By folks. Just done here. No fun at all. Mods, please delete my account.

Won't happen again, I assure you. Have asked mods to delete it.

No need, but thank you. I think the ones on there are their photographers (a Photojournalism group). Be interesting to see.

Take care!

I suppose I should explain... I don't allow downloads because this is my profession, and like any of you, you want to be paid for the work you do. While I don't mind sharing and love talking about images and image making, I simply can not afford to give away my imaged.

Bert, sorry to disappoint. Can't please everyone all the time.

I am in a group on FB with a few people from that paper and I will ask. They may have picked weddings as a subject they felt would have some interest to the general public, but no newspaper anywhere has a dedicated wedding photographer. And generally, this is a trend in newspaper work. Most all of the photographers I know and worked with are all out of work. To have people specialize like this would be completely unique and very expensive for the newspaper itself.

BTW, I love the Museum of Natural History in Raleigh. Wonderful.

Try this, Don... Shoot wide and as you shoot, move in closer and closer and closer still until you get down to one or two tools and see what you prefer. In my journalism work, this is what I do. Establishing shot to a very detailed shot and everything in between those two. Options are always a good thing. Good luck and hope you will post here for us to see,

WOW! Your newspaper has 5 full time photographers and one specializes in Weddings??? That's amazing! Just curious, what newspaper is this? Even papers like the Chicago Tribune are using the cell phones with reporters. They literally fired their entire photo staff and many other papers in America has as well. Good for your paper and I hope you support them.

Hmmmm... on here, your shots are underexposed. I'd say your technique is suspect and the post work as well. I take my students for a "photo walk" third week of class, and we actually disprove this technique. If you don't believe me, walk around a large pillar and take about 4 different light readings and you're going to see that they are not all the same. Angle, reflectivity, light intensity all play into the final exposure and if it was as cookie-cutter as you're implying, you wouldn't need all of the options for exposure that you're given on your camera.

Perfectly OK to disagree. In normal "storytelling" you break the story up into smaller parts. Look at any good photo essay and you will see this. You don't typically show everything in one image. So, if you're telling a story about ship building, you can do it in 4-5 different shots that together tell the story more fully. But again, is perfectly ok to disagree.

Thank you, but I appreciate your asking before reproducing my images. I agree, but if done correctly, it crops into the light, so a compromise.

Thanks for the comment. You know, it is interesting that you mentioned the crop because, being very honest here, I really had a tough time with it in the post work. Not only on the top, but the left side of the image as well, with half a plant at the bottom. If I cropped, it would go into the light, which I liked and wanted to keep. Eventually, I just decided to live with the half of a plant. The top of the image I also had trouble with, but for identical reasons that you pointed out here, I decided to leave it in as well.

Thank for the insight!

Oh, and BTW... I was a "stringer" for the Tampa Tribune and attended T.R. Robinson High School off Interbay in Tampa. Sooo many years ago for both!

Right, I would agree with this as well. Plus a camera in a phone generally won't teach you many things that a DSLR or SLR will. You are also limited by the optics in a phone as well, most of which simply crop the image and then resize it to "full size" and the resulting image is pretty terrible. I really see nothing wrong with a total beginner picking up a DSLR or SLR (I would recommend the DSLR just on cost savings alone) and going out and learning photography. Keep the camera on manual exposure and you will not only learn about exposure and lighting, but be able to see the approximate results instantly. When I bought my first SLR at 12 years old (from my newspaper route) it was an all manual Ricoh with some crappy, off brand lenses. In 4 years, when I was 16, I was shooting full time for the daily in my city. Having a fully manual camera gave me a big lesson, and a DSLR, the results are immediate and while you are still there. The other thing that I did, even for years after that camera, was take notes. I made sketches of where the light was, where I was in reference to the light and subject, exposure, ISO, lens and every other detail I could record. So, when I came across a similar situation and wasn't sure how to handle it, I could look at my notes, which were always with me when shooting, and could see what worked and what didn't. This debate about the lighting is really pretty elementary because you can do BOTH with backlighting, and neither one is wrong, but simply depends on the situation and what specifically the goals for the shot are. And if detail is required for both, there's always fill flash...

I use manual mode for everything. A bit of a control freak when it comes to my images, so I want to ensure that whatever I shoot is going to be to a specific standard. Just how I roll. I almost always shoot at either 25, 400 or 1600, depending on the subject. For my "pretty" photos, ISO of 25 and a tripod. For general work (photojournalism for me), 400 ISO and indoor or night time sports 1600 ISO unless I am permitted to hang lights (for indoor), then it goes back down to 400.

Generally, this isn't done anymore, sadly. In fact, many colleges are trending toward using the cameras on phones, since most (media) programs and real-world practices are based on the phone photo by reporters, and very few media companies have full-time staff photographers now with most either hiring freelancers or as stated, giving the reporter an iPhone and a few hours of training and setting them lose... Sad, but true.

Last time I checked, Best Buy had some nice Nikon D3400 kits with 2 lenses for about $400. A great "beginner" camera with both auto and manual exposure. Where I teach, we use it for our first year photography students.

Let me know if you have questions.