Strike three

05 September 2008: Walking the line

On this Monday Paulette was out of town with the USTA national team and I told the office if they needed any help out my way to give me a shout. Turned out the Huntley area teachers went on strike and they needed a photo for the metro section. Woohoo, a news assignment.

With the flooding in the city and a depleted suburban staff this was not a real big story and Huntley was a long way from the city but not to far from me.

The teachers were in a few different locations and our reporter was at the school district office and trying to talk to families in some of the neighborhoods. I called her and told her if she was able to talk to some of the families to give me a call and I would swing by.

So the first place I went was the high school that is out a way, surround by farmland.

When I walked up on the scene the first person that spoke with me had to tell me no one could talk to me and give me the phone number of the official spokesperson. I told them I was not writing the story and just need to get names and basic information but of course to the minority I was the evil media.

It puzzles me why some of these people wonder why media coverage seems one sided but they will not even give their names to a photographer. I did talk to several of the teachers who were very nice and I even told one of them who’s son is a journalism student that I would be happy to show his son around the newsroom when he is in Chicago.

As I was leaving the high school the same teacher approached me when I showed up yelled out to the group, “Did anyone even ask for an I.D. from that guy? How do we even know he works for a newspaper?”

I walked back and presented my id to the first person I saw.

Two days later the strike was over.

We used a pretty generic group of teachers walking with signs shot in the paper but I like these three better.

I shot a lot on long lens pix because all the wide stuff looked busy until I found a low angle with a nice puffy cloud background.

After shooting at the high school for a while I swung by the school district office and trying to get anything different I used a the reflection in a puddle to make a photo.

At the high school I recognized one of the teachers who used to coach cheer at McHenry High School when Kati was there. He was taking his turn keeping count of motorist’s opinion with notches on his sign. No response was the leader with positive reaction running a distant second.

-john