There’s always plenty of opportunity to...

There’s always plenty of opportunity to get newsy shots on the

first day of classes at Orange Coast College. The difficulty is in

finding something different.

Something less obvious than the sea of confused young faces

finding their classrooms. Something a little better than the lines

that tend to form outside the registration office.

On Monday, photographer Kent Treptow faced this challenge and

entered the pandemonium of campus.

He shot the long lines inside the Admission and Records Building.

That could have been enough. This would be the safety shot -- good

enough to work, but not anything spectacular.

But Treptow decided to press on, scouring the area for something

more interesting. The school is expected to have 29,000 students by

the end of the semester. Even though not all of those people showed

up Monday, there were still plenty of individuals on campus.

However, try as he might, Treptow was unable to find masses of

people that might represent the enrollment numbers.

What he did find was a sea of cars in the school’s parking lot.

Every space, it seemed, was taken with an automobile.

You might expect, on the first day of school, to see a shot with

hundreds of people in it. Instead, a shot of a lone student paying

the parking meter, lost in a sea of cars, carried the same message

with a different twist.

Tarrah Wauson’s search for coins in her purse seemed to say it

all.

-- Daily Pilot Photo