When David Labelle wrote about the importance of curiosity, it instantly reminded me of my friend who recently completed an assignment for one of his photo classes. His assignment was to take pictures of 10 different strangers. He decided to leave Columbia for this project, but on his way out of town he saw an old man with a cane walking along the side of the road. Curiosity led him to double back and pick up this hitchhiker, and he not only got good and original photos, but he got to hear an incredible story as he volunteered to drive the old man to a town 10 miles away. My friend said that if he didn’t have classes, he would have tried to follow the man for a week to get more of his story. He has the curiosity that will make him a good photo journalist.
Something else that stood out to me in this assignment was David Snider’s picture of a man ice skating in Rockefeller Plaza. It has so many of the elements of good photography that David LaBelle describes. My first reaction was laughter. There is definite humor in this photograph, and that is greatly due to the composition of the photo—the ice skater exactly mirrors the statue. Additionally, LaBelle captures a single moment. Any other moment with the skater’s body positioned in any other way would not have created such a great photo or such great humor.
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