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I do not like to use on camera flash. I don't like the way it looks. Whenever possible ( almost all the time) I use available light. The Pittsburg Christmas Parade last night is a good example of how stubborn I am about it. Of any event I cover, this parade calls for the use of a strobe of some kind. I refuse. Instead, I work hard at finding what little bit of light there is and use it. Headlights from cars, emergency lights from fire engines, the green, yellow and red from stop lights, the interior lights from downtown shops, cell phones, flash lights and of course Christmas lights. All of these can make for interesting photos. So, I take advantage of these and study how the light falls on faces and shoulders etc., and make my images that way. I also shoot in manual mode. It is just too dark on the street for the camera to meter correctly. If I did so, the shutter speed would be several seconds if not more. I manually exposed for the small amount of light that was there. For instance, the photo of the ROTC members was shot at 1/250th of a second at F4 and ISO 3200 in manual mode. The light meter in the camera was telling me something totally different because the scene is almost all dark. I had to adjust to capture the image the way it looked to me and I like the way it turned out. If I had used an on camera flash, everything in the photo would have been lit up and looked very much different. The colorful light outlining the cadets as they led the parade would have been lost and I would not have liked it at all. The way that I look at it, the parade is at night on a dark street, the photos should reflect that. There are many different ways to make these photos and it is up to the photojournalist to choose to do their job the way they think is most accurate to the situation and capture the moments as they happen.
Sean Steffen has been a staff photographer at the Morning Sun since 2007. He has been a photojournalist for more than eight years.
The purpose of this blog is to document life in southeast Kansas, one photograph at a time.
