Today’s the day that will result in record numbers of football fans watching the game, record number of pizzas and beer, and  record number of photographers wanting to shoot the game.

I’ve done all three and can tell you eating pizza, drinking beer, and watching it on tv is a lot more fun and a lot less stressful.

May professional carer shooting sports began before I could afford a motor drive for my Nikon F SLR. I shot single frame using two cameras, manual focus lenses, Tri-X, and a brief prayer before each game.

“Lord, let me find the action. Let me get in in focus. Amen.”

I cut my chops at Florida Field, long before it was known as “The Swamp” and had an open end zone the way Ohio Stadium used to.

I serviced UPI with action from each game and the university with a collection of photos that are probably now in a dust bin beneath the Swamp. I’m not sure I have originals of many of those photos, only some yellowed and brittle newspaper clippings store away in my personal dust bin.

Eventually, after turns at the Orlando Sentinel where I continued to travel to Gainesville to shoot Florida, and at the Ft. Lauderdale News with continued trips to Florida Field on an irregular schedule and covering the Miami Dolphins, I joined The AP in Atlanta.

Continued to shoot football sometimes shooting two games in two states on a single day. Auburn in early afternoon and Georgia Tech at night.

Then to Columbus for Ohio State Football in 1982.

I shot a lot of film during that time. Fortunately I’d been able to afford my own Nikon F motor drive to go along with the company issued gear. Still, everything was manual focus, manual exposure, hand processing, and darkrooms.

That changed in 1994 with the $18,000 NC2000, the first digital news camera. Its introduction accelerated the design and production of auto-focus lenses and accelerated the production of faster, cheaper, and higher resolution cameras leading to today’s low-end digital SLR kit cameras that have become so prolific at school sporting events.

I’m often asked which I like better, digital or film. I always answer digital.

My Keith Byars photo at top represents shooting in the black and white, manual focus, manual exposure,  film processing and  darkroom days. The time from shooting the photo until it was received in a newspaper photo editor’s hand was, at best, 30 minutes. That includes the 10 minutes it took for the photo transmitter, a very sophisticated fax machine, to send the photo signal over a telephone line.

On important game days (OSU-Michigan) we were lucky to be able to send 5 photos. That was nearly an hour of time on a time regulated network of analog receivers.

Today, a sports shooter used  several digital cameras costing one tenth of the NC2000 with autofocus lenses, auto exposure,  a speedy laptop and wireless deliver in minutes instead of hours for a complete set of photos to cover the game.

A photo editor receives hundreds of photo on a football Saturday, all crisp and focused, properly exposed, delivered within minutes after the play, editable, and archived without danger of fading like the old receiver prints.

The next time you pick up a Sports Illustrated and there is an article or photo that points out a great moment in sports before digital, compare the accompanying photo with the photos that are digital.

Digital wins hands down. For all the good reasons. For all the bad reasons film wasn’t always best.

Aperture Priority, an E-Book by Photographer Gary Gardiner, is available as a free download.

The starting point for most professionals is setting their auto-exposure system to Aperture Priority.

It means the photographer is controlling the most important aspect of any photo, what is in focus.

Using aperture to determine depth of field sets the basis for controlling shutter speed and focus point to make the best photo possible.

Begin today to shoot like a pro. Get Aperture Priority, an E-Book by Photographer Gary Gardiner

I recently updated the Copyright and Usage Permissions for photos displayed at GaryGardiner.com and WestervilleLife.com, and several of my other sites with loads of photos.

Each page now displays the following set of rules and requirements for using my photos.

I’ve decided it is near impossible to prevent personal use on Facebook and personal Web sites. What I can try to prevent is commercial use without proper compensation.

My photos are licensed for use by individuals and businesses.

The rules are easy to understand.

Personal Use – If you like the photo I shot of you, you are welcome to use it on your personal Facebook page or personal Web site. Keep my copyright notice and include a link to my Web site. Use the photo as an avatar or a profile photo at Linkedin or Twitter. Let me know that you are using the photo so I can keep accurate records of its locations. If you any advertisements on your page use the business license information below.

