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LEAVING THE CUBICLE
February 2006- Los Angeles, CA
Joyce Lin
Senior staff photographer/UCLA Daily Bruin/Los Angeles, CA
I pop out of bed at 7 AM,
do some morning exercises, spruce up, plan for the day, stuff an orange
in my mouth, and then bike down to Kinross,
my art building. I don’t emerge from Kinross until 5 PM, when
I wearily pedal back up to main campus to edit, pull wire, and caption
photos until around 10 PM as the Assistant Photo Editor of my campus
newspaper, the Daily Bruin. Back at my apartment, I try to finish the
day’s work and leftover work from the previous day, finally
falling asleep on the floor, crawling into bed around 3 AM, exhausted
.
All that ended 2 weeks ago. I quit my editing position of 5 months,
coming to terms with just how much I hated it. Quitting the job gave
me my life back. Instead of rushing to the office after class every
night, I could hangout with friends, exercise, catch up on work;
even get some needed rest.
Working as an editor helped me better appreciate my old editors
and understand their actions and attitudes. I remember being bitter
whenever
they didn’t take the time to go through my shoot and just wordlessly
accepted my photos or bluntly and brutally put me down for the bad photos.
Well, as I learned, editing is a highly stressful and busy job. The
work never ends. I rarely left a night of work without getting a phone
call to “come back! We have something more!” seconds after
stepping out of the building.
I originally signed on for the job to learn more about photo editing
and the newsroom itself. Little did I know that I would spend so
much time and energy in the photo cubicle, jealously watching other
photographers
trooping in and out on shoots as I just sat there lamely handing
out and advising on equipment, then unhappily editing and captioning
others’ shoots
afterwards, rarely photographing myself. The work was never-ending and
unrewarding: pulling wire photos, dealing with disgruntled editors from
other sections constantly shrieking, “deadline! Deadline!” as
I’m trying to do work… most painful of all pulling file
photos, sometimes searching for hours for the one perfect photo of an
obscure person, especially athletes, who aren’t photographed
much.
I think I learned a lot, not as much as I would’ve liked, but
enough to know that I can never become an editor or work a nine-to-five
desk job; I’d go insane with boredom and cabin fever. Staying
in the photo cubicle for such long hours and under such negative
conditions really turned me off to the whole newsroom. I dreaded
going to work
and avoided the newsroom as much as possible, which is a total
change from how I started as a newspaper photographer, hanging out
in the
newsroom every free moment.
Photo-editing for the paper is usually a quick twiddling of levels,
curves, color balance, some cursory dodging and burning, and then
cropping and sharpening, finally converting to CYMK, RGB and black
and white.
I usually rushed through the editing process, dealing with the
rest of the newsroom as little as I could, engrossed in pulling file
photos
as quickly as possible just so I could get out of the windowless
horridity and go home to finish my other work… and maybe sleep.
The past few weeks have been amazing. I’m unemployed again,
and it’s a wonderfully free feeling, albeit a little empty.
Some new experiences include rock walling in our gym, midnight
biking for 55 miles with a group of 1000 bikers, hiking at 2 AM
above the
405 freeway, Greek dancing, etc. Most importantly, my photography
is on the upswing again. I discovered that part of the reason my
photography was in a slump was because I was too worn out by the
end of each day to shoot, and the mixture of too many classes and
the editing work gave me no time to shoot at all. Nowadays, after
class, instead of rushing off to the office, I can stop and think:
what do I want to do now? Bike to the beach? Read a book? Make
some photos?
You never realize just how wonderful unemployment is until you
get a job, lose your free time, and have to work with a set schedule.
I get four more months of parental monetary support and allowable
unemployment as a student before I’m booted into the harsh
real world, penniless and desperate for a job, with useless diploma
in hand and heavy camera around my neck. So, I’m enjoying life
right now, literally trying everything possible, and savoring the
post-lecture question-to-self, “What now?”
Anyeverything.
Joyce Lin
jazamoo@gmail.com
http://www.joyce-lin.blogspot.com
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