Brady Helmink plays the keyboard as Troy Webber and Nick McGraw play guitar in their Morningisde College dorm room Sunday evening, September 23. 2007. (Jim Lee/Sioux City Journal)

Make sure you check out the latest installment of the roommate series. Journal reporter Joanne Fox is following a set of male roommates from Morningside College and a set of female roommates from Briar Cliff University and writing about them throughout the school year. The latest story about the men is in today’s Journal and the women will be featured tomorrow.

You can also read blogs from both the Morningside men and the Briar Cliff women.

Nicole Hoogeveen races toward the laundry room ahead of another student in the Briar Cliff University dorms Sunday, September 23. 2007. (Jim Lee/Sioux City Journal)

Sioux City and Waterloo players battle each other in front of the Blackhawk goal, most of them unaware that the puck has slipped out from the pile. Click here for more photos

It seems like hockey season just ended. When they start in September and play until April, that doesn’t leave much of a break.

Hockey presents some tough photographic challenges. Luckily, the light in the Tyson Events Center is excellent (well, for an indoor venue) so that helps. But the action in hockey is fast and unpredictable. That’s true for many sports, but hockey players move darn fast. I can think of a few sports where the athletes move faster — track, auto racing, horse racing — but those sports are easier to shoot since you know where the action is going.

A big problem for hockey photos is the glass. It’s thick and it easily distorts the image when I try to shoot through it. I worked in Minnesota for five years and hockey is big up there, so I have a lot of experience with different arenas. And for some reason the glass in Tyson is funkier than most arenas I’ve shot in. It’s nice to shoot at floor level so I can get the “in-your-face” action shots, but because of the glass I have to shot almost straight on to prevent the funky distortion. That makes it hard to follow the action.

I can avoid shooting through the glass by going to the upper level and shooting over it. That works pretty good, but I’m only up high enough to get a clean shot for about half the rink. Plus most of the images from that angles tend to look a lot alike. But I’ll be doing my best to provide good action shots as the season progresses.

Midland Lutheran quarterback Tyler Swanson is sacked by Briar Cliff’s Joe Melton during football action at Memorial Field Saturday, September 29. 2007. (Jim Lee/Sioux City Journal)

Couldn’t ask for a better day to shoot college football. Not too hot. Not too cold. And the Briar Cliff Chargers were looking great for the first half as they took on Midland Lutheran, but then fell 31-32. You can see a photo gallery from today’s game here.

For the gear-heads out there who wonder what I shoot football with, I use a Canon 30D camera and a 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 IS USM lens for most of my daytime stuff. For night games I use a 70-200mm f/2.8 IS lens. I wish I had a 300/2.8 ($3,899) or better yet a 400/2.8 ($6,500) for football, but since I only have about $4.89 in my checking account I make do with what I have.

Briar Cliff’s Adam Robards is tackled by Midland Lutheran’s Josh Northrup during football action at Memorial Field Saturday, September 29. 2007. (Jim Lee/Sioux City Journal)

Briar Cliff student Ryan DeMaria shows his school spirit as the Chargers take on Midland Lutheran during football action at Memorial Field Saturday, September 29. 2007. (Jim Lee/Sioux City Journal)

Framed by a giant flag, the Elk Point-Jefferson football team huddles prior to football action at Dakota Valley Friday, September 28. 2007. (Jim Lee/Sioux City Journal)

Dakota Valley brought out the giant flag for the National Anthem for their last home football game of the season. Made for a fun photo framing the visiting team during introductions. You can read more about the flag in Tim Gallager’s Sunday Column. And of course, there is a photo gallery from the football game.

Don Stich cheers for Dakota Valley as they take on Elk Point-Jefferson during football action at Dakota Velley Friday, September 28. 2007. (Jim Lee/Sioux City Journal)

And that means high school football. Tonight I will be at Dakota Valley as they take on Elk Point-Jefferson. Check our website later this evening for photos. Oh, and if you want, you can check the sports section for a story, but we all know that the photos are the most important thing.

A reader asked me how I got the angle on the Pets on Parade photo in the post below.

The photo was taken with an ultra-wide lens, a Canon 10-22mm lens on a 20D camera body. I held the camera at ground level and aimed it upwards as people walked past with their dogs. I set the exposure on manual and exposed for the sky, creating the silhouette. 

I’ve been shooting photos for so long that a lot of this seems second nature to me so I don’t think to write about how I shot the photos. But I’ll try to do a little more of that in the future. If you ever how any questions for me about how something was done or anything photo related, please email me at jimlee@siouxcityjournal.com. Thanks!

