You know that photo on the front page of the newspaper? Sometimes this is how it comes together…
The assignment: The busiest of Utah’s state-owned liquor stores.
Time of shoot: 10:30am on a Tuesday. I’m wondering, are people buying a lot of booze early Tuesday morning?
I walk in and introduce myself. The clerks go, “This isn’t the busiest store!” I look around and sure enough, the large store is empty.
Concerned, I call in. An editor: Don’t worry about the busiest store angle. The story’s about a report on liquor sales. You’ve got time to work it. It’s for the front page.
The phone in the store rings ten minutes later. It’s someone from the newspaper calling to let them know that a photographer would be coming in this morning. We all laugh.
One of the clerks won’t be photographed so I’m down to one subject. I start following her around working every angle I can think of. As often happens when I show up somewhere to photograph
busy, it’s eerily slow. She says, “It’s usually busier than this.”
The office calls. Something has come up and they need me downtown pretty soon.
Since this one was for the front page and there wasn’t much to work with I send in eleven shots. Way more than normal.
The story goes live on our website with five of the eleven photos in an automatically-generated photo gallery.
No one at the paper notices that all five photos in the gallery show the same clerk stocking the shelves. Only the angles are different.
A reader left this hilarious comment:
And another:
By the time those comments appear on our site I’ve already been rushed through two other assignments. More and more that’s the way it is.
