atomicphoto

By pure scheduling luck I’ve managed to get several assignments to do outdoor sportraits at high noon in the past few weeks. Having the sun directly above the subject isn’t the most flattering light, and also isn’t the easiest to work with, so we do what we can with external flashes to make things work.

For this one, I was able to put Justin on the shady side of the white brick wall outside the lacrosse/football field. I added a few flashes, one directly in front of him as the main light and one to my immediate right for fill light, to make the wall go pure white. After moving myself around a bit to get the best angle, this is what I came up with.

CAPTION:
Recent Westerville South graduate Justin Young, a goalie for the lacrosse team and cornerback for the football team, will play lacrosse for the Presbyterian College Blue Hose in the fall.

Funny story for a funny picture… After taking this photo and writing down all the caption information, I proceed to take it back to the office to upload in our system. After we finish working up the photo, our workflow requires us to print out a black and white copy and place it in the corresponding edition’s bin. Since we have 23 newspapers, this keeps things a bit more organized.

As I’m putting the photo of Sam and several other pictures from the Worthington Art Festival into the Worthington bin, I see another staffer’s picture that catches my eye. It was a shot of Sam at the Worthington bike race from the day before! Talk about random! Never once did Sam’s owners mention he had just been photographed by someone from my same paper. After calling the other photographer to share the story (and getting a pretty big laugh out of the whole ordeal), we decided to use my photo of Sam looking at the bird photos due to the irony of the situation.

CAPTION:
Sam the retired 27-year-old blue and gold macaw from the now-defunct Kahiki Restaurant admires David and Joanne Kelch’s bird photography while being pushed around the Worthington Art Festival by his owners Jim Rush and Beth Mitchell, not pictured, on June 21. Sam, who worked at the Kahiki from 1982 until it closed in 2000, was admired by festival goers young and old throughout the morning.

CAPTION:
As Scottish Corners Elementary first graders, from left, Simranjit Butalia, Allison McGrover and Daniel Buehler practice balancing plates, Jimla the clown declares success after helping Sowbhagya Gosangi balance hers during a circus-themed recreation time at the school. Jimla, a 1989 graduate of the Ringling Brothers’ Clown College in Florida, toured Columbus in preparation for the Ringling Brothers Circus coming to Nationwide Arena.

Generally photographers prefer shooting with the sun at their back. This puts the light directly on the subject’s face making it not only easier to expose the photo, but also providing better color and detail. Unfortunately, we’re not always able to get in a position to put the sun behind us. Thus was the case for half of my matches at the state tennis tournament.

The matches were played at Ohio State’s 12-court outdoor facility. The courts were arranged in rows of four aligned from east to west, so depending on which court the local kids were playing on, I either had to shoot across three courts to keep the sun behind me, or I could stand on the other side and shoot directly into the light.

Shooting into the light has its benefits too. Depending on how low the sun is in the sky, it can provide a nice rimlight around the players. Things like smoke, and in this case tennis ball dust, will show up better when backlit as long as the background is dark. Getting the correct exposure in this situation is the hardest part. Cameras will almost always underexpose the subject when metering automatically. Spot metering on the shadow side of the player’s face and setting the camera to manual exposure is the best way to get around this.

Here are two examples of the difference between shooting into the light and shooting with it behind me. Note the clean backgrounds, which make or break a tennis photo.

CAPTIONS:
(above) Gahanna Columbus Academy singles player Will Petrie returns a forehand shot during his first round match against Warren John F. Kennedy’s Michael Fredericka during the state tennis championships at Ohio State’s Stickney Tennis Center on May 30. Petrie won the match 6-3, 6-0.
(side) Gahanna Columbus Academy singles player Andrew Enslen tosses up a serve against Cincinnati Country Day’s Joey Fritz during the first round of the state tennis championships at Ohio State’s Stickney Tennis Center on May 30. Enslen lost 6-2, 6-0.

The third state tournament we had this past week was baseball. Canal Winchester was the only local team to make the state finals this year. Their semifinal game was far more exciting than the 6-0 loss in the finals two days later. After tying the game in the bottom of the seventh inning, Canal went on to win it on a walk-off single in the bottom of the eighth. After the player hit home plate, and the ump finally got out of my way, this was the image I ended up with.

CAPTION:
After scoring the winning run in the bottom of the 8th inning, Canal Winchester coaches and teammates tackle Matt Romanowski, lower left, at home plate ending the Division II state championship semifinal game against Notre Dame Cathedral Latin at Cooper Stadium on June 5. The Indians won 6-5 to advance to the final game against Walsh Jesuit where they lost 6-0.

The state championship lacrosse game between Worthington Kilbourne and Upper Arlington provided some great shots of the players putting it all out on the line and smashing into each other. Here’s the shot I like the best.

CAPTION:
Upper Arlington’s Alex Pore (26) collides with Worthington Kilbourne’s Angelo Gutierrez (25) knocking the ball loose as Kilbourne’s Pat Riffee (2) takes a hit from UA’s Cal Case (45) during the Division I state championship game at Dublin Coffman High School on June 7.

We had two Columbus School for Girls runners in consecutive heats of the 400 at the state track meet on June 6. Their school mascot is the Unicorn. The girl in the first heat collapsed at the finish line and was helped off the track by meet volunteers. The girl in the attached photo was in the second heat, and she fell at the finish line as well. As soon as it happened, I hear one of the photographers beside me exclaim, “We have another Unicorn down!” It was funny at the time. The girl was fine after some ice and water.

CAPTION:
Columbus School for Girls’ Clare Connor collapses to the track after completing the 400-meter dash during the state track meet preliminaries at Ohio State’s Jesse Owens Stadium on June 6. Gusty winds and temperatures in the high 90s posed problems for many runners.

Ana constantly reminds me that I work as a photographer for a living, yet somehow we don’t have any photos hanging in our apartment. I’ve never had a photo printer at home, so it’s my thinking that I’d rather save the money we’d spend making prints at Cord Camera or Printroom.com and invest in a good photo printer. I saw what I thought was a good deal on a decent printer at Staples earlier in the week, but I wanted to do some internet research before pulling the trigger.

I spent better part of the afternoon today looking at printers online. For about $300, I can get a printer that does 13×19″ glossy, archival prints. Both HP and Epson have models in this price range. Doesn’t seem like a bad deal until I started calculating the cost of paper and ink.

HP Premium Plus high gloss paper costs $35 at Staples for a 50-count bundle of 8.5×11. OK, I suppose I can handle that. It’s a heavy, tangible object that will probably outlive me.

Then I start looking at ink.

That’s when I stumbled across the above chart that compares price per milliliter of various common liquids. The cost of HP black ink blew bottled water out of the water, not to mention human blood, penicillin, and Red Bull. I’m not sure about the specific data in the chart, but a recent antitrust lawsuit against HP alleges some ink can run upwards of $8,000 per gallon. The lawsuit also addresses the ridiculous steps printer companies have taken to prevent the usage of “generic” inks.

Now I’m never going to use a gallon of black ink, but proportional to usage, the cost of ink is probably going to be the deciding factor on whether or not Ana gets some wall decoration. Looks like now I have to figure out which photo printer uses ink most efficiently and whose brands of ink are the cheapest. I had no idea this was going to be such an ordeal.

And happy birthday Dad!

My cousin Becca got married to Blair Lang in Duck, North Carolina on the Outer Banks last month. Here is a selection of photos from the wedding.