All the best from The Oklahoman Photo Dept.

More sports pictures

If you’ve followed Alternate Crop at all, you’re aware that a healthy portion of our assignments are from sports events. We’re always looking for sports action pictures during these assignments, but getting storytelling images doesn’t stop just because we’re at a game or a match. A player’s reactions in those moments after a game can be even more important than a photo of him driving the lane.

Bryan Terry photographed the state high school wrestling championships last weekend. The pictures that stand out are the ones taken in the moment that the wrestlers become state champions. You can see the hours of training and the intensity of the tournament in Garrison McCualey’s face and body language as he celebrates his win. Meanwhile, Pau Gasol and Kobe Bryant celebrate an exciting and exhausting win over the Thunder. OU’s Carlee Roethlisberger comforts teammate Danielle Robinson after Robinson’s last second shot doesn’t fall and the Sooners lose to the Baylor Bears. In all these cases, whether the pictures were used in the newspaper or not, it’s the players’ reactions to the game that tells the story.

Click these links to see photo galleries from Thunder against Lakers, high school wrestling, or OU women against Baylor.

-John Clanton

---

Pictures I Like-So far this month

So far this month, Staff photographers at The Oklahoman have put over 1,100 images into our archive system. I thought that seemed like a high number and attributed it to the snow storms. When I looked up the same time period over the last few years, however, we turned in about the same amount in the first 13 days of February 2010 and 2009 we turned in nearly 1,400 images.

We’re getting back into a more normal routine after the recent snow storms. No early deadlines or assignments  canceled because of ice and snow this week. There are plenty of images to catch up on from the end of last week and some good stories to look for on the Alternate Crop blog site in the next few days. Here’s a last look at some of the blizzard images you may have missed last week, as well as gymnastics and Rumble the Bison. We’ve put up galleries about the PBR events in Oklahoma City over the weekend as well as galleries from Oklahoma City Thunder games that you can watch by clicking here and remember that you can click the images on this post to see them on a dark background.

-John Clanton

---

Blizzard

Just before the snowfall started, Nate Billings had the idea to do a time-lapse video of the blizzard from multiple locations. He set up a camera on the ninth floor of the OPUBCO tower at Britton and Broadway in Oklahoma City on Monday night. I braced a camera to a ladder in my garage to get images of the snow piling up in the window, and Sarah Phipps set one up in the front window of her home in NW Oklahoma City.

We attached Pocket Wizard receivers to our Canon Mark II cameras and set them to take a picture every 20 seconds. To avoid glare off of the windows that could ruin the effect, you have to mask off the area around the lens. To do this I nailed an old blanket to the top of the window and draped it over my camera. On the sides of the windows, I propped up two large pieces of cardboard. This kept the garage light or the light from the kitchen from refecting off the glass.

We started recording around 11 pm on Monday night and let the cameras take pictures all night long. I turned off my camera at about 12:45 pm on Tuesday.

We ended up with three very different time-lapse videos that we edited together to make this video.

As always, you can see images from the blizzard and all of our photo galleries by clicking here.

-John Clanton

---

The most recent Thunder game

I was tempted to spend time finding the perfect pun for the title of this post. It might have involving the name of Miami’s NBA basketball team and Oklahoma’s forecast over the next week. I thought about it, but I couldn’t bring myself to go through with it. Sarah Phipps and I shot nearly 40 GB of images during Sunday afternoon’s game. Sarah used two remote cameras and hand-held two cameras.

Take a look at all the images we turned in by clicking here or read all about the Thunder’s loss to the Heat by clicking here.

-John Clanton

---

Best of 2010-The rest of the months

I’ve strung this out too long. I think that by Jan. 12, 2011, we should be looking at pictures from this year and not looking backwards. So this is it. A colossal blog post featuring some of our best pictures from the last four months of 2010. Click on all the links to past posts, galleries and slideshows and you’ll be all caught up on 2010.

We’re always busy in the fall with high school and college football, RedHawks baseball, feature stories and the usual newspaper assignments. We produced slideshows about Route 66 Bowl, Moore High School football Head Coach Scott Myers, and Kody Turner, a high school football player who died after football practice in September. Sarah Phipps worked on a story about Oklahoma City Firefighter Kent Collins, that was published in October, and there’s a nice slideshow about the 2010 Bedlam football game.

