While I was at WCIA, I had the opportunity to shoot and edit my own pieces wherever I found them. Usually I stumbled upon interesting people or situations, but in the first one, “The Woodcarver,” a producer gave me the phone number of the artist, who I later met at the forest preserve where he was doing his “carving.”
In the second piece, as I passed a school in the fall one day, I started thinking about how boring and tough a school photographer’s job must be. I wondered if there weren’t some characters out there who must have some tricks in their bags to shoot kids’ pictures day after day, year after year. After some phone calls, I found a great one. He couldn’t have been better, and he provided me with a “surprise” to reveal in the middle of the story.
The third example was truly a found one. I was returning from a story, having a hard time keeping the car on the road from the crosswinds on a state highway, when I saw a construction worker struggling to hold onto his sign. I called the desk, they said okay, and here it is. Doing these types of stories really gave me a sense of accomplishment; I felt like a true journalist, not just some guy schlepping a camera. I reported and let the person tell his or her own story as best as I could.