Newspaper is only a slight step above toilet paper… its just a little less absorbant.
Just the other day I had one of those abysmal jobs. Not quite “shoot the fire detectors in the new building because the manufacturer wants to use it as a demo” and not quite as inane as a group photo, but it was still a little squishy.
I was given the task of photographing a taxi cab. Yes, just the car. The driver died and they had his car set out as a little memorial. Yep, it was a job that didn’t even hit the desk before it was passed down to the intern.
Let me count the ways upon which this one was loathed: #1, it was very overcast; #2, the car was white; #3, the wheels and hubcaps were solid black; #4, it was in the middle of a shopping center parking lot; #4, it had rained and the car wasn’t shiny anymore; #5, read all of the above one more time… and then realize once more that it was VERY overcast.
So, I took my light bag just in case. I had Joe McNally’s words running through my head: “Sometimes you don’t need to light it, you need to light AROUND it.” (When I meet him in a few weeks I’m going to ask him about this one, actually.) Well, it was overcast and in a black-top parking lot. And the car was white. And the wheels/tires were black. Even three lights were completely useless.
And then the clouds parted (not really) and a little ray of sunshine “Mack” showed up. Okay, I jest, it wasn’t that happy of an occasion, but still…
WHOA!!! Person! He began to write a little note on the sticker on the windshield like a bunch of other people had already done… I went to madly shooting photos. I’m talking ripping it at 9-frames-per-second here.
I fiddled with the lights for about 10 more seconds after he left and suddenly realized, “what the heck am I doing out here with lights? Its overcast, the car is white with black wheels and its sitting in the middle of a shopping center parking lot.”
So, I load my card and look though my photos and one immediately catches my eye.
Alright, the stars are aligning in my favor. I kinda smile a little and chuckle to myself proudly.
“It’ll never reproduce,” said my boss over my shoulder.
He wasn’t being mean, I assure you. He was simply stating a fact that I completely neglected to remember after I look at thousands of photos a day on my nice bright and shiny computer monitors… and he has been shooting photos for a newspaper for 30 years.
So, the other one…
…ran in the paper.
And the extraordinary irony is: it ran misattributed. After all that, I didn’t even get credit for it.
Oh, the life. Its humorous.
-Noah D.
