So I guess winter has finally arrived in Cheyenne. Since I’ve been here, this was only the second serious snow fall we’ve received. It’s only the second time I’ve had to put my truck into four wheel drive to get around town. Some days it’s incredibly hard to find features around town. Today that wasn’t the case. Early in the day, there were a lot of people cleaning off cars and sidewalks on almost every corner. I even ran across a group of antelope leisurely walking around a neighborhood in the city.
Wyoming Tribune Eagle
Cheyenne East long jumper Jeremiah Hunter
This week I was assigned my second prep athlete of the week portrait. It was a particularly challenging portrait because of the sport and the season. My subject was a long jumper and I was photographing him on a day when Cheyenne was getting blasted by a few inches of snow in the morning. I decided to shoot him inside with the lights at full power to over power the ambient light, thus leaving a completely black background. The shoot took place in a gymnasium, but I wanted to keep it very clean since the background doesn’t contribute to his sport.
A memory for Valentine’s Day
On Friday, I was assigned to shoot a portrait of Francis Oline, a local WWII veteran living at the Cheyenne VA Medical Center. Oline submitted a touching story about proposing to his late wife to the paper for a Valentine’s Day feature. I was trying to make a nice portrait of Oline with a framed photo of him and his wife, but I kept getting frustrated with myself. The background is too busy. There’s a glare on the frame from my flash. The window is too hot. As this self criticism was running laps through my head, I was having a pretty nice conversation with Oline as he reflected on his life. At one moment as he talked about his late wife, Dolorus, he paused and looked away from me as he reflected on a story in their life together. I snapped a few frames. It was a touching moment, and by far the best photo from the assignment (seen below). It might not be the best composed image, but for me the moment completely trumps the composition in this case. After I had taken several frames, I listened to about another 45 minutes of old stories from Oline, including a very interesting one about hunting buried train robbery treasure near Cheyenne. I felt bad as I had to leave soon thereafter in order to make an afternoon meeting back at the newsroom. Oline is a lovely gentleman and I hope my pictures represent him well in the newspaper.