Graduation...

One assignment I end up shooting every year is graduation. It's just inevitable when you work the evening shift. And, after shooting the graduations for the local schools pretty much every you I've noticed something... they never change. The only thing that is different from year to year is the students names. That's why I try to make it a point to try to get something before the start of the ceremony. This is especially true with Wylie (the only school's graduation I had to shoot this year), since it's graduation is on Friday night, so the earlier I can get photos in the happy the page designer is who is putting the page together. There are two people I work with I try to never piss of, page designers and the maintenance guy (you'd understand why on the latter when you are sitting in the office working on deadline and ever notice a river flowing out of the bathroom at 9pm!).

Just because my goal is to get my shot before the ceremony doesn't mean that I won't be sticking around at least for the start, you never know what is going to happen. This year, however, nothing exciting happened... it was just like most years, rather dull and long. But, since I knew I had a useable shot before the ceremony started I was able to leave early. It's a nice feeling getting out ahead of the traffic and knowing your not going to have a page designer breathing down your necking waiting to send a page because of you. Not to mention being three-quarters of the way through the graduation and still wondering what you're going to use for the paper b/c you showed up at the start of the graduation ceremony. It happens, this is after all a newspaper and unscheduled news happens. Luckily, this year it worked out well, and I'm happy with what I got.