I was mistaken in thinking that yesterday was a trial by fire… when I got to the Press today I got an email from my mentor saying that he was having flu-like symptoms and that he wouldn’t be coming in today! I slightly panicked. But looking at the schedule I relaxed a little because there was no photo requests yet. The other photographer that works at the Press came in not too long after me which was good because I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask her. First was, what do we do on a day where there aren’t any photo requests; she then reminded me about what they call at the paper “stand-alone” photos. She then told me about a great place to look for stand alone-shots, on the CDA Press website there is a calendar of events going on in the city and the surrounding areas. So we started looking there.

I found a few events that I wanted to go to and see if I could get some shots there, one was an event at the city library called Tales for Two’s and Three’s where there would be stories read to children and activities for them to do. Once I was done there I went next door to the news room where there is construction being done on a new building for everyone. The boss wanted us photographers to get some photos and video to document the construction because when it is all done and they move in he wants to run a special about it.

Next I went to another event that I found on the calendar of events, a senior hula dancing class. Yes, I admit, there are a lot of assignments that aren’t very glamorous but I’ve got to tell you, these ladies were a riot! When I finished at the luau, I discovered that I had missed a text from the other photographer on staff asking me to go to an interview for a feature story with one of the reporters at 2pm, it was 1:59pm…Oi. So I rushed back to the news room to figure out where all of this was happening and thankfully it was just down the street. I didn’t get there too late so I didn’t need to worry, unlike most photo ops, feature stories usually just have a single portrait of the interviewee (at least in this paper). So that concluded my busy day. A great learning experience and also like yesterday and everyday full of prayers.

PS: Today was the day that the North Idaho Business Journal was published! This is another one of the many publications that the Coeur d’Alene Press operates and about two weeks ago I second shot with my mentor on a story about the Litehouse Foods company. That was my first big publish.