People walk their dogs along the riverfront trail during the Siouxland Humane Society’s Pets on Parade at Chris Larsen Park Sunday, September 23. 2007. Kristin Kaduce, Sioux City, below, and her dog Trudy both sport a pair of sunglasses. Click here for photo gallery

Morningside’s Antuan Bloom scores a touchdown. Above is the full-frame version of the photo, below is how I cropped it for the newspaper.

Today I was at the Morningside College football game and a student photographer asked me if I cropped my photos. Yes, I do.

I try to shoot as tight as possible to get the best technical quality from the images. But sports can be unpredictable. I’ll try to shoot a lot of tight shots, such as this full-frame shot from last weeks Briar Cliff football game.

For the newspaper, I shaved a little off the left and a little off the bottom (you can see the cropped version in an earlier post.) But I do wish I had a little more of the ball carriers helmet in the frame.

I’ll hear some photographers say you need to be shooting football with at least a 400mm lens and you should only be shooting from the waist up, you don’t need the legs. That produces a tight, clean shot that really jumps off the page.

But sometimes I think about the words of wisdom from my college mentor Charlie Schlosser. One time I showed Charlie a football pic I took at an Iowa State game and I was so proud of how tight and sharp it was. Charlie told me that yes, it’s was nice shot and it takes a lot of skill to shoot this tight, (this was back in the manual focus days when the photographer had to do the focusing, not the camera.) Then Charlie asked, “But what does it say about the game.”

When I look back at some of my all-time favorite photos, they’re usually not the ones shot super-tight from the waist up. They show unpredictable action with the arms and legs flying all over the place. And sometimes you have to shoot a bit looser to get that action.

I have more control over non-action photos, so I usually need to crop less, but I still do some cropping. I know there are purists out there who believe you should never crop a photo, and that you should crop when you shoot. I do believe that when possible you should crop when you shoot, But that doesn’t mean you can’t crop more later.

Most digital SLR cameras produce an image with a 2:3 aspect ratio, the same as 35mm film. I don’t believe there is anything magical about the 2:3 ratio. Large format cameras produce an image with a 4:5 ratio, and some medium format cameras produce square negatives (1:1 ratio.) There’s nothing magical to me about any of those formats. I crop the image to a shape the best suits the subject, not to some format that was designed a century ago. If an image looks best cropped 2 inches by 10 inches, that’s how I’ll crop it.

A photo I shot today at Art in the Park. At left is the full-frame version, and right is how I cropped it.

Morningside’s Pete Lewis is tackled by Sioux Falls’ Nick Benedetto during football action at Olsen Stadium Saturday, September 22, 2007. Click here for photo gallery

I was talking to one of our other photographers earlier, an he said he received a complaint from a reader because he only posted 3 photos in our online galleries from a Morningside game a couple weeks ago and last year we had 15 photos from each game (I think he was exaggerating a bit.) We have no set standard for the number of photos we post. And there are many factors that influence how many photos we have to post. Some games have better action than others. Sometimes there is better light at one place compared to another. Sometimes most of the action goes to the far side of the field and sometime most of the action comes straight at us.

But the number one factor that determines the number of photos I post online is time.

A while back I wrote a blog entry about what a typical day may be like for us. We have plenty to keep us busy. I don’t think I have ever had a day where all I had to do was photograph one game and had nothing else to do. And after shooting a game, we have to come back and edit the photos for the paper, caption them, crop them, tone them for the presses, save them and proof them for the copy editors. And usullay when we get back from a game there is also a stack of AP photos waiting for us to do the pre-press work on them.

Once everything is done for the print edition, then I will pick out extra photos for online galleries. Each photo has to be cropped, sized, captioned, saved as a high-rez version then again as a low-rez version, then uploaded to our online gallery then uploaded again to our reprint gallery.

I never paid any attention to how long it took for one photo, so I decided to time myself. I picked a photo that needed almost no toning done to it and started the clock. One photo took 4 minutes and 38 seconds. That doesn’t sound like much time. But multiply that by 15 and that is well over an hour just posting online.

In an ideal world, it would be nice if I could spend that much extra time for each assignment. But it’s not an ideal world. Plus, most evening games don’t start until 7:30 p.m., and sometimes later. The evening shift in the photo department ends at 9 p.m. By the time I shoot the game, drive back to the office and get all of the work done for the print edition, it usually pushing 9 o’clock. It’s not unusual for me to stay late on my own time to post photos online (something that I am reminded often by my boss and our union president that I should not be doing.)

Please don’t misinterpret this blog entry as an apology to those who think we don’t post enough photos or as a complaint about the workloads at the Journal. I’m just explaining how it is.

Sioux City East’s Justin Anderson breaks a tackle by Southeast Polk’s Ethan Bass during football action at Olsen Stadium Friday, September 21, 2007. Click here for photo gallery.