A Little News

There are days when photojournalism is, well, less than attractive.  Maybe you got up on the wrong side of the bed or maybe somebody pushed you out.  You come to work a little sour and before you know it the whole day is pretty much sour.  Then you get to work and get the dreaded, “We need a feature” from you editor.  What to do, what to do? 

We depend rather heavily on the standalone feature photo and it requires a lot of time every week searching the communities we cover to come up with them.  Whenever I can’t find people, I turn to animals.  We have a national wildlife refuge literally within the city limits of Decatur so waterfowl are abundant in most seasons of the year.  I keep a few feature “fishing holes” in reserve for those days when we must have a standalone.  The duck photo is from one of my favorite fishing holes.  It is a little lake, a pond really, tucked into a city park in Athens.  I can go there almost any time of the year and find someone doing something and when there are no someones there are always ducks and geese.

Keeping a mental list of fishing holes can really bale you out of a jam.  One of our guys used to photograph the crossing guards at the area schools when he was in a pinch.  He used that trick so many times it is kind of a joke now.  I love to read J.R.R. Tolkien’s books and I remember in The Hobbit, the lead dwarf tells two of the younger ones something like, “There is nothing like looking if you want to find something.”  That is the real key to good feature photos.  I like to say that you can’t find a picture sitting in the office.  Hey, if nothing else works, take a lesson from the duck; stick you rear end in the air, duck you head beneath the water and don’t forget the waterproof housing.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily.  The views expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.