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Separating families

I guess what struck me the most about this assignment was that it took me away from my family for three nights, but some of my subjects wouldn’t see their families for months on end. Three days was hard enough for me … I can’t imagine what it must be like for those who come here to work and leave their families behind. I’m not sure I could do that, but then, I’m not faced with same circumstances they are.

ANDY SAWYER/Yakima Herald-Republic A passenger says a final good-bye as bus doors close and the trip north begins.

All in all, it was a great assignment. It was a challenge for sure, since the photo opportunities were limited, and editing was even tougher because the story became one that is both impressionistic and literal, and cutting photos out was easy to a point, but then the story line took over, and I found myself keeping photos that I normally would have thrown out early.

I think we ran more photos than a story like this would usually require, but given the linear element, I really believe what we ran was what it took to give readers the full story of the bus ride. I mean, it’s a long ride, and my knees ached by the middle and onto the end … I need to try to convey that ache, too, even if it’s just that a reader is sick of looking at my pictures.

–Andy Sawyer

I heart Holga

Holga is the small, cheap, plastic camera I used to shoot my photo page of this year’s Central Washington State Fair. She is completely unlike the hefty workhorses we carry for daily work. To start with, she’s a toy. Weighing practically nothing, she doesn’t even come weighted with the need for advanced photographic knowledge. To make a picture you punch down the shutter button then wind the film by hand. Her back is taped on so that halfway through the roll it doesn’t fall off and ruin the entire take. She has no batteries, no light meter, no motor drive. Her shutter speed is set, and approximate. Her lens focuses by moving it back and forth between a picture of one person (close-up) and mountains (far away).

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 â€œflawed,â€ 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

The future has arrived (pt. 1)

The future arrived via UPS in two large cardboard boxes at the newspaper last week. Both had overnight shipping stickers affixed to their slightly battered exteriors. Inside were two Canon

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

Just another day at the office

One of the things I love most about being a photojournalist is that every day brings new challenges. No two days are ever alike.

On Thursday, I got to the office with two assignments in my box-fairly typical. One was in our studio, head shots of two people for a story, and the other, a feature for the sports department. After checking my e-mail, I headed out to get one of my other chores for the day done-getting my press pass for the upcoming Central Washington State Fair. Because the fair office had had problems with its camera, the line was pretty long when I got to the SunDome. But, I was simply in the same boat as all the other folks-delivery people and fair workers-who were waiting, and no doubt the people making the pictures were having a much longer day than mine. Ten minutes into the wait, I get a call from my editor-there’s a city council meeting that needs to be covered. My pass will have to wait. I pop into the office to pick up my new assignment, so I’ll know what the story is going in and head over.

The problem with photographing meetings is that, although the issues discussed may be important, visually, there is usually just a lot of talking

and listening.

I sat on the floor for almost an hour, waiting for the people in the neighborhood surrounding the site where a Seattle developer wants to build apartments for seniors to show, through expression or gesture, just how frustrated they were. I could tell the man sitting near me, Earl Pratt, had something to say-he’d been taking notes and nodding as the people before him made their presentations. When he stood up to address the session, I knew I had my photo.

Back at the office, I downloaded my images, thinking to get them ready for publication before the women I was photographing in the studio showed up. Before the files were even finished copying, a message came over the police scanner, and a news editor came running towards the photo department: someone had been shot on South Naches Avenue. Lots of police were heading over. The suspects were still at large. Grabbing our cameras, fellow photographer Kris Holland and I headed out.

Spot news-fires, accidents, crimes-aren’t an every day occurance, but they are part of our job. They are usually part of the job I like least â€“ photographing people on what is likely the worst day they have had in a long time. When I showed up to the scene, police cars were already blocking the road, and emergency workers were loading the victim into the ambulance. I shot a a few frames, knowing we likely wouldn’t publish them. Kris and I stayed back, taking some shots of the overall scene while we tried to get the lay of the land.

A police officer went running by me, and suddenly, a nearby police car took off down Naches Avenue. Kris headed for his car and I jumped in and off we went. Two blocks later, police, with guns drawn, were running down a back alley and around several houses. Kris took the alley, and I headed around front.

I jumped, but kept photographing as police drew their guns and started shouting at someone I couldn’t see.

At any emergency scene, my job is to come back with storytelling images, but to stay out of the way of emergency workers who are trying to do their jobs too. I remembered a story I once saw of a photographer chasing a suspect with police only to realize later how much danger he’d put himself in because the suspect was armed. It ran through my head that if shots started flying, I definitely didn’t want to be in the way. Luckily, for all, that wasn’t the case.

The suspect had hidden under a house and they pulled him out and handcuffed him.

Shortly thereafter, I was at the office, downloading the photos and running to get the lights set up for the headshots.

That done, time to grab a quick lunch and head to my afternoon assignment, the sports feature.

I love shooting sports, especially the dedicated athletes in high schools. I admire the dedication these young athletes bring to their sports, and the excitement and joy when they compete. My afternoon feature was of a Eisenhower High School runner, Ivan Alfaro who has Usher’s syndrome. He’s been deaf since birth and only has about 20 percent vision.

In order to show how Ivan was different from his teammates, to show his unique challenges, I couldn’t just shoot him running. Visually, he’s no different from any other runner. With some help from the writer and my editor, we decided to shoot the pre-preactice pep talk from the coach, which Ivan hears through an intepreter who signs the coach’s words. I had a good situation, but needed to figure out how to get both elements into the frame. I decided to shoot the intepreter’s hands, to show the signing, then Ivan’s face, watching. After a couple of wider shots, I realized Ivan didn’t really stand out from his teammates-he’d be hard for a reader to identify.

I switched lenses and cropped out his teammates, and had my shot.

I hung around for a little longer to see if I could get another nice photo of him warming up. Although I had a shot that described how he was unique, I didn’t feel I’d captured any of his personality, showed the person, not the disability. And it’s people that I’m interested in. As he was warming up, he was joking with his teammates, and the coach came over to push him in his stretches a bit. He groaned but laughed at how inflexible he was. His face lit up and I had my shot, felt good that I could show him as just another member of the team, gearing up for Saturday’s big race.

After toning the photos back at the office, I had one last task for the day: the press pass. Kris and I headed to the SunDome together, knowing that good conversation might make the wait go faster.

When we got to the front of the line, the folks at the fair office laughed as we took pictures of each other, and of ourselves being photographed. No doubt they’d had a very long day helping impatient people get their credientials, and a little fun to top off all of our days was a good thing.

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Separating families

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Just another day at the office

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