First off - a confession. I'm a gear head. I absolutely love equipment but I don't have a fetish for it. I'm not a collector or one of those people who names their tools like they are pets. Nah, but I do believe that the choices which an artist makes in regards to their tools says something about who they are and certainly how they work. Sometimes this even says something about how they think. Given that I almost became a psychotherapist I do have a penchant for wondering how a person thinks. So as much as I love deconstructing an image I like to try and deconstruct what the photographer was doing/thinking/feeling before the exposure was made. It’s a little game of mine. One of the things that I do often is use an EXIF reader pluging for Firefox which is my web browser of choice.
EXIF is a bunch of data that is nearly universally encoded into the files made by digital camera. It tells you what camera model, and even the serial number, all the various settings, lens type, zoom setting and sometimes even the focusing distance. The data can be striped out but it’s often there when you post an image to the web. So if you are a nosy guy like me you can take a deeper look into what is going on in the image.
I regularly read The Online Photographer and they have been
posting a bunch of stuff by Peter Turnley. If you don’t know about Peter and
his identical brother David Turnley they are a couple of the best
news/documentary photographers of the last 20 years. They have worked for more
big names and won more awards that I can keep track of. But I digress. TOP has
a big three part post of images that Peter took in
So I was doing my thing looking at the images and got to reading the EXIF data as I went. By half way through the first installment I developed the following insight into his working method for that shoot: One camera, one lens, one exposure setting and a lot of walking around. Specifically he was using a Nikon D3 with a Nikon AF-S 24-70mm set to shutter priority and cloudy white balance. Alright time to get geeky so I’m putting on my tweed jacket for this.
Frankly as I was going along I was waiting to see him post an image that used a long lens to isolate the subject but no. In fact of all the images in the three posts I don’t believe that he ever got longer than 32mm. So what he was doing was essentially carrying a 24- 32mm zoom lens. This I’m sure freaks some out but to me it makes sense. He will be wading through the crowd and processions so a truly long lens will be nearly useless. Also anything wider than 24mm is going to bring a lot of edge and foreground distortion. 28mm works wonders and the zoom gives him a bit of flexibility. Given that one body makes things easier to carry. I found it neat that he didn’t change his white balance. It stayed on Cloudy the whole time. If the light got cool or warm so did the photo.
What I found most interesting was the use of shutter priority exposure. This is coming from a guy who has done fully manual exposure since the Regan administration. He kept his shutter speed to be 1/250th in nearly every bright light shot. This seems to be a smart move by a seasoned pro. Our light meters are surprisingly good these days and if he’s shooting people watching and reacting to an emotional situation a 1/250th will do a good job of keeping their movements sharp while letting the photographer not worry about camera blur as he quickly moves about. He set his ISO to a place that let the camera select apertures between the lens maximum of f/2.8 to around f/5.6. He was using the ISO as the key exposure setting to keep the lens pretty much open for good subject to background separation. This is a nice trick that I think I will play with in the future.
But the best lesson here is how he obviously moves about. Considering he was using essentially a fixed, call it 26mm, lens he is tight, wide and everywhere in between. He moves and moves and moves. His feet are his most used photographic tool. In this era of “auto everything” and even more of “fix it in post” this proves that getting to where the photo is and putting yourself where things line up and the moment happens can’t be automated or processed. Bravo maestro!
