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October 9, 1998 "The waiting is the hardest part." There are times when I show up for an assignment and the subject isn't ready or they are running late. They often apologize for the delay and my response is usually the same - "I've waited a lot longer for a lot less." My least productive waiting game since I've been at the Sentinel was in 1989 when television evangelist Jim Bakker was under investigation for fraud . He and his technicolor wife Tammy were evacuating from North Carolina and had plans to move to Orlando. One night, we had a tip that Jim was flying in to look at local real estate for a new church. About 8 p.m. I went to Orlando International Airport with a reporter and we went to every arrival gate that could have possibly originated from North Carolina.. We'd watch everyone get off the plane, then head to the next gate that had a promising origin. A little more than three hours later we were out of flights and went home never seeing Jim but seeing hundreds of confused tourists who wondered why there was a newspaper photographer greeting their flight. More typically, our assignments have a built-in waiting game. We try to arrive early and sometimes purposely dawdle and stay late in order to catch moments that other photographers might miss. The best photographers have a good measure of patience. For instance, it is not unusual to spend several hours, or even days, traveling for an assignment. I once left Orlando at 11:30 p.m. on a Thursday (after waiting two hours on the tarmac) and flew on an Antov cargo plane to New Foundland and then to London in time for dinner Friday night, having ate only power bars and bottled water that I'd brought with me. After a night in a hotel, we flew on the same cargo plane into Croatia. We were on the ground for only 7 hours before returning to London. I was back in Orlando and done with the assignment by 10 p.m. Sunday. I had been working for 72 hours and less than 10 percent of that time was available for shooting.
These days I sometimes wished I had more time to wait around. Throughout the newspaper industry, editors are wanting more and more work out of the photographers, requiring us to shoot faster and move on the next assignment. What we miss when we can't hang around is the unexpected photo or the photo that requires planning or one that might work better after we've schmoozed a security guard for awhile. A good is example is Jim Richardson, a Denver photographer who, 20 years ago, photographed a book called High School USA. In the book, there is a wonderful photo of a boy pulling himself up to a school bus window in order to kiss his girlfriend good bye. In the book's caption, Richardson wrote that sometimes, he thought that three years was a long time to spend photographing a school but that he'd wait just as long to see that same moment again. I just wished more of our editors saw the value of that time investment. Tom Burton October 9, 1998
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Tom
Burton
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Contributor
since 1998
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Behind
the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism |
