While taking photos at a life celebrating experience – a baptism – I got a call from my editor talking about an accident that happened early in the morning at a nearby town. It was a huge accident, and as such become a huge story in our coverage area.
These are the kinds of events that make my job pretty difficult, but I also think pretty important.
After going to the accident scene early in the morning and finding only construction crews fixing damaged power lines I returned in the afternoon to find a memorial with students surrounding it, mourning for their friends. I was really nervous to start taking pictures, but it was an important story to tell. After going up to them and just talking to them for a little bit one of the kids told me to start taking photos, so I did. One of the girls even stopped to talk to me about how she wanted to be a photographer, which I found bizarre in such a tragic situation, but was also happy that it seemed like she had respect for what I was doing…when I feel at a place like this some people may have a hard time respecting it. I think its important and that’s the bottom line …but general acceptance never hurts. This ran on the front and on the cover of a bunch of weekly papers as well as in other area papers. Hopefully people will see what these kids had to go through and make smarter decisions because of it. If no one gets a reaction and learns anything from the picture then it serves no purpose.