I posted this photo on my Facebook page and got a lot of comments. I thought I would write here about my setup.

My first camera, which I am not using but only this camera, is straight on and shooting a little loose—always shooting interviews on 4K. Let me crop in and do some Ken Burns Effects. The Ken Burns effect is a panning and zooming effect used in video production from still imagery. The name derives from the extensive use of the technique by American documentarian Ken Burns. 

This first camera lets me get some gestures when the subject moves their hands.

I position the subject on one of the 1/3 vertical spots in the frame and typically look to the side with more space.

I usually put one camera to a much tighter side. I like the second camera to be tighter where I focus more on the subject’s facial expression.

Here you can see the setup from the subject’s perspective. I have one light off at 45º to keep me from getting raccoon eyes due to the top lighting. I like having good Rembrandt-style lighting on the face for interviews. I keep the cameras all on the shadow side of the light to give me some modeling on the face.

Then the three cameras are what I call the sizzle camera. Here I am using a motorized slider constantly moving on a loop.

Couple quick tips

• FOCUS – I am trying and shooting on manual focus. To keep the person focused when they move, I typically shoot around ƒ/5.6.
• FOCUS SETUP – Once I get the composition set, I zoom in to check the eye’s critical focus. I do this on my Cameras by pushing the + button on the back of the camera. Since both the Nikon Z6 and D5 have touch screens, I can pinch them like you would with your smartphone.

My primary microphone is typically a wireless lavalier Omni directional microphone put on a shirt near the subject’s breast bone. This is always manually adjusted using closed headphones and the audio meter on the camera.

Top Photo Camera Settings: [NIKON Z 6, 28.0-300.0 mm f/3.5-5.6, Mode = Aperture Priority, ISO 51200, 1/100, ƒ/5.6, (35mm = 122)]

I could not believe how dark the venue was at Lips Atlanta, but the Nikon Z6 took on the challenge and didn’t disappoint.

We celebrated Dorie Griggs, my wife, and my daughter Chelle’s birthdays. 60 and 21 are milestones that deserve going big.

Even the stage wasn’t super bright. I was shooting at ISO 20000 to get good results.

I am not expecting ISO 51200 to look like ISO 100, but to be able to take photos in that low of light without a flash is incredible.

Years ago, film shooting ISO above ISO 800 was only possible with black and white. Shooting color, you had to just light venues.

This camera is just incredible in so many ways. This shows you the high ISO capability.

Top Photo: Justin Jefferson #2 of the LSU Tigers makes a catch against Justin Broiles #25 of the Oklahoma Sooners during the first half at the 2019 College Football Playoff Semifinal at the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl on Saturday, Dec. 28, in Atlanta. [NIKON D5, 120.0-300.0 mm f/2.8, Mode = Aperture Priority, ISO 32000, 1/4000, ƒ/5.6, (35mm = 250)]

When I am hired to shoot a game for a company like Chick-fil-A, I have to look for ways to show the brand.

This photo here works just great. You can see the branding on the patch of the Oklahoma player.

While this touchdown is a great photo as well, it is less valuable by itself since you cannot see the brand anywhere in the image. The place it does appear is in the caption when the photo is published in news outlets.

It also helps when the CEO, Dan Cathy, is in the photo.

You are also taking some photos of critical people participating in the brand. Capturing the invocation is essential to the client.

You are also taking photos of the company leaders at the event and coving the game itself.

When an icon intersects with your client’s brand, you know they will use it. Combined with other photos, their brand is associated with cultural icons.

What is the point of this post? It isn’t just about shooting for a brand; it is more essential than that. Know your client and their audience.

Know your client and their audience.

Photo above: Chelle Leary at Krog Street Tunnel in Atlanta, Georgia
[NIKON Z 6, 24.0-105.0 mm f/4.0, Mode = Aperture Priority, ISO 1000, 1/60, ƒ/4, (35mm = 58)]

Flashpoint XPLOR 600 HSS TTL list price $699

Sale Price $479

I have shot with this flash in Hawaii because they have a couple at the school I teach each year.

I put this photo up on the blog in February and am using it here.

When the sale price popped up around Thanksgiving, I started to think should I do it and buy them. I finally bought two and will be slowly selling my older lights, which work just fine, for these shortly.

I took my daughter to the Krog Street Tunnel in Atlanta. The Krog Street Tunnel is a tunnel in Atlanta known for its street art. The tunnel links the Cabbagetown, Reynoldstown, and Inman Park neighborhoods. It is trendy among cyclists and is part of the BeltLine for bicyclists and pedestrians to cross Hulsey Yard.

