 Welcome to another episode of Deconstructing Photography. Today, we're talking the art of wild art. So today, I thought we'd talk a little bit about local photojournalism. In other words, newspaper photography, news, sports. And you might be thinking, wild art photography, what's that? That was a term we used in the newsroom for a photo that was a feature photo, an image that was kind of like a standalone or filler. Maybe something that didn't go with any particular story. Or just kind of an interesting community photo. I'm not sure that's an official name. That's just what we've always called those kind of photos, wild art. We're not talking nature photography here, but it could be. What kind of photos would be wild art? What kind of subject matter? That's really pretty wide open. Anything that's an interesting photo. Somebody doing something interesting in the community. Something that depicts everyday life. The newspapers I worked for were either a city paper or a county wide paper. And it would just be images that kind of showed something special about the community or the area that the people lived in. It could be wildlife. This photograph of three raccoons in a tree was made in my backyard before going to work one morning. Or this image of an eagle coming in for landing. This was made in between assignments going from one assignment to another. I know our viewers really appreciated it when we took a wildlife photo and put it in the paper. Anything that would show the weather is always a good option for wild art. So you go out and you find somebody doing something that you could put a weather story around. How it's 100 degrees out. Somebody doing something in the water to cool off. In the area that I live, flooding is kind of a problem in some of the roads. And so over time you kind of get used to knowing where all the flooded areas are in your community, in your area. And when the water is high, you just make that part of your route when you're looking for wild art. Or the aftermath of a storm cleaning up the debris. So where do you find wild art? I always had kind of like my favorite places. Just depending on the year, the time of year, the season. If it was summer, I might head down to the river, see what's going on. Places like parks, skate parks. They've always been a good one for me. I always got decent photos in places like that. Maybe the fairs in town. And you might just want to go and walk around the fairgrounds and see if you can find something that might make a nice photograph with a little cut line underneath. There might be a landmark that you can use in a photograph in some way that could be interesting as a photograph that people would recognize and you show it to them in a different way. You might want to keep in mind what kind of constructions going on in the area. Are they building new roads or a bridge or something? That was always something I kept in the back of my mind. Why would you need wild art? Why do you need these photos? Often when we're working on a story, and let's say the story falls through, the editor will stroll over to my desk and say, hey, you got something that we can put on page one today. I really didn't like it when that happened. And there will be times where actually myself or the other photographer would have something we'd just kind of set aside just in case something happened and we needed some art for one of the pages. And these photos would come about sometimes when you're looking for them and then sometimes they come about just going to an assignment or on the way back from an assignment. On the way to the office, you might come across an interesting scene or subject matter. One of the real challenges of doing that kind of photography, especially when it involves people or a person, is after you've made your photograph, approaching that person and getting their personal information, asking them their name, where they're from, telling them what you were doing, why you took their photograph, and if they would mind being in the newspaper. You never get used to approaching people like that in public. I don't miss that. I don't do that anymore. I didn't really enjoy it at the time. But you just bite the bullet and do it because that's part of the job. Now, I don't know if newspapers still rely a lot on wild art. I suspect on a slow news day they do. We kind of had a rule that we generally ran local art on the front page. We didn't use wire photos unless it was a really important big story. As our lead photo, I was really fortunate to work for a newspaper that valued good photography. Our editors knew that the photograph is what really would get people to look at the paper. When they laid out the pages, they laid out the pages around the photographs. They didn't lay out the stories and then squeeze in the photos. They actually laid the photos out and then put the stories around them. It was pretty cool to have such an impact on what people saw on a daily basis. I enjoyed this little glimpse into the newspaper photography business. This is just one type, one aspect of the photography. I think I will go ahead and add more to this deconstructing photography series with the topic of news photography. Some of the elements that might be of interest, the types of photos that you might take. And today we just focused on the lighter side, the art side. So I'm going to end today's video right here. Until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.