On Patience

Over at the New York Times’ Lens blog, Kerri MacDonald has a short interview up with Jared Soares where he talks about the impact of one of my favorite images by Sam Abell.

I remember studying that photo for hours. I would look at that photo, then I would run off to a country fair and I would try to find a scene and wait for everything to develop. Just try to be more patient.

It really is about patience. It’s not just getting there, it’s getting there and waiting sometimes for the story to unfold in front of you.

Hmm … reading this post, where Soares talks about how the assignment work at his old newspaper wasn’t giving him the opportunity to make the images he wanted to, and thinking about that Joe McNally post earlier today about the time investment made at places like National Geographic offers a nice contrast.

Is one a better approach? Absolutely not.

Just as there are multiple ways to shoot a photo, there are multiple ways to approach shooting it and multiple ways a story needs to be told. The daily news organizations have a responsibility to their readers to tell them what’s happening now in their community. (As opposed to what happened yesterday, like printed newspapers do, or last week or month, as a magazine does.)

It’s the difference between shooting issues and shooting events. They overlap, but they have different purposes. And that is okay.