Before buying the lights, I shot all these on TTL and controlled the two lights using the Godox X1 I already owned.

I just put one of the lights on A Channel and the other on B Channel and powered them at 0, -1, and low as -3.

Depending on the ISO I set the camera, the scene would look vastly different.

The lower the ISO, the more the flashes became the dominant light. I didn’t want to hand hold the flash a long time, and then you would see ghosting in the subject if she moved.

By changing the ISO, I could decide how natural light blended with the strobes worked. Trying to keep a tiny flash on the model’s face gives the skin tones the best color and dynamic range.

I also took my daughter out in the sunlight and took more photos. Here the daylight is at more of her back; she would have been silhouetted without the flash. Notice the flash sync went up to 1/320. You can do high-speed sync with these flashes.

While I shot with my Nikon Z6 to get all these photos, these flashes will work with Fuji, Nikon, Canon, and Sony. You need to buy the correct transmitter for your camera brand. The strobes will work with all of them.

I bought the Flashpoint brand. However, you can find the same flash in brand names like Godox, Neewer, Cheetah, MoLight, and others. It’s a good idea to go with dealers a little more local to you just in case of problems. If you have a problem with Flashpoint, Adorama has a good reputation for taking care of you to get it repaired.

I changed my Macbook Pro Hard Drive to Solid State Drive many years ago. WOW!!! That was a massive difference in my time on the computer.

Rugged and solid state drives differ in the technology used to store and retrieve data. HDDs are cheaper, and you can get more storage space. SSDs are faster, lighter, more durable, and use less energy.

When I changed my computer to SSD, the start-up time and performance time the computer took to complete a task were super fast compared to the standard HDD.

Since I was storing and not needing performance when it came to photos, I just continued to use HDDs for my external hard drives.

Back in June, I wrote this blog post Camera Insurance? I wasn’t Covered!!!

I said, “While in Trinidad teaching in the Storytellers Abroad workshop, I got up from my chair, and my foot caught the power cord plugged into HyperDrive – USB Type-C Hub, which also my 4TB Western Digital Hard drive was plugged into. The hard drive went crashing to the floor.”

This was when I switched to SSD external hard drives.

My first external SSD was the Samsung 500GB SSD. The main reason the traditional 4TB HDD failed was the moving parts. When the hard drive crashed to the floor, the platters got scratched. Had I been using the SSD, that wouldn’t have happened. There are no moving parts.

I also am making backups more frequently than I did before. I lost a lot of images because I hadn’t been backing up those drives as often as I should have been.

I have bought many more SSD drives like this SanDisk 1TB. While these are about 3 to 4 times more expensive than the HDD drives for the same amount of space, I feel more secure that the chance of failure is greatly diminished.

I still recommend backing up your hard drives. The SSD can fail, just like the memory cards we use to capture the images in our cameras.

When writing this post their are sales going on that place these hard drive prices:

• 500 GB $80
• 1 TB $150
• 2 TB $300

While the larger drives cost more, they may be a better investment. Many believe it is better to have smaller enterprises than lose a lot if one were to go wrong.

Whatever theory you are using for drives now is probably good to do with SSD.

I hope this tip helps you and keeps your images around for a long time.

One of the best things you can hear in a testimonial from a client is, “Thank you for the quick turnaround.”

You see, in business, when you miss a deadline, it often has a financial impact.

You won’t instantly find success in the world of business by just setting arbitrary deadlines for all of your projects. Your deadlines must set you up for success—they must be strategic.

Strategic running your own business means that deadlines are essential to help you achieve goals.

For example, if you were producing a video to ask donors to give and missed using it on Giving Tuesday. $511M was raised on the day of giving. This is a 28% increase from 2018.

Missing that deadline means you missed an opportunity to have a good reason to reach out to your audience with an ask.

Always Quick Turnaround

It doesn’t take long for one to create a great deal of content that needs to be edited. If projects need to be edited and delivered to a client, you have MAJOR RESTRICTIONS on your time.

You cannot just respond to that phone call that someone is asking you to leave tomorrow for a major project that may require you to fly around the world and work for a month.

Setting realistic deadlines doesn’t always mean you are rushing the process. The most significant time killer is not starting and not how long it takes to do a project.

I was starting my career at a newspaper drilled into me the importance of a deadline. We have all been watching TV when they break into your regular program and give us a “Breaking News” story.

In AMBER ALERTS, they know every minute is precious. Based on the history of child abductions, the longer it takes to get the news out can be the difference between life and death.

Because the news organizations know these breaking news events can happen, they have a plan to execute in those situations. The way to improve the quality is to increase the time. That is done through early planning.

