Wrong choice
I think I made the wrong choice in running this photograph:
Over this photograph:
in a story about auditions for the haunted house in Wenatchee.
The first picture is actually a mistake I made. The first frame of the assignment, I had my camera set to ASA 200, the aperature on f/20. So it is actually a very long exposure, taking at least 10 seconds to complete. In that time, I realized the shutter was staying open so I moved the camera down to look at the settings during the exposure, giving the blurred look to the image.
I like that image and ran it because I thought it conveyed the spooky atmosphere of the setting and the story. But reproducing an image like that in newsprint is a difficult thing to do and the second image would have reproduced much better and would have been less confusing to our readers.
I ran it by the Vicki test, asking my wife what she thought. “Huh,” was her first reply. “What’s that?” I told her to read the caption and she replied she shouldn’t have to read the caption to at the least figure out what the subject matter was.
Better luck next time.