meet the (creepy) photog (day 6)

i've never encountered a newsroom with boring photographers.

ever.

there's something about them that's hard to put into words. a lot of times, they're sort of like hyped up, red bull addicted picasso's--very temperamental, near genius, and easy to piss off.

you don't get photo requests incorrect and it's a must to learn their individual system early if you want to have any sort of art to go with your stories.

honest to god, i had a photog refuse an assignment i'd put together once because i didn't capitalize every thing correctly. (actually, i'm pretty sure i capitalized nothing during one of those phases i went through. sometimes when i have to write everything as near perfectly as possible professionally, i like to f$&# off with the rules on every other sort of document.)

somewhere along the road at the a&m battalion, the editors had brought back a photographer they'd fired the semester before without really saying why he was back or why he'd been fired. i'm pretty sure his name was josh. he had a double chin and a hairy nostril. just one. yep. strange.

josh and i got paired together a few times one particular month and as he was shooting our story, he'd always shoot a few of me, too. it was a little weird, but he always gave me copies and my ego loves looking at pictures of myself for some reason. especially back before four kids. you know, back before the laws of gravity became little assholes, yanking on everything in every direction, all at once.

josh wasn't exactly charming. he lacked a little in the personal skills and he sort of stunk. he picked his nose, but i tolerated him because he was building my teen model portfolio one news assignment at a time.

after a couple weeks of this, josh finally made clear why he was being so nice.

"i'm putting together a portfolio for grad school," he said one day, offering to take pictures of me for free for his portfolio.

i said i'd think about it.

"one condition, though," he said as he pulled up beside my work station in the bowels of the journalism building. i was late on a deadline and sort of tired of pretending to be nice. "they need to be nudes. i need nude photos."

i'll just bet you do, dude...

all of a sudden, the reasons were clear why josh got fired and even more unclear why he'd been rehired.

i didn't see him after that, honestly.  i meant to say something to my editor, but another reporter had complained that he was taking too many shots of her on assignment and not of the subject.

she never said anything about the nakey picture offer and i wasn't sure if i should have felt honored or a little dirty.

last i heard, he'd found a job shooting for a university somewhere as part of their sports public relations staff. shooting women's sports. go figure...

This is part of a 31-day micro-memoir writing challenge where I talk about my amusing career writing about reindeers, MMA, and snooker tournaments. View more here.