February’s outtakes

By Clifford Oto | Published: March 6, 2014 | Leave a comment

“The February sunshine steeps your boughs and tints the buds and swells the leaves within.” – William C. Bryant

Although the month started out with sunshine, we finally got some much-needed rain and the clouds that come with it in February. Along with that, basketball on all levels pervaded the month. Here are 10 of my favorite previously unposted photos from 2014’s second month.

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2/1/14:

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2/2/14:

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2/12/14:

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2/25/14:

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2/26/14:

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2/27/14:

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2/28/14:

Posted in Month in review, Outtakes | Tagged | Leave a comment

Making time

By Clifford Oto | Published: March 3, 2014 | Leave a comment

We all live busy lives, and even if photography is your passion, it’s often hard to find time to pursue it. We need to make dinner/breakfast/lunch for the family. We to go to work then drop off/pick up the kids from school, soccer, gymnastics, etc. Then there’s grocery/clothes/back-to-school shopping to be done along with numerous of other errands. I have to admit that even I, whose job it is to take pictures, can have a hard time finding time to take the pictures that I want.

On the Light Stalking website, professional photographer Rachael Towne wrote an article on how to find time for your photography.

Towne first suggests that we look at how we spend our time. I know that I spend too much time watching TV or surfing the Internet, so there is some time I can find there.

But most people are very busy, and many of those obligations that we all have are tough to get out of.

She does make a useful suggestion for those of us who have children. Take them along with you on your photo outing. They can even be the subject of your photos. Of course, if they’re really young, it’s more difficult, but as they get older and more self-sufficient, the easier it’ll become.

Towne’s next suggestion is perhaps most important: Always keep your camera with you. You can’t take a picture without one.

I can’t tell you how many times people have come up to me and told me about a beautiful sunset or an adorable moment with their kid only to be followed by the sentence: “… but I didn’t have a camera with me.” The first rule of photography is “always have a camera.” It doesn’t have to be a big bulky DSLR or even a small point-and-shoot camera.

If I’m taking a quick jaunt down to the supermarket, I probably won’t take my work camera, but I will have my cellphone. Occasionally, I’ll take a photo with it that’s good enough to stand on its own. Other times, I’ll take photos of little things that might not make a great picture but may have a kernel of something interesting, sort of like photographic notes or ideas to use at another time.

Towne goes on to suggest making a photo schedule for yourself. Set aside some time just to go out and take some pictures; maybe put those chores on hold just for a little while.

When St. Mary’s High School sophomore Sydney Spurgeon took up photography, her parents not only encouraged in her interests but took another step. They sat down with her and came up with “assignments” for her to shoot. Together they think of events or themes for her to photograph and go with her on her photo safaris. The result is a budding young photographic talent with a bright future.

When I was taking photo classes, one of my assignments was called “Out your back door.” Due to familiarity, we often ignore the things and places that are close to us. We tend to think that we need to go off to far away and exotic lands to make great photos. With the “back door” assignment, the idea was to explore someplace that is close to you and find something interesting. Once you have that mastered then you can go anywhere, far or near, and make compelling photos.

Finally, Towne says to quit making excuses. We’ve all done it. “I don’t have the right lens,” or “the light’s bad” or any number of other excuses. Recently I traveled up to Highway 4 to Angels Camp for an assignment. Just outside of Copperopolis is this gnarled old tree on a hillside. It sits atop of a low-rolling hill. An old stone fence connected to a slightly newer barbed wire one makes a “Z”-like composition in combination with a smaller, rounded hill in the foreground. I’ve always wanted to stop and take a picture of it, but in my more than 29 years at The Record, I never had. I never had the time, or the light wasn’t right, or the clouds were all wrong. I never even made time to go on a day off either.

On this trip there were some decent clouds, but the light was just so-so, I thought. The grass on the hill was all dried and brown. It would be better if I came back in the spring when the grass would be green and vibrant. Once again I made excuses, and I started to pass it by. Then I thought to myself, “When am I going to have another chance? What if something happened to the tree, like a wildfire or bolt of lightning and it’s gone forever?” Even though the clock was ticking, I turned the car around and went back. I stopped the car and got out. It may not have been perfect, but I still took the picture.

