There’s nothing wrong with having a little fun while working, especially if you’re photographing a grill with a roaring fire or a lady in a bathtub in the middle of a construction site.

As newspaper photojournalists, we cover a wide range of stories from politics and daily life to sports and news events. And yes, sometimes we are allowed creative license to illustrate a fun feature story. In the pictures below, the stories focused on backyard grilling and bathroom remodeling. These are certainly not the most hard-hitting news stories, but they are topics of interest for many of our readers in their personal lives.

For the grilling photo, Features Picture Editor Lynden Steele is standing just off-camera with lighter fluid to keep the flames high and a grill cover to extinguish the flame once I have finished taking pictures. We decided to have our model hold another grill top in one hand and a fork above her head with the other hand to emulate the movie “300″ and the attitude of many who grill as going into battle. After a few near misses with the tower of flames, we moved our volunteer model farther away from the fiery grill. She was happy about that.

Bathroom remodeling isn’t the most thrilling topic for most people, but that just allows for more creative freedom with the picture to capture the reader’s attention. We decided to place a bathtub in the middle of a home construction zone to illustrate remodeling with staff photographer Christian Gooden helping me out as an assistant. The two construction workers, both brothers, were actually working on the home but took time out of their schedule to be models in our photo shoot. The older brother used his seniority priviledge to be the one pouring the wine for our model. Two artificial light sources were used in this shoot, one up high and to the left of the camera for the model in the bathtub and another was placed outside of the home, shooting through the back window to emulate natural window light for the construction worker in the background.

For all you photo geeks (like myself) out there, each photograph was taken with a Canon EOS-1D Mark IIn camera body, a 28mm lens, and monolights of varying brands like Dynalite, Alien Bees, and White Lightning. Each monolight was hooked up to a Pocket Wizard wireless transmitter, which allowed the camera to fire the monolight without having to be tethered by a cord.

These photo shoots called for logistical planning in terms of determining the composition, securing locations, setting up lights, models who are patient with a photographer giving them direction, editing on the back end to find the best picture possible and maybe even having a little fun in the process.