Endangered species list: Newspaper staff photographer

Special corner of hell for the newsroom managers who want to fire their full-time shooters.

 

^^^

 

Several of our photographers over the years have done weddings as a side business. When I got married seven years ago, I asked one of them how much he'd charge to shoot our wedding. Figured the answer would be somewhere between $300 and $500.
He said $900, for a basic package.
We were friends, so I asked how much for the friendship rate, and he said, "That IS the friendship rate."
A lot of photographers can probably make $2,000 or $3,000 for a wedding pretty easily. It's a lot of work to shoot one well, but DAMN.

 

A friend who has managed to hold on to his gig at the local rag, shoots weddings and several years ago, told me he made an extra $20K a year doing it. He said he averaged 1-2 a month.

 

Bingo. The cash they make for one hellish weekend is great.

 

At a previous gig, I served as photo editor and de facto chief photographer for about a year. I wasn't Iooss or anybody but a couple things I shot picked up some regional awards.

At a more recent stop, when the honchos laid off all the staff shooters and started telling the writers to shoot pics too, I made sure when I did the pictures were the dullest dumbshit staged head shot slabs of shit I could come up with.

No higher-up ever told me any of the photos were bad, although plenty of them were. The honchos were happy as long as there was some kind of image. Blurrry, out of focus, etc etc, they didn't care.

 

We have one shooter and a freelancer who's better than our staff photographer, but he has his own business and we can only afford to use him but so much (we did get to use him for our player-of-the-year shots we did). Our staffer is competent but unenthusiastic at best on most sports assignments.

Though I came into my current situation having to shoot a lot, I was told I wouldn't be taking photos except on an emergency basis. Well, that's getting close to being a daily emergency.

News has priority over our staff photographer, to the point that in a championship tournament game I was covering that went extras, the news editor calls him back into the office 2 hours before deadline. Fortunately for me, because I have a backpack with me that has all electronics I need (Chromebook, smartphone, iPad, camera), batteries, battery packs, notebooks, pens, the works, that I could whip out my DSLR while I was tweeting and tracking the game to get a celebration shot, do my interviews and file my story from my car to get it in on our 10 p.m. deadline.

Our photographer, by the way, would have still had time to get back and get his news shots in, and get the sports shots in, but we have no pull on him. Having had experience taking my own photos having worked at weeklies, I'm comfortable working a camera, but I don't have the gear for night and poorly lit indoor games, so when I have to shoot under those circumstances, you can tell, though I can usually frame a shot well. I'm saving for better gear on my own, because our paper won't pay for any upgrades to anything, not even for said staff photographer who's using outdated staff camera equipment.

It is only getting worse. I've used my smartphone in a pinch for front page centerpiece shots (used one at a district track meet recently when I had left my DSLR in the car actually believing our photographer was going to be able to stay; he had to leave after half-an-hour for a last-minute news assignment). While my phone has a 13 MP camera on it, it's not designed for fast-paced action shots either. But on some days, if I didn't at least have a clue how to shoot or get something usable, we would be scrambling big time for photos for our stories, which at least on the fronts are almost all local all week long.

 

It's gotten to the point here that our publisher told me after basketball season that I'm not allowed to use my freelancer again until football season. I hope we can use him after that, because our equipment is nowhere near good enough to shoot even a half-ass image of a football game once the sun goes down.

What makes it worse is that the publisher is all about photos. So reporters are having to go take pictures of everything and take hundreds of them so that sometime later in the week, they can use six or eight of them for a photo page.

Last year, I went on my mid-summer vacation. My roommate texted me and said that one of the sports pages that week was a photo page of a Rural Podunk softball game ... from April.

 

Seems like a lot, but when you consider that they're probably the most important photos of a person's life, it makes sense. Cleaning out some of my grandparents' stuff from the house I now live in a few weeks ago, we found some of their wedding photos, and we found some of their parents' and grandparents' wedding photos. The latter are probably 100 years old.

Fixed.