Sometimes you just have to get off of your duff and start taking pictures. We all need to take inspiration from athletic shoemaker Nike’s tag line and “just do it.”

Posted in Enterprise, Inspiriation | Tagged | Leave a comment

In the wet of the night

By Clifford Oto | Published: February 27, 2014 | Leave a comment

The response to the latest Readers Photo Challenge assignment has been a bit slow. Only a handful of people have sent in entries so far with a deadline of Sunday looming. It can be a bit daunting to make the time to head out in the darkness to take pictures. And the forecast of rain for the next few days may make it more difficult for some people. But for the souls willing to brave the wet weather the rewards can be great. The rain can add an added visual element to night photography. Lights gleam a little more and reflect off of the wet surfaces. So put on your raincoat, grab an umbrella and buckle up your galoshes then head out and take your night shots.

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Here are the rules:

1. Entries can be emailed to coto@recordnet.com. Type in “Night” in the subject line.

2. Photos have to be shot between Feb. 17 and Mar. 2.

3. Include your name (first and last), hometown, and the kind of camera/lens you used and where it was taken (ie: “Weber Avenue in downtown Stockton.”

4. If there is a recognizable person in the photo, please identify them (name, age, hometown).

5. The subject is up to you but it must be shot outdoors at night, any time after sunset to before sunrise. It can be a found situation or a created one.

6. Please feel free to include any interesting anecdotes or stories on how you took the picture.

7. The deadline for submission is Sunday, March 2. The top examples will be published on Monday, March 10 with an online gallery of all the photos on the same day.

Posted in Readers Photo Challenge | Tagged | Leave a comment

“I gotta have more cowbell”

By Clifford Oto | Published: February 24, 2014 | Leave a comment

The Pacific Pep Band, part musical group, part cheerleading squad,  perform at men’s & women’s basketball games, playing tunes such as “Eye of the Tiger” and “Hey Baby” and doing chants and cheers to rattle opposing teams. For as long as I can remember, there has always been at least one person playing the cowbell. Some have been very demonstrative in their performances while others are more subdued. Sometimes you can really hear its hollow knock-knock-knocking over the band, other times it just blends with the rest of the music.

This year’s cowbell player is student Sam Berris of Oakland and he is a show unto himself. He struts, jumps and prances as if he were Mick Jagger in his prime. Hitting the cowbell with a drumstick with such force that at times it seems that he’s louder than the entire the band. At times he hits the bell so hard that little pieces of the wooden drumstick go flying off. Just watching him, one can’t help but to have their spirits lifted by his zeal. I don’t know if the rest of the band is taking cues from his enthusiasm this year, but they have their own set of choreographed moves and perform them with nearly the verve and vigor of Berris’ impromptu steps.

Strangely enough, the pep band isn’t a part of the music program at UOP but is actually run under the auspices of the Pacific athletic department. While many members are music students, the band is open to all Pacific students.

The cowbell player is usually one the percussionists in the band. They tend to switch off between the drum set, tambourine and the aforementioned cowbell. Berris breaks that mold by not being a percussionist at all, but rather he plays an orchestral instrument that’s not really suited for the pep band. What does he normally play? The bassoon.

Saturday Night Live aired a skit on April 8, 2000 gave a fictionalized account of the recording of “Don’t fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult. Will Ferrell played the made-up character of Gene Frenkle who vigorously played the cowbell. A fight ensues when Ferrell and other band members – played by other cast members of SNL – argue over Ferrell’s playing of the cowbell.

Guest host Christopher Walken, playing fictional music producer “The Bruce Dickinson” comes out of the sound booth and says: “I got a fever; and the only prescription is more cowbell!”
Berris’ verve and energy at playing the cowbell puts even Ferrell’s relentless performance to shame. So if you’re feeling the need of some energetic entertainment and just “gotta have more cowbell,” then Berris has the cure for what ails you.