Our interns, Miranda Grubbs and Mitch Alcala left us at the end of July. We wrote about their pictures, and we had some other interesting posts toward the end of 2010. Some of our memorable pictures and posts include Welcome to the South Pole, OSU and OU pictures just days before Bedlam, 5 years at The Oklahoman, Happy Halloween, the State Fair, black mud and minnows, the most photographed rainbow of the year,  Bryan Terry’s pictures, and Of Light and Shade.

If you haven’t already, click here to see our best news and feature pictures of the year or click here to see our best sports photos of the year. We publish new photo galleries everyday at this site and this page holds an archive of our slideshows going back to Feb. 1, 2008.

I looked through thousands of pictures from 2010 to write about them for Alternate Crop. If we had a Photographer of the Year Award at The Oklahoman, I would nominate for Bryan Terry. His name is the only one that made the final edit during every month of the Best of 2010 series. He routinely brings back compelling pictures from a wide variety of assignments. In 2010 he he got nice images everything from Division 1 college football and NBA basketball to junior rodeos, candlelight vigils and neighborhood picnics. If such an award actually existed, Bryan would likely received a refurbished soccer trophy from 1984 during a banquet that would be held on my back porch.

So, that’s it for 2010. We’ll get back to concentrating on our newest pictures and multimedia projects.

-John Clanton

---

Lunar eclipse on the winter solstice

Tuesday’s lunar eclipse was the first time that it has coincided with winter’s solstice since 1638, 372 years! A once in a lifetime occurrence, so I decided to stay up and take photos. First thing was look up the times that the eclipse would occur and hope that there were no clouds. I gathered my equipment and then took a nap for an hour, setting my alarm for 12:40 am., which was the start time. After waking and going outside to see if it was clear, I grabbed my camera gear.

To shoot the moon you need a long lens, 300mm minimum, the longer the better. I used a 300mm f2.8 Canon L lens and added a 2X extender to create a 600 f 5.6 lens. I then used a 50D body which has a 1.6 crop factor for the chip, which basically gave me a 960mm f 5.6 lens. Next thing to grab was the sturdiest tripod I had which had a Slik Pro Ball head on it. The eclipse was almost straight up, so the ball head worked well.

Not having a remote cord handy, I set the self timer to the 2 sec. delay. That allows the camera to settle down after the shutter button is pushed. Next thing is to determine exposure. Because of the 2X extender, I knew I wanted to use f8 so that the lens would be stopped down one f-stop from wide open to improve sharpness. I started with iso 800. While the sun was still on the moon that gave me a shutter speed somewhere around 1/500. There were light clouds that cut the exposure down some.

I used the camera in manual mode and proofed the exposure on the camera monitor. Automatic will not work in a situation like this because of all of the black surrounding a bright white object. If your camera has a “spot” meter setting, this is the time to use it!

Once the earth’s shadow had completely covered the moon, about 1:40 am, I had to move my iso to 2500 and slow the shutter down to about 1/2 sec. to expose the red glow of the moon. I was really  glad the Oklahoma wind was still, or everything would have been shaking at those slow shutter speeds. Next time there is a lunar eclipse, plan ahead and give it your best shot!

-Doug Hoke

---

‘Tis the Season-Best of 2010 part 1 of 12

It’s that time of year again when we search through Merlin and make folders of our best images of the year. So far, we’ve got a general folder and a Best Sports Photos of the Year folder. Since there are 12 days left in they year, I’m hoping I’ll find  five or six pictures from each month to put up on Alternate Crop and bring another drought to a close. That’s what I’m hoping, but you both know that I’ll probably string the Best of 2010 blog entries well into February of 2011.

At any rate, here’s a few images that caught my eye from January 2010. Sarah Phipps worked on a couple of Slideshows in January that accompanied a multimedia project about Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in Oklahoma City. Watch the first slideshow here and the second by clicking here. You can see all the slideshows we’ve produced by clicking here.

-John Clanton

---

The Prime Lens Challenge

or, How a Bent Up Lens Mount Forced Me Out of a Comfort Zone.

For years I’ve had my ‘go-to’ combination of lenses on daily assignments. I always had a 24-70mm attached to a camera and an 80-200mm ready to go as a second lens. Generally speaking, that combination can cover any daily newspaper assignment. My favorite lens though, was a 50mm @ 1.4. I felt like I was really composing pictures when I used a 50mm, but I didn’t use it often enough.

