Here’s what was bugging me about the shooting conditions… Photographing world class skiers flipping through the air is very cool, but the finals are at night so you’ve got them against a black sky which takes away all context. The best shots of aerials are usually during the day from way up top behind the jumps looking down toward the crowd, and I hadn’t been able to make it to the earlier qualifying session with its dazzling blue sky. Winter sports photography tip: Shoot action during the qualifying and emotion during the finals.

Another annoyance is that a still photo never really captures the skill and technique of this sport. So what do you do when you end up with a thousand-plus photos of flipping skiers on a plain black background? I needed something different from last year. Here’s what came to mind…

That is Olga Volkova’s jump, in nine frames from left to right. And that’s kind of a fun way to look at it, but why stop there?

Here are the lady skiers from the finals in order of their results, gold medal on top, down to twelfth place at the bottom…

It makes for an eye-catching poster. And check out the Chinese skiers in red taking five of the top six spots. Here are the men…

With a little bit of thinking, the very thing that bugged me about the conditions— that boring black background— was turned into an asset and something cool was created. Stop by some day and see the 16×20 inch prints on my wall.

My beloved 16-35mm lens was last seen somewhere in this photo, surrounded by friends and amidst the gear of several photographers at the Utah vs. TCU mens basketball game Saturday afternoon. It’s hard to imagine that someone could have stolen it from under my nose during the game. I’d much rather think that another shooter accidentally shoved it into their bag without realizing it was mine.

But after checking with the shooters at the game, I’m beginning to accept the obvious. It was stolen.

If you stole it, congratulations on stealing an old 16-35mm lens. I’m sure you will enjoy its trademark softness, its poor image quality outside the center of the frame, its horrid lens flare, and its inability to focus sharply on most subjects. If you want the half-smashed lens hood to go with it I could probably find it in the basement.

But seriously, you will enjoy the primo B+W filter that I spent a hundred of my own bucks on.

(Note to detectives: the lens was stolen with no hood and a B+W UV filter. It had a rear cap)

If you stole my lens, you should know you have caused a lot of unnecessary drama for me and my employer. This lens wasn’t the toy of a hobbyist. It was a professional’s tool that helped me to earn a living. It has traveled the country and has seen things that you could only dream of. Screw you.

If anyone has any information about my 16-35mm lens, please contact me. I just want it back, nothing more.

The lens can be returned anonymously to:

Trent Nelson
The Salt Lake Tribune
90 S 400 W #700
SLC, UT 84101

I am not posing as a polygamist wife. I am not Honey Dawn.

A few months ago a new blog went up allegedly written by a plural wife named (Honey Dawn). From the first post it was completely ridiculous, written in excited-mommy blogger style and riddled with intentional misspellings. Here’s a sample:

WOW!!!! This is SO exciting!!! My first blog!! Pratt says I should REALLY write this becuse Im so clever about writing things down. He says I should write a book about how to live Celestial Plural marriage (the right name for polygamy, which is TOO nasty a word!) so Im just putting down my ideas to help people know what a fun way this is to live, and how very HOLY it is too.

Recently someone claimed to have tracked Honey Dawn’s blog to a Tribune IP address. (Which isn’t possible; it’s a Blogspot blog. Blogspot is run by Google. Only Google would know the IP of the blogger.)

Next came comments guessing that I was behind the whole thing, writing as Honey Dawn.

Sorry, but it just isn’t the case. It would be unethical of me to do this while covering polygamy and I can’t see doing it even if I weren’t. My credibility is more important to me than writing a Big Love knock-off. And anyway, I would definitely write it from the guy’s point of view. Way more angles.

Started the day taking photos of a guy I can’t tell you about (until the story runs).

Then my day got shuffled. I was re-routed to an assignment involving 7,436 teddy bears after another photographer was rushed onto a plane to cover breaking news out of state. I don’t know what the story was, and apparently the his wife didn’t either. She twittered: “Husband: I’m going to Seattle & don’t know when I’ll be back. It’s like he works for the CIA.”

My third assignment of the day was a swim team. With no time to work it I expected little from this one but it turned out okay.

My fourth assignment was a basketball game at Judge Memorial High School, where a great travesty was taking place: the snack bar was charging a buck-fifty for a candy bar. Upset by the price gouging I shot unsugared.

I talked briefly with a writer covering the game. Feigning interest I asked, “So is this going to be a close game?”

“As long as the clock keeps running, I’ll be happy,” was his response. Then he asked if he could borrow a pen.

The gym was pretty dark so I set the ISO to the “noise blizzard” setting and let the frames fly.

