Cold and windy weather coming in to the state. If you haven’t been up to see the Aspen colors you’d better hurry. If you can’t make it, here are a couple of photos from this past weekend – Mark Reis
Worry over the safety of neighborhood kids led members of the Colorado Parks and Wildlife department to tranquilize and relocate a mother bear and her two cubs just south of downtown Colorado Springs Wednesday, August 3, 2011. Nearbyresident Jessica Ibell said the bears had been around off and on for the past week. She said her kids, ages 11, 11, and 9 have been afraid to play outside since the cubs were seen playing in the kiddie pool in their back yard. Event the recent hot weather wasn’t enough to coax the kids into their pool. “They’ve got spray bottles,” Ibell said. The mother bear and two cubs were all tranquilized and will be relocated. Mark Reis, The Gazette
United States 
Air Force Academy cadets attempted May 18, 2011, to break the Guinness World Record for most participants in a dodgeball game. With more than 3,600 cadets taking part they should easily break the previous record of 2,012 held by the University of Alberta, Canada. What a blast. More photos at gazette.com
Bryan Oller’s photo of a cannon salute during a casing ceremony shows what a nice eye he has. While pulling the photo to post here I happened to notice this food photo that was published in January. I had to add it to this post because it also shows what a great eye for design that Bryan has. A nice vision for the photo and wonderful use of light. 
Mark Reis
The Gazette photo staff did well recently in two state-wide photo contests. Bryan Oller was recognized for his photo of a flag-waving fan encouraging race car driver Nouhiro Tajima during the Pikes Peak International Hill climb. Mark Reis won with his dessert photo from the cover of the Gazette’s Dining Guide, a collection of high school athlete portraits from our spring “Peak Performers” section and a photo of a motocross rider flying over the rainbow. Jerilee Bennett took home awards for her photo story on the Hassoldts, who have ten children, including six adopted from around the world and also for her feature photo of a “Man-Eating” pumpkin. Congratulations and here are their winning photos. Enjoy!
I’ve had a couple of people ask me about this business portrait so I thought I’d answer your questions here on the Gazette’s photo blog. Business portraits can, frankly speaking, often be a bit dry. So, a solution is to punch them up a bit with added light and maybe a camera trick or two. I’ll admit this one borders on “gimmicky” but I can live with that. Since this is a “posed” portrait I think it’s OK to go beyond photographing a scene exactly as it appears. This company’s network data room was full of computer equipment and I found one console that had some gaps between the shelves. I decided to photograph board chairman Wayne Adams through that gap and use the equipment shelves to frame him. To give the photo some pop I used two “off-camera” flashes. One flash was hidden pointing at his face from behind the console and a second flash with a blue plastic gel over it lit the back of his head. To help isolate him I also hung a black backdrop on the wall behind him. There were florescent lights overhead that couldn’t be turned off so I also suspended a cloth over Wayne’s head to block those lights (so the only light on him would be my flashes). The room’s ambient lights were lighting the front of the panel but required a slow one-fourth second exposure. When time came to take the photo I still wasn’t thrilled with the way it looked. Since I was using a slow shutter speed I decided to spin the camera slowly during the exposure to add the spinning blur to the photo. There are two reasons Wayne’s face is sharp and not blurred. The first is that the only lights hitting him are my strobes, which only fire for a 1/1000th of a second during the exposure. The second is that his face is in the center of the frame of the spinning camera where there’s much less movement. This all may sound like a lot of work but, hey, Wayne was willing to kneel in a cramped space for the good of the portrait so I had to do my part. Mark Reis
