Make sure to update any bookmarks or RSS feeds you had pointing to our old system as they will no longer work.

New blog URL: http://blog.thenewstribune.com/photo
New RSS feed: http://blog.thenewstribune.com/photo/feed
New Atom feed: http://blog.thenewstribune.com/photo/feed/atom

Emerald Ridge's Stephanie Riley avoids the ball and cleats during a 9-0 win over Spanaway Lake. For photo gallery. Click here.

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.

Former PLU football coach Frosty Westering is emotional as he places a football jersey on John Nelson's wheelchair at Olsen Auditorium. "Nellie always said 'I want to play football someday, and I'll play when I get to heaven," Westering told the crowd. "I'll close with one last thing. Nellie, you in the game." Click here for photo Gallery.

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

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.)

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.

I was at the Puyallup Fair yesterday as more than 3,000 people crushed the gates trying o get a job for the 17-day run of the fair this year. Employees from WorkSoft worked to process all the applicants but the line never stopped coming through the door of the portable office they had set up near the corner of the fair by the roller coaster.

Susan Brown, center, and Claudette Dean, right, with WorkSource, work to process fair jobs in a makeshift office near the corner of 5th St. and 9th Ave. in Puyallup, Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009. About 3,000 people turned out today to apply for the fairs 3,000 jobs, a process that usually takes three weeks, officials said.

This morning, figuring there would be more people, I headed down there again. Today they handed out numbers to the first 600 job seekers and sent the rest away. The first group in line when I got there were four high school-aged teens from Federal Way. They arrived at the fairgrounds at about 12:30 a.m. They all hope to get jobs with the games this year. A couple of them said they wanted to make some money for cars or school and a few talked about having some fun and meeting people.

Cody Olson, right, from Federal Way, fills out an application at the Puyallup Fair as his brother Colten Olson, Keenan Walch and Levy Molina stack up to do the same, before the gate opened at the Puyallup Fair, Thursday morning. The group showed up at 12:30 a.m. to try and get a job at the fair.

I talked with several folks waiting in line and to the WorkSource supervisor for a video I am working on. Check back later, I'll post it here when I'm finished.
Joe

Part of my conversation with WorkSource's Theresa Hoffman:

The 600th person in line this morning was Peggy Coffey. Coffey has been working mostly day-labor for a while after her government job went away a few years ago. Things have been slow for her at Labor Ready and her gas has been shut off. She hopes to make enough at the fair to get caught up with the gas company before the cold comes. This is a bit of our conversation:

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.