The way that an image is destined to be used dictates how you shoot it. This example talks about the difference in approach to shooting what is essentially the same subject, but for two different uses. I went to this southwest London school to shoot a "fly on the wall" documentary article about a music project to fill a couple of pages in a tabloid sized magazine.

The journalist commissioned to write about the project arrived well before me because I had been delayed shooting an urgent news job. By the time I arrived the workshops with three professional musicians and the composer of the piece they were working on were well under way. I had a quick word with the writer and got on with shooting the pictures. I hadn't missed anything that wasn't going to happen again so I relaxed and worked on shooting images that I knew would fit into the style of those pages.

Some of the photographs were lit with Lumedyne lights, but most were either available light (400 ISO) or used one or more Canon 550ex speedlites triggered with a Canon ST-E2 transmitter. Within the two hours remaining I had completely covered the project, it's key personnel and I was really confident that I had filled my brief so I went home to edit the pictures. I sent twelve images back to the picture desk by dial up ISDN connection.

These four pictures represent different ways of shooting, a range of techniques that the news photographer needs to be able to switch between quickly and easily. The first image on the left was purely available light in a room with some daylight, several sodium floodlights and a number of tungsten spotlights. This required custom white balancing at 400 ISO and an exposure of 1/60th of a second at f2.8 (Canon 70-200f2.8L lens).

At 200 ISO the exposure was 1/45th of a second at f4.5 on a preset flash white balance (Canon 17-35 f2.8L). The third picture is just bounced flash off of a low ceiling in a room so small and dark that little else was possible without totally disrupting the session. 1/125th of a second at f5.6 (Canon 17-35 f2.8L). The fourth image was in a fluorescent lit room, with the camera on fluorescent light balance using a Canon 550ex on camera set to -1 1/2 stops filling in with a green Sto-fen Omni-bounce 1/45th of a second at f4 at 400 ISO (Canon 28-70 f2.8L).

The story ended up being promoted to the front page so I had to go back and make a really graphical front page image. Following discussions with the picture editor, the designer and the sub-editor I had a strong idea what they were looking for. We had looked at examples of how similar subject matter had been handled before and we decided on a few variations to try. The fly in the ointment was that it was the last day of term by now and I only had about half an hour to shoot the job.