Chad Cates of Snohomish takes a flying leap toward his inner tube. He landed on it and stayed upright. This is at the SeaFair Chevrolet Cup Hydroplane Races on Lake Washington in Seattle.

USAF First. Lt. Jason Coley and wife Emma Soteras came up from Tuscon to see sister Second Lt. Tammi Coley's commissioning at Ft. Lewis.

Rampart Lakes in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area are a favorite for (my wife) Toni and I. There's something fascinating about an interlocking cluster of lakes and ponds nestled in an alpine cirque.

On the second day we took advantage of a soft snowfield to climb up to the ridge for a little day hike, and it was even better for coming down.

Warning: if you don't have mosquito netting, you may want to wait until late summer when things dry out more.

When you're a thirteen-year-old like Ben Howard of Spokane, sometimes playing around with the binoculars is more fun than looking at Rainier's glaciers. This is at SunrisePoint in Mount Rainier National Park.

A Harrier jump jet hovers above a sailboat during the Tacoma Air Show at Freedom Fair in Tacoma. This marks the 30th year for the annual Freedom Fair. The Wall Street Journal, CNN and USA Today have honored it as one of the nation's best summer events. For more photos. Check the news photo galleries.

Shooting a restaurant assignment at Harbor Lights, I found that any shot showing their signature view also had really long-scale scene. So even when blowing out the highlights outside, the foreground subjects were too underexposed:

So I needed to add light to the room, and bouncing a strobe off the ceiling is almost always the practical way to do that. But the ceiling at Harbor Lights was red. REALLY red. The bounced light was way too warm:

If I could put a colored filter over my strobe to skew the color away from red (i.e., toward blue), I might get a usable result. For such purposes I carry a collection of colored gels, ready-to-go with wings of gaffers tape. They add almost no weight to the camera bag and are very compact.

Knowing that my "cooling" gel wasn't strong enough to balance the strongly red ceiling, I tried the blue filter:

Which was obviously too strong, but when bouncing, one can moderate the color by partially uncovering the flash head like so:

The resulting color is now a little too purple:

I suppose if I were really careful and wanted to reduce the color-correction that I'd do later in PhotoShop, I might have added some of the green gel, too.

But the result was perfectly useable:

And a whole lot better than no added light at all:

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.