Look here for more images from the game and to listen to Paul Wulff talk about his first game as head coach.

Washington State's Gary Rogers and new coach Paul Wulff prepare for the season opener against Oklahoma State's at Qwest Field, Saturday, Aug. 30, 2008.

A recent photo of mine relied on interesting light for much of its appeal. Not so much the lovely color, directionality or softness of the light, but that the light source itself was in the photo.

This breaks one of the basic "rules" that amateurs rely on to get good shots of their subjects, but I just happen to be fascinated by the look when the light source is in the photo.

Or appears to be. In this case I needed to add some lighting.

You can see that the light on his face comes from the left side of the frame. To put it there I swiveled the head of my strobe 90° to the left and bounced its light off the wall. To keep any light from the flash showing up on the portion of the wall that's visible I added a little black cardboard box to my strobe's head to act as "barn doors" to restrict the strobe's beam to a spot just outside the frame.

Below are some other examples with the light source in the picture.

It was just luck that I got someone's flash going off in the picture of Gregoire campaigning. I was already using my own lighting (bouncing a warm-gelled flash off the ceiling), but that person's direct flash was so much stronger (and bluer), I was able to darken the whole picture so that my bounced flash looked like a trace of ambient light.

At this daytime horse competition in an indoor arena I saw the potential of a silhouette when horse and rider enter. Here the light source is all of the bright outside (not the sun or sky per se) and part of it is in the photo. I spent a half hour working in Photoshop to bring out all the rim lighting on the subject.

The main hill of this cyclocross event had the sun at the top. I love the look, and even the lens flare. Many of my frames were useless because of excessive flare or exposure problems, so I was lucky that lots of riders came along over the afternoon.

This memorial service in Iraq was in a large hall with bland lighting, but there was one door open. I spent most of the service shooting angles looking toward the door, struggling with exposure difficulties and flare.

I love how the saluting soldier outside is mostly washed out. And lens flare brightens the edge of things around the door. Since flare is an artifact of the camera and lens, I have the option of using Photoshop to minimize it, but in this case I like it.

Including the rising sun in the shot of a stakeout surrounding a village in Iraq didn't just look good, it was relevant to the story. Again, lots of Photoshop work.

Lighting is almost everything in this shot of soldiers sitting in a bunker illuminated by two glow sticks. Note how I shot from back far enough to have a frame of dark soldiers in the foreground.

It wasn't necessary to shoot toward the light-- I could have put my tripod near the glow sticks and shot entirely with the light instead of against it. The soldiers would have been more fully illuminated, but it sure wouldn't have looked as good.

Here most of the Photoshop work was fighting the huge "noise" (what we called grain in the old days) from my early version of a digital camera (a Nikon D1H).

Finally, here's the rare example of where one doesn't have a choice but to shoot toward the light source. And it required almost no Photoshop work.

Last week I was shooting pictures for a story on used book stores when I found spot in Tacoma Book Center that I thought would make an excellent lead shot. (A lead shot is the most prominent picture when there are more than one shot for some story.)

With a 50mm lens, I was able to shoot a row of book spines close enough to read them and still have background elements of an aisle, lots of shelves, and, if I waited long enough, a person perusing the books. I just had to wait for a customer to linger on that aisle.

For an hour I kept an eye out for anyone who would visit the aisle and shot some photos elsewhere in the store, but no one came to my favorite aisle. I decided to give up-- other photos would suffice for the lead shot.

Later, when getting some help selecting photos at the office, Janet Jensen opined that the shot would indeed be my best lead shot if I could go back and catch a person in the picture.

So I went back to the Tacoma Book Center the next day. The books weren't in such a nice arrangement this time-- in the original arrangement I had liked the couple of books that had been lying on top. But I'm not allowed to rearrange them, just as I'm not allowed to ask someone to stand in the aisle pretending to peruse books. As they say in golf, "ya gotta play it where it lays."

I waited (while keeping busy listening to NPR on a portable radio) and finally I caught a frame of a young woman looking at a lower shelf:

But her coloring and body position didn't work so well. Then her boyfriend arrived, and his white shirt and interesting stance helped, but the two of them overlapping made it a "hard read", meaning that someone looking at the photo might find it difficult to decipher it:

I then found another spot in the store that offered a similar composition:

But I don't like the above photo very well, either. I like her dark shirt and I like the vivid book titles, but the background lighting is not congenial and the shelves don't make such good lines as the deeper shelves in my original composition.

So after the second hour in Tacoma Book Center I gave up, hoping to find time to return for a third visit.

On the third day I was able to shoot and older man:

Then a couple of young guys:

After several minutes, one of the guys left, and I like the body language of the remaining one:

This is my favorite frame. And I have offered it as the lead shot for the story (which is yet to be published). You also can see that it is the only one of these frames that has been fully worked up (meaning the the color and contrast have been perfected).

But of course, I know that I could go back a fourth time and wait some more, and I just might come up with a slightly better version.

Back at the barn, Natalie Breshears, 11, struggles to remove her hunt boots after her horse 'Oreo' finished showmanship judging at the Pierce County Fair Wednesday, August 6, 2008. Russ Carmack/The News Tribune

Joe Barrentine/The News Tribune

Mount Rainier is silhouetted against Tuesday morning's sunrise, as seen from Ruston Way.

Darren Breen / The News Tribune

A fox licks its paw on Five-Mile Drive at Point Defiance Park on Tuesday August 5, 2008. Have an urban wildlife photo to share? Post you own here.

Darren Breen/The News Tribune

The Colombian tall ship Gloria, crewed by third-year Colombian naval cadets, is moored in Tacoma until Wednesday and is open for viewing from 9am to 8pm. On Wednesday, she will set sail for San Diego.