Photojournalism | The Photographers and Camera Equipment

© 2011 Wazari Wazir | The Photojournalist During UMNO General Assembly 2011 at Putra World Trade Centre PWTC | Kuala Lumpur

It is always interesting to read a debate or discussion about whether it is the camera or is it the person behind the camera that make a difference, some people say, the camera doesn’t matter but the photographers and vice versa. You will get a different answer depending who you ask. I don’t want to wasting my time discussing about that in depth but just wanted to share something with you that maybe will gives you a better understanding about the camera equipment that we photojournalist use.

The photographs above were taken during UMNO General Assembly 2011 last year at Putra World Trade Centre, there were politician on the stage delivering their speech and there is a VVIP sitting on the front row facing the stage, meaning that we can’t easily move there. Some people who have no ideas about photography might tend to ask, why we need to use such a big long lens for this event, some people only think that this kind of lens usually found its place in wildlife photography, sports photography and birds photography and not something like this but time and time again we will use this lens covering this event and nothing will gonna change that.

The reason is simple, for one thing we wanted to minimize our movement and not to be a distractions to this event by moving here and there, by using this lens we can get a tight shot of the politician on the stage without being too close with them and yes before the event start we take a lot of wide angle shot, wide view shot, to show the crowds and after that most photojournalist will concentrate on getting a tight shot of the politicians.

Our task is to captured a politician expressions while delivering their speech, it’s the moment that we are after, whether they are smiling, their body gesture, their expression does make a lot of difference here and just imagine  if we use wide angle lens to take the shot, we will never have the same impact like what we can have with telephoto lens. Just for your information, basically photojournalist will use 300mm – 600mm for this event and to be honest with you we don’t use this lens to show off but to help us get the shot better.

Other than having the right lens, we also need to have a camera with High ISO capability without too much digital noise (grainy). The reason is that, using flash for this event will be a distractions, even though from the picture above you can see some photographers attached flash on their camera body, but most of the time they are switch off.

The light on this hall is quite dim, for the shot above I use ISO 1600 and it’s normal to use ISO1000 – 2000 here with f/2.8 lens. Actually the point of this article is not so much about camera equipment but the right equipment for a any given task. Every photographers need the right camera equipment to do their job effectively. Luckily nowadays most professional DSLR camera are very good at High ISO with less noise, yes sometimes it is still visible but to photojournalist, the noise will be a second factor compared to the moment captured but off-course it will be better if it was noise free and I think todays camera are very good at it.

You can’t be wildlife photographer or sports photographer if all you have is just a kit lens like 18-70mm lens, but you can be a photojournalist even if all you have is a compact camera but like I said again, it’s all depend on your task, if you wanted to take natural disaster picture like floods, tsunami or car accident on the highway, any decent compact camera will do that, because most of the times, you can get close to the scene and normally it’s about the subject and the environment and having a compact camera with a wide angle lens like what most compact camera have will do the job and I know also that some of the images taken with a compact camera has made into the front page of our local newspaper and some of them also made it into the wire.

Since this is not an in depth writing about photographer and camera equipment, hopefully by now you will know that as a photographer we just need the right equipment, for those of you who take photography as a hobby, they can buy the most expensive camera to satisfy themselves because they don’t have any client to worry about but for working photographers, be it photojournalist, wedding photographer, food photographer or whoever makes photography as their career to support their family, we just need the right camera and its equipment and most of the times we don’t really need the most expensive camera but just the right camera and talking about “the right camera”, it will depend on the assignment given.