When I respected myself because of my job...

Kris from Bulgaria told Sara I needed to update.
Kris, thanks for the reminder. This one's for you. =)

Kris, I don't know you and I may never meet you.
But I know we speak the same language. We shoot
because we have to.

Back when I was a photojournalist, I got paid (crap) to take photos. That's a pretty common practice around here. You go to school for photojournalism, probably paying upwards of $120,000 for your education, then you run off with your diploma and make $10/hour at a crappy paper, if you're one of the lucky ones.

After I interviewed at The New Britain Herald I cried for hours. I knew was I going to be offered the job, but I knew the paper was dying and it was going to take me down with it. An editor quit on my 5th day on the job. Then a day later the editor of the whole paper decided to stop coming to work. I had no idea who my boss was, or what I was supposed to be doing. It was like that for two years.

More often than not, my assignments were the usual hand shake shot of people congratulating themselves for giving money, or doing something good for the world. Those assignments made pieces of me die. It just seemed too obvious. Very rarely did I get awesome assignments.

Before I quit I made a list of a handful of images I wanted to take. One of them was the underwater shot. At the Herald, where I worked for 2 years as a staff photographer, we had to make our own assignments each day to fill town pages. Usually I would get pissed off because the reporters didn't do their jobs. If they were writing a story, they were supposed to give me a photo assignment. When they didn't, I would have to drive around until I found something interesting. It wasn't until I gave my two weeks notice that I realized how cool an opportunity of "shooting enterprise" really was. There were a ton of town pools in our coverage area, so I figured to start there. Finally one of the towns agreed to let me swim with my camera in a pool loaded with little ones. It only took a week to convince people that I wasn't a creepy perv looking to steal kids from pools.

The shark boy swimming shot was picked up by the Associated Press wire and subsequently
bought by Italy's Vanity Fair. That was pretty cool. A lady with a thick Italian accent called me at work one day to ask to buy the photo for the magazine's weird science section. I thought it was one of my relatives playing a joke on me. =) I told her I'd call her back after I thought about it. As if there was much to think about...