Slightly out of focus

Photography is both an art and a skill. You need to master the technical elements of a camera but you also need to have an eye for composing a good shot and the willingness to put yourself out there to get it. After 35 years in journalism, I’d like to think my photography skills have improved. Maybe that’s just a polite way of saying they couldn’t get worse.

I didn’t take photography classes in college because I intended to get a job writing. This was not an unreasonable career approach because back then, newspapers often sent a photographer out with a reporter. Reporters weren’t expected to take pictures and photographers weren’t expected to write stories. Unless you got hired by a small-town weekly paper where everyone did everything with varying degrees of competency.

I do not think of myself as a photographer. I am a writer who also takes pictures. My photography skills have been self-taught. This translates to “took a lot of out of focus, under exposed, over exposed, poorly composed, badly-timed pictures.” Let’s call it on the job training.

The advent of digital photography A) eliminated a lot of those problems and B) allowed me to take hundreds of photos at every event I covered, meaning there were bound to be at least one or two good shots in the bunch.

Before digital, when we all shot with film cameras, film was not something to be squandered. Black and white film was bought in bulk and rolled in 12 or 24 exposures for staff use. General news was shot with 12 exposure rolls because it needed to be developed in a timely fashion, not sit in the camera waiting days for another news event to finish off the roll. Twenty-four roll exposures were for big events where you knew you’d take a lot of pictures and didn’t want to stop and reload the camera every 12 shots.

You weren’t a tried and true photojournalist until you shot an event without loading film in the camera or opened the back of the camera before you’d rewound the film. Learning by doing, remember? Do it once and it’ll never happen again. The modern equivalent is forgetting to put a memory card in your camera but even at that, the system will notify you of its absence before you take 200 shots at a community celebration.

With the advent of cellphones, suddenly everyone’s a photographer. When I started at the newspapers, only a limited number of people had “fancy cameras” and when you walked into a school event or the county fair, people took a step back and said, “Oooooh, the newspaper is here.”

I still laugh at the assumption that possessing a “fancy camera” meant you can automatically take good pictures. For quite some time (and occasionally still) I was living proof that was not the case.

I’ve done my share of news photography, check-passing pictures (grip and grins, we called them), home decorating shots for special sections, kids and animals at county fairs, parades and the occasional house fire or car wreck. I dabbled in sports just enough to know neither my reflexes nor my camera equipment was up the job.

I love nature and weather photography, too. Foggy sunrises, autumn sunsets, and summer thunderstorms have carried more than one slow news week. I’ve captured wall clouds and funnel clouds but to date, no actual tornado. While I’d love to catch a tornado picture, that basically means unless I go on a storm chasing tour on the Great Plains, a tornado would need to touch down somewhere in the vicinity of our house and I have rather strong feelings about that not happening.

Comments: Melinda.Wichmann@southeastiowaunion.com