It is the exciting life of a never-sleep reporter, with a camera to manage instead of a pencil.
III
WHAT TO PHOTOGRAPH
If you wish immediate wealth you have only to locate several oil-pockets and dig into them. Similarly, if you aspire to success at marketing photographs you have only to discover the needs of editors and to satisfy them. But although there are not many more available oil-pockets, there are many editors and innumerable editorial needs.
It would be as absurd for me to attempt to state precisely what you should photograph as it would be for me to make a pencil-dot on a map and to say: "There's an oil-pocket; go dig into it." The one way to discover the needs of editors and how to satisfy them is to develop a "nose for news."
A "nose for news" is simply the ability to determine the value of any certain photograph to any certain editor. The several ways of acquiring that very necessary ability are: (a) by experience, which consumes the most time and is the most difficult; (b) by examining the nature of photographs already sold to publications and printed in them, which is less difficult and just as effective; and (c) by careful study of prevailing editorial needs and market-demands, which is the best method of all.
To succeed, mix thoroughly liberal quantities of (a), (b) and (c).
Not many, other than the large metropolitan newspapers, employ staff-photographers; and if a smaller one does, the photographer is usually a reporter who has much scribbling to do besides. When most newspapers require a photograph of something local, the city-editor telephones to a commercial-photographer and tells him to "get it." Thereupon, the commercial-photographer packs up his forty-pound outfit, goes out and gets it.
However, a good many subjects are not of sufficient interest to cause the city-editor to dispatch a commercial-photographer to obtain them; but, if photographs of those same subjects were brought unsolicited to him he would at once see their value and buy them. That is the biggest advantage of the free-lance photographer with the newspapers.