A lot of people can take good pictures. Better pictures come when you recognize a great opportunity, plan for something, or wait for something to happen that makes an extraordinary image.
All those things also go into making a good newspaper photo. But there is “something” else. It comes from years of photographing ground-breakings, ribbon cuttings and press conferences. And high school basketball practice, and people in offices or in their living rooms who say "What do you want me to do?” It is far more common that we don’t have time to plan, don’t have the option of waiting, or are headed to another assignment when we serendipitously stumble across something else - and can’t stop to see what develops. That’s when experience comes into play.
Like when a story falls through and the newspaper needs to fill a hole on a page and you’re told to get a “piece of weather art.” That assignment usually comes right on deadline, and always when you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time (plus, it’s really irksome that editors call our work “art,” when everything else in the paper is “journalism.”)
What do you do with you do when you get the request to “find a weather photo?” And it’s already dark out.
My colleague Charles Fox and I got that last minute, deadline assignment one night recently. He was in Philadelphia, I was in New Jersey, but we both independently knew we had to find some “light.” He headed toward the illuminated public art installed a few years ago in the once-dark tunnel under I-95 and the entrance to the elevated SEPTA Spring Garden Station.
I headed to a skating rink in Cherry Hill. I had photographed the WinterFest ice skating rink at Cooper River Park after it moved a mile up the river this year from Pennsauken to Cherry Hill, and remembered it had lights in the trees, and neon-colored lighting banks all around the ice. That’s the photo at the top (a slow shutter speed and panning with the skater helped).
We both work a night shift and that often actually helps sometimes. Again, we both recently also shot an exterior assignment - he a suburban hospital and me, the installation of a public sculpture. And Again, coincidentally and independently, we both shot the assignment in daylight, but after shooting other assignments nearby, we both ended up returning to reshoot them during twilight.