End of in internship

Today is my last day at The Seattle Times. It is a nerve-wracking thought to get tossed out of the safety of consistently daily work. This is not so much of a monetary concern (though it should be), but more of an issue of "what now"? Personally, I like getting handed a different assignment every day. It is a chance to peer into lives that I never would otherwise. This is what makes the job fun. Of course there are the days that I look at my assignment and think, "this is the least relevant news item and I am sick of it." So I am left to do whatever I want to do, and that can be the toughest thing. An example of this on a smaller scale is the "LO" (lines only), also known at some papers as wild art. On a slow news day I will be expected to come up with some sort of interesting photos. It is incredibly open-ended which seems like a blessing, but I find it terribly stressful. However, given a bit of guidance, or a theme or suggestion for an LO, I find these the best assignments. An example of this came late on weekend afternoon. The sky had developed a yellow haze from forest fires in the area. This became my new assignment. I quickly thought of interesting locations to illustrate this, and I decided that with a bit of patience, something might happen on the Jose P. Rizal Bridge between Beacon Hill and the I.D. The skyline brought me there because it would give this hazy sky a sense of place, and from there it just took some waiting for some sort of pedestrian or cyclist. The first image I made had a woman wearing headphones, and with the silhouette, she looked very iPod commercial. It was too passive though, so I kept waiting, and along came a bike. I was glad to have the cyclist going uphill, since it gave a stronger feeling of struggle against the choking air (though it was not that dramatic of a haze).

A cyclist crosses the Jose P. Rizal Bridge under a yellow-tinted sky on the way to Beacon Hill on Sunday, August 1, 2010. The yellow sky is an indicator that there is smoke in the air from a fire nearby.