Business Use – If you’re a business with a Facebook Page, you must obtain a license. I you want to use them on your Web site, you must obtain a license. Using my photos without a license is not Fair Use. It is commercial usage. If the intent is to use my photos to help draw traffic to a Web site which has advertising or to proclaim a product or process that may enhance a personal or business bank account, the photo needs properly licensing. Commercial use also requires a model release for publicity and privacy rights for any persons appearing in the photo.

If you’re not in the photo you want to use you still need to get permission from the photographer to use it in any way this includes a personal Web site. There is a fee for usage.

Prints – Printing requires a license. You may not make prints of any of the photos, either for personal or business use. Printing requires a very specific license, even for personal use.

These photos fall under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license. Creative Commons licensing does not mean you have freedom to do as you want with these photos.

Copyright and Usage Permissions

“The photos on this Web site are available for limited personal, non-commercial use by anyone who appears in them. Use limited to Web only. Use in printed materials is prohibited. Commercial use or use by any others without proper licensing is prohibited and protected by US Copyright law. That means you must obtain a license for their use and pay a commensurate fee. Photos are property of Gary Gardiner who must be credited for any usage and a link to his Web site included in the use. Removal of the copyright notice on the photo or removal of metadata is a violation of federal law and punishable with fees and fines”

Related articles

• Understanding Copyright And Licenses (smashingmagazine.com)
• IPTC, EXIF and your photos (newdigitalphoto.gs)
• Copyright Information: FAQ (library.pitt.edu)
• The 10 Rules Of US Copyright Infringement (jeremynicholl.com)
• Website Legal Issues: Copyright Infringement and Protection (iplawforstartups.com)
• What Everyone Should Know about Copyright Laws: Internet Tips & Guides (brighthub.com)

Top Five Composition Techniques

The Composition Carry Guide for Photographers™, the latest in a series of pocket guides to better photography, is published and ready for download.

The PDF has the Top 5 Composition Techniques to help you make better photos. When folded, the Carry Guide is an eight page reference and instructional guide with space for notes about your next photo shoot.

The Carry Guide is a pocket version of the Composition e-Book, also ready for you to download.

Get your copy of the Composition Carry Guide for Photographers™ by completing the form below. See the Composition e-Book page to see if you also want to download it.

Provide me your e-mail address and I’ll send you the Composition Carry Guide for Photographers™. It fits in your pocket as an easy reference. It’s free. You can print it as many times as you want. Keep notes for each day’s shoot. Whatever is best for you. I’ll keep the e-mail private, share it with no one, and only use it to communicate with you infrequently.

Framing Device

One of the strongest elements in this photo is use of the tree as a framing device that fills the left side of the frame.

A framing device is exactly what it sounds like. Just as a frame that holds a photo or painting mounted on your wall and isolates your view to the work of art, a photograph’s framing device acts to hold eye movement inside the edge of the photo.

A framing device can be any object, in or out of focus, that forces the viewer to move toward the photo’s center of interest.

Triangle Shapes

The base of the tree, coupled with the light colored bee hive, acts as one corner of a triangle formed by it, the hay rake at right and the barn in the near background. This triangle shape forms an object made up of individual objects that  anchor the lower half of the photo

Another aspect of this particular triangle is each of the corner objects lies at a different distance from the viewer. This spacial relationship between objects forms a three dimensional path that moves the viewer through the  photo from front to rear.

Foreground Objects

There are four planes of focus in this photo. First three are the three objects in the triangle. The fourth is the cloud filled sky.

Using the tree and bee hive as foreground objects, the triangle formed by the other two objects is built on three planes. Each corner in the triangle is at a difference focus point. A small f-stop makes all the objects in focus.

An additional depth illusion is the three foreground objects sitting in front of a distant background, the sky, increasing the depth and dimension of the scene.

Remember that a photo is a two-dimensional representation of a three dimensional object.

