I have a job. Kind of. If you apply the absolute loosest interpretation… the publisher / owner of the local weekly, community paper, has asked me to be their ‘in-town’ freelance photographer.
That was a few weeks ago, and no one has sent me an information package regarding rates, and I have yet to take part in a news meeting, but at least someone was kind enough to ask if they could pay me for my photos… it kind of made my insides all tingly for a couple of days.
I even received my first assignment on the first day of 2013. It was noon, and I was laying in bed recovering from a bout of bronchitis and the flu, when the publisher called me to let me know the VKH volunteer firefighters had been called to one of our heritage buildings.
It turned out to be some burnt toast and a loud smoke detector, but it was exciting for about twenty minutes.
I’ve been donating my photos to the paper for a few years now… they’ve published most of them. In fact, they published this one as well… albeit in exactly the wrong place, and at the wrong size, in their latest issue.
But no one is paying me to decide photo placement in their paper.
…anyway. I don’t know the old guy, but he was definitely taking a chance being out with no gloves or boots on. I ran around Main Street for about an hour basically looking for this shot. I’m using the 20x optical zoom, and I meant to frame the shot exactly how it appears.
I have a version where I lightened everything by almost two full stops, and it actually looks better. But I like the grey too much.
Vankleek Hill Photo Club 
Congratulations and I hope this is a starting point for you to go on to bigger things! And I have to tell you, as soon as I seen the picture I actually started shivering! Brrr!!!
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Cool pic, nice composition. Do you shoot raw? I’m just starting to explore that, and having fun with playing with levels and such.
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Thank you, and you’re damn right. I do not shoot ‘RAW’, I actually had to look that up, and it just confirms my former suspicions that we’re all fucked. So thanks for that.
I try to shoot as naturally as possible, so I do my cropping in the viewfinder, and I’ll make a few adjustments in the camera — stuff like exposure settings, or using the automatic settings. But I try to stay away from using PhotoShop to enhance photos. All of that out of the way, stuff like ‘RAW photography’ scares me because it means the introduction of new file formats.
JPEG / JPG is a horrible, horrible format for storing images, but I have more than 12,000 (of my own) images stored on my hard drive as JPG flies. When the inevitable happens, and there’s a new standard, I’m going to have to convert everything to the new standard. So the more people using ‘RAW photography’ — which is (I think) based on the TIFF format, the more likely the standard will change.
I just want JPEG to last until after I’m dead. That’s all.
Thanks for the comment, Alan, even if it did bum me out a little.
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