{"id":19745,"date":"2016-05-18T11:44:24","date_gmt":"2016-05-18T16:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/?p=19745"},"modified":"2020-10-23T12:25:44","modified_gmt":"2020-10-23T18:25:44","slug":"passages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/2016\/05\/18\/passages\/","title":{"rendered":"Passages"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Ada<\/a>
Ada head coach for boys basketball Ron Anderson left this for me the other day, as a “thank you” for making so many photos during their season, including the ones in this collage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As my readers know, my duties as a news photographer include covering area school activities, from the first grueling two-a-day football practices in early August to the proud and nervous graduations in May. Each year I seem to get to know the kids a little better and get a little more involved in their lives.<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a>
An nice surprise: an AP\/ONE sweepstakes award for images of area flooding last year.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The 2015-2016 school year was a particularly involving year for me, and for some reason, as I stood in the Cougar Activity Center last night surrounded by kids I photographed for essentially their whole lives, who were surrounded by their parents, who I essentially photographed their<\/em> whole lives, I felt an acute sense of loss. I felt it far more than I did at my own high school graduation, and in some very important ways, I get more involved in their lives of the people I cover than I did with the people with whom I went to school.<\/p>\n

This school year was complicated by the fact that for much of it, my newspaper had a staff member who made it difficult for us to do our jobs well.\u00a0Despite this obstacle, I stubbornly continued to document these young lives. That staff member is gone, replaced by a talented and eager person who likes and respects my work.<\/p>\n

I thought of that last night at Ada’s graduation, about how I wanted to push my images to the edge, to make them as good as I’ve got, since I knew they’d be appreciated and used well in our publication.<\/p>\n

I was also amused by the way the kids at Ada High know me: as I watched them file from the school to the auditorium for last night’s commencement, a number of them waved at me and called me by name.<\/p>\n

Lastly, I was truly surprised that in the dark work environment of 2015, I was able to do work good enough to earn an Associated Press\/Oklahoma News Executives sweepstakes award for coverage of last summer’s flooding. Bonus.<\/p>\n

\"As<\/a>
As you can see, all the kids know who I am, and that I might put their pictures in the newspaper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As my readers know, my duties as a news photographer include covering area school activities, from the first grueling two-a-day football practices in early August to the proud and nervous graduations in May. Each year I seem to get to know the kids a little better and get a little more involved in their lives….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,15,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-essays-and-opinions","category-journals-notebooks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19745"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19752,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19745\/revisions\/19752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}