There were only fifteen minutes left on my shift when I finished sending in photos from the day’s four assignments. I was looking forward to finally getting a break and crawled into bed when a voicemail shattered the peace and delivered my fifth assignment. The voice said, “I’ve just been told that I need to call you about a murder-suicide (on)…Redwood Road. They told me that you should call (the reporter) for further details. You can call me with any questions. Thanks, Bye.”

I loaded up and headed south. The crime scene was an apartment complex and surprisingly the TV news trucks were parked in the complex’s parking lot. As I got out of my car the media was being kicked out (private property). In the dark I was able to get a few photographs before a police investigator alerted a security guard to my presence. I left when he asked, having no choice but to leave.

The media moved across the street, waiting for updates from police. I sent my photo from the car, checked in and drove home. And again crawled into bed, two hours after the first time.

I spent three straight days photographing World Cup Speed Skating at the Kearns Olympic Oval. 6,969 frames later, I still don’t know how to process it all. Will I really go back and edit all of those frames? Of course I will, but right now the thought just gives me a headache. During the events I shot every athlete and then edited the winners and key players for each day’s coverage.

Now that it’s all over I’m stuck with twenty-two gigabytes of photos that need attention. I guess I’ll dig in there and try to tell you something about it…

The first day I entered the venue without a credential, walked past security at two access points and made it all the way to the press room without being stopped. I looked around the press room and instead of setting down my laptop I decided to carry it with me while shooting. I had kind of a weird feeling about that place. The intuition turned out to be real, as the guy two seats over had a camera and lens stolen from the press room.

The news about the theft made its way through the photographers while we were shooting an awards ceremony. One guy started blaming it on the Europeans. He said something like, “This always happens with the European photographers. When I worked in (redacted), they would come over for a big tennis tournament and every time equipment would disappear. It’s always the Europeans!”

Saturday morning we had a send-off brunch for our photo tech Emily. It was good to see my colleagues and catch up on the team building meeting I missed earlier in the week. Emily will definitely be missed.

Saturday at Speed Skating there was another equipment theft reported. I don’t know all the details but you can make up your own scenario picturing these three elements in a bathroom: a camera bag, a photographer, and a thief.

Three days of shooting the same sport forces you to be creative. Every day I tried to shoot with different lenses from different spots. When I get time I’ll put up some galleries of my favorites.

The high school basketball game I shot was delayed for an hour due to late refs. Knowing the gym would be dark I had planned on using my 50/1.4 lens. But it was quickly obvious that the 50 was too loose. I switched over to the 70-200 to get closer but lost two stops, dropping my shutter speed below freezing.

Right now we’re stuck with gear that doesn’t provide the low light capability of modern cameras. My camera is now two generations behind the current technology so I’m now calling my camera a grandfather.

My settings for basketball were far from optimal: 1/250th at f2.8 and horrible noise at ISO 3200. I shot as many pictures as I could, hoping that not only would a great play happen but that I’d luck into a frame of it that wasn’t horribly blurry. But luck vanished and hope died. There was nothing worth posting today.

In the past week I have been offered the following free food: strawberry cheesecake ice cream frozen with liquid nitrogen, oven fresh cookies (twice), and even a tall frosty beer. People are always surprised when you tell them you can’t really take it. I mean, I did eat the ice cream, because who else was going to, you know? The cookie maker offered to let me take whatever I wanted, and I watched her put baseball-sized pieces of dough onto cookie sheets. Instead of taking cookies I bought a couple to share in the office.

Yesterday I went back to the cookie store. The clerk said, “Hey, you’re not working on a story today, so I can give you free cookies.” It was a nice gesture but I insisted on paying.

I spent most of the day in the office working on several projects simultaneously and making little bits of progress on each. But I didn’t finish any of them.

We had a quiet party for Emily, a photo tech who is leaving to become a pastry chef. Our two photo techs have been rock solid, doing a much more important job than is recognized. It’s always a little scary when we lose one but so far the new guy seems capable.

Then off to a local high school for a girls basketball game. The girls on both teams seemed pretty small and young, but it was halfway through the first quarter when I realized I was shooting the JV game. The varsity had played earlier.

And there’s the day for you.

I’m sure it will come back to haunt me. That is, my affirmative answer the other day to the question, “Would you be willing to help out the (Utah) SPJ Board?”

Already they’ve put me to work. I spent part of today with an editor going through photo contest entries from another state, narrowing down the selections in each category so that tomorrow we can pick the winners.

