I wanted to do a video on the first day of basketball tournaments in Wenatchee and kept my eyes - and ears - open to find a suitable subject to focus on. Jade had walked by while I was getting ready to shoot the first Entiat game and I noticed her shoes, thinking that might be an interesting photograph so at halftime I looked for her in the stands and to my surprise there she was, the most vocal person in the crowd. I wired her with a remote microphone and spent the first half of the boys game telling her story in video.

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Photographer Kelly Gillin was out with reporter Jay Patrick, looking for places that might be in trouble for not keeping the sidewalks clear of snow. I was headed home for lunch, just starting to cross the George Sellar Bridge when I spotted Amaza Clothier having a difficult time as he began the journey across the bridge making his way along a narrow path of tramped down snow and ice. I crossed the bridge, trying to decide if I should try to get the photo and called Kelly to see if they had found anything yet. They hadn’t so I made my way back to Wenatchee across the bridge then back across and found a place to park. I ran to a spot on the East Wenatchee side with a minute to spare as Clothier walked the final few feet across.

I’m glad I went back for the picture and missed a few minutes of lunch.

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Caught an interesting moment on video Monday at the scene of an accident on Mission St. when Glen Widener with the Wenatchee Fire Department nearly went down on ice. Here’s a still from the scene and a video link but when you get to the link click on the auto accident video.

Glen looked like he came out of it alright but I’m guessing he may have had to make a visit to his friendly chiropractor.

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Had an okay night of shooting basketball Friday at Eastmont. It was an exciting game, close till the end, but my best photographs came from an unexpected and unplanned halftime show.

Up:

Up:

And………… Down

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You may not have realized it but Thursday’s paper contained images on page one and page two that were revolutionary for The Wenatchee World newspaper. On those pages contained photographs produced using frame grabs from videotape. It’s almost like stepping back into shooting film. The photographs by Kelly Gillin and one by myself,

were pulled from our new video camera.

And today’s newspaper’s front page has a frame grab image made by Kathryn Stevens.

This quality means we can begin using the video camera more and more and use video and sound as an exciting tool to tell your stories.

Check out our video page for the videos that came from these stories.

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I have to be honest. I didn’t expect too much from this photo request, covering an awards ceremony of an honorable mention award. And I really just showed up to take a few close-up pictures of bus passes with children’s posters printed on them. Our photo staff is too busy to attend most award ceremonies and the public probably doesn’t want us to use the space to run such a photograph anyhow. But as I waited for that chance to take a macro photo of the passes, the unexpected happened right in front of me and my camera. It was a natural, and visually exciting reaction that will make my week. I’m so glad I was blessed to be in the right spot, camera powered, and wide angle lens on, to capture the moment as Tiffany Snyder suspects she made a mistake on her poster that cost it from being selected as one of the posters to be used as a bus pass. I was able to get four frames off, the first out of focus, before she returned to her normal sitting position.

An even better reaction shot was published in Monday’s newspaper, a photograph made by staff photographer Kathryn Stevens. The reaction from the two students watching the primary subject really frames and makes her picture.

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Mike Bonnicksen used our new video gear testing the equipment and trying his hand at video editing and came up with a really great first project documenting Chris Ohta, the manager and a “ski tunah” at Tune-A-Sport working on skis.

Mike has some video experience, shooting video for a television news project the Wenatchee World had in the mid to late 1980s. In those days shooting video meant lugging around a large camera, a video deck and tripod. And if you wanted to shoot stills, you had to carry that gear too.

I had dug in my heels and refused to shoot both stills and video because of the extra load and because of the huge potential of missing a still photo moment while shooting video. So the paper hired Mike to shoot exclusively video until the television project was canceled after a few years.

What is different now? Why is the photo staff able to shoot both? “The gear has changed a lot,” says Mike. “The gear is a lot smaller, seems to be a lot better, and the ability to get frame grabs is revolutionary. I predict that in five years, most photos in the paper will be grabbed off of video rather than taken with still cameras.”

Check out his first “new” project.

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Swimming used to be one of my worst sporting events to cover. Dark, humid and colorless, I dreaded having to shoot pictures with my old film cameras. That has changed with well-lit pools, colorful lane dividers, and better competition.

I photographed the Wenatchee Eastmont meet today and came back with some interesting pictures. I like this one the most because it conveyed the emotion of the event against the rival schools:

And this one that shows the speed of the swimmers as they travel through the water.

If we hadn’t run a diving photograph in Monday’s newspaper

I would have been temped to use one of the diving pictures I made just before the divers hit the water.

Swim meets have sure become a better subject for me.

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I had a tough decision to make last night between two photographs. I had covered WVC’s game against Columbia Basin where the Knights were defeated by a large margin. It was a real ugly game for the Wenatchee team and I wanted the picture that ran in the paper to show that. On my first edit, I thought this was the best photo:

But when I was setting up the gallery, I found this picture that seems to say dominance better:

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I unpacked a box of equipment last Monday that ushers in an exciting change in my profession. Over $5,600 worth of video gear arrived and with it a new way of telling news stories other than still pictures and words.
It was with nervous excitement that myself, Kelly Gillin, Kathryn Stevens, Christine Pratt, Rachel Schleif and Steve Maher traveled to Yakima to attend a workshop on elementary video gathering and editing and we came away thrilled with a new way of getting information out to our readers and web users.
So it came that my first video assignment and training was last Tuesday at the Wenatchee Valley Senior Center during tap dance lessons. I spent over four hours editing the 53 minutes of raw material into three minutes of video. I hope you enjoy learning about subjects and events in our community in this new way for us.

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