It’s up to the photographer to use all the tools of composition to  create a photo that represents the three dimensional view.

This photo’s use of a framing device, triangle shapes, and a foreground object combines three compositional techniques to create a pleasing cover for the cover of the November issue of WestervilleLife Magazine.

This photo is from the Composition e-Book by Gary Gardiner. It is available for download as one of a series of e-Books for Ohio Photo Classes students and fans.

Time Magazine notes in a year-end piece about photojournalists often travel together covering the same events because of convenience and safety.

Sometimes that doesn’t end well as we learned this year with the deaths of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros during an attack in Libya.

An earlier marker was the deaths of Larry Burrows along with Henri Huet, Kent Potter, and Keisaburo Shimamoto, when their helicopter was shot down while covering the Vietnam War.

Also interesting is how the difference of inches, sometimes the width of a body, or less, radically changes the  composition of the compared photos.

Above is a simple photo of a butterfly landing on flowers with a raging forest fire spewing smoke as a backdrop. Jae C. Hong’s photo, the one on the right, places the flower and butterfly against the more open sky and the horizon line at the bottom. The result, to draw your eye to the butterfly, is more effective than Djansezian’s photo where the same flower and insect are lost against the darker background.

Remember this the next time you’re struggling through the viewfinder with composition. Sometimes it’s a matter of inches in any direction that can complete a composition and make a better photo.

As I was shooting the feature above, I must have looked quite crazy as I side-stepped and squatted my wall along the park across the street from the hedge trimming. I’m sure she wondered what exactly was going on although the presence of several camera around my neck and on my shoulders gave her a great set of clues.

I watched for background changes as she worked the length of the hedge and adjusted my position to eliminate the bright background spots that would have distracted from her as the center of interest.

When almost moved into what I thought was the best position for my photo when she stopped, looked at the trimmer, and walked away. She’d accidentally cut the only extension cord she had.

Her trimming and my feature hunt ended at the same time.

I I hadn’t been working to find the best position for each frame I fired,even the ones I wasn’t confident about, I might have missed this photo.

Trying to get the best possible composition for each frame is essential. It sometimes can be a matter of inches.

Back in my youth, a few weeks ago, I read in one of the popular photo magazines that the first accessory lens bought by new photographers is a telephoto. That placed me in the select group of people whose first lens purchase was a wide-angle. I purchased a telephoto a few weeks later when I was assigned to cover a series of motorcycle races at a track in North Dakota.

I think the designation given to short focal length lenses should be more descriptive of their greater purpose. Wide-angle more accurately describes their angle of view. It doesn’t even consider the perspective altering capabilities or how depth-of-field characteristics can be used to interpret a scene.

This photo of a group of women finishing their trip through the fields at a u-pick strawberry farm illustrates how objects in the foreground of wide-angle lenses can help define what the photo is trying to say.

Placing the strawberries large in the foreground quickly tells the viewer much about this event. It also, if you’ve ever had a fresh strawberry, might elicit some sort of Pavlovian drooling response.

Foreground objects are like the opening paragraph of a great novel. Imagine a run-on sentence or a set of fragmented, unrelated words, opening a novel. Who would continue to read?

Just as a great author has the ability to move and arrange words into sentences, sentences into paragaphs, paragraphs into chapters and chapters into a great book, you have the ability to arrange objects in the frame of your photos.

The placement of objects in your frame can emphasize their importance. A wide-angle lens draws interest to what is mot important in telling your story.

Using a wide-angle for nothing more than increasing the angle of view is a poor use of an important tool in your bag.

The assignment was a series of photos of a fitness athlete doing warmups at sunrise, then follow her for the day for training and meals.

For anyone show shoots at sunrise you know the planning is precise. The sun is in the right position for a very short period of time before it loses its warmth or the angle is too high.

To capitalize on the early arrival we began the shoot before sunrise. In our case sunrise was a little later than normal because the sun had to break across a line of trees across the lake where we were shooting.

