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A Little Help

Last week I visited a family in Tuttle, Okla., who is in the process of adopting a child from Haiti.

Gardina is an active kid. She’s learning English, so while she played in different rooms of the house, I noticed that she mimicked words from her relatives and from us. “No, thank you!” “Gotcha!” She jumped and played around her parents while reporter Darla Slipke interviewed them. After awhile she took an interest in my camera equipment. She took the mic attached to my Canon 5D mark 2 and mimicked my actions by sitting on the floor and holding the mic toward her new parents Jeff and Jennifer Dewitt.

Read Darla’s story about Gardina and her family, as  well as other adopted children from Haiti, by clicking here.

-John Clanton

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A New nDepth

Click here to see final slideshow about Perry wrestling.

Slideshows take awhile to edit, especially when the topic is fairly broad. Last week when I photographed wrestlers at Perry High School for an nDepth project, the story idea behind Matt Patterson’s  topic as he described it was “The History of Wrestling in Perry.”  At the end of last Wednesday, I had 1,114 images and 9 interviews saved on my memory cards. That’s a lot more than if the story had been a bit narrower, like this one for example. For that one I had one interview and less than a hundred pictures.

To edit down from 1,114 I thought about how the quotes would form the story. I listened to the interviews and got an idea of the direction the interviews would take me,  sorted through the images, and tagged the ones that I liked. That left me with 115 images. I sorted through those, looking for images that were redundant, picking out the ones that really helped move the story along. That third round of editing got me down to sixty images. After I got the sound edited and exported, I fit the sound and the pictures together, and did one last round of cutting pictures. The final slideshow about wrestlers in Perry features 34 photographs and parts of all 9 interviews. Take a look at the nDepth page too.

-John Clanton

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A Quick Preview

I’ve been editing pictures all morning. Last week I mentioned on our facebook account that I’d spent the day in Perry, Okla., photographing wrestlers for a story about the tradition and history of the sport in the small Oklahoma town.

I still have plenty of work to do, editing sound and putting together the slideshow, but here’s a quick preview of the project. Look for Matt Patterson’s story in the Sports section of Friday’s newspaper and check back here for links to the online story, pictures and slideshow.

-John Clanton

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OKC National Memorial in snow

Bryan Terry went to the Oklahoma City National Memorial at night during one of our recent winter storms and got some beautiful pictures. I meant to put these photos up a few weeks ago, but something kept coming up. Since good photographs don’t have an expiration date, here they are now.

-Nate Billings

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From the All-Star Game

Staff Photographer Bryan Terry covered the NBA All-Star game in Dallas on Sunday. Here’s a couple of the pictures he sent in from Cowboys Stadium in Dallas, Texas.

To read more of The Oklahoman’s coverage of the All-Star game, click here.  Look for Oklahoman Photography Department on Facebook.

-John Clanton

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People On Sundays-Mike

As church services begin, Mike Lee sits alone near the top of section 117. Below him, on the arena floor, employees tape up advertisements in anticipation of the PBR event in a few hours. Gates squeak gently before slamming shut, bulls fidget in their pins, and lights flicker on around the arena. As spiritual music continues, Mike, a professional bull rider from Decatur, Tx.,  leans back in his chair, his eyes closed. “I’m not thinking about bull riding,” he says after the service ends, “Thinking is too slow for bull riding.” Mike attends the PBR’s christian outreach, called Riding High, every week in a different arena around the country. Mike says he’s looking for something to give him peace. “You got to have your heart right when you’re on a bull.”

To see more pictures of the PBR event in Oklahoma City, click here.

-John Clanton

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Pictures I Like

In cased you missed them when they ran in the newspaper, or in case they never got published, here’s a couple of pictures from The Oklahoman photo staff in the last couple of days.

• 

  Brent Link, seated, shakes the hand of a person while he and his guide dog, Gipper, wait with Link's son, Stephen, outside a courtroom inside the Cleveland County Courthouse Monday morning, Feb, 8, 2010. Link testified Monday in the murder trial of William Eugene Davis, 52. Photo by Jim Beckel, The Oklahoman

  

  A concrete pier collapsed into an alley south of the Oklahoma City Downtown Library in Oklahoma City on Monday, Feb. 8, 2010. Photo by John Clanton, The Oklahoman

  -John Clanton

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Behind the Photo-Extreme Edition

On Sunday I was sent to Slaughterville, Okla., to photograph the taping of the television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Sunday was the final day, so I was supposed to get a picture of their reaction to the famous reveal, when the bus pulls away and the family sees their new home.

As chaotic as I thought the scene would be, it was worse. There were barricades and corrals set up for fans, extended family members and media. Cameras crews, sound guys, volunteers, Thunder Girls, PR representatives and the stars of the show, like Ty Pennington and Xzibit, were  cheered by the fans as they walked by. I stood up against the fence in the media pin, watching the scene unfold. For three hours.

My favorite part was right before the reveal. There was a group of people stationed to the right of the media, extended family, the home builders, and people with all access passes. They would have the best seats in the house, after the bus pulled away. The Public Relations representatives were worried that before the bus pulled away, the crowd would get excited and press into the media’s view, so they brought in human blockers. Volunteers from CVS pharmacy were seated in front of us. The idea was that the excited crowd wouldn’t step on volunteers just to get a good view. It worked. Despite the chaos for three straight hours, once the bus pulled away, we had a decent view of the family’s reaction. More pictures from the reveal will be published on Saturday, Feb. 13, 2010,  in The Oklahoman’s real estate magazine.

-John Clanton

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Odds and ends

I used a 100mm macro lens to photograph icicles as they melted outside my house in The Village on Tuesday. I’d been looking for an excuse to use it. Last week I published a post where I implied that this slideshow was a result of staff photographer Sarah Phipps making the most of an assignment. Actually, the frog and turtle race would be better described as an assignment that Sarah brought to the newspaper and NewsOK.com.

-John Clanton

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