Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
It’s an innocent comment, but one that still annoys me a little bit, just a little, but the annoyance is there.
As I pack my camera along the baselines, on the sidelines, or just behind the fence at rodeos, wrestling matches, volleyball games, football games, track meets, wrestling matches, baseball games or just trying to get that perfect afternoon or early morning light on a flower, deer, or other wildlife images, someone will inevitably say, “Still shooting pictures for the paper?”
Nope, I’m not, but I’m still shooting.
I don’t shoot as many frames as I once did, especially during winter sports season. The viewer on my camera bodies has grown substantially larger than my first digital Pentax SLR camera in 2003. You can tell a good image just by previewing it on the small screen. At least once I could. Now I pull out the 1.75x readers I carry hanging from the front of my shirt to take a look. The same is true if I have to switch to manual settings on the camera. Setting ISO, shutter speed, and aperture (the good ol’ F-stop).
Shooting with manual focus totally requires those glasses just to get a crisp image.
Those are just technical issues, technological challenges that a much older technology, one invented by Arabs sometime around the start of the 11th century, and refined in Europe 200 years later, helps me overcome. (Eyeglasses if you haven’t caught on…)
It doesn’t overcome the annoyance of the comment. Yes, it conveys that the person has noticed I’ve been photographing events for a long time, it also conveys a modern phrase I often read, “Tell me you know nothing about the subject, without telling me you know nothing about the subject.”
Its often written as a comment such as, “tell me you know nothing about football, without telling me you know nothing about football,” or more commonly in our exasperating political situation, “tell me you know nothing about (fill in the blank, wolves, water, elections, vaccines, taxes, the economy, international trade…the list is endless….)
I’ve been writing for a long time. My first published article was in October 1979, in the University of Wyoming Alumni News. Since then, I’ve written for at least 75 different print and online outlets. At last count, I’ve had 17,000 stories published in various formats, and now three books.
Yes, my latest “Rail to Trails Along the Sweetwater” hit Amazon, KDP, Barnes and Noble and several other outlets last Friday afternoon. We’ll have some type of local book signing/media event this fall; I just haven’t had time to schedule it.
Another book, “Under the Wyoming Sky,” is at the publisher at present, with a deadline looming in six weeks for international book fairs in Frankfurt, Germany, Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, and Guadalajara, Mexico. The shows begin in late October and end just before Christmas.
The book agent tells me that stories of Wyoming and the West are hot, but then again, he’s never been here, so hot is likely a relative, marketing term.
Which brings me back to packing that camera to graduations, concerts, fundraising events, swim meets, historical speakers, and random shots of dogs, horses, kids, and car wrecks. Others may have the luxury of just taking photos and sending them in. Mine are all accompanied by a story, sometimes a short one, sometimes not.
In any given week, I publish between 8,000 and 12,000 words for County10, another couple of thousand for Sportsman’s Warehouse, and then a few thousand more for my own projects.
I’m thankful to my track coach Leroy Sinner for much of this. Yes, I write about Coach Sinner occasionally and always mention Leroy Sinner Field for football or track stories out at Pavillion, but it was his work in the classroom that allows me to write at the pace I choose.
Mr. Sinner was the business and typing teacher at Wind River, the old Wind River High School at Morton. He taught the same classes before the Cougars were born of a merger between the Pavillion Panthers and his own Morton Broncs.
As an eighth grader, I checked out a book from the Mather Air Force Base Library on how to teach yourself to type. I could crank out 35 words per minute on our ancient, heavy steel Underwood manual with multiple mistakes.
I took Mr. Sinner’s typing class as a sophomore and those mistakes began to disappear and my speed (unlike my speed on the track running for Coach Sinner) increased to over 100 words per minute.
Speed and accuracy (and not even looking at the keys!) allow a lot more latitude in writing than someone who has to hunt and peck with their index fingers to create a story. When I’m in the “zone,” I can crank out a thousand-word piece, edit it, spell check and format it, and put it on the page in an hour.
That’s just the final piece of a writer’s work. Walking those sidelines, writing down important plays of a game, recording who scored, when, and how, all while still shooting photos, is an acquired skill.
Sadly, it’s a skill that the snowplow parents of today don’t have a clue about. Their only concern is little Johnny or little Nancy. These people must think words magically appear on a screen.
I work with great coaches, conduct fascinating interviews with the amazing people in our county then transcribe the notes into stories. Often stories are written solely from the coach’s memory of a game.
Heaven forbid a hard-working coach gets the down and distance a little off or much worse (in the eyes of the snowplow drivers) fails to mention their future NFL or NBA star or commits the unforgivable sin of telling me Jimmy scored when it was really Johnny. Then the snowplow rolls with venomous vengeance, and it always rears its ugly head on social media. The same ugly personalities go after coaches and officials, all the while thinking the behavior will give their little darling an edge. Newsflash, it won’t.
So yes, I’m still shooting pictures, but I’m writing much more. The latest series, #aglife, sponsored by Riverton Community Bank, has become a once-a-month favorite. We have some amazing farmers, ranchers, and support people in Fremont County. Telling their stories is a blast.
Those 10 to 12,000 words a week take me about 15 hours to write, and another 20 or so to report, interview or research.
It’s a great job.
The classroom was fabulous, the gym, track and field even better, and my summers building barns, garages, houses, and sheds was rewarding. I’m not going to include roofing, fencing and concrete in that praise. It paid well, but it was no fun.
“Am I still shooting pictures?” Well, yes, obviously, but there’s just a little bit more to it than that.