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The really soulful pictures — musician portraits — are living at Communicating Arts–The Journal.

As may be seen by the above, the Nikon D200’s own strobe — a snap shooter if ever was — handles a bit of space quite well.

I was heading out the door when the dancing began (having courted the flu most of the day, I hadn’t expected on going out at all, and once out knew that I would make a short evening of it: a beer, an hour, a camera, and a little bit of presence on the local music scene) and didn’t want to rig up again with a flash unit.

Last week or so, I had some fun using Lightroom tools to bleed a positive background on to the web page; this evening, I played around in the other direction, fade-to-black vignettes with dodged spotlighting.  Such effects plus palette change impression quite a bit.

Two lessons learned about photojournalism along the way, both familiar to those who have given the matter a moment’s thought: 1) photographs lie, often; 2) a picture seldom “tells a thousand words” or “a story”: to the contrary, it often takes a thousand words to tell the viewer, honestly, about what has been recorded.

A photograph is, has been, will be always a recording of a surface reality freighted with intimations.  Entertainers leave definition to the viewer’s imagination; photojournalists needs must provide captions (and refrain from doctoring overmuch).

Many years ago with the advent of the “digital revolution”, I proposed differentiating between a “Type I Photography” aligned with fidelity to the real, i.e., “straight photography” and “Type II Photography” intent on coloring and illustrating after the exposure (there were some rousing discussions too about “Response Photography” — photographer as tourist in an extant reality — and “Constructed Photography”, i.e., photographer as a producer and director importing elements into the frame.

Considering in retrospect the prodigious verbiage that went into that art colony shop talk (zoetrope.com for the curios), I could have been writing short stories and novels.

Sometimes, perhaps especially these days with so many concept-to-post-production options at the desktop, one might do just as well to enjoy the art and not worry it to death with interminable discussions about method.

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