Lightroom, PhotoShop & Adobe Premiere Skills

You take classes and practice working on images. You get better and better in not just being able to improve the product but also enhance your time doing those skills.

“Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today.”

Benjamin Franklin

The most significant problem most people face in business is time management. Keep a sharp eye on any timelines.

The most significant issue in meeting deadlines is the gap in your timeline of working on the project.

Don’t Be This Photographer

Know the industry standard for turnaround times

How long should it take to get wedding photos back from the photographer? Average wait time for wedding photos. Typically it can average anywhere between 2-6 weeks. Of course, photographers will try and get your photos to you as soon as possible; many will send some sneak peek photos of a selection that have been edited for you to view.

Don’t Be Average

• Take classes in your profession to help, most of all, improve your quality from Good to Great.
• Maybe use something like Loupedeck+ Photo & Video Editing Console lets you edit effectively using its intuitive buttons, dials, and sliders. 
• Do personal projects – if you are only working on client work, you cannot experiment and try techniques and ways to improve your time and quality.
• When you take on a project, carve out the time to finish the project in a timely basis. Mind the Gap!

I hope these tips and reminders will help you see that getting images to your client in a timely matter helps them make more money if this is for corporate work and things like weddings; well, the link to the video tells you that story.

The power went out the other day at our house for a few hours. When I went to check on my backup computer that I have running with multiple external hard drives plugged into it, I had to restart to get the hard drives to mount.

However, one drive wouldn’t mount. I ran on my Mac Disk Utility.

When I googled the line “File system check exit code is 8,” I got a few hits.

Click on it, and it will take you to an article describing my problem.

It is very effective for recovering lost data from corrupted drives that have the file system check exit code 8 error.

The software M3 Data Recovery could see my files on the external hard drive that wouldn’t mount. I could select all the folders and transfer them to a new hard drive. A few corrupt files didn’t move, and some folder names were corrupted.

The good news is for $69.95; I could recover 99% of the files from the nonworking hard drive. I hope you never need to do this, but if you do in the future, maybe you can search my blog for this article.

Surgeons are doing a bone graft of the lower part of the leg for a little boy to hopefully help him keep his leg at the Hôpital Baptiste Biblique located in Tsiko, Togo, West Africa. [NIKON D5, 24.0-105.0 mm f/4.0, Mode = Aperture Priority, ISO 11400, 1/100, ƒ/9, (35mm = 82)]

Many believe that video consistently outperforms all other forms of digital communication regarding likes, shares, downloads, and donations. Every campaign should include inspirational fundraising videos with a simple call to action.

I think the strength of video is that it lets you control the narrative by pacing and delivering a message.

Here are some statistics I came across that are worth mentioning.

Important Video Stats Nonprofits Need To Know

• 57% of online donors make a gift after watching an inspirational fundraising video.
• Crowdfunding pages promoted by video raise four times as many donations.
• More than 1/2 of video views happen on a mobile device.

According to Into Focus: Benchmarks for Nonprofit Video and a Guide for Creators, a report by See3, YouTube, and communications strategy consultancy Edelman:

• 80% of respondents said the video is essential to their nonprofits.
• 91% believe video will become more critical in the next three years.
• 92% value the investment they made in the video.

Liz Ortiz served for the past year as a media missionary for ABWE. She just returned at Thanksgiving to the US. Hannah Strayer has been in Togo for a few months and is a full-time media missionary for ABWE.

Together we produced this video for ABWE to help raise funds to make improvements in the Hospital that hasn’t had any significant modifications since it was created 35-years-ago.

Here are some tips for telling a nonprofit story to raise funds.

1. Use storytelling to engage the audience.
   1. Start with the problem. What will not happen if the donors don’t give?
   2. Make the problem worse. Be careful not to skim over the issue. If this hospital didn’t expand, more than 50% of those coming each day would continue to be turned away and not helped.
2. Speak To Donors and show them how your organization makes a difference. In our video, we let you hear how the hospital was evangelizing and planting churches.
3. Show The Good You Are Doing with inspiring behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with program recipients. Besides having a good discussion, capture a b-roll that shows what they are talking about and put this over their interview.
4. Be Passionate and show donors how they can help contribute. We showed specific needs for Autoclave, X-Ray, Outdated nursery, and nurses station were things we showed. Listen to how the doctor talks about those needs.
5. Ask the viewers to contribute and tell them how.
6. Caption your videos. Did you know that 85% of videos on Facebook are watched with no sound? It’s true. If you don’t caption your videos, you’ll lose impact with your video because some people won’t bother to watch with the sound on.

