Spot News Sunday

A couple Sundays ago was my last Sunday on that shift rotation. I'd heard for some time that Sundays can get hairy with breaking news and as the only photographer on duty, that prospect left me excited and nervous simultaneously. After seven weeks of boring Sundays, it finally hit the fan when a body was found in the river at the same time a house in Benton City caught fire.

It's weird to be thinking of aesthetics when covering a house fire. The trees and the light clouds in the sky made this house seem like it was so picturesque before it burned. I tried working the scenery to accent the sense of loss in the absence of emotional homeowners.

From there, I hustled back to a park in Richland in the hopes I'd get to cover the body recovery. That haste (and the speeding ticket risk that came with it) turned into a hurry-up-and-wait situation. Camping out on the opposite bank was as close as I could get to the crews waiting by the body, which had gotten stuck on an island. I put a 300/2.8 with a 1.4x teleconverter on my 30D, effectively having a 672mm lens and the resulting images is still substantially cropped. After 45 minutes of waiting and tiring out my left arm and wrist, they finally worked out the jurisdictional logistics and I got a serviceable shot. Still, I was glad to have heard both of these come over the scanner and still made it to the Fever football game with a quarter and a half left.

Don't mistake my excitement for sadism, however. It's not that I want bad things to happen.

I just want to be ready to cover them when they inevitably do.