Here are some thoughts…

In this contest photographers were allowed to enter prints or CD’s. Judging the prints was really easy. You throw them out on a large table and starting yanking the losers. It’s fast. Having to load discs into my laptop to look at a single photograph was obnoxious. The extra time it took to go through all the disc entries was a huge burden. We didn’t hold the inconvenience against the people who sent discs; we judged them fairly. But if you’re entering a contest this year, submit your photos in the most convenient manner accepted. Because some judges will hold it against you.

Now that the main Utah contests have moved to online entry, we’ll probably see other states follow suit. (Contests are one thing we’ve been at the forefront of.) I’m really looking forward to judging contests in the future when I won’t have to sift through dozens of file folders filled with prints, discs, paperclips and gluestick. I’d much rather hit a URL and go from there.

Other things I’m working on right now…

Audio/Still/Video edit for a weekend sports profile.
Utah SPJ contest website

…also, an editor gave me two Notebook Screen Cleaning Wipes. Just so you know.

The sun went down at around 4:30pm today but it wasn’t really dark until I stepped into Bountiful High School’s gym to shoot a basketball game tonight. The frame above is my first test frame, before I had to adjust my ISO higher than desired and my shutter speed lower than any sports photographer would go if they had a choice.

I ended up shooting at 320th of a second, which was really unfortunate. The frame above is in focus, but the action is too fast for the slow shutter speed to freeze it. And I was shooting at 3200 ISO, which really fills the frame with noise. Hey, the camera’s five years old, what can I say?

Here was the other fun thing. I’ll often shoot a frame of the scoreboard after key plays so I know what the score was at that moment. The scoreboard here was one of those kinds that has LED’s (I guess) that flash faster than the eye can see. But the camera easily notices and you end up with a blank scoreboard, even though to your eye everything is visible. To combat this I usually take three frames of the scoreboard in a fast sequence, and only if I’m really unlucky will all three be blank.

Okay, I think I’m done complaining about stuff. Here are some photographs of varying quality…

That was the other photographer shooting the game. He does a lot of Bingham games. There was a great moment when Bingham’s Nate Girsberger (4) walked into the team huddle during a timeout. He had just hit a few tough shots and as a joke, chest-bumped the coach, who was caught off guard and flew back about three or four feet. Alas, sometimes great moments like that don’t make great stills, as this sequence demonstrates…

Trust me, it was a great moment.

The Bingham starters came out of the game in the fourth quarter, holding a forty point lead over Bountiful.

I’ll put up some real photos as soon as I get a second, but I couldn’t help but notice the poor condition of BYU’s football field during today’s game.

Almost always I answer, “I don’t know yet.”

It’s not that the information isn’t available. I just find it easier to not look until the final moment. I’ve never been big on pre-visualizing my shots. I’m more of an improv photographer and like to go in with a clear head. But more than that, if you’ve got a dud assignment on your line you don’t want to toss and turn all night long “looking forward” to it.

Another reason I don’t look is that the schedule is always changing. News happens and assignments get shuffled. You can have an assignment on your line for three days only to have it moved off at the last minute.

Early yesterday the assignment “Magna Alleys” was on my line. Here’s the Description from the assignment:

A network of historic alleys remains in Magna. Salt Lake County wants to make it less expensive and less cumbersome for property owners to eliminate these alleys.

Here are the Instructions from the assignment sheet: (Hey wait a minute, I thought Chris Magerl, our photo editor four editors back, had the line “Instructions” changed to “Notes.” When did we revert to taking instructions? We used to consider ourselves journalists on par with those filling out the assignments. Oi!) :

Instructions: (I provided a couple locations of alleys above, but there are a ton of them in the old neighborhoods of Magna)

I looked at that assignment and thought, okay, here’s a challenge. Magna is very photogenic, but photographing alleys for a story on county zoning law? At least the story wouldn’t make the front page, I thought, meaning that if I failed not as many readers would see it.

I didn’t have to worry too long, because Magna Alleys soon vanished from my line, either moved to another shooter or NO-GO’d.

Fast forward to 4pm. It’s freezing cold out with heavy, dark cloud cover. The sun, if you could see it, is getting low. Phone rings.

Editor: You’re back on Magna Alleys. Head out there.

Me: Okay, I’m heading west, but it’s getting dark out. This would have been a much better shot earlier when we had light.

Editor: It’s going to be the centerpiece photo on the Utah Section.

Me: Gulp.

With that kind of set up, you’re expecting an awful photo of an alley in Magna. Oh, I did get a few of those, but lucky for me long-time Magna resident Norm Fitzgerald was game for a photo in the alley space behind his home:

Also, big thanks to Scott Sommerdorf for finding an old Canon speedlite in his basement and letting me use it. It’s been a big help on at least a dozen assignments now. Who knew?