Marketing of Video

The best videos cannot do their job without promoting them.

Know your audience. Target your story for a direct and specific purpose—if you don’t know who you’re talking to, the right people won’t be listening. We identified the audience before we started. Then we tailored all the content to that audience.

Use social media: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram.

Contact people and ask them to have a watch party. For our video, this can be churches and small groups. Every missionary on the field has friends and family that could have a small dinner party and then show the video around a TV.

When you have a group together, ask everyone to pull out their phones, go to the video link, and then ask them to share with all their friends and family. You might even want to help them by giving some text examples to promote the video.

Other ways that people can help with the call to action is to use the video on their birthday and try to raise funds from their friends by asking people to donate. Many people will give to a cause just because they are asking.

Know when to call in the professionals. Using a smartphone to shoot videos to share on social media, in email, and on your blog is okay. Video doesn’t have to be polished to be effective. However, there are times when a professionally done video is best – like on your home page or at a fundraising event. Find someone experienced in creating the kind of video you need so the results are what you want. Call me!

Pastor Rodrigo Cisternas is studying at his church in Santiago, Chile. [NIKON Z 6, VR Zoom 24-105mm f/4G IF-ED, Mode = Aperture Priority, ISO 5600, 1/100, ƒ/5.6, (35mm = 68)]

This past June, I was working in Santiago, Chile. I was helping lead a workshop of storytellers. I was focused on those stories and had no idea about the kettle ready to explode.

On October 14th of this year, the protests in Santiago started.

Chile’s most diehard protesters may be young, but their grievances possess a long lineage, one decade in the making. Back in 2007, the government made it possible for more to get loans to go to college.

The problem is that many who graduated have massive student loan debts and lousy, low-paid jobs. The issue that is very evident today is a significant inequality gap that education didn’t help solve.

I fear what is happening in Chile can happen here in the USA.

In Chile, privatizing health care and education has led to more choices and greater access, but it also left the poor and middle class saddled with mounting debt. Chile’s cost of living has become increasingly expensive while wages have remained low.

The more you read about the unrest, the more you can see their storyline in ours.

George Washington’s chair for the Federal Conventions had a sun on it. James Madison reported Benjamin Franklin saying, “I have often looked at that behind the president without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now I… know that it is a rising…sun.”

There is a scripture that says something similar about unrest.

Deuteronomy 28:67

“In the morning you shall say, ‘Would that it were evening!’ And at evening you shall say, ‘Would that it were morning!’ because of the dread of your heart which you dread, and for the sight of your eyes which you will see.”

This week we need to remind ourselves of how blessed we are even amid unrest.

First Thanksgiving

At the first Thanksgiving, colonists were likely outnumbered by more than two to one by their Native American guests. Colonist Edward Winslow writes: “many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men.”  The preceding winter had been a harsh one for the colonists. Seventy-eight percent of the women who had traveled on the Mayflower had perished that winter, leaving only around 50 colonists to attend the first Thanksgiving. According to eyewitness accounts, among the pilgrims, there were 22 men, just four women, and over 25 children and teenagers. 

Philippians 4:6

“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”

I believe the whole concept of hope is born out of those who seem to have much unrest.

Every Cloud has a Silver Lining

The phrase seems to be John Milton’s 1634 poem “Comus,” which includes the line, “Was I deceived? or did a sable cloud/Turn forth her silver lining on the night?”

“I have always found that actively loving
saves one from a morbid preoccupation
with the shortcomings of society.”

Alan Paton

This is the children’s ward of Hôpital Baptiste Biblique. As you can see the children are precious. You can see the parents taking care of their children while they are healing from their sickness.

Listen to Dr. Tom Kendall, Jr. talk about their needs.

“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”

Fred Rogers

Last night my wife and I saw the movie staring Tom Hanks as Mister Rogers in “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”. That quote stood out to me.

As a storyteller I am often just wanting to mention often the unmentionable so that something can be done.

I was first moved in the hospital by the people and quickly was aware of how old the place looked. Don’t you think that 35 years is a long time before upgrading and refreshing a hospital?

Here is a link if you want to help support the hospital as they upgrade and expand to meet the physical and spiritual needs of Togo.

Women cook for their family members who are patients at Hôpital Baptiste Biblique, located in Tsiko, Togo, West Africa.
[NIKON Z 6, Sigma 24.0-105.0 mm f/4.0, Mode = Aperture Priority, ISO 5000, 1/200, ƒ/4, (35mm = 52)]

I went to West Africa to help tell the story of Hôpital Baptiste Biblique, located in Tsiko, Togo. Built in 1985, they are in desperate need of infrastructure upgrades and need expansion. Today I want to share what they have to develop for the patients and families.

