Claire Schrock (left) and Elana Hummel got a little shade from the sun as they watched the Tacoma Fire Department conduct a practice burn in Fircrest.

Colorado Rapid's Ugo Ihemelu uses sitting on top of Sounder's Fredy Montero as a defensive tactic to keep the Sounders leading scorer from scoring. Montero overcame the Ripids' defense to score the first goal in the game to help the Sounders beat Rapids 3-0 during a game at Qwest Field in Seattle.

It's summertime and lots of our photos are going to be shot in direct sunlight. Ugh.

And if that isn't bad enough, many of our shots will be partially under a tree canopy, so the shadow areas will be especially dark.

You've heard me kvetch before about digital cameras' too-limited dynamic range (e.g., cameras can't record the full tonal range of the subject from bright white fabric in direct sunlight to the black hair of people who are shaded by the trees), so no need for more of that.

Short of waiting for an overcast day or going back to color negative film, all we can do is shoot carefully and fix it later in what the video/cinema folks call "post-production". (We call it "PhotoShop", although there are many other programs that work equally well for this.)

When shooting, sometimes one can use direct flash to fill in the shadows, but it usually looks ugly and it doesn't help anything in the frame farther away than the foreground items (unless you're willing to blow out those foreground items).

All that is left for us to do camera-wise, is to try to get the exposure just right. We know we can't record the whole long-scale scene from bright to dark, so we have to make a tough call on how much of the highlight to blow out versus how much of the shadow areas to leave down in the murk.

And this is where using your camera's features for analyzing the exposure are valuable. Pretty much all cameras offer a histogram,

and many, even the little ones, have the display option of "blinking highlights". (When reviewing a photo on the camera's display screen, the portions of the photo that are blown out will, rather than merely showing as pure white, blink white-black-white-black...) I find the blinking highlights especially valuable and use them to quickly check my exposure on nearly every assignment.

For example, after I took shot below, the camera's display showed that much of the wooden deck in the foreground was blinking.

I chose to sacrifice tone and detail from those brightly-lit planks in order to get useable tones in the rest of the photo. I knew that in post-production I'd be able to brighten the midtones (and by doing so pull up some shadow detail), thus making the overall picture look acceptable. One can do this sort of thing with almost any of the simplest picture editing programs, even if they don't allow one to select and control individual sections of the photo.

The other main task in fixing this shot was to soften the tones of the harsh, blown-out foreground planks. Here's the final workup:

I'll describe how fixing the highlights was done with PhotoShop's tools, but there are usually equivalent tools in other programs.

There are two aspects of these blown-out highlights that made them easy to fix. One is that they were all of one hue. The other is that selecting them (with the "magic wand" and "lasso") was easy.

Actually, the area that was easy to select was not JUST the blown-out highlights, which have complex shape and would require varying amounts of feathering at the edges, but rather, it was easy to select those blown-out highlights ALONG WITH adjacent areas of the same hue. Some of those adjacent areas aren't blown-out at all. Some are in the mid-tones.

Take a look at the middle frame below:

My selection was easy to make because it followed the sharp lines of the boards and-- counterintuitively-- I didn't mind that it included areas that don't have blown-out highlights.

The next step was to wash an appropriate color throughout the selection using "levels" (or "curves", if you prefer). To match the orange hue of the wood, I wanted to mix two of the three primary colors: magenta and yellow. This was done by pulling on the triangle for the highlight output levels in both the green and blue channels:

Green and blue channels? Yes. Recall that we are working in "RGB", so we don't have a magenta channel nor a yellow channel. But when we reduce the output level in the G, that is the same as adding more of its opposite: M, or magenta. And same for blue/yellow.

At this point a wash of orange flooded the whole selected area. What had been blown out to full white was now darker and colored a light orange, much like the other planks. I tuned the exact hue of orange by adjusting the G and B channels relative to one another.

At this point one needs to pay attention to the saturation (a vital term in photo work-- it means 'intensity of color'). As usual, I pulled on the output level triangle of the RGB channel to add some gray which reduces saturation. Using that triangle will also darken the selection, so it's necessary to balance it with the other two triangles.

