A Little News

Sometimes you have an assignment that simply clicks. Everything comes together in one of those moments you will remember for a long time. Some of those moments are the great events of life, a presidential visit, a huge fire, a big ball game. Then there are the quirky moments. This is just such a moment. I had an assignment a couple of weeks ago we just published and I wanted to share it with you. This young woman’s mother found a squirrel near death and brought it to her daughter who nursed it back to health. We went to the young woman’s home to shoot pictures as she was getting the animal ready to release into nature again. As it turns out, she probably won’t release the squirrel until spring so we went ahead with the story.

Suffice it to say that it was the funky story of the year for me. The pictures turned out so well I wanted to post them here. I have one of the pictures in my flickr stream and it has become extremely popular in just a couple of days. There is nothing all that technically challenging about these pictures except that the squirrel moves incredibly fast and doesn’t stay still very long at all. As the saying goes, this little guy is so quick he is even fast asleep. (chuckles) I lit the room with a single SB800 on a light stand bounced into a wall and ceiling and used a D2Hs with both the 17-35 and the 80-200. This is one of those jobs you come to work for. It makes it worth all the negatives that photojournalism can sometimes serve you.

The photo of the cat and squirrel is extremely funny, or ironic, to me. The cat doesn’t mess with the squirrel but you can look in the cat’s eyes and see the predator very near the surface. I am not sure if the cat and the squirrel were left alone in the room together that the squirrel would survive the encounter. As long as the girl is there she kind of refs the deal and the squirrel can play safely. It was a cool assignment and I hope you guys enjoy it seeing it as much as I enjoyed shooting it.

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