In Photojournalism as in life, when times are tough, humor can be an elixir that can nurse us back to mental health. On Saturday I was driving to a morning assignment when I saw the dog houses in juxtaposition with the home for sale signs......I wrote the following caption for the paper.

Another sign that the housing market has truly "Gone to the Dogs," is this dog house open house on 84th. St. S. in Tacoma. Actually the zero down financing is being marketed by "Dan-o," for the house next door.
Saturday February 28, 2009 photos by
Dean J. Koepfler / The News Tribune

Friday night at Pacific Lutheran University I was reminded again that often, "My job is truly cool." I love meeting people of all ages, different cultures and walks of life. I met Ingelore Katjingisula, a exchange student from Namibia, who's face and arms were painted a bright blue to represent a "Blue Devil," in a Carnival Parade at PLU celebrating the world cultures and international study. At the parade's conclusion Ingelore wowed the crowd, and me, with a trick she learned as a PLU student studying in Trinidad ....spitting fire. I marveled at how she could keep her cool as she sprayed burning fuel , like a human blow torch, time and time again.
February 27, 2009
Dean J. Koepfler / The News Tribune

I shot this in a few minutes and cut it last night. The idea was that with even a simple video that we might be able to add little bit to to a reader/viewer's understanding of the how a baby can sign and how a family can use that to communicate. Let me know what you think.
Thanks.
Joe

A puddle partially covered in a crystalline skin of ice reflects a wintry sky and slumbering trees on Fox Island, Wash., as cold temperatures created natural beauty and slick conditions on Thursday Feburary 26, 2009.
Dean J. Koepfler / The News Tribune

A cormorant swims through the water of Commencement Bay while another bird flies through the fog as seen along Ruston Way, in Tacoma, January 12, 2009.(Janet Jensen/The News Tribune)

Tracey Koon feeds seagulls in a snow-covered Wright Park in Tacoma, Thursday morning, February 26, 2009.(Janet Jensen/The News Tribune)

I started on this a few days ago, but got caught up in other things so I'm afraid the timeliness is a bit off. But, the music and interviews still give you an idea of what it was like to roam the halls at the 16th annual Wintergrass.

Second graders create colorful art inspired by the music of J.S. Bach, and all thirty works will be projected behind pianist Amy Grinsteiner in a public concert at PLU.

(If no video player shows above this sentence, you can follow this link.)

Cruising for a weather photo I noticed these brawny dudes playing intramural tackle football at Mount Tahoma High. I appreciated the fact that having fun was more important than vanity. Any good lineman needs to carry some extra ballast to be effective. You just don't usually see them without their shirts. From left: Storm Koester, 17; Devin Abdon, 17; Michael Simpkins, 18; and Joshua Roberts, 18, Monday, February 23, 2009.

David Roberts, a laid off concrete finisher, isn't waiting for the "stimulus" program to kick in to lift him off the roles of the unemployed. Roberts and friend Jamie Lynn of Auburn were hard at work digging a ditch from a Tillicum house to the septic tank in the side yard. "I'm doing what I need to keep food in my gut and a place to live," said Roberts who is making a little money helping on the renovation of a couple homes in the community near Ft. Lewis. Dean J. Koepfler / The News Tribune.

Aaron Cady, a horticultural technician for Metro Parks, trims a Japanese crab apple tree in the Japanese Garden at Point Defiance Park in Tacoma on Tuesday morning.

What is it about looking over someone's shoulder? Or from under someone's arm? It seems that when shooting one person facing another (or facing a group) I just like that view.

Last week when photographing people lined up at a local food bank I shot from that sort of viewpoint as numbered tickets were being handed out:

I could have stood off to the side and included the person handing out the numbers, but that person isn't as interesting as the group of clients who've been waiting to come in. And not showing that person makes for a tighter, simpler photo, which is almost always desirable. Then there's another reason that this angle appeals-- everyone is looking at the numbered ticket, so putting the camera by the ticket gets a shot of all of these folks looking with interest toward us ("us" being the viewers of the photo).

In a shot of the removal of a car from Wapato Lake I chose the under the arm viewpoint:

Here we don't see a bunch of faces, but it is likewise useful to not include all of the tow truck driver who's tossing the cable. Simplifying the shot down to the diver, twists of cable, and concentric little waves benefits the composition. Those elements come together to make the photo more intense-- the composition drives our attention toward the diver.

And now some over-the-shoulder examples from my visits to Iraq:

A U.S. soldier trains Iraqi army recruits in 125-degree heat. (2004)

An Iraqi policeman searches, and an American soldier checks the I.D. of, a possibly crazy man who backed his car wildly into a ditch. (2005)

Again, these shots benefit from eliminating nonessential elements.

