This was almost definitely shot with a disposable camera at night. That’s literally it.

You largely start getting used to how things go and where the action is going to be. I was a wrestler in high school and my journalist friend was amazed that when I sat with him covering an event I could tell him a few seconds ahead of time what was going to happen in each match.

It’s the same when I shot basketball in college (awful). You know where the ball is going to be because it’s a lot of rote practiced activities for the athletes. When things go well, it’s predictable.

It’s the same when I shot basketball in college (awful). You know where the ball is going to be because it’s a lot of rote-practiced activities for the athletes. When things go well, it’s predictable.

I would agree with this. Well lit professional environments are a huge plus. High School Volleyball is almost definitely the worst lol. And you start to get to know where and when things happen.

I think it’s correct based in what I’ve seen also

These are really excellent points to consider when I want to use the “I googled it for you” website. Thanks

Preach! I have to imagine many of these folks must be much older and just never figured out how to google. they’re used to calling their kids or something for help on anything. at least that what it feels like.

The MagMod Community on Facebook is largely pretty nice and inspirational. But even there, I managed to run into several people who suddenly decided they needed to critique and offer (bad) advice on my photos despite it being a primary rule not to offer unsolicited advice. Anytime I call people out for it, they lose their minds and cuss me out (then get banned). It’s a good time /s But for the most part people are really nice there because it’s active and the MagMod team moderates it.

UGh for real. All of the “Which camera should I buy for $$$” is just like…there are whole websites devoted to buying guides for your insanely tiny budget. Or the other day someone asked for help with his homework identifying certain concepts in his photos and I’m like…did you try looking up each individual concept on google so that you could apply it to these photos? that’s literally the task your teacher was trying to teach you…It kills me. It’s so hard not to be a dick on the internet about stuff like that.

The number of easy-to-Google questions that get posted on r/AskPhotography makes me want to scream.

Oh man, I don’t think I’ve heard this one but I’m pretty sure I would just say “No.”

Photographers who use skin smoothing that looks obvious, especially some of the recent AI skin smoothing. It seems to replace people’s skin with a texture that looks like some kind of “skin grain” and it’s so obvious because no one really looks like that. It also sets unrealistic standards and makes everything look fake and uncanny. I hate it so much. I resist the urge to call people out on social media when I see it (barely resist)

Since you’re not using a printing lab, it could also be your printer. Would be worth looking into adjusting the printer to match what you see. Turning up the exposure for print makes sense. There may also be recommended printer or color profiles you need to set up. When I printed with newspapers and magazines, they had to add profiles and brighten the hell out of photos to avoid printing dark. Assuming your histogram is a good average to start with. But what you’re experiencing is not unusual.

Aw yes, that’s good advice. As a journalist, I have gotten good at getting people to open up to me quickly, so I can try to apply that outside of interviews.

AI skin retouching. It’s become so obvious and terrible lately when I see it. It gives everyone a uniform grainy texture and washed out facial features

This is largely good advice. But shutter speed affects ambient light with flash. For the reason you said. The flash goes off at 1/1000th and then a slower shutter speed can allow additional ambient light to expose the background more.

Try it out, it’s a fun trick. Take a picture of something in your poorly lit house but like have a kitchen light or something on further away. Start at 1/250, then lower the shutter as far as you can one 1/2 stop at a time and watch as the kitchen gets brighter but your subject stays the same since your aperture hasn’t changed.

This is relevant for OP because he can either kill the background at 1/250 or show it at 1/60. But the action and people directly in front of the camera will be largely the same with the flash.

This comes up, especially with temperature imbalances. You can kill ugly lights with faster shutter speed. Slower shutter speeds means you often get two light temperatures, which can look ugly.

It never stops being awesome to see your own work in print. Keep it up!

As a photojournalist and also corporate professional, this number varies greatly.

Shooting photojournalism you can shoot from 20-100 shots in an assignment, maybe 300 if you’re rapid firing speeches or events (not including sports) and 1-3 go with the article. But now everyone wants a dozen choices and a photo gallery, so you have to up your game and produce more. I turned in three recently and got begged for my rejects and they ended up publishing six in a magazine out like 20 fairly bad choices.

I went to Iceland and shot 3,000 photos in a week, got home and probably liked 300, but 12 went on the wall.

But then I went to Arches National Park yesterday, shot 158 pictures (50 were for a panoramic HDR to be fair) and I’ve just now produced 4 total pictures for showing off and I’m pretty sure I actually like 2 of them.

I shot an all-day event last month and had two cameras, so I shot like 6,000 because I was chasing a lot of kids around the park, getting vendors interacting, etc. and the client wanted 150 finals, including all the musicians, award winners and demonstrations, so I had to massively increase the number of shots I took to get 150 good shots.

And then shooting portraits I can do a dozen for a headshot and produce 3-5 for the client or I can shoot 200 for a session with lots of movement and outfit changes and get 25 I like but only 8 that they like.

It’s a crazy numbers game for sure. I don’t know if someone can derive a percentage out of my stats but this is kind of how it goes. But at least I can generally go in to an assignment with these intentions in mind and shoot with the goal of getting those outputs for them or myself.