Things changed on election night when I dropped my 24-70 and broke it right before the Republican watch party got into full swing. I went out to the car and got the 35mm, the 50mm and kept the 70-200mm in a hip bag, just in case. It worked. I made nice pictures, got the front page of the paper and had fun trying to see pictures in a little bit different way. Basically, a bent up lens mount forced me out of my comfort zone. Forced me to try something new.

Committing to prime lenses takes away my ‘fallback mode.’ If all else fails, for example, ‘get up close with a wide angle.’ Let the lens make the picture for me. If I force myself to watch for real moments instead of relying on what I’ve done in the past, relying on the same approach at every assignment, then that’s continuing education for a news photographer that’s 13 years in. It sounds so minor, but the effect on my eye, the way I see assignments, feels profound. I feel like I’m back to watching people, waiting for unexpected moments, spending longer at assignments and turning in nearly full frame images. The other day at a gang-prevention assignment (above) I even started thinking that I was going to mess up the assignment. Miss it! I kept waiting around, and eventually ended up with nice pictures, but I haven’t felt the ‘I’m going to miss this’ feeling in a long time. I think that feeling, that I’m really composing pictures through the viewfinder, that I feel re-energized (even on some questionable assignments,) is worth putting a cap on the ‘go-to’ lens, at least for awhile.

So, last week, I committed myself to the prime lenses. I’ve re-arranged my equipment bag so that the 24-70 sits with a lens cap on in the back instead of being attached to my favorite camera. That was a big step in kicking my addiction to the zoom lens. When I get my cameras out of the car, I’m forced to reach first for the 35 and the 50, and so far, I’ve been happy with the results. Here’s a few pictures that you may have seen in the paper, and a few that may only appear on Alternate Crop. As always you can click here to see more galleries from our photo staff, including pictures from the Pearl Harbor ceremony in Oklahoma City.

-John Clanton

---

‘Check your self!!’

There’s a new sign in the catwalk at the OKC Arena. Printed on a piece of typing paper, it reads ‘It is 96 feet from here to the floor. If you drop something it is probably going to kill somebody. Check your self!!’ I like the new sign. Good advice and a good place to end our recent hiatus on Alternate Crop. Here’s a few Thunder basketball pictures that you didn’t see in the newspaper.

Photographers from The Oklahoman use eight strobes, mounted in the catwalks of the OKC Arena, to light up the action on the court. A receiver is mounted to the lights, and we have transmitters mounted on the cameras we use sitting behind the baseline on the court. I usually use one camera with the lights and one without. Here’s what a difference that burst of light makes to the camera settings. I took the picture above at 400 ISO, f. 4.5 at 1/250th of a second. Sarah Phipps took the picture below with a 300mm lens, ISO 3200, f. 2.8 at 1/1600th of a second. We post photo galleries of the Thunder games with all the images we’ve turned in after each game. You can see those galleries and more by clicking here.

-John Clanton

---

Better to Receive

We know football season is around the corner when we get Media Day assignments. I’ve written about these phenomena before, but yesterday, pictures that our staff photographers took during media days several weeks ago, were finally used in the newspaper.

Staff photographers Bryan Terry and Chris Landsberger hauled lights, backgrounds and cameras out to Oklahoma State and University of Oklahoma campuses earlier this month to get portraits of some of the star players. Here’s a couple of images from the events, but for more sports coverage related to the recently released college football sections, click here.

We photographed the media days on different days, in different towns and under different conditions. Chris and Bryan tried to get the light as consistent as possible, even though Bryan was indoors at Gallagher-Iba Arena and Chris  was outdoors at Memorial Stadium in Norman. They used the same grey backdrop and put one light on each side of the backdrop, slightly behind the players and then one directly behind and slightly above the photographer. The covers of the special sections looked fantastic. Seeing those sections in the paper means that football season is no longer around the corner. It’s here.

-John Clanton

---

Powered by Wordpress | WP Premium theme by WP Remix
Copyright 2007. Alternate Crop. All rights reserved

• Home
• RSS Feed
• Oklahoma Pictures | NewsOK
• Oklahoma Sports Pictures
• Oklahoma Weather Pictures