When you try it, you'll find that playing with these three triangles will let you find the best looking highlight color, but there's one more step. Remember that our selection includes areas that aren't blown out and don't need darkening nor added color. You can keep them from getting too dark and strongly colored by pulling the midtones up. Grab that middle triangle in the RBG channel, pull left a bit, and we're done.

Here's another sample of this technique:

Now that you've seen this technique, you'll start noticing examples of it in advertising photos and National Geographic. It's often used to keep color in the highlights of autos and soften the highlights in sunset shots.

I spent a little time with Ken Campbell from Azimuth Expeditions at Owen Beach the other day. He had a few Stand Up Paddle boards down there and was letting people try them out. Looked like a blast!
Joe

As you might expect, photojournalists shoot a lot of frames on every assignment.
This is not the secret to good photography, its simply part of the process. We try to photograph a variety of situations in variety of ways to produce enough to choose from.

Sometimes, though, you do end up with many good photos. In these two editing examples, we boiled the choices down to two photos of a retiring teacher for the lead image and two photos of school-oriented goodbyes for a secondary image. Which ones would you choose?

In the end, we decided to use just one - the photo of Linda Tromsness getting group-hugged by students outside of their bus. We liked the sweetness of the moment and the clean composition.

Doesn't make us right. Its a subjective process.

Neither of these photos made the cut. We decided to just use one image so we could
play it a little larger. Generally, every time you add a photo to a page layout it reduces the size of other existing images.

Capt. Nick Carlton tosses his 2-year-old son Ryan into the air directly following his Stryker Brigade's Deployment Ceremony at Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, Wash., June 19, 2009. About 3,900 soldiers from 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division will begin leaving this month for a yearlong deployment to Afghanistan.(Janet Jensen/The News Tribune)

This is a project I started a few weeks ago that got blown off track. It was pushed to the back burner for a bit in part because I tried to do too much with it and got a little overwhelmed. Too much footage...none of it seemed to mach the interviews...and the piece just didn't come together well. So, after a week or two of working on other stuff I sat back down and cut this together. It is, essentially, a daily feature that turned into an infomercial. There is some good information in the final cut and some footage that I like, but next time I'll try to avoid overshooting in the first place and stick to a simple narrative.
I'll take all feedback. Thanks,
Joe

Following the memorial service for Spc. Samuel Stone, Debbie Smith-Wray, who has two sons deployed in Iraq, stands before his memorial, in Port Orchard, June 10, 2009. Smith-Wray did not know Stone who was killed in Tallil, Iraq, on May 31.(Janet Jensen/The News Tribune)

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Boxing event for charity. Police against Firefighters. This is a preview for the event that will be tonight at the Emerald Queen. All the money goes to charity, so go have some fun.

For a series of vignettes of unemployed individuals, I was sent to get a shot of Duane Crouse, who uses the internet for job-seeking. When I got to his home that morning it was just him and the two family dogs.

Since it's nearly always a good idea to include animals and kids-- they're lively and unpredictable, which helps to generate more good situations for photos-- and since these animals are sometimes allowed inside during the day, I requested that they be brought in.

The spot where he uses the computer had a miserably busy, contrasty and bright background, so I added a little bit of lighting: a blue-gelled strobe to the left. Then I shot frames as the animals did their thing.

Predictably, the unpredictable animals generated lots of good shots:

And here's my personal favorite:

During the editing of this assignment, several of us opted for this last shot. People looked at it, they saw that there's a guy at a computer, then after another moment realized that the dog was peeing on the carpet. Everyone laughed.

When choosing which photo to put in the paper, we usually will opt for the funny one. But this guy is unemployed, and he's got a blended family with many kids. He, himself, might see the humor, but to many readers it would look like we were ridiculing him.

So we opted for another shot. Yes it has less humor, but it also has less pathos:

I spent the day at the Puyallup Fair Grounds yesterday meeting people and watching the dog show. I put this together to try and convey a better feel for what it was like there. About 3,500 dogs and their owners packed the building for the two-day event to show off and catch up with the organizers and competition.

You can read Brian Everstine's story here.

Jeff Mayor and I had the chance to go fishing with Todd Reis from the Cascade Musky Association. It was a long cold day with lots of laughs, but not too many fish. That's fishing!

Joe Barrentine/The News Tribune