Last week I shot a fire that broke out in an abandoned house a few blocks from the paper. No one was living in the house at the time it caught fire, and no one was injured. We had space for one photo so I chose the more conservative shot of firefighters doing their job.
I was thinking about this today and questioning my decision. The men in the vertical photo were clear they didn't want to be in the paper when they saw my camera, but by that time I'd already shot this frame. On the other hand, I see crowds of people gathering to watch fires or car accidents play out all the time and we, as members of the media, rarely acknowledge this reality. I still don't think this would have been the right photo to put front and center in the paper, but as a standalone on A5 (where the horizontal image ran) it might have been an appropriate slice of a situation we don't report very often. Just my two cents.
Thanks for looking.