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Still pictures can only capture so much. To get the full effect of Berris’ enthusiasm and energy I shot some video of him playing during a recent game. Enjoy his performance here.

Posted in Column, Music, video | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Moon night

By Clifford Oto | Published: February 20, 2014 | Leave a comment

Getting a photo of the moon is a little different than getting your usual night shot. Typical night photography normally entails either using long exposures, or high ISOs (or both).

A moon shot (apologies to NASA) involves daylight exposures. Why you may ask? Our only natural satellite is at an average distance of about 238,000 miles from us. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just a stone’s throw away, astronomically speaking. Thus the light falling on the moon is essentially the same as the light during a sunny day here on Earth.

Now, if you want to get a photo of, say a landscape or a city scene at night with the moon in the background, then you’ll have to use more of a common nighttime exposure, but then the moon itself will be extremely overexposed and appear like a glowing orb in the sky.

The exception to that is to shoot in the early evening when the moon first rises when, for a short time, when the ambient light matches the exposure of the moon.

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We are still accepting entries to the latest Reader’s Photo Challenge: Night.

Here are the rules:

1. Entries can be emailed to coto@recordnet.com. Type in “Night” in the subject line.

2. Photos have to be shot between Feb. 17 and Mar. 2.

3. Include your name (first and last), hometown, and the kind of camera/lens you used and where it was taken (ie: “Weber Avenue in downtown Stockton.”

4. If there is a recognizable person in the photo, please identify them (name, age, hometown).

5. The subject is up to you but it must be shot outdoors at night, any time after sunset to before sunrise. It can be a found situation or a created one.

6. Please feel free to include any interesting anecdotes or stories on how you took the picture.

7. The deadline for submission is Sunday, March 2. The top examples will be published on Monday, March 10 with an online gallery of all the photos on the same day.

Posted in Night, Readers Photo Challenge | Tagged | Leave a comment

Color temperature

By Clifford Oto | Published: February 19, 2014 | Leave a comment

In my last post I mention little bit about color temperature. Each light source has its own “temperature,” and thus they glow at different colors. Most appear to our eyes as normal white light because our brains compensate for the color shifts. A tungsten or incandescent light bulb will have a warm orange/yellow glow; Fluorescents will have a green tint, LEDs will appear bluish and cold. Today’s cameras, as sophisticated as they are, are just dumb machines and record the light as it really is. The cameras have what’s called “white balance” presets for the different light sources. Although most people (myself included) use the auto setting (which tends to be fine in most cases, you can switch between tungsten, fluorescent, flash, daylight, etc., if you wanted to).

In the old days, most film was balanced for daylight (though you could buy film that was made for, say, tungsten lighting). Shooting it under artificial light, the pictures would have a different color cast, depending on the light source. One could correct for it in the darkroom or put a filter that was the opposite color of the light source, thus canceling out the color shift.

With today’s digital cameras, one can correct the color change with a filter over the lens (as in the old film days) or fiddle with the camera’s white balance , but you have to know what the light source is. You can also correct for the color in the digital darkroom with a image editing program such as Photoshop or Lightroom.

Most people shoot their cameras in the JPEG, which is a compression format. When you take a picture as a JPEG, your camera compresses the photo by comparing pixels then throwing some out that it deems unnecessary. The trouble with that is some of the digital information that makes up an image is lost, and it becomes more difficult to do the photo corrections such as color shifts or fixing over/under exposures.

But with most DSLRs (and a few point-an-shoot digital cameras) you can set the camera to record images in what’s called the raw format. Raw is lossless and records all the pixels of an image. With all the information available, it makes it much easier to do any corrections a photo might need. The downside is that the images take up much more memory that those compressed in JPEG. Also, because raw photos are in an unprocessed format and are unable to be printed or even viewed, you need the tools usually found in the high end (re: expensive) software to access the raw files.
Here are 2 examples of color temperature.
The first photo is of the Record company car that I drove to an assignment at night at Franklin High School in Stockton. Although the overhead light in the parking lot was enclosed I guessed that it was what’s known as a sodium vapor light. Its signature color is a sickly orange cast given to everything it touches. It is so pronounced that even the mind can’t compensate for it. I have never been able to correct for it when shooting JPEGs no matter how much I fiddle with it in Photoshop. But shooting in raw I easily fixed the problem. The raw converter portion of the software has a feature where you can do what’s known as a white balance “click.” Just find a neutral color, a black, white or gray, in the photo and take the white balance tool and click on it. Instantly everything in the photo turns to its true color.
On another assignment to shoot a men’s basketball game at the University of the Pacific Spanos Center in Stockton, I saw a full moon rising over some leafless trees in the parking lot. A nearby light on a pole illuminated a tree as the moon peeked through some thick cloud cover. This time the light looked to my eyes to be white. But when I returned to the office and downloaded the photos, I realized that it must have been a fluorescent light, because the branches of the tree were an eerie green that made it look as if it were a scene from a Halloween horror movie. The moonlight, which essentially is the same as regular daylight, made the portion of the clouds that could be seen a neutral gr ay save for a reddish ring around the moon. I shot it in raw and by doing a white balance “click” on the branches of the tree, they turned their natural grayish color. However when dealing with more than one light type source in the same photo, if you correct for one, the other is likely to be thrown off. While the branches were right after the color change, the clouds turned a purplish color, and the ring around the moon became a bright magenta.

So when it comes to night photography and knowing about color temperature, it can affect how you take your pictures and can help you make your decisions on what steps to take on correcting the color shifts.

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Here are the rules to the latest Readers Photo Challenge assignment: Night

1. Entries can be emailed to coto@recordnet.com. Type in “Night” in the subject line.

2. Photos have to be shot between Feb. 17 and Mar. 2.

3. Include your name (first and last), hometown, and the kind of camera/lens you used and where it was taken (ie: “Weber Avenue in downtown Stockton.”

4. If there is a recognizable person in the photo, please identify them (name, age, hometown).

5. The subject is up to you but it must be shot outdoors at night, any time after sunset to before sunrise. It can be a found situation or a created one.

6. Please feel free to include any interesting anecdotes or stories on how you took the picture.

7. The deadline for submission is Sunday, March 2. The top examples will be published on Monday, March 10 with an online gallery of all the photos on the same day.

Posted in Night, Readers Photo Challenge | Tagged | Leave a comment

Owning the night

By Clifford Oto | Published: February 17, 2014 | Leave a comment

“Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.” – Henry David Thoreau

My wife and I were driving home on evening after dropping our son off at a Boy Scout troop meeting. We needed a few grocery items so we stopped at a supermarket on the way home. We’ve passed by it many times during the day and never thought anything of it visually. It was in a normally drab, non-descript strip mall-like shopping center as many stores are. But at night the entire place took on a whole new look.

The dull brown exterior grew to a deeper, richer color highlighted by the warm glow of parking lot lights. The store and surrounding businesses looked livelier because of their interior lights shining through their windows and glass doors. Gone was the general dinginess and replaced by a scene that looked more of an exciting place to be. Such is the power of night photography and it brings us to our next Readers Photo Challenge assignment: Night.

In general the dirt and grime of urban scenes tend to disappear in the shadows during nightfall. Things tend to look fresher. Even air pollution appears less.

There are a couple of either/or situations to consider when shooting night scenes. The first is shoot during “blue hour” or not. The blue hour is the period of time just after sunset when the sky turns a deep indigo blue. Many night shooters live for this time because it can add that rich color to your photos. It can imbue that color to everything in the photo. When there are other points of light such as street lamps it can contrast against the warmer tones of the artificial illumination. Lastly it also can help to delineate something that is darkly silhouetted against that blue. On the other hand some people prefer the inky blackness of later in the night. True you won’t get the color or the detail of the “blue hour” but the deep darkness can add an aura of mystery to the photos.

The second either/or consideration is whether to use a tripod or not. Going without a tripod usually means employing a higher ISO (the camera’s light sensitivity) so that you can use a faster shutter speed to reduce the incidence of burry pictures due to camera shake. The trade off is that with the higher ISOs comes increased noise in your pictures. With a tripod you can use slower shutter speeds that come with the lower ISOs in dim light. But tripods tend to be bulky and you lose the ability move around quickly and the spontaneity that it brings. Going with or without a tripod is up to the individual photographer but you have to be aware of the pros and cons of each technique.

A long timed-exposure to used photograph a starry sky breaks the either/or rule on tripods: you’ll absolutely need one. Exposures can go from 30 seconds to several minutes there is no way that anyone can keep from moving the camera no matter how practiced one is at holding it still. Also you’ll need to get as far away from urban areas as possible. The light pollution from even small towns can overpower the faint twinkling of the stars and ruin your photo.

In urban areas the artificial light plays a much more important role. You can use it as your primary light source to illuminate your photos. If there are low clouds they can pick up an orangey glow from the streetlights below. Different light sources have what’s called different color temperatures. It means that the various types of artificial light will have different colors. Incandescent light blubs will tend to have a yellow/orange glow; fluorescent are, in general, green; LEDs have a bluish tint. Knowing the color temperature of the lights can either help you correct for it or used the color to your advantage.

I don’t recommend using a flash to anyone who is not skilled at using one. Light from a on-camera or built-in flash unit can be harsh and unflattering especially in portraits at night. It can also cause the dreaded red-eye effect. Advanced amateurs and pros might know how to combine a flash with a night exposure but it tends to beyond capability of the casual picture-taker.

A few safety concerns: First, despite the unseasonably warm and dry weather we’ve had lately, it can get still a bit chilly at night so be sure to dress appropriately. Second if you’re shooting near traffic make sure you’re visible to drivers by wearing bright colored or even reflective clothing. Lastly nighttime can bring out some unsavory elements of society in any neighborhood. It’s best to go with a friend or two. There’s safety in numbers. Be aware of your surroundings. If as place or situation seems a bit sketchy then pack up and find a safer area, preferably one with a lot of foot traffic.

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Here are the rules:

1. Entries can be emailed to coto@recordnet.com. Type in “Night” in the subject line.

2. Photos have to be shot between Feb. 17 and Mar. 2.

3. Include your name (first and last), hometown, and the kind of camera/lens you used and where it was taken and what’s it of (ie: “The Hotel Stockton on Weber Avenue in downtown Stockton.”)

4. If there is a recognizable person in the photo, please identify them (name, age, hometown)

5. The subject is up to you but it must be shot outdoors at night, any time after sunset to before sunrise. It can be a found situation or a created one.

6. Please feel free to include any interesting anecdotes or stories on how you took the picture.

7. The deadline for submission is Sunday, March 2. The top examples will be published on Monday, March 10 with an online gallery of all the photos on the same day.

Have fun and good shooting!

Posted in Column, Night, Readers Photo Challenge | Tagged | Leave a comment

Hurry up and wait…and wait…

By Clifford Oto | Published: February 13, 2014 | Leave a comment

Some people may think that covering a standoff situation is dramatic and gripping. For the majority of times nothing can be further from the truth. Things move at a glacial pace.
There’s hours upon hours of waiting for something, anything to happen. And as often as not, the house that the suspect was supposed to be holed up in turns out to be empty.

I understand why things are so long and drawn out at these situations. The police would rather wait the suspects out than go in guns a-blazing. It’s better to have a suspect in custody than one dead on the floor, or worse, cops injured or dead. But it the wait doesn’t make covering these events any easier or, frankly, any less boring.

Last August covered a standoff in Stockton. A man wanted in a homicide in Georgia who was suspected to be holed up in a house on Alabama Avenue near Houston Avenue in Stockton.

I arrived on scene at about 2:30 p.m. Stockton Police had cordoned off the streets and surrounded the house about a half hour before. A crew from Channel 10 KXTV was there ahead of me. From behind the yellow crime scene tape at the nearby Van Buskirk Park we stood and watched. As usual for this kind of event there loads of people standing with us. Some were neighbors who were evacuated by the police while others were just curious onlookers.

