens, the composition or aesthetic, pre-planning is a vital and integral part of photography. It gets you in the right place at the right moment with the right gear and the right settings to make a good picture.

To see my photos from the match, click here.

]]> http://www.yakimaheraldphotos.com/2009/03/01/before-the-moment/feed/ 0 http://www.yakimaheraldphotos.com/2009/03/01/feline-photographer/ http://www.yakimaheraldphotos.com/2009/03/01/feline-photographer/#comments Sun, 01 Mar 2009 04:10:13 +0000 Sara Gettys http://www.yakimaheraldphotos.com/?p=722 Okay, so a friend sent me a link to this story and I love it. This Seattle cat, Cooper, has (with a little help from his humans) become a photographer. His humans (who are filmmakers) got a small digital camera with a timer that snaps the shutter every 2 minutes. They put it into a hard plastic case and Cooper is able to document his travels throughout the day and also take portraits of his people. His pictures are pretty cool, ranging from abstract blurry scenes, to a cat’s-eye-view of the people around him. He recently had a gallery show in Seattle. It’s such a fun story, I just had to share. To check out Cooper’s blog, click here. They have links to his photos and to Cooper’s press. For a fun video on this furry photographer, click here.

I find it almost impossible to pass up a beautiful book filled with lovely reproductions of work I find inspiring. And when I’m feeling a little uninspired, sitting down for a bit with a big book of photos never fails to perk me up. Right now I’m spending evenings with a recent birthday present — Annie Leibovitz’s “At Work,” which is the perfect antidote to the unending news about the economy’s nosedive and the state of newspapers. Seeing as neither are likely to look up in the very near future, I’ve compiled a list of inspiring reads from among my favorites. Enjoy!

Starting from the top of the stack, my current read. I’ve just been opening the book and reading whatever section I fall into, and have enjoyed it all. The book is organized into sections of different lengths, from discussions of individual shoots to larger discussions on topics such as conceptual pictures, which gives some background on her portraits of famous folks such as Bette Midler and Meryl Streep. The section I read last night was about group shots and it’s interesting to read how organized and pre-planned each shoot is. For a photo of President Bush and six others, Leibovitz and her team were given the exact height of everyone in the photo so the lighting and seating arrangement could be composed before hand. Many of the people she photographs give her very little time to make pictures, and so the photographs are often days in planning and setting up, then minutes in the actual shoot. I imagine it must be both steadying to have the concept and technical aspects of a photograph worked out beforehand, and challenging to know you have to make the picture work in the 10 or 20 or 30 minutes you are give to work with the subject. As someone who’s often asked to go in someplace, scope it out, light it and make a telling portrait in 15 minutes, her process fascinates me. I’d also recommend reading her “A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005.” It’s a great book and heartbreaking in places.

Next in the stack: “Sam Abell: The Photographic Life.” Right after this book was published, Sam Abell came to speak at the University of Missouri, where I was attending grad school. He struck me as an insightful, soft-spoken, and thoughtful person. He talked about what photographs have meant to him, both as he made them and years later, reviewing his contact sheets. His pictures, to me, mirror the quiet confidence and reflection of his demeanor during that presentation. They are a considered, integral part of his life. And this format, with the pictures presented alongside his thoughts about the images or the process of making them always remind me that making pictures is a process that is most successful when it stems from somewhere inside ourselves.

Jim Brandenburg set out to make one photo a day for 90 days. One picture, no retakes and no shooting a gazillion frames (like digital photography has allowed us to do). The result is a book full of incredible nature images, and a testimony to self-directed challenges and dedication. It’s like a meditation. A meditation shared by one of the world’s best nature photographers. Simultaneously inspiring and a little bit intimidating.

I discovered Sally Mann’s work when I was taking photography classes at Hollins University, where I did my undergraduate study. She was a student at Hollins at some point, and somewhat legendary at the school. In part, I think all of us aspiring photographers loved how her seemingly simple pictures of her kids could convey such emotion and innuendo. Moreover, the photos are just beautiful. She shoots with a large format camera and, even in her books, the tones and richness of the photographs just pull you in. Now, I look at her work to continue to learn to create richly metaphorical images (when the situation calls for it) and also to assuage the occasional pang of “home” sickness (I only lived there 5 years) for the lush Virginia landscape.

This book, which follows the stories of two gay teens in the early 90s, was shot by Rita Reed, my professor and mentor at the University of Missouri. She tackled it because she was alarmed by a 1989 study that gay and lesbian teens were 2 to 3 times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers, and also alarmed that no one wanted to tell that story. It took her 7 years to research and shoot. When I get dragged down into thinking that pictures don’t or can’t make a real difference, or that a story I think about may be too difficult to access or impossible tell, I pull out this book and think about the challenges she overcame. I wonder what I could do if I devoted the next 7 years to it and whose life I might just be able to change if I did.

This book is like a smorgasbord of great photography. Between its covers, Magnum photographers pick out one of their stories, talk about it, then show the images. Their styles, tastes, and topics are diverse. You’ve got weird British life by Martin Parr and war photography by Alex Majoli. And because Magnum is an international photo agency, there are images from all over the world that are influenced by aesthetics from all over the world. Most of the images are geared toward magazine publication and are therefore a little more compositionally daring than newspaper photography tends to be. Flipping through these pages gets me ready up to head out and try something new.

Lastly, I got this Diane Arbus book 2 years ago for Christmas and it’s interesting to glimpse into the mind of someone who shaped the photographic world. She was a woman who was unafraid of seeing, of looking at other people. My favorite thing about this book is that it includes some of her contact sheets and notes. I go back and forth on how I feel about her pictures — although I always find them interesting, I don’t always think she was a compassionate person, which is one quality I think should be essential to a photographer. Reading her notes I get a glimpse into her life and thoughts that, for me, makes the photos more accessible.

Those are just a few of the books I like to flip through. There are, of course, websites and blogs that I read regularly, and some of those are listed in a previous post Kris and I wrote, so go back in the blog entries to check that out.

Unleashed photographer Janessa Mains

My students — Janessa Mains, Alex Braman and James Hibbs — scattered when we hit the lodge, tromping off into the snow to capture their unique visions of snow day fun. Look for their photos soon in the Unleashed blog and in an upcoming Life in the Northwest page in the Yakima Herald-Republic.

Unleashed photographer Alex Braman

–Sara Gettys

Not to say that none of these aren’t exciting, but there’s not the rush of adrenaline they once held for me. And I never would have expected that an assignment to photograph a girl receiving an oversized check could make me feel what all of these things don’t.

Last week, I was sent to photograph 18-year-old Sharon Reyna, a student at Toppenish’s Eagle Alternative School. Sharon had won a $10,000 scholarship for designing a greeting card and was going to find out the big news at an assembly of her fellow students as well as the teachers and mentors who have helped her.

Only those teachers, some school administrators, the man with the check, and the members of the media knew. As she walked in the door, I positioned myself to stand near her so I could get a reaction shot when she figured out that the assembly was for her.

As I waited, she joked with her peers. I remembered the uncertainty about how I was going to pay for college, and the huge difference an education made in my life and the lives of many young people. I knew that this money would be a life-changing event for Sharon, a door opening. I thought about how I would feel if a new world opened up suddenly before me, if a huge weight were taken off my shoulders, if a road of struggle suddenly became a little easier.

I was so excited for Sharon and as she started to figure out what was going on, I switched to auto focus so my shaking hands wouldn’t blur the picture, wanting to capture that moment, when hope becomes reality, when the future is, for a moment, bright and wide open.

– Sara Gettys