Here is a story that I shot, which ran in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

Soldier Finds Minefield on Road to Citizenship

I thought you might be curious about how assignments like this work. Here's a quick play-by-play of a freelance job and then post some outtakes.

The call (or email)

One of the photo editors of the paper emails and says, "We have this story, can you shoot it?" Unless, I'm out of town or in the hospital the answer is always "yes!" If I don't shoot it, someone else will. The photo editor is your lifeline to the paper and there is a tremendous amount of trust between a photographer and a photo editor. As a photographer you must trust the editor to give you the information you need for the story and trust that the photos he or she selects will tell the story in the best way. A good photo editor understands their reader and the culture of their publication much better than you can hope to. You will inevitably send them photos, which you think are Pulitzer-worthy that they don't run. You need to trust their judgement. The editor, on the other hand, needs to trust that they can send you off with a deadline and almost no control over your choices and that you will represent their organization in a professional manner and return with high quality images that tell the story. In many stories there are no reshoots, so the editor needs to believe that you can get the shot on the first try. These days, especially in news outlets, they also need to trust that you understand journalistic ethics, their photo guidelines, and are completely above board when it comes to manipulating images. You are the only one who knows what happens between shooting and filing; a lapse of judgement here is career-killing.

The assignment

The large news outlets like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have automated assignment systems that keep track of assignments, invoicing, deadlines, etc. When you are assigned a story you get an automated email with details like the assignment ID, the story slug, contact information of subjects, the agreed pay rate and expense allowances, as well as very brief outline of the story. Sometimes if you are lucky, the story is already drafted and they'll send the complete text. It will also have very detailed filing instructions, which must be be followed exactly. That's it, the rest is up to you.

Shooting

In this piece the original assignment was to cover the story before the outcome of Mr. Lopez's case was known. He found himself discharged from the military, unable to legally work, and uncertain of his immigration status. A real predicament and interesting story, but one with no action to shoot—nothing is actually happening. I talked about this in the original communication with the photo editor and we decided that a simple environmental portrait would work if we could link it to the story. The biggest challenge turned out to be a finding a way to visually connect him with his past military service. He didn't have access to anything like a uniform or medals that communicated military service and I didn't know this until I arrived. This is a problem — my job as I see it is to visually tell the story, even if it's in only one image, and Mr. Lopez's military service is the single most important fact in this story. So I asked him to look around for something, anything, that spoke of his service and he came up with some old dog tags and a military photo of himself in uniform which was just enough to fill the gap.

Filing the images

Once the images are selected they need to be tagged with the appropriate metadata. Setting up a metadata preset and using Lightroom's 'Sync Metadata' command will save you a lot of time and help avoid errors. The two most important pieces of metadata are the caption and the assignment ID. Newspapers like captions to be in AP style with basic facts including names, which you've hopefully been scribbling down along the way. The assignment ID is what connects your images to the story. A large news organization has photographers filing images all the time from all over the world in a constant stream of data. They have systems which sort through all the images and associate them with the appropriate story. It also alerts the photo editor when a photographer has filed images for one of their stories. All of this depends on the assignment ID being in the correct metadata header. If you forget it, the whole system breaks down and everyone suddenly has a lot of extra work to do. And it will probably take you longer to get paid because in some systems invoicing is automated with the assignment ID. After you've triple-checked the captions and assignment ID you file the images—generally high resolution jpegs—via FTP.

Bask in the glory of your name in print

Your work is done—you're well on you way to fame and somewhat less poverty. Except in this case the story didn't run. Two weeks later I get a note from my photo editor saying that Mr. Lopez was to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen the next day and they would like to cover it as part of the story. The story now had an ending. Back to step one. This time, though there was an event to cover, an action. There was also a tight deadline—they were running the story the next morning and were hoping to have these images for the late edition. One of the challenges of living in Alaska is that a perfectly reasonable east coast deadline falls right in the middle of our day. Since papers often run stories on the web the night before it is on the stands, the story was already running on the web while I was FTPing the new images for the late edition.

Some outtakes: