Photographer Bil Bowden has been taking pictures for nearly 30 years at the York Daily Record/Sunday News. These photos aren't 'news.' They lean toward pretty and fun; his only hope is that they make you smile.
When we first published this photograph a few years ago, even my friends asked where I found this stuffed turkey to place in front of the 'no hunting' sign.
Ah, but we don't do that. As a newspaper, we cannot manipulate or mislead our readers, and have them think the photo they see is anything but real. So, how did this picture happen?
Three Lancaster County fishermen were seen Friday afternoon standing up in their boat near Long Level on the Susquehanna River. As one of the men said, and as we've all seen on bumper stickers-- 'A bad day fishing is better than a good day at work'. Since the trio had caught only one fish in the three hours on the water, Friday probably qualified as a bad day fishing. But they were all smiling.
Water temperature was 43 degrees, and we're assuming they had life jackets somewhere in the boat, since I didn't see any being worn. In those temperatures, they wouldn't be swimming for long.
Lake Clarke Rescue does a terrific job, but I'd rather not get a shot of them working.
To accompany a "Here comes Spring" story, we needed a picture showing people working outdoors, preparing for the annual explosion of green leaves and lawns.
Generally, most folks are still huddled indoors, nervously expecting a late-season snow storm any day, squashing hopes of wildflowers and warm temperatures. But professional landscapers get a jump on things, cleaning up winter's mess (downed tree limbs, dead plant material, and other assorted cold weather yard maladies).
So, Dick Rishel and his crew are already hard at work, making their client's yards look like they came right out of HGTV's Gardening By The Yard. My yard, on the other hand, is a prime example of a 'before' picture on Desperate Landscapes, also on HGTV.
So, how do we make men spreading mulch look interesting to our readers?
Since we haven't had much snow this winter, I drove Monday to one of my favorite places, Fairport Harbor, Ohio. Wanted to see how much havoc was raised with the recent storm there, and take pictures of the sights.
Fairport is a tiny town on the Lake Erie shore, about 30 miles east of Cleveland. Generations ago, the Slovaks, Hungarians and Finns arrived to build the railroad to Pittsburgh, and those cultures are still strong. Cabbage rolls or chicken paprikash are terrific here, but only if you know someone's Grandma who cooks it up at home. Strangely, there are no ethnic restuarants in Fairport and it seems like an obvious place for one.
The town boasts a Slovenian Club, Finnish Heritage Museum, and a Hungarian Culture Club. It also has two lighthouses; one is a now a maritime museum, the newer one is far out on a stone breakwall. Sunsets here are beautiful, and with the lake frozen over, I expected to shoot a cold wintry scene.
Sometimes, a preconceived idea of a photo blinds me from a better picture.
An explanation of the long, thin vertical 'cloud' toward the right of the photo comes from our friend Dr. Bill Kreiger, professor of earth science at York College--
It appears to be a solar pillar. Sun dogs, solar rainbows, solar pillars, solar rays there is a variety of atmospheric optics. They are cool! Water in the atmosphere, ice crystals, snow flakes, dust, ash, soil particles under the right conditions produce all sorts of atmospheric optics.
It's that time of year again, when snow geese and tundra swans migrate back to their northern summer homes. It's quite a site. Thousands and thousands of these beautiful birds (the swans are larger, with longer necks and the geese have black wing tips) make a brief stop at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area north of Lancaster about this time every year.
Most people stop on weekends, pulling over to the side of the road and watching them swim around, some not 20 yards away. And that's a good feeling. But to see the massive numbers, wait until the sun goes down.
A few years ago, a photographer with a lens as long as my arm set up at the prime spot-- a point of land at the end of a paved walking path. He had all the tools-- tripod, monster lens, big camera. But he didn't have the one thing he needed most.
Many years ago, newspaper photographers frowned on using flash to shoot pictures because it was adding light to a situation in which there wasn't much light. To keep from using flash, we used special film normally used to photograph star tracks (recording film), 'pushing' film to extraordinary and coarse, grainy depths.
But let's back up a step or two. The higher the speed of film (or digital ISO for that matter), the 'grainer' it gets. That is, 100 ASA film is terrific for larger pictures. The grain grows as the speed increases. At 3200 and 6400 (some claimed even higher) It looked like beach sand sprinkled on a photo. If we didn't use flash, we had to increase, sometimes dramatically, the film speed. Light-- or the illusion of light-- had to come from somewhere. Digital imaging has improved some of that, but just substitute 'noise' for 'grain'.
We used special developers, heated the water, agitated the solution a particular way. Some probably even danced over the stuff, hoping to give it magical powers. Looking back on those days, it's almost comical now...
