WHAT'S
IT ALL ABOUT?
by Dick Kraus
Newsday Staff Photographer (Retired)
Since I
retired from my job as a Staff Photographer for Newsday in 2002,
I have enjoyed reliving my experiences as a newspaper photographer
by "singing for my supper" so to speak. I give illustrated
lectures aboard cruise ships, as well as other venues. I have
also been sharing these trips down Memory Lane with you on The
Digital Journalist. It's fun. It keeps me aware of how fortunate
I was to have had a forty-two year career that I loved. And,
it's a huge ego trip for me.
But, let's
do some math. Adding up all the five day weeks and deducting
an average of four weeks a year for vacations and deducting the
five paid holidays per year, it would
come to 9,870 days. OK, there was lots of overtime, and there
were personal days off and sick days, but, let's use that figure
of 9, 870 days as the total days that I came to work at Newsday
in 42 years..I just said, in the last graph, that I loved my
career. Did I love all 9,870 days?
Actually,
yes.
However,
some
days I loved less than others. Those were the days where I ended
up
pretty much just shooting "head shots and real estate." This
was a term we used for the endless amount of plain and simple
head and shoulder pictures of people for The Business Page, The
Sports Page, The Society Page, The Education Page, The Political
Page, and on and on. So many times, all that we were required
to do was to get a simple "head shot" of some politician,
businessman, school teacher, baseball player, debutant, show
biz celebrity
and so on ad nauseum. Or else it was "Get a shot of a fire
damaged house for a News Page, or a new house for The Real Estate
Page,
or the new supermarket that was opening for the Business Page,
and on and on ad nauseum.
For
every one of these celebrity headshots that I took...
Boring!
Yes. You could try to get an unusual angle or try a different
perspective or gussy it up with some clever lighting. But,
it was still "head shots and real estate."
There
were many times when I photographed a head and shoulder of some
celebrity
and
I would enjoy listening to the interview as I shot. There
were also times when I would be photographing an "unknown" but
that person might have an interesting story to tell.
I
loved being a newspaper photographer because the potential
for something
interesting and dynamic was always present.
Then
there were those days when the potential of which
I just spoke, happened. You might be in the middle of
a "head
shots and real estate" assignment when you
would be summoned to cover some major, breaking
story.
Those happened
often enough to make up for the boring days. Those are
the assignments
that I usually recount here, on The Digital Journalist
and tell aboard cruise ships. I usually tell my audiences
that Newspaper Photography is 90% boredom and tedium and
10% excitement and glamour. But the 10% makes up for all
the rest.
Avianca plane
crash, Oyster Bay Cove, Long Island, NY.
I certainly
don't mean to demean the importance of anyone's work, but, if
you had your
druthers, would you druther do what I did or flip burgers or
work in an office or something like that?
I
averaged about three assignments a day. That would make
it about 29,610 over my 42 years. There were thousands
upon
thousands upon thousands of "head shots and real estate."That's
a load of boring. I didn't even mention the amount of down
time involved in almost every day. While there were times
when you could scarcely catch a breath as one assignment
after another came your way, more often than not you would
have an hour or more between jobs. I would never complain
about those days. I'd look for some kind of floater shot
(that's a picture without a story that could run anywhere
in the paper at any given time.) Or, I'd park under a shady
tree and read a book. I figured that it was payback for
those days when the Assignment Desk ran my sorry butt from
one
end of Long Island to the other.
FLOATERS
Northport Harbor is iced over
on a cold Winter day.
Needless
to say, I don't talk about the "head shots and real
estate" assignments or how many chapters in my novel
that I read, when I write these journals or speak aboard
cruise ships.
I wait, along
with NY Post Photographer Mary McLoughlin, outside Nassau
County Courthouse, for a verdict to come in.
I do mention these
things in passing in order to dispel the notion that many
people outside of the industry have, that news people are
always chasing disasters or flying off on Air Force One to
some exotic assignment.
I wait and
wait some more for President Clinton to arrive to lay a
wreath at the American Cemetery in Normandy, France on the 50th
Anniversary of D-Day.
I have no
idea what I was waiting for, or where, but, it was some kind
of press conference, somewhere.
If
you have labored in the news business for any time, you know
this simply isn't the case.
