What it's really like

After three assignments and an eight-hour workday, I was given an assignment to photograph Christmas lights for the Arizona Daily Star's metro centerpiece for Thanksgiving. I thought it was going to be an amazing array of colorful lights, Santa Clauses, snow machines, little things operated by batteries. But nooo, it was a plain house with way too many white lights covering way too many cacti in someones front yard. “So now how do I get a metro centerpiece out of this?” I thought.

So much of what we do as newspaper photographers is to solve problems. There are so many times a day I run into a situation like this, I wonder "how am I going to get through this one?" I showed up earlier at a fabric store with a list of seven fabrics for a Home Cover shoot. The woman looks at me and asks, "so what are you going to shoot?" Like I have any idea! Fabric? Fuck if I know how to make a beautiful, exciting, front page worthy photograph of fabric. It’s a feeling like driving up to this dark ally to shoot bland white Christmas lights for the metro centerpiece.

And as I painted light on the cactus with my 550ex flash, and allowing my shutter to stay open for thirty seconds, I knew I had gotten myself through another assignment. This is what I did: