Wednesday, May 28
First day on the job and we have spot news - I am quite the lucky photographer, especially because spot news doesn't really happen in this quaint town. There was a bank robbery nearby, which I covered by bike (more detail on that fun can be found at fotofobe.blogspot.com).
The suspect ditched a bag of cash and a hat with hair attached in a bush close to the bank and was apprehended a few blocks from the bank. The suspect, who was from Florida, was not terribly smart, as the suspect robbed a bank approximately 6 blocks away from the city's police station.
It was a big day for the Columbia Police Department and nearly everyone seemed to show up at some point in the robbery's timeline. I am used to Boston cops and was fairly timid in my photography (plus, I was dragging my bike around with me) - I thought this photo went well with my fear of authority figures.
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Thursday, May 29
I enterprised both Wednesday and Thursday, but I don't have the Wednesday photos with me yet. Thursday, I was supposed to photograph some retirees playing Wii Bowling, but the event was cancelled due to lack of participation. I rode my bike around Stephen's Lake for a bit and found these kids fishing with their grandfather. I spent about an hour with them (regrettably, without sunscreen - the farmer's tan is in full effect on this photographer) and got some cool shots. I was chatting with the grandfather and we decided that our activities - fishing and photographer - were remarkably similar. Both required extreme patience, some strategy, a bit of luck and the award-winners were few and far between.
(Vignettes seemed appropriate, because the whole situation reminded me of moments in my own childhood.)
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Saturday, May 31
We're required to work two Saturdays over the course of the summer and I signed up for the first one so I could get one out of the way right off the bat. It was a long day - the rummage sale started at 6 a.m. and we were on-scene at 5:30 a.m. In the future, I need to do a better job of pretending to be awake and alert so I can get some better shots. I got a bit of a break until the carnival, but almost missed it. I was kind of dragging my feet in going (it was a day-long thing) until my obsession with local doppler radar pointed out that the event was about to fall victim to an intense thunderstorm. The carnival was only one block over and I shot for about 10 minutes before the fat raindrops started to fall. Later that evening, I shot a high school graduation, which proved surprisingly frustrating because I had to stay up high with the parents. I really liked the first shot here, with the two "tardy" boys running in to line up, but we couldn't run it because (1) the guy on the left is looking right at me and giving me a thumbs-up and (2) none of the teachers I found knew either of their names (it was a class of 551, so...that's understood). But that's why we have blogs these days! Also, several episodes of graduate volleyball broke out - I got an okay shot of that.
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Wednesday, June 4
Yesterday was a very typical day in the newspaper world. I covered the "State of the City" address, which was painfully boring and visually gross (TV cameras blocking everything, TV lighting casting shadows, etc), so I had to be creative and ultimately, had to keep myself entertained for the duration of the speech. The upshot, however, is that the media crowd in Columbia, Missouri, is significantly smaller than that of Boston, Massachusetts. Go figure. After that, I went to Stephen's College to do a portrait of the president, Wendy Libby. She was nice and easy to chat with and, it turns out, a fellow New Englander (Brooklyn, NY). I liked these two shots because they are fun and we were laughing about personal neuroses (she arranges the clothing in her closet by hue, I line up books on my shelves in descending (left to right) height.
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