I had an assignment to get an "A-1 shot" (a photo interesting enough to belong on the front page) for an Ian Demsky story on the folks who answer the 911 calls at Law Enforcement Support Agency. The crux of what they do is face a bank of computer screens and talk on a headset, so this would be a challenge because it amounts to yet another "person at a computer" shot.

Several call-takers were work at any one time at LESA, so I looked them over for good angles, backgrounds, lighting et cetera. It would be nice to show both a call-taker's face and at least part of a computer screen, so shooting straight at them (through a gap between two monitors) wasn't very good:

From one side could show other call-takers in the background:

But the other side was better. There was better light, the headset is more prominent, and a screen shows up:

Then, realizing that the screen isn't readable anyway, I shot tighter (forcing the screen behind to blur out more). It is a bit more intense, which is an appropriate way to convey their job:

But it still wasn't quite an A-1 worthy shot. So I tried even closer and got artsy. I wanted to show a screen through the guy's glasses. But I was never able to find any part of screen that looked intelligible, and even at f5.6 it also wasn't sharp enough:

I found my favorite picture in a different place in the room. It just happened that the overhead lighting was dimmer there, allowing the glow of the computer screen to be more prominent. And the shape of his eyeglasses revealed his eyeball well. This picture suggests more intensity than any of the others:

The photo ran on A-1.