Page Two

In Shooter Heaven, all assignments end with Jube,..

2011-03-13T07:42:00.000-07:00

I shot a number of the championship games in the state basketball tournament yesterday. We only had one local team and they won their game, so that I meant I had the pleasure of not having to take pictures of any sad kids. Hooray Jube!

First up, Wilkinson County.

Next, Wesleyan beats Pace Academy.

Finally, Buford threepeats against a team with a 6'3" center. Whoah.

They jubed it up early.

Thanks for looking.

Grant B.

Mercer in the A-Sun Tournament

2011-03-04T04:27:00.000-08:00

With home court advantage, Mercer had their first game of the 2011 Atlantic SUn Basketball Tournament Thursday night. They left with with a 73-63 win over Lipscomb.

For my part, I had a 9:30 PM color deadline on a 9:00 PM start.

I got those three images out by the deadline. Next up on the block, the 10:30 deadline for inside pages.

And then the rest for online....

So there it is. Onward to facing Belmont, the top seed in the tournament, today at 6:30. No deadline pressure there, right?

Thanks for looking

Grant B.

Some recent work....

2011-02-21T17:42:00.000-08:00

A few images from recent weeks.

Master Sergeant Kenneth Austin of Tallahassee, FL, squeezes his niece Melanie Taylor after a ceremony Saturday at Macon State College for the members of the U.S. Army Reserve's 377th Quartermaster Company, Detachment II who deploy Sunday morning for a year to Afghanistan. Members of the 377th, most of whom come from Georgia or Florida, are tasked with organizing and dispensing supplies to soldiers int he field. Though the Afghanistan deployment marked the third for Austin, his first two being to Iraq, this is the first deployment for most members of the 377th Detachment II.

Macon resident Wendell Beasley, who worked for 20 years in the Federal prison system before retiring, explains how a freeze in cost of living benefit increases plus increased taxes have hurt him. "A hundred dollars is a hundred dollars," he said,"Of course I'm an animal lover. They say I can get rid of my animals, but I ain't."

Mercer's Justin Cecil picks up a foul while driving the lane Florida Gulf Coast's Kevin Cantinol, left, and Sherwood Brown during Mercer's win Saturday.

The Morgan County, GA, girls basketball team gets pumped before their region championship game against Northeast Macon Saturday. After seesawing across the scoreboard for the entire game and much of an overtime period, Morgan County lost the game.

Thanks for looking,
Grant B.

National Signing Day

2011-02-03T11:31:00.000-08:00

As in most years, we made the rounds to the local high schools sending football players on to the college level yesterday on National Signing Day. Its always a challenge to do something other than an image of a stiff kid scratching his signature flanked by family. I gave it a shot. I feel pretty good about it.

Both of these guys were headed to four year schools after playing at Northside High School, Warner Robins, GA. I don't think either of them were often in suits. Jeqaundus Albritton, the player on the left, was tying a tie for Steven Nelson, right.

More from the same school. I love the idea that they needed fresh breath to sign their letters of intent. You have to do it up right, you know?

This is the kind of moment I guess I was trying to mine. Steven Nelson gets a kiss from his mom. They are, football prowess notwithstanding, somebody's baby.

Different school, different kids. Chris Swain, left, of Mount de Sales Academy, a Catholic school in Macon, GA, was the only kid in our city to get the nod from a big time program this year. He's headed to Navy. Brandon Sartin, on the right, will play at Morehouse. Here they get the attaboys from classmates after signing their letters.

Well, that was my attempt at breathing something into signing day. Thanks for looking, take it easy.
GB

Loose (year) ends...or years end...or something

2011-01-02T12:36:00.000-08:00

Just a couple of images that I felt floated to the top of the attempt to keep the paper above water in the holiday story scrum of recent weeks.

A sportrait. Grace Tinkey is a formidable middle distance runner in our area. She always makes the best athletes of the year list at our paper. As such, coming up with new ways to shoot her is a challenge. Here was this year's attempt.

