I had envisioned a background of dark blue, twilight sky, with maybe a hint of sunset when I had our sports department set up portraits for our NCW football tabloid scheduled for Sept. 5. But last night the clouds rolled in and even spit out some rain on my photo shoot. I think the pictures came out even better with the stormy clouds in the background. As Eric Gordon, sports reporter, told me, the color of the sky matched many of the cars used as a backdrop.

I bounced a flash off of a white piece of paper to get the lighting to be harsh. It works here but normally, I stay away from bringing in my own source of lighting.

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Needing a feature photograph for the next day’s paper, I intended to shoot photographs of fans at the AppleSox playoff game. They made an interesting picture but nothing too dramatic until the end of the game when they made it into the championship series. That’s when I sat in the seating section and made this image of Linda Phillips, Entiat, and the rest of section A seating at the Paul Thomas Field reacting to Wenatchee getting the last out to beat the Kelowna Falcons and sweep the playoff series. Phillips says she has had season tickets in section A, seats 20-23 every year the AppleSox have played. That’s great information to make the photograph even more newsworthy.

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Packed out at 55 pounds, the hike to Spider Meadows was level enough that my legs held up but my shoulders were pretty sore the first day of a three day assignment to photograph a researcher looking at the disappearing glacier at Lyman Lake. But the hike up to Spider Gap, down to the lake and glacier, then back up and down to Spider Meadows  just about did me in. Wouldn’t have been too bad but hauling camera gear, food, boots and crampons was too much weight for my 47-year-old bones.

But worth it! A beautiful day with brilliant blue skies above 7,000 feet and an interesting topic and people to photograph.

Look for the story by K.C. Mehaffey and photographs by me in print in early September.

Here’s a preview:

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Press conferences never - okay almost never - provide any photographic opportunities. It’s a staged event of people talking. So getting there early or staying late can be very helpful. I arranged a quick tour of the arena after the naming ceremony and was blessed to see Linda Haglund, giving Town Toyota owner Tom Barros and his family a tour of the building and their first look of the box they would be getting with their naming rights. Much better and informative than people talking in front of a big sign.

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This is an idea I had a couple days before I shot this sequence. I’ve seen it done before in studio lighting with black backgrounds using strobes and wasn’t sure if it was going to work with a “normal” background. I shot about four sequences of Owen Parsley throwing disks and the final one had the whole series, earlier ones cut his hand off or didn’t show the disk. I brought it back to work the next morning and photographer Mike Bonnicksen did the hard work, using layers to add Owen in the original scene as he made his throw. I did a little touch up at the end and I think it came out pretty good.

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I was looking for something interesting to photograph, crossing the Wenatchee River bridge, I saw a group of kayakers together underneath the pedestrian bridge and headed to the state park to try to get there before they left. I was late, the kayakers were heading down the river and my thoughts of a photograph of them from above was squashed. I hung out at the bridge, photographed a pair of osprey, and Rich Goodwin of Malaga wandered by. There were only a couple of moments when he was away from the shadow of the bridge.

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Here’s what I photographed when I first decided the poles remaining at Walla Walla Point Park might make a story:

But without any people in the picture, it didn’t speak to how this affected anyone. Were people having to walk around the group of obstacles? Were they looking up in wonder? Or had they seen these around for so long that they were ignored? People would also add scale to the picture.

I waited there for quite a while and finally this group of sun bathers came walking past, completely undisturbed by the group of poles.

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At the Peshastin fire, I followed a couple of parishioners into the neighboring church while they checked for any kind of damage. capturing an image of Jay Garza, a trustee of the Peshastin United Church of Christ, carrying the large church Bible from the sanctuary was a good moment and would have been used, but the image didn’t show the smoke and water damage as well as the one we eventually used in the newspaper.

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Originally this photograph of the house fire in Peshastin was cropped like so:

I sent it over the Associated Press wire service like this but the next morning, photographer Mike Bonnicksen thought this crop was more direct and focused the picture to the theme of the fire overwhelming the firefighters. I agree.

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Looking for something interesting along the Wenatchee River earlier this week and I noticed at the top of the railroad trestle, a pair of osprey outside of their nest. Fairly interesting but also photographed before. What would make it unique?

I kept my camera focused on them when one opened its wings (still not too much of an interesting moment) but when the other bird moved its neck out of the way for a split second, I knew I had something worth publishing.

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