Great video on the making of a great picture

It's a moment most sports photographers dream of. A big game (in this case, THE big game), close score, time running out. The team's driving down the field. Then, there it is. The pass to win the game comes YOUR way. The crowd goes bananas. But the question remains: Did you get it?

Of course, today it's a matter of looking at that 2.5-inch screen on the back of your camera to see if your hard work and planning have paid off. Sometimes that little screen can carry a lot of disappointment. We all hope that in those brief moments all of the planning, practice and study of the craft and the game has paid off. Many times Lady Luck (or a stray referee, or the Evil Autofocus Fairy) has a different plan.

With this year's Big Game just around the corner, NFL.com has this fantastic video about about Getty's Streeter Lecka and Sports Illustrated's Al Tielemans and their experiences trying to capture the defining moment in last year's Super Bowl, Santonio Holmes' catch in the corner of the end zone to win the game for the Pittsburg Steelers (Tielemans' photo made SI's cover above).


The video not only shares the experience of two great photographers and how being separated by just a few feet can make all the difference, but the technology used to make the video itself is absolutely fascinating!

Haiti and the desire to know

I can only imagine what Haiti must be like right now in the midst of overwhelming devastation. Fortunately, as I sit here comfortably in my office, brave journalists have picked up cameras, computers, pens and notebooks and headed into harm's way in Haiti so we can know what's going on there.

I admire these brave men and women and the work they do. It's not easy to jump into a situation like this, when people's lives have been destroyed in an instant, and take pictures. The images coming from Haiti are extraordinary, not just from a journalistic point of view, but from a technology point of view.

As you can probably imagine, the majority of the country has been leveled. There is no going to the local library to plug in your computer and use the Wi-fi to transmit. Generators and satellite phones are the modern tools of the trade in a situation like this. A video of an Associated Press reporter's impressions on arriving in Haiti is here.

Solving problems isn't new to a photojournalist. For decades, solving the problem of getting news out of inaccessible areas has been one of the hallmarks of a good journalist. Undoubtedly, technology has made solving that problem a little easier (imagine trying to get a roll of film developed in Haiti right now!).

A major discussion in journalism circles right now is the use of "citizen journalists." It's a term I don't like, because in a way we are all citizen journalists, but the concept is accurate: An average person, not trained to be a journalist in any way, sees something happen, records it in some way, and tells as many people as possible. Is information gathered in this way any less valid than what is gathered by a professional journalist?

In the context of the disaster in Haiti, I would say the answer is "no." Some of the first photos from the disaster area were pictures taken by cell phone cameras from people who were there and posted on Twitter before Internet services went down. Of course, the work professional journalists are doing right now to bring accurate information to us is the reason why I choose to seek out the work of those professionals when gathering information.

Check out some of the work Damon Winter of the New York Times (a touching example is here), Chuck Liddy of the Charlotte News and Observer, and the Associated Press' Gerald Herbert (who shot the photo above) have done over the last two weeks. Their work is the reason we all need professional photojournalists seeking images of newsworthy events.

I'm not much of a fan of winter. I don't mind dealing with it when winter conditions are "normal", especially when I'm out there on my own terms, say, hunting or fishing.

But it's another matter entirely when you've got to be out there in sub-zero conditions we're now experiencing, regardless of whether one's working or playing. In any case, mom had good advice: wear a warm hat, gloves, and boots.

Taking photographs outside when it's this cold is a lot of work and takes some special precautions. Naturally, wearing gloves makes it hard to make camera adjustments. I wear glasses so dealing with frost on them can be a pain.

And likewise, condensation from going from a cold car to a warm building is always a possibility so on the coldest days, I bring my gear inside. (And keep it in the bag so that the condensation occurs on that instead of the lenses or cameras).

In the old days of film, the watchword was slow down. Film got brittle in very cold temperatures, requiring that we rewind our film back very carefully. And just like with our cars, batteries lost power. Today's digital cameras don't use film and the lithium batteries remain remarkably functional in cold weather. Still, I noticed that the spec sheets for the lithium batteries we use warn against using them below 32 degrees F and 104 degrees F. I'm guessing who ever designed the batteries never lived in Minnesota during January.

Fortunately, old habits die hard, and I still find myself slipping my camera inside my parka and next to my body when I'm outside shooting photographs for extended periods on days like today to keep the batteries strong.

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Our favorite photographs of 2009

One of my favorites from 2009.Check out what we consider our favorite photographs of 2009. As we wrote in our story in Sunday's Currents section, we are often greeted with amazement when we tell people how many frames we shoot at an assignment. Of course, it varies depending on assignment, but in an attempt to average things out, I figured we shoot more than 100,000 frames a year between John and I.

That's a lot of shutter movement!

But I'm a firm believer that if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a couple of eggs. I would prefer that no one sees the broken eggs, so to speak, so I often delete, or at least not download from the digital camera's card, all of those out of focus, overexposed, or just plain rotten photos that won't ever see the light of day anyway. Thanks to modern technology editing through all those frames is much easier than it used to be. The modern equivalent of the light table we use is a program called Photo Mechanic made by Camera Bits. It makes working with that kind of volume easier.

Some photos, like the ones John and I picked as our favorites this year, just stand out in our minds from the moment we see them. They get filed away, set aside for contest entries and our annual photographers' favorites section.
The photo gallery below includes the six photographs (three from each of us) that were published in the paper and an additional three apiece that didn't make the cut in the paper, but were still among our favorites.

Enjoy!

So what if the weather's bad

GAC student.I find it ironic that when Mother Nature really throws her worst at us, it's often the photographers who end up venturing out to find a picture. Let's face it, when the wind chill is -40F and the snow is coming down in flakes the size of Volkswagons there are good photos to be found.

Usually our first accumulating snowfall of the year is a couple of inches. Just enough to cover the grass. Ease us into winter. Not this year. An 8-inch blast of white stuff, followed by single-digit temps and some wind to boot, shoves us into winter. Usually these are the last conditions anyone wants to venture out in. But this is the stuff I'm compelled to venture out in regularly.

Mike Endreson blows his way through a drift in front of his Mankato home Thursday morning.

A day off from school made for a full house Thursday at a sledding hill in Mankato's Sibley Park.

As storytellers and newsmen at heart, John and I have headed out into conditions that make most people curl up inside with a good movie and wait for the snow to let up. In our case, people want to see just how bad it is outside. They want to see whether or not they should venture out to work or church. What's been canceled due to the weather?

A pair of City of Mankato snowplows work their way down Riverfront Drive during Wednesday's snowstorm.

Don't take me wrong, I respect the weather. I take "no unnecessary travel" warnings seriously. As a sailor and a former pilot I have seen what bad things the weather can do to people. But when the weather gets ugly, that's unusual, and it's news. And I'm probably out in it somewhere.