One more Christmas image before we bah humbug into the year. The police in Macon, GA do an annual holiday party complete with a toy raffle and Santa Claus. Here a little girl who had her number drawn picks a brand new bike. You think she'll remember the light in that room?

Finally, the first baby of the year in our coverage area. Happy parents, sleepy baby. Maybe there's a connection?

Merry Christmas

2010-12-24T16:29:00.000-08:00

From the living nativity at Mabel White Baptist Church in Macon, GA.

Merry Christmas!

Pretty Parts, CNC ribbing

2010-12-08T07:05:00.000-08:00

I've been working with Dave Parrett at LH Thomson for the last couple of weeks, helping them get some high res images for catalog display and also for trade show booths. I thought I would share some of the latter for the circumscribed group of you that enjoy the beauty of machined aluminum. I know I do.

and, all hail the X4..

This was actually more challenging to do than you might expect.

These images are going to be printed in the 16x20 neighborhood at 100 dpi. The images they replace have some JPEG artifacts in the transitions from strict highlight to what passes as midtones. I decided to shoot RAW and to do the final retouching with the images as 16 bit Tiffs, only compressing the images at the end of the process when they are exported as CMYK JPEGS. Between that and the fact that there is no inerpolation going on to get the images up to size, I hope that the JPEG artifacts will be minimized.

Then there is dust. You can't even see some of this stuff on the black parts until you have it in the computer. I started treating each part like it was coated with the in dust while I was shooting even if I couldn't see it. That helped a lot.

Simple in appearance, but it took more effort than you'd think to get there.

Special Needs Child Care

2010-11-28T05:33:00.000-08:00

Heather Duncan has a lengthy look at the trouble the parents of kids with special needs have finding child care in Middle Georgia. Link to story here.. http://tinyurl.com/2eyl4ru ..

In shooting the story, the images divided into two separate streams. Some of the first stream, images from a daycare center for medically vulnerable children, ran in the Telegraph and macon.com. The other stream, which went unpublished, I'll share here.

William Meelaphsom is a nine year old autistic boy. According to his grandmother and primary caretaker Marcie Meelaphsom, she needs the help of both William's mother Mara and Andrea Stone, a home health nurse who has been with William since he was 3, just to keep up with her grandson.

William has little fear for injuring himself and is largely nonverbal. Here Andrea Stone, left, Mara Meelaphsom, right, and Marcie Meelaphsom, in the mirror, manage to get William out the door and on the way to speech therapy.

The speech issue seemed tough for William. He has things to to say, but just can't easily communicate them. Here Marcie goes to great lengths to get William to explain why he is upset. Direct eye contact and some signing looked to be important tools.

Andrea Stone, William's home health nurse, is incredibly devoted to him. By her own accounting, she has spent most days over the last six years with him. While following her car from the Meelaphsom's home to the therapist's office, I saw her carrying on a conversation with him, pointing out animals on the side of the road, keeping him company. I'm sure it goes deeper than good company. Here they wait together for William's speech therapy appointment.

This is the sort of care that kids like William, who benefits from good care in his public school, still need in the home. Hey, the parents need it, too. Raising kids is hard. Raising kids with medical conditions that the doctors themselves only partly understand has to be exponentially harder yet.

A birthday surprise at 80

2010-11-22T04:39:00.000-08:00

Anne Harris, 80, of Griffin takes a ride down Wimbish Road on the back of the Harley-Davidson owned by Danny Outlaw of Macon as a part of her birthday party Sunday. Harris said she had been fascinated by motorcycles for as long as she could remember.

Harris' cousin Alyce Bailey told a story about a trip to Deadwood, SD during which she and Harris were awed by the bikes on their way to Sturgis for the famous rally there. Another family friend recalled the motorcycle charm Harris sometimes wears around her neck. But despite the lifelong fascination, Harris had never had a chance to ride an iron horse. Harris' first ride on Sunday was the idea of a broad swath of friends and family but particularly of Gus and Nancy Bohler of Clearwater, FL. Harris is the caretaker of Gus Bohler's 97 year old mother in Griffin. When asked what she expected from her birthday party, Harris said she certainly hadn't thought of a motorcycle ride. "I thought I was going to a restaurant for a meal," she said, "I'm flabbergasted."

