Posted on: Sunday, February 6, 2005
AFTER DEADLINE
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By Anne Harpham
Adveriser Senior Editor
Every day, The Advertiser's staff of seven photographers crisscrosses O'ahu in response to breaking news and on assignment.
On an average morning, some 15 to 20 of their photos will appear in the pages of your daily Advertiser.
Movies may portray a photographer's job as a lot of running to assignments and snapping some quick shots.
The reality is far from that.
Getting a photo that is visually appealing, conveys information, has impact and is well composed requires patience, quick thinking, hard work and news judgment.
Photographers sometimes will tell you that they got lucky when they got that perfect shot. And occasionally that may be true. But that luck is almost always the result of thinking through assignments, planning and reacting to events. Few good photos are just stumbled across.
A number of readers commented on a beautiful Jan. 26 Page One photo taken by Bruce Asato showing a whale frolicking offshore of Sunset Beach as a surfer caught a wave.
Don't be lulled into thinking Asato chanced into the photo.
Asato had been in Kahuku that morning for an assignment that didn't pan out. The photo desk asked him to head up to the North Shore because waves were expected to reach 20 to 25 feet.
He first stopped at Sunset Beach to check on waves, which did not look as high as had been forecast. So he waited for them to rise. After a half-hour and no change in the waves, he loaded his cameras into the car to head to another beach. At that point, he saw a whale breach.
The light bulb went off, as Asato put it, and he hauled all of his camera equipment back out of the car and stayed to get a shot of whales. He waited another half-hour but the whales were either camera-shy or just being coy.
So Asato again loaded all his camera equipment in the car. At that point, a whale came up again. So once again, Asato hauled his cameras back out of the car and waited some more. As he saw whales spouting he also saw the surfers. He positioned himself on the beach so he could get surfers and whales in the same shot and waited. A whale breached again and Asato started to shoot. He figured he had a shot but said it wasn't until he saw the frame on a computer screen back in the newsroom that he realized how far away the whale had been.
In all, Asato spent about an hour and a half getting his perfect shot.
For photographer Deborah Booker, a Jan. 27 assignment at a fire at a Makiki apartment building required speed for the initial shots and then some planning to get a photo that gave readers a perspective of the scale of the damage.
Booker got to the midday fire in time to get shots of flames still shooting from the building.
For some photographers, that might have been enough.
But, after the fire had been extinguished, Booker took the extra step of shooting a photo of the burned building from a nearby high-rise looking straight across to the burned units. That gave a bird's-eye view of the damage with the perspective of the fire trucks in the street below.
What made that photo work, said photo editor Seth Jones, is that it showed not just the event but a sense of place.
It is ingrained in photojournalists to look for news angles and unusual photos, but it is the extra effort to provide context and to look beyond the obvious that sets some photos above the rest.
Senior editor Anne Harpham is The Advertiser's reader representative. Reach her at aharpham@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8033.
