A very, very incomplete list of things I suck at:

1. Flash photography.
2. Flash photography.
3. Flash photography.

Almost all of the photography I do is available-light. This goes for sports, concerts, and my presumptuous efforts at so-called “fine art” photography (whatever the hell that may or may not mean). I occasionally use off-camera flash to spice things up, but for the most part I try to avoid having to use flash at all.

This weekend, I photographed an event put on by SweatFree Communities: a panel discussion and rally targeting the National Governors’ Association meeting in downtown Philadelphia. One of SFC’s major goals is to get states to commit to sweatshop-free procurement policies, so an event that brought together all 50 governors in one place was an obvious opportunity to hold some publicity events.

The panel took place inside a church, on a low stage with minimal light. I had brought a strobe but nothing to mount it on. Available-light shooting with the lenses I had (80-200/2.8 on my D300 and 12-24/4 on my D70) was getting me ISO 3200 on the D300 and ISO 800 on the D70, neither of those anywhere close to ideal. The above photo was shot available light at ISO 3200, and would have been a heck of a lot better at a lower ISO or with some carefully applied strobe - the noise in the wall behind the panelist is kind of distracting to me, which bothers me a lot because otherwise I really like that shot.

With a wide stage to deal with and no light stand on which to mount my SB-800, I enlisted the help of a friend and had him hold the strobe standing to the right of the stage near the podium. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have time to give him instructions on how to orient the flash head, so he just kept the CLS sensor pointing toward my camera as I wandered around the room, which meant uneven lighting on the stage depending on my position. So most of my flash shots came out fairly badly.

If this had been a paid gig I would have shown up earlier with appropriate gear (rented from Penn Camera most likely) and positioned a strobe or two on the stage. Instead, I improvised and it didn’t really work. So it goes.

On the other hand, the rally was outside the church in broad daylight, so lighting was not an issue here. But rallies and protests present their own challenges, of course, in that it’s sometimes tough to take creative shots. Most of mine are fairly cliche, but at least I think they’re reasonably well-executed. And these kinds of things are always a lot of fun to photograph.

The rally was confined to a relatively narrow sidewalk - there was a massive police presence befitting the fact that all 50 governors were in the building across the street from us - which made getting wide photos of the whole rally basically impossible (though I did hop over to a distant street corner to at least grab a couple environmental shots). So I focused on headshots and the like and came away with a few that I’m happy with.

Another thing - this was the first time I used my D300 and D70 in conjunction, and switching between the two wasn’t nearly as jarring as I expected. It did take me a few moments to remember how to do a few extremely basic things on the D70 (like change ISO or zoom in and out when reviewing images), but once I got reacquainted, it was fine. The tiny, dim viewfinder of the D70 didn’t bother me at all, which was something I had been worried about. Instead, what I noticed most was the tiny LCD screen that made it hard to evaluate photos in the field. I’ve definitely taken to analyzing my photos reasonably critically using the D300’s enormous LCD. That’s a nice luxury for sure.

I turned over a bunch of my photos to SFC, but a select few are in this Flickr photoset.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Photojournalism, Technique. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.