Sportrait

2010-11-09T07:19:00.001-08:00

I'm not really sure when I first heard the term Sportrait. I think maybe Tommy Metthe, a college friend who shoots in TX, taught me the term. He's good at them, for sure. Here's the link to Tommy's blog..... http://tommysmodernlife.blogspot.com/ .

An obvious bit of short hand, Sportrait denotes a portrait made of an athlete. You do a lot of these at a newspaper.
Why all the sportraits? You have a lot of stories, and a lot of sports pages to fill, between games. And obsession of fans continues unabated between Fridays, at least in the case of high school football. We produce a lot of stories during the week to keep interest up, contextualize the upcoming slate of games, etc. Those stories often get illustrated by the Sportrait.
So here we have the roster of receivers for the Peach County Trojans. They are undefeated in the regular season and headed into the first round of playoffs this Friday. The request to get all six (!!!) of these receivers begged for, say it with me, the Sportrait.

For the gear heads, I shot this with a mix of natural light from the burning ball of hydrogen that fails to make bad light this time of year and two Nikon speedlights triggered remotely. They added some light to the guy fully in shadow and opened up the shadows on the down sun (is that a term?) sides of the other players' faces. Chris Deighan, the writer of the story, was kind enough to throw the ball over and over while my timing got sorted.

Cheers,
Grant B.

After the last pass...dejection and jube.

2010-11-07T04:55:00.000-08:00

My friend Ross Taylor has a photo blog called Fries at the Bottom of the Bag. Here's the link.... http://rosstaylorfoto.blogspot.com/. I didn't think too hard about the name for a while except to think that Ross really likes fries. This morning I get it.

It's a "duh" moment, for sure. He's talking about the images you file from something that you really, really love that, for whatever reason, never see the light of day in the paper. And like the fries at the bottom of the bag, those lonely, forgotten greasiness sticks, those neglected images are often, to me, the best ones of the day.

Two examples from shooting the game between Fort Valley State University and Albany State University in Columbus yesterday.

So Fort Valley lost, which was really disappointing since they would have won their conference title otherwise. So, sure, the winning side got the whole tank of gatorade thing to look at, but frankly I prefer moments like this. Major let down seems less scripted, in a way.

Jube is the news photographer term for post game celebration, aka jubilation. If jube is what you are after, which my paper wasn't, I have this image of the father of the MVP of the winning team heading back to his car with the MVP trophy. "My boy's gonna play on Sunday!" he said more than once.

Fireball!!!!

2010-11-03T14:38:00.000-07:00

Sent to the Georgia National Fair (secede much?) to shoot some pretty pictures, a pretty common Fall assignment, I decided this year to get on a ride rather than just look at it.

Enter the Fireball.

Standing in line I couldn't decide who I wanted to sit next to on the ride or whether or not "The Man" would let me on with a massive SLR on my neck. First problem was solved when I realized how awesome the sisters in line behind me were. They were totally game to have a weirdo behind photograph them on their first trip to the Fireball. Second problem was easy, too, through the magic of apathy on the part of "The Man". Ah, apathy.

On the ride, I now have to decide how to strap the camera. Wrapped around the wrist would seem to be the best route. So, naturally, I leave the strap around my neck, assured by the heft of the camera that all would be fine.

Once upside down I had that "oh yeah, gravity" moment in which I really feared the mega-awesome SLR was going to follow my hat groundward. Through well trained upper body strength (and some help from the endocrine system) I held on til the end, making the image above.

There you have it.

Cheers,
Grant B.

Photo Stories, in 1s and 0s

2009-09-15T14:17:00.000-07:00

A pair of multimedia stories. Play buttons are at the bottom left of each pane.

First up, Shannon Jones, nurse in the Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit at the Medical Center of Central Georgia in Macon, GA.

Next, an experiment in gender segregation in a public school in rural Wilkinson County, GA.