Kayley Cole of Olympia (left) and Gayle Denman of Auburn stay out of the drizzle as the newly retrofitted boat Point Ruston arrives in Thea Foss Waterway, moved from its previous dock in Ruston at the former smelter site. It will be used as a "crew's lounge" for visiting sailors involved in Tall Ships Tacoma. It is the former Pierce County ferry "Steilacoom" and served the Anderson Island route.

My assignment was to show that the former ferry was refurbished and moved downtown. Showing that people were on hand to see its arrival, and showing the weather as well, is a bonus. The challenge is to tell as much as one can in a photo without making it too cluttered or having the main subject too small to see it well. Wide angle lenses are a valuable tool for that.

Perhaps your next point-n-shoot should have a zoom that can go as wide as 28mm equivalent, eh?

Eleventh-grader Joshua Ghozeil plays and chants as part of a (Japanese) Taiko Drumming group in Stadium High School's "Multicultural Assembly" Friday, March 21, 2008. Students, several from foreign lands, performed music, dance and showed fashions,a slideshow and a video.

When shooting a speech or performance, I like to show the whole event rather than just the person(s) on stage. So rather than shoot from the viewpoint of the audience, I usually move to the side or rear so that I can get audience in the background. Since performers don't look back very often, it limits the number of moments I can catch. I'll have fewer frames to choose from, but it's usually worth it so show a more complete version of the event.

Melanie Anderson, watches as her husband, U.S. Army Sgt. Phillip Anderson's casket is carried by members of the Washington State Honor Team, at Tahoma National Cemetery, in Kent, Wash., Thursday afternoon, 20, 2008. Sgt. Anderson, a resident of Graham was assigned to the 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Hood, Texas and died in Balad Ruz, Iraq, March 10, 2008. Janet Jensen/The News Tribune

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, a pool player at The Swiss wore a green hat.

But it was the beautiful lighting that forced the camera to my eye.

In the back rooms at The Swiss there are large window up high, so when shooting toward the windows with a telephoto, the backlighting puts a thin bright rim on the people.

It also makes for lots of flare. It's one of the rare times when I wish I had a telephoto that wasn't also a zoom lens because with fewer lens elements, it would have a little less flare.

Having lots of flare means more work in PhotoShop to clean it up and build back the contrast that was robbed by that type of flare.

An assistant with a card to shade my lens would also help. That's one of the differences between a big commercial "shoot" and a roving news photographer.

Dancers from Evolution Irish Dance Troupe bow to their audience at Villas at Union Park, a senior home in Tacoma. The troupe performed jigs and reels, then packed up their dance flooring and music box and headed for their next gig on a busy St. Patrick's Day.

Staff photographer Dean Koepfler works with parents, children and designers to make a fun photo to illustrate a story on the differences between disposable and cloth diapers.

Audience members react excitedly as the "jammer" for the Dallas Deception is sent off the track by the "pivot" of Tacoma's Puget Sound Outcast in an early round of "Throwdown in the Sound", a mens roller derby tournament held in Tacoma Saturday, March 8, 2008.

The biggest difficulty when shooting an event like this is catching sharp action photos with the very poor lighting that such venues usually have.

One could shoot with a flash, but that produces ugly, unnatural lighting, and it doesn't usually allow one to shoot many frames rapidly.

To shoot action indoors without flash, the first requirement is to have a large camera, such as a digital Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera. Small point-and-shoot cameras don't have the capability of shooting in very low light-- their little sensors actually don't capture as many photons as sensors in larger cameras.

But the lighting in the Tacoma Soccer Center is so dim that eventhough I was shooting at an ISO of 3200, I still had to use some flash in order to have adequate exposure and freeze the action.

I used a shutter speed of 1/180th of a second - which isn't high enough to freeze the action reliably - and the widest apeture that my telephoto lens would allow: f/2.8.

To see more photos from the Throwdown in the Sound, visit the gallery.

Lynden's Blair Bomber guard, tries to block Foster's Refugio Soto-Lopez during 2nd period action of the 9 a.m. game of the WIAA State 2A boys basketball tournament in the Tacoma Dome this morning.