Fire-fightersE.L. Lewis Building fire, New Westminster, BC Compose your image from the background forward to the action. Build layers. Watch for tiny details. In other words, compose and wait.
Sound counter-intuitive? Yet this approach, advocated by Sam Abell, an acclaimed 30-year veteran photographer of National Geographic magazine, works even in action-packed, dramatic situations (http://www.cherylmachatdorskind.com/blog/friday-quote-compose-and-wait-sam-abell/).
This image is one that I created of a major fire that leveled the historic E.L. Lewis Building in New Westminster, BC.
Here is the process I used. I took a few long-shots of the overall scene as soon as I parked my car so I at least had something. But I knew I didn’t have any images with impact from that perspective. I tried the opposite approach, moving as close as the police barricades would allow, switching to a wide-angle lens and training my viewfinder on spectators and hoses in the foreground. Better but still no images that had life.
Finally I settled on a middle-distance. For this image I started by defining my stage which was the wall and parking meters on the left-hand side, the building across the street on the right-hand side and the street sign on the top edge. The smoke, the yellow-suited fire-fighters, and the stream of water were the action items. Surprisingly, although each of these elements varied from moment to moment and it was important to get them right compositionally, they did not move too much which allowed me to concentrate on composing the rest of my image. I needed something in the foreground layer. The command car was already parked, I just needed someone to come to it. So I waited. Finally another fire-fighter did appear. I knew instinctively that when his hand touched the door handle it would complete the image for moment and for gesture.
Many photojournalists were at each of the locations that I tried. Mostly they were using long telephoto lenses in an attempt to get into the action. I created my image with a 90mm (equivalent) lens.
I did not set out to photograph this fire, rather I came across it when I was driving to an appointment. So, other important considerations are that I almost always have a camera with me and that I took the time to stop. From there it became a case of first exploring the location and then using Sam Abell's compose and wait technique.
posted by Ted Nodwell
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