Shooting nothing

Emergency vehicles line Owens School Road near where "person of interest" in a Carroll County homicide was taken into custody after a high-speed chase in Independence that ended at Owens School and Flynn roads. Independence officers spotted the Independence man near Missouri 291 and 23rd Street, not far from where he lived, and pursued his vehicle. 1.4.2011 Adam Vogler

Sometimes I get to an assignment and there will be nothing to shoot. Either there's not an interesting visual component to the story, there are technical or lighting issues at the location or your subject is 1/2 mile away with several dozen heavily armed members of the law enforcement community in the way such as in the photo above.

There is a constant in a photojournalist's life that is made glaringly obvious in situations like this. Nobody ****ing cares. Your readers and, more importantly to your continued employment, your editors need a photo or there's going to be a big, empty rectangle in tomorrow's paper and you're going to be working on updating your portfolio and resume.

Sometimes you have to make something out of nothing. My longest lens is  a 70-200 so I'm often faced with being under lensed for the subject I'm shooting and I'm used to having to get creative in my composition to make a frame. That said this was a bit of a challenge.

We'd been listening to some odd traffic on the scanner most of the day. A repeated BOLO (Be On the Look Out) for a suspect in an incident of domestic violence and arson in Independence. This soon changed to a suspect being wanted in connection with a homicide in an adjacent county with the additional information that the he was armed and dangerous and had made comments about not being taken alive.

Late that afternoon we heard a IPD officer call for back-up, he was in pursuit of a vehicle matching the suspect's. While I raced towards the area the pursuit was taking place; a reporter continued to listen to the scanner to provide me with updates and, later, the address where the chase ended. By the time I arrived on the scene everything was over and the subject had already been transported away.  I was left about a 1/2 mile away, with a sun that was rapidly dropping below the horizon.

There was no chance of getting close enough to the scene to get anything and I knew that this was going to be our front-page story and I needed to get art to go along with it, so it was time to get creative trying to frame the scene to lead the eye to the relevant parts and combine any story-telling elements I could find into a frame.

Are any of these going to win an award? No. They aren't even going to get close to being entered. They will never, ever, come near my portfolio. This isn't great photojournalism it isn't even good, but it got the job done. It provided a eye-catching graphic for the front-page. It made my papers readers go 'hey, what's that,' which, quite often, is what my job is all about.