I guess the main reason that I like these two compositions is that they are "layered", meaning that the main elements of the photos are distributed over several distances, some near and others far. You might say that the photos have depth.

Looking over the shoulder of someone in the foreground (while still showing part of them) puts us very close to the nearest layer. This maximizes the range of the layering (meaning the range from nearest layer to farthest).

Bear in mind that these explanations are ex post facto. As far as I can tell, I simply like this style of shooting and I'm just making up reasons after the fact.

To my eye the compositions look cool.

Shooting the feeding of a walrus at the zoo recently I encountered some really tough light: direct sunlight on the background with dim and very blue lighting from the sky on my subjects. At first I attempted to shoot with natural light, but then gave up and then resorted to the dreaded direct, on-camera flash. But my best frame was an early one, so back at the lab I had to spend about 40 minutes rescuing the frame with PhotoShop work.

Here's the before and after:

These two versions reminded me of other examples of the dramatic improvement that can be wrought. Here's another example where I spent about 40 minutes in PhotoShop rescuing a shot with really bad lighting:

There was no practical way to set up good lighting on the ski slope, and it was just bad luck the the sun had to be upslope.

And here's an example where there wasn't much "heavy lifting" to be done in PhotoShop, but careful use of "shadows/highlights" and "unsharp mask" made a big difference in a shot with easy lighting:

And keep in mind that it isn't the particular program-- Adobe PhotoShop-- that is essential. There are several other photo editing programs that can be used for this kind of work. PhotoShop is merely the Cadillac version (and us news photographers only use about 10% of the features in it).

The sun rises behind Mount Rainier as fog fills the Nisqually Valley Wednesday morning, February 11, 2009. Icy roads and more than an inch of snow cover the Lacey area after Tuesday's snowfall. Jeremy Harrison/The News Tribune

We recently upgraded the photo portion of our website allowing for easy posting of photo albums. So I took this opportunity to put up an album of my favorite photos going way back to 1979 when I was a science student at Berkeley and biked over to the source of a column of smoke.

I figure that this event must have been my first attempt at shooting "spot news". I imagined the it could be newsworthy, so I fired up the VW bus and drove over to the San Fransisco Chronicle with the undeveloped roll of film. I sat in the photo department, not savvy enough to be pumping the photogs for tips on how to shoot better, and a guy who looked through the roll said "he's got a pretty good shot". They made a print, gave me the negatives, took down my info for payment, and the next day I had my first publication in a big paper.

Then I discovered that I had misplaced the negatives. Argh! But someone in the Chronicle photo department was kind enough to make me a 4x5 (!) copy negative of the print that Gary Fong had made. The above image is from a flatbed scan of that negative, so the photo credit should read "Peter Haley/Gary Fong".

None of my other favorite photos are so compromised. You can see them in the "portfolios" section of our website, or follow this link.

Reporter Jeff Mayor and I headed up to Concrete a few weeks ago to check out the bald eagles on the Skagit River and see what else we could find.

See the story Here.
Check out the video here.

With the help of a local guide Wayne Ackerlund we found several bald eagles enjoying the mid-day sun. It was a very cold day on the boat, but the sun was out and the birds didn't mind. There were even some fisherman trying their luck.

This is the Tech stuff:
I was shooting a Nikon D-3 with a Nikkor 300 2.8 and 1.4x tele-convereter.
The camera was set at 400 ISO with the aperture set at f/4.0 and shutter speed at 1/4000.

I was shooting from a moving boat and wanted to make sure the images were as sharp as I could get them. I also wanted the shallow depth of field the aperture gave me to separate the bird from the background.

Here are some of the other images in the sequence. You may notice the image that ran in the paper had a crop on it. That moving boat made it harder than it may sound to keep the bird in the center of the frame. I tried to use the sequence in the video, but The last three images were too tight for me to successfully organize them for a clip.

Enjoy!
JB

"Why no face?" wondered some in our morning news meeting about this photo on page A1 last Friday.

It's because he was reluctant to be shown identifiably in the TNT.

Mostly I shot from behind him as the ladies asked survey questions about his homelessness. When he turned to go I put the camera waist high near his sign, flag, and new possessions and walked backward for a couple of steps, shooting.

The shot doesn't show the literal main element of the story-- it doesn't show the actual survey-taking. But it's the most charming shot and it does capture the mood the day's activities. Janet Jensen had the good idea of making it the main shot and using a more literal shot of survey-taking as the secondary photo next to it.