ShutterSpeed

One of the most difficult aspects of being a photographer is editing your images. The process starts when the photographer is in the field shooting. Elements such as lens selection, depth of field, exposure and lighting can help the photographer edit within the camera the subject or event as it happens.

I take a little more than a hundred frames on average, depending on the assignment. For example, when I cover a football game at UW, I might shoot 800 frames. On the flip side, a feature or portrait might yield 25 or 30 frames. In any case, choosing one image from a hundred can be difficult.

I recently struggled with an editing decision on the WTE’s coverage of the deployment of local National Guard troops to Kuwait.

The two pictures involved were of Shannon Gallagher showing her father’s dog tags to him the morning he left for deployment. Shannon was unpacking her book bag at school when she pulled out the tags and showed them to her father, Maj. Joe Gallagher. It happened so quickly, I was caught off guard and also emotionally moved by the gesture from the 7-year-old.

I clicked off a lucky six frames. All six were underexposed by a stop and a few out of focus. But the last two were tack sharp and at the decisive moment. The image of Shannon on the left caught my attention first because the dog tags caught a little light and lit up. You could see both of the child’s eyes, and the expression on her face was genuine. However, when I went to the next frame, I noticed an image a little more symbolic of the emotions this family was going through. My boss mentioned that the way she was looking at the dog tags made him think that her father had already left. Her gesture and the focus of her eye are a revealing look into this family’s situation.

Ask any photographer, and they will tell you that light is the most important factor in making great images. I really got lucky, in that the light in schools are generally really bad, but on this day the lights were out because we were the first ones in the classroom. The room was lit from a single bank of windows, and that created the soft muted light that illuminates this image.

Technical Information

I shot this with a Canon MarkIIn equipped with a 24-70mm 2.8 lens. My exposure was a 1/60^th of a second at F-Stop 2.8 and my ISO was 800.