The Conference Chamber, The Auditorium, Independence Missouri. My favorite image of the morning.

I posted this image on Facebook recently and received a lot of comments and some questions. I was photographing a communion service at a church conference in Missouri using two DSLR cameras and an iPhone. All told, during this one service and the short time before and after, I created 354 images.  So how many “selects” (best choices) did I pick?

Total images per camera:
Canon 5D Mark III:    139 photos
Canon 7D Mark II:     188 photos
iPhone:                        27 photos

On the Canon 5D Mark III I used three lenses, a Canon 24-105mm lens, a Canon 17-40mm lens, and a Canon 15mm lens. On the Canon 7D Mark III I used a 70-300mm telephoto lens.

All 139 Canon 5D Mark III photos.  Click the image to see a larger version.

To keep this simple, let’s look at just one camera, the 5D Mark III. In this screen capture (above) are all 139 photos that I created with this camera. When I went through all of the images, I picked 13 selects to capture the essence of the event.

13 Selects, Canon 5D Mark III. Click the image to see a larger version.

First I will cover the technical details of my favorite image, and then discuss the selects in chronological order.

To create my favorite image at the top of this page, I was on the very front corner edge of the balcony. To get an idea where I was, if you look at the top right corner of the U.S. flag on the opposite side of the room, that is exactly where I was, but on the near side of the room. I was using a lens that has a sweeping 180° diagonal angle of view. The ISO was set at 1600 and the aperture was at f/11 to give me a lot of near-to-far depth of field. The shutter speed was slow at only 1/13 second, which is really too slow for a camera without a tripod. I was braced against the hand rail as a tripod substitute to give me some extra stability and a sharp photo.

The first photo of the morning is the Communion servers waiting on the ramps outside the conference chamber. It was created at 10:26 am. The choir is singing at 11:09 am but no one is seated on the rostrum. In the 11:14 photo the ministers are on the rostrum.

During the first “stand up” hymn I ran down the ramps to the conference chamber floor and I was in the aisle between the rostrum and the first row where Tahitians servers are standing. As much as possible, I prefer to move around the room when people are standing and singing. The grapes at the feet of the Communion servers is one of my favorite unusual compositions. Almost no one photograph’s feet during a Communion service. After I got the images I wanted, I ran back up the ramps to be back in the balcony before the hymn was over.

By 12:10 pm Communion is being served and it is still being served at 12:30.  In between I wanted at least one closeup shot of one person taking Communion.

At 12:54 pm the serving of Communion is over and everyone is seated when I created my favorite image of the morning, as discussed above. I wanted to emphasize the flags and the sweep and roundness of the whole room, the curves of the ceiling lights, and the people filling the room from all around the world.

At 1:04 pm the choir and congregation are singing the closing hymn. I wanted to be close to the edge of the choir to take this image. I moved into position while everyone was standing.

At 1:09 pm the organist is playing the postlude as most people leave the conference chamber. I wanted to show her hands on the keyboard, all the keyboards, the stops, the peddles, and the complexity of the music.

As often happen, children went up to the console after the service to look at the organ. Jan Krabill, the organist, showed the children how the organ works and what the different stops do. In the last photo at 1:17 pm, two children are sitting next to Jan on the organ bench. In retrospect, I should have picked that as additional select.

13 selects out of the 139 photos taken with this camera is less than 10% of the images I created.

To put that into perspective, Joel Sartore, a National Geographic photographer, says he he creates about 20,000 to 40,000 images for a single NatGeo article, and the Geographic editors pick 10 to 20 for the article.

In a way, it doesn’t matter how many images you create to get your chosen images. Dewitt Jones, who spent 20 years shooting for the Geographic, says it best. It doesn’t matter how many total images you shoot. What matters is, “Did you get the shot?”  If you did, who cares if it took 1, 10, 100, or 1,000 photos to get the shot? Then move on to the next shot.  I highly recommend his Ted talk at the link below.

Link

Joel Sartore on shooting for NatGeo

Dewitt Jones, Celebrate What’s Right with the World – 18 minute video presentation.