Nate Chute. Photojournalist.

Currently listening to: Jigsaw Falling Into Place by Radiohead

In all honestly, the reasoning behind this post’s title was just that the pun fit easily enough. This past week I was the sole staff photographer at the paper and accumulated 66 hours in 6 days. The moments to breathe or “stop for gas” were few and far between and mostly spent in fast food drive thrus between assignments. 

Legion Baseball

Despite the long hours and short amount of time I had to come up with shots at assignments, the pace of everything proved to be a reminder of how lucky I am to be doing what I am. Meeting new people, getting access at various events, witnessing intimate interactions – I caught myself smiling with these romantic realizations of my job in my car throughout the day. Don’t get me wrong, one week of this much work was enough for a good while – I crashed hard every night. Besides, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Having gone through and seen others experience burnout in positions that they were extremely passionate about, I know keeping an appropriate balance between all of the different parts of my life makes good old fashioned sense.

Click Image for link to Graduation Gallery

I did have one very interesting thing happen to me this week that I hope doesn’t repeat itself. I had just finished shooting a feature assignment about a woman who does some beautiful needlework pieces and was about 8 miles out of town. I turned on the scanner as I got closer to the city limits and heard there was a fire. I pulled the scanner closer to pay closer attention to find out the fire was on the same blockas my apartment. Following this, I grew increasingly aware of how much slower the driver in front of me was going compared with the speed limit. On top of that, I was greeted with a red light at each stoplight once I got into the city limits. I thought I had missed the event by then but hadn’t. The house was a full 6 houses away from my apartment and the flame hadn’t really spread very far (as you can see in the image to the right, there weren’t any flames). Regardless of that and like I said earlier, I don’t wish to hear of that ever again on my scanner. 

All Smiles

A large portion of my week was spent at a local school documenting a principal’s last week on the job. Creating images at a school isn’t the easiest thing, with kids jumping in the frame with an exaggerated grin or telling you they want to be in the paper when you’re trying to gather some NAT sound. It would have been nicer to dedicate a bit more time to the project as well in order to get a more intimate look at what the principal’s relationship has been with the school, not to mention the field of education. The paper is holding the story until next weekend so the blog will have to wait to show those images. Look for an entry with images from that project next week.