There were calls on a bullhorn for the suspect to come out (that went unheeded). And must have been other behind the scenes things going on because there seemed to be nothing else going on.

Other TV stations with their live trucks showed up and waited along with the rest of us. The long minutes turned into even longer hours. Our feet and legs started to ache and eventually we ended up sitting on the cool soft grass of the park in the shade of a cork oak tree. After a while the spectators started to dwindle with only a handful of the most curious left.

One of the things about these kinds of situations is that once the SWAT team is positioned, it becomes a waiting game and not much happens, visually speaking. With nothing going on, my attention wandered to the things closest at hand to me. I began mindlessly picking at the grass, twigs and leaves around me as I sat on the grass. By then it was late afternoon and the shadows began to grow long as the sun sank towards the horizon. Like noticed how some fallen oak leaves caught the light. Backlit, they became like small golden  golden scraps laying on the ground. I stuck them in the dirt beneath the tree and with their shadows they made a cool composition.

I had other assignments to get to so I left around 6:00pm or so, before the resolution of the standoff (the house turned out to be empty), but I came away with a small tribute to the long hours of boredom.

Posted in Spot news | Tagged | Leave a comment

Silhouetted

By Clifford Oto | Published: February 10, 2014 | Leave a comment

Silhouettes can present graphically bold images. The dark outline of a person or thing can virtually jump out of the photo. For the challenge sunsets/sunrises were a common theme. The combination of a sun low on the horizon, dark foreground and brilliant colors in the sky makes evenings and mornings the perfect time for silhouettes. 21 readers sent in a total of 48 photos to the challenge. Here are some of the best examples.

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From beginner to advanced pro, the challenge is open to all skill levels. Rich Turner is one of the best professional freelance photographers in the area (full disclosure: he was once the chief photographer at the Record many years ago). He sent in several photos to the challenge and each one was a master class in shooting silhouettes. My favorite was one of Mount Diablo during sunset. When I issued the assignment, I said that you shouldn’t overlap your silhouettes lest the meld together. Turner’s photo is an exception to the rule. Diablo appears as pale purple as all majestic mountains do when seen from a distance because of the amount of atmospheric haze that scatters the light in the air between it and the camera (a Nikon D610 DSLR with a 80-400mm lens in Turner’s case). You don’t see any detail in the peak, just its outline. Turner then waited for a serendipitous moment of a trio of sandhill cranes to fly by. Being closer to the camera than the Diablo they were silhouetted black against the purple mountain. Combined with a golden orange sky made for a perfect sunset picture.

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While most of the entrants looked for found situations Darin Dennison of Stockton took a different route. He set up a silhouette of a small bronze statue of a girl blowing bubbles. You may think that’s easier than finding a picture out in the “wild” but you’d be wrong. When done well, a set up photo can take as much time, effort and thought as a found one. It took Denison about 6 hours to thoughtfully arrange his items (art glass vases in this case) and carefully light the scene from behind and below with 2 floor accent lamps. Looking at the scene he saw that there were some unwanted reflections so he blacked out 2 windows to eliminate the glare then photographed it with his iPhone. The result is a colorful bold still life silhouette that was well worth the time and effort.

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Some art may be puzzling at times, perhaps even indecipherable, but it’s designed to make the viewer think and take a second look.

Ann Scott of Stockton took her silhouette at the Maui Airport in Hawaii while on vacation. She took it with her iPad through the window of the airport’s waiting area. She captured not only the silhouetted figures of the people there but the reflection on the glass as well, creating a unique layered effect. You can tell what’s going on in the photo, but the viewer is left wondering what is real and what is just an ethereal reflection. It makes the photo worth more than a second look.

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Trees are great subjects for silhouettes especially this time of year. Their leafless limbs can stand in stark contrast to a brighter background. Teresa Mahnken of Morada used Canon PowerShot SD1300 IS digital compact point-and-shoot camera to photograph an old oak tree along Airport Way in Stockton during a recent sunset. She captured the last bits of colors in the clouds just before what’s known as the “blue hour” when the sky turns a deep indigo. The tree, dark in its silhouetted form, stands eerily out against the paler sky like some horror story harbinger.

