It looks like this fellow is waiting to be seen by a doctor in a third-world health clinic. It's actually a worker pausing during the construction of "World Vision Experience: Village" at the Puyallup Fair.

I hope I'm not jumping the gun here. Perhaps it's really the beginning of a lovely Indian Summer.

There are usually some functional reasons to prefer one cropping of a photo over another cropping-- how it fits on a newspaper page, or how it leads the eye, emphasizing one object over another. But more often, which crop is the best one is based on only an aesthetic concern. I don't mean "only aesthetic" as if it were trivial-- I mean it in the sense of "strictly aesthetic". Aesthetic differences can be big-- fotogs sometimes stew in anger for days when a bad crop is applied to one of their photos.

At the other end of the spectrum, I recently ran across a shot from Star Ice & Fuel that has an unusually large number of aesthetically and functionally good crops.

Here's the uncropped version:

It's perfectly fine as is. It would look fine if it ran large, and even if it ran somewhat small it would still be readable.

But one might want to crop it for aesthetic reasons, or to fit a layout on a page. Here are the obvious crops, one horizontal and one vertical:

Both versions of the shot convey the same information as the original, and in my opinion, both look fine.

But my favorite crop turns out to be close to square (which is quite unusual):

I like how keeping the guy low emphasizes the height of the stack of bagged ice, and cropping off the left edge allows the stack to be of indeterminate size.

And for this shot there are other good crops. A tilted crop would have looked like a mistake 25 years ago, but our collective visual senses have evolved, and, for this photo, a tilt in either direction adds some dynamism:

I don't prefer these crops, but they aren't so bad as to be poor crops, either. Such a crop might be quite effective because of how the picture plays adjacent to some particular other shot in a layout.

And finally there are minor variations: a more extreme vertical, a more extreme horizontal, and a tighter crop, which cuts into the taut plastic, but might be useful if the picture had to run really small.

It was the opportunity to shoot past figures in deep shade toward the noontime brightness that attracted me. Only later did their dancing perk up to make for a good moment.
(Ariene Reich-Norris, left, daughter Arianna Reich-Norris, Jayden Deagan, and Destiny Faison, right, dance to the music of "Bretonvangrohl" at the Tacoma Farmers Market on Broadway.)

Occasionally we need to run a picture in black and white. With most shots one can tell at a glance that the picture will convert to BW just fine-- it'll "read" easily. But there are a few that need help to become readable in BW. Here's a straight BW conversion of a construction picture:

The fencing, machines and guy all stand out in the color version, but are nearly lost in the BW. In this case, the fix is easy: what makes those items stand out in the color version also make them stand out to the magic wand tool in PhotoShop, so the selection of them is easy:

The next step is to brighten the selection with a control such as "levels", "curves", or "brightness/contrast":

The picture now looks a bit strange in color (above), but when turned into a BW, it looks fine. Here's the final, with the earlier BW for comparison:

Fishermen are well-known to be laconic and wary of "the media". It must be something to about men spending long periods alone. Or what happens when lots of waiting is usually followed by disappointment (the fish are rarely as big or numerous as one would hope for). The fishermen presumably think that an outsider-- someone who isn't there to fish-- may spoil their luck.

It was strikingly different at a recent dawn when I was sent to Dash Point. Nice-sized pink salmon were being caught left and right. The mood was festive. Running around with my camera and wide angle, I could barely keep up. With so many fish around, the normally dour men were almost giddy, and they were happy to have a news photographer chasing their fish with a camera.

Yes, LITERALLY chasing their fish with a camera. As you can see in my favorite shot, the camera is just a couple of feet from the fish. So as the fish is dragged from the water and flops around, I have to run to stay with the fish, holding the camera at ankle level, keeping it two feet away, ripping lots of frames.

And why not? We were are ALL giddy.

While working up a pile of photos from a Quinceañera I was once again struck by the difference between RAW and jpeg.

JPEG

RAW

I find it fascinating when I run across examples where the RAW is a much better image and I'm posting this assuming that a few others will, too.

Bear in mind that I'm not always able to output a better file from the RAW. There have even been a few difficult images with bad "color failure" in which the jpeg was a better starting point for my workup than the RAW output.

And it's also interesting to see, once again, how the brightest of the highlights in the RAW image have no color. This trait of RAW images has always puzzled me. Usually a few minutes of Photoshop work can fix that type of artifact adequately.

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.

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: