Perceptions at a tea party
UPDATE: I clarified some language here as I accidentally referred to the 2nd photo when I should have been referring to picture #1. It is now correct! -Mike
I spent last Saturday covering a tea party rally in Stafford. I expected that there would be a lot of signs and flag-waving as seen at every other tea party and I was not disappointed in that regard. I wanted to try and get an overall shot that didn’t misrepresent how many or how few people showed up. The reporter and I took an informal count and estimated 200-300 people. In order to get the overall I put a 14mm on the camera and held it above my head with a monopod and came up with these two frames. While it doesn’t show the entire crowd, many of whom were off to the side, at least it didn’t make it look like 10 people showed up.
Initially I preferred the first one; the guy was giving a speech called An Angry American, getting pretty worked up and gesturing a lot with his hands. We ended up running the second one, mostly because nearly every person I showed frame #1 to thought of a nazi salute. I wonder if that is because of their own feelings about this political movement or if it really does look like that? I was concerned that using the first picture would be considered unfair or at least editorializing if readers saw the same thing. The idea of objectivity (and that discussion is worth an entire post on its own!) is drilled into your head in the newspaper world but I wonder if I went too far in the other direction and sanitized what actually was going on there out of some kind of political correctness. Was I unnecessarily concerned about this? Am I overthinking this? Which one would you have published?
Looking Back on 2009
Here is a quick slideshow of some of my pictures from 2009. For lack of a better term I’ve titled them my best but that may not be totally accurate nor would calling them my favorites. I suppose when I think of my experiences in 2009, at least as far as the paper goes, these pictures come to mind.