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Silhouettes can turn even the simplest scenes into a bold artistic statement. Tiffanie Heben of Tracy used a Canon Rebel T1i DSLR to photograph a humming bird on a tree in a small neighborhood park. The upsweep of the delicate limbs of the tree lead the viewers’ eye directly to the darkened outline of the tiny bird. The beauty is in the photo’s simplicity and the perfect placement of the subject.

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 You can use a silhouette for a part of your photo other than your subject. Rick Wilmot of Lodi used a Canon EOS 5D Mk III to photograph his wife Debby under a tree at the edge of Lodi Lake during a break in a bike ride. Although dark and in the shade, his wife is still recognizable but the darker tree around her is silhouetted and it provides a visual frame for the scene.

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 Using a Nikon D51000 DSRL Dave Skinner of Stockton took this photo of a sentinel oak along the Mokelumne River on Highway 88 in the Sutter Creek/Jackson area during sunrise. The tree accents the bucolic scene of a farm as a fog rises in the hazy morning.

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 Sydney Spurgeon of Stockton used a Nikon D90 to photograph Fort Point under the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Spurgeon captured the spark of sun peeking from around a watchtower with a lone figure standing near its base.

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 Freddie Flores used his Samsung galaxy 3 smartphone to take a picture of 11-year-old Daisy Tong during sunset at Half Moon Bay. Common practice dictates that you should never center your subject but despite having the horizon line in halving the frame vertically and the sun at dead center, the slight offset of the girl makes this photo work.

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As always readers have stepped up to the challenge with some great photographs. Stay tuned for the next assignment on Mon. Feb. 17.

Posted in Column, Readers Photo Challenge | Tagged | Leave a comment

The importance of backgrounds for the non-photographer

By Clifford Oto | Published: February 6, 2014 | Leave a comment

I go on and on about having a clean, non-distracting background in your photos. From a photographer’s standpoint it’s something that we look for to make our pictures better. But what about those who aren’t photographers? What can an uncluttered background do for them?

If you’re having an event such as a groundbreaking or wedding, it will behoove anyone planning said happening to make sure that the background is clean and tidy.

First of all, even if you’re not taking any photos yourself, almost invariably someone will be. And even if you’re sure that there won’t be any pictures taken, a non-distracting background may be a small detail, but it will make your event much more professional-looking and better for your audience.

A few months ago I covered a kickoff event for Supportive Services for Veterans and their Families. The event was held at the Catholic Charities office in Stockton. In a conference room that was probably two or three times as long as it was wide, a couple of dozen chairs were set up in front of a table. Curiously, the whole setup was situated width-wise rather than length-wise in the room. Nor was it centered in the room, instead everything was sequestered in the western end. But the table was situated right in front of what looked like a fuse box door and a thermostat. When the speakers rose to give speeches, they all stood in front of those two things. There was no amount of maneuvering that could be done to get rid of them in the background. I just had to grin and bear it. Had the whole setup been in an east/west position instead if north/south or just moved 12 feet to the right, the background distractions would have been avoided.

Now, I’m not singling out the organization, because I’ve been to many events like this where the backgrounds have been as bad or worse. It just happens to be one of the most recent that I’ve covered. Nor is this a comment about the organizations involved or the admirable and worthy program that helps veterans and their families who are at risk of becoming homeless.

It’s about appearances. It’s easy to think that appearances don’t count, but they do. If you take the time to look competent, then you will be perceived as such. Even if the event wasn’t covered by any news outlets or even wasn’t photographed by anyone, it can look professional and orderly with just a little bit if thought.

Posted in Event, General news | Tagged | Leave a comment

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    Clifford Oto

    Clifford Oto, an award-winning photographer, has been with The Record since 1984. Through the changes from black and white to digital photography, he’s kept his focus on covering the events, people and life of San Joaquin county. This blog deals ... Read Full
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