You see, there is no hotel in the area or restaurants. When patients come to the hospital, they need a place to stay, cook and take care of their family members.

When you go to the Hospital here, you get your mother’s cooking or a relative’s cooking because the hospital takes care of the medical care, and the family takes care of laundry, food, and things like bathing the patient.

The first thing that they are doing is adding more space for the patients and their families by creating a hotel with traditional outside kitchens.

They first build four new hotel wings in their renewal and expansion project. They had to do a better job of taking care of the community and putting them first.

Besides adding hotel rooms, they have had to build sewage and an electrical system. They cannot tie into the existing grids because they don’t exist for sewage, and running a hospital where the town’s power goes out almost daily isn’t realistic. They have a generator and system that kicks in when the local power goes out.

When I was there, it went out 2 to 3 times a day, and the generator kicked on after 7 seconds.

It won’t be long before the patients move from this older hotel to the new, improved version.

Here is a link if you want to help support the hospital as they upgrade and expand to meet Togo’s physical and spiritual needs.

The photo above: Mother and her little boy carried in kitenge. They are staying here at the Hôpital Baptiste Biblique in Tsiko, Togo, West Africa.

African Time is when one says they will arrive at a particular time but come much later.

It should be noted that almost every African (on both the leaving and receiving end) does this. So, if one does arrive on “American time,” don’t be surprised if a party is still getting set up, a person is still getting ready, etc.

Most all my frustrations with Africa were from my not allowing for myself to adjust to the way we do things in Africa or as the old saying goes, “When in Rome do as the Romans do.”

How this impacts Humanitarian Storytelling

In the United States, if you plan a project, you email, text, and call people and plan. You put together a schedule so you can make the most of your time when you arrive.

On all my trips to Africa [Burkina Faso, Ghana & Togo], the team I worked with did everything to work with Americans who lived there to plan our itinerary. This last trip reminded me of African Time. Had I been fully aware, I would have designed to take two weeks to accomplish what I usually can achieve in one week in the states.

Now Africa isn’t the only place like this, but for Americans who are punctual and like to have a packed and productive schedule, you might find yourself like me, with little hair left.

Most likely, the host in Africa you will work with is more than willing to help you and will start when you arrive.

I planned trips for a few months with a writer when we went to Burkina Faso.

This is a photo from that meeting where the writer reviewed the plans. This was when they said what possible the next day was. Looking back, I should have noted that this is a common way and not the exception for storytelling coverage by media specialists when they come from another country to Africa.

I arrived in Lome, Togo, on Friday night. They don’t drive in the country on the roads at night because it is just too dangerous. You can hit an animal, and getting help wouldn’t be until daylight.

I stayed at a hotel in Lome with the plans that we had worked on to leave the following day to drive and arrive to meet with a team that afternoon to plan.

Well, I found out at the airport the night before that they had to wait and pick up more people later that afternoon. No communication to me or the rest of the team that this was happening.

In Africa, this is “normal” behavior, whereas, in the USA, we would check with the guests before making plans for them without involving them in the process.

It took us four days to locate Faro Faro Agoda, one of our subjects, for the story. I didn’t know until he arrived that he had driven almost 4 hours to make it for our video interview.

In the area of Africa where I went, there are over 43 languages. This impacted everything you do. While you think you are clear and the person you are talking to might understand, by the time your thoughts are translated through who knows how many different languages, the message can become quite different to the intended audience.

In the movie The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy, upon arriving in Oz, says, “Toto, I have a feeling we‘re not in Kansas anymore.” This is how one often feels when they forget there is a cultural difference to working in another country.

Preplanning

You can still make plans before going to Africa. They will tell you a good time to come and can tell you most of the time if the people you need for the project will be in the country. As always in life, you still need to be flexible for those things outside your host’s control. Accidents can happen, and even family crises take people away.

You can still communicate your plans for the project and get as much as a possible agreement before you go.

I would suggest making most of your time to get the people to agree to a schedule before buying your airfare and booking your hotels. You can find out this way if they tell you everyone is OK with the program.

Boots on the Ground

When you arrive, you must have planned your first meeting to go over everything you have been planning in person.

From my experience, everything you are used to doing in the States will take twice as long or longer to do in Africa. This is the culture; you must learn to work with it and not fight it.

Bottom Line

With Humanitarian work, you are often in a different country and working with a different culture. You must learn to be flexible and able to go with the flow.

It would help if you still got the storyline no matter where you are to tell a story. Continue to be persistent and ask for what you need. Just give them time to respond.