A Little News

In the last post on adding light I was talking about using light ethically in the hard news environment. One of the things I said was when I add light while covering news I try to use the same angles as the existing light. In other words, I am trying to honestly show the readers what was there and still create an image that can be reproduced well on a printing press. Yesterday, Governor Bob Riley was in town to give a press conference on the new robotics center that will locate at Calhoun Community College just outside Decatur.

I brought in two light stands, strobes and pocket wizards. The room the press conference was in has a high ceiling, and I mean thirty plus feet high, and is painted black. The room has the odd combination of filtered daylight which is somewhat blue, incandescent spots all along the wall about fifteen feet up and some variety of sodium vapor lights in the ceiling. As you can image, this creates an interesting variety of light. This makes my decision to strobe pretty easy. Lighting angles were not a problem since light was coming from so many directions so I set one light stand at about 45 degrees to the podium left and another about twenty degrees to the podium right. Both strobes were a good fifty feet from the podium. I set the strobes on 1/4 power and my ISO on 800. The color balance worked best on Auto or on incandescent.

In a press conference you don’t usually have to worry too much about being unethical with the light. TV people usually bring lights and the assortment of still photographers will be shooting flash too. In the conference yesterday there were at least five still photographers and all of them were using on camera strobes except me. Most of them were using some form of bounce. The TV guys just used room light. The reason I am talking about ethical use of strobes in the news environment is because it is really easy to get to fancy with lights. Since I found STROBIST I could easily be tempted to do something “extra” with the lights.

In many situations you simply have to add light. It is unavoidable. An on camera strobe is not more ethical than an off camera one. The main thing you are looking for is to document honestly what you are shooting. That means using light and all your other photographic tools ethically.

For instance, if I added a background light or put a gel on a strobe to do something other than color balance I have effectively changed what I am photographing. Then I am going to be presenting a picture that I created rather than a picture that I recorded. That’s okay in some environments but not in a documentary environment. Now this photo of the Governor during a campaign stop is a nice image but this lighting just didn’t exist. In all honesty, I wasn’t thinking about lighting ethics when I shot this photo. It was dusk, there was virtually no available light to work with and I hate on camera strobes. I had my son stretch an SC17 off camera shoe cord around behind some folks and aim the flash directly at the governor while I framed using several other people. Now, no one is going to jail over this photo but it is not really and accurate representation of what I saw. No reader standing beside me would have seen this light because it simply did not exist. I created it.

Like I said, it is not the end of the world but there is one thing my dad taught me a long time ago about life. He said, if you will give in to the small temptations now it will be much easier to give in to the bigger ones later on. Lesson being, if you are honest in the use of light it will be far easier to be honest in your use of your other tools such as Photoshop and we have seen quite a few people get in trouble there.

Photo copyright The Decatur Daily, Gary Cosby Jr. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.