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

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

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....

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

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

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

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




Merry Christmas!

Pretty Parts, CNC ribbing

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.