Last week I was shooting pictures for a story on used book stores when I found spot in Tacoma Book Center that I thought would make an excellent lead shot. (A lead shot is the most prominent picture when there are more than one shot for some story.)

With a 50mm lens, I was able to shoot a row of book spines close enough to read them and still have background elements of an aisle, lots of shelves, and, if I waited long enough, a person perusing the books. I just had to wait for a customer to linger on that aisle.

For an hour I kept an eye out for anyone who would visit the aisle and shot some photos elsewhere in the store, but no one came to my favorite aisle. I decided to give up-- other photos would suffice for the lead shot.

Later, when getting some help selecting photos at the office, Janet Jensen opined that the shot would indeed be my best lead shot if I could go back and catch a person in the picture.

So I went back to the Tacoma Book Center the next day. The books weren't in such a nice arrangement this time-- in the original arrangement I had liked the couple of books that had been lying on top. But I'm not allowed to rearrange them, just as I'm not allowed to ask someone to stand in the aisle pretending to peruse books. As they say in golf, "ya gotta play it where it lays."

I waited (while keeping busy listening to NPR on a portable radio) and finally I caught a frame of a young woman looking at a lower shelf:

But her coloring and body position didn't work so well. Then her boyfriend arrived, and his white shirt and interesting stance helped, but the two of them overlapping made it a "hard read", meaning that someone looking at the photo might find it difficult to decipher it:

I then found another spot in the store that offered a similar composition:

But I don't like the above photo very well, either. I like her dark shirt and I like the vivid book titles, but the background lighting is not congenial and the shelves don't make such good lines as the deeper shelves in my original composition.

So after the second hour in Tacoma Book Center I gave up, hoping to find time to return for a third visit.

On the third day I was able to shoot and older man:

Then a couple of young guys:

After several minutes, one of the guys left, and I like the body language of the remaining one:

This is my favorite frame. And I have offered it as the lead shot for the story (which is yet to be published). You also can see that it is the only one of these frames that has been fully worked up (meaning the the color and contrast have been perfected).

But of course, I know that I could go back a fourth time and wait some more, and I just might come up with a slightly better version.