It also meant that the angle would be higher when the sun first appeared so our time with optimum light would be less than a location where the eastern shore wasn’t obstructed by trees.

We made our own sunlight.

The location I’d planned was along an eroded edge of the lake where I could stand below the athlete shooting into the morning sky. The tree added a graphic compositional element to help balance the photo.

An assistant stood in front of the athlete with an SB800 at the end of a very lightweight monopod. He raised it just high enough to simulate the angle of a rising sun.

Using Nikon CLS I underexposed the ambient light to pull down the sky and darken the tree. The strobe exposure was increased slightly to compensate.

We ran through a series of poses moving the light left to right to change the horizontal angle of the simulated sunlight. Further to the left created more of a rim light along her profile. Further to the right placed her more in full sun.

The unique aspect of using the strobe instead of the real thing was we were able to create different sets of photos with differing angles without changing the composition.

To have moved the athlete into different positions to create rim light and full sun would have required both of us to move to different locations. That would have changed both the sky background and the placement of the tree.

We continued during and after sunrise shooting similar poses. It’s interesting to show people the entire set of photos. The approval rate is all over the board with some preferring these simulated sun photos while others like the sunrise itself.

The next time I shoot at this location under these circumstances I’ll add a second strobe on a different channel to slightly fill the tree behind her.

Shot with a 70-200mm in RAW. Processed in ACR and PS.

Some photographers take a mid-day siesta to recover from the hours before sunrise wake-up call or alarm clock that allows them to be in position when the sun breaks the horizon.

While most people are enjoying a leisurely lunch with friends or a second helping of barbequed pork, most really good photographers are catching a few Zs on the couch or leaning back in their office recliner.

Slipping a camera, lenses and a tripod into a dark car trunk signals an advanced dedication to good photography. The act of preparation for an early morning shoot means the photographer is adept at planning, anticipation, clarity of purpose, and willing to take risks.

All the signs of a photographer whose work eclipses that of the photographers who wait until sunset for similar light.

The moments of early morning light are fleeting.

The is that time, just before sunrise, where all the world is gray. The only light reflecting from your subject lacks color and contrast. The shadows are midnight black, the highlights defined only by their shape and slight depth.

If you listen before sunrise, birds announce its anticipated arrival. Before the first rays of light begin to give color to the gray landscape and before the light begins to fill shadows with details and before teh night changes today, birds begin their cheerful greeting of first light.

The evolution is rapid. The opportunity for good photography quickly evolves as light alters the landscape.

Go out this afternoon and find a spot where you want to stand tomorrow morning when the sun rises. Listen before sunrise. Watch the light change the landscape. Enjoy it. Take pictures of it

Do it again the next day.

Street photography is part of the daily tool kit for news photographers. It can be much more difficult for photographers who are not expected to produce a news package every single day.

Walking up to a complete stranger and pointing a camera at him from just a few feet away can be disconcerting at best and dangerous at the extreme.

I usually employ the “OMG” opening explaining how great the light-angle-face-timing-color-movement-location-work-surroundings are that make it imperative that I take a photo of this person. It’s not a lie, just an exaggeration of the importance.

It also means that I have little time to make this work. Especially if I’m interrupting the subject’s work, path, or destination.

Be prepared to shoot quickly to make sure you have an insurance photo. An insurance photo is one that is taken early in the shoot to make sure there is something publishable if nothing else you have planned works.

Check your focus. Focus on a different subject approximately the same distance away. This will pre-focus your lens before pointing at at the intended subject.

Check your exposure. Make sure the aperture is proper for the subject. Does it need to be set lower for narrow depth-of-field or higher for a more in focus background?

How does that affect the shutter speed? Do you need now to adjust the ISO setting to compensate for the previous setting?

Is your subject still standing there after you’ve broken eye contact to check these things?

Street photography doesn’t forgive the slow photographer or the photographer who has to work through a check list of requirements.

It rewards to proactive shooter who anticipates the moment and is prepared when it arrives.

Eds note: this originally appeared at newdigitalphoto.gs