The New York Times has a report on and a shocking gallery of photos taken by a photographer who was shooting a wedding in the affected region of the country when the recent earthquake struck China.

A couple of weeks back I attended one of the two “reasonably smart” evening occasions that readers kindly invited me to in response to my appeal so that I could test out some wacky lighting techniques. This was photographing various Latin American performers at a Cambridge college ball. I’m sure you’ll agree such a setting can be a challenging one in which to perform…

…but such is my love for my art that I endured, exposing myself to whatever spectacles my surroundings presented, recording them faithfully in the tradition of the great masters of reportage…

A very few of my experiments worked. I was trying out a range of freaky home-made diffusers on my flash guns. Sadly, some of them interfered with the infra-red beams—which I didn’t want—as well as softening the light source—which I did—so my hit rate was low and the results weren’t what I was hoping for, but that’s exactly why I didn’t feel I could charge anyone money for them. Worse, the scanner at the lab used to digitize the negatives introduced lots of noise to the (intentionally) dark originals.

Thanks to percussionist Martin Goodson—in the foreground of the image above—for getting me on the guest list.

I hate cigarette smoke, but smokers can make for great photos. Smokes are both excellent delivery devices for addictive drugs and wonderful props: They relax, distract, and sometimes illuminate—literally and metaphorically—the subject. In a way cigarettes do for shots of adults what toys do for shots of children:

Many of the photographs in this BBC slideshow about the writer Alan Sillitoe’s life as a smoker are superb.

Photographers talk about their work for the newspaper in the “commentry” to this short film [requires Windows Media Player].

[If the link above doesn't work for you then try following it from the Times Online front page. Search within the page for "Word and Pictures".]

I believe that the best photography, like the best of other kinds of craftsmanship, is often created by those who know the “rules” so well that they can confidently break them. The photograph below is technically “wrong”, just like the frame that forms the banner of this Website, but I still think it’s very good. The subjects of the photo are relatively tiny and exactly centred in the frame. There are seven people in it, but you can’t see any of their faces—and, anyway, most of them are out of focus and cut off by the edges of the view.

But the picture is striking and tells a story. Telling a story is the point of photojournalism. Some wedding photographers call this naturalistic, narrative approach “photojournalistic” or “reportage“.

This week I have been breaking one of my own rules and manipulating my images digitally: to remove an ambulance from the background of some group photographs. I used the “clone tool” in The Gimp, a wonderful free (both “free-as-in-free-beer” and “free-as-in-free-speech”) image manipulation package. There’s a simple reason for this: the ambulance is a completely unwanted distraction from some pleasing formal shots. It isn’t relevant to the event or aesthetically pleasing, and it isn’t a nice omen for a marriage. Removing the ambulance was also, thanks to the nature of the rest of the background, relatively straightforward to do—if boring and time-consuming.

In photojournalism, there are good “distractions” and bad “distractions”. Good distractions can contribute to the plot, often by forcing you to read a picture in a particular way, or contribute to the composition, sometimes as counterpoints. Bad distractions interfere with a picture’s story or detract from its beauty. In real photojournalism, however, deleting distractions is frowned upon.

For a top professional’s views on such matters you should read this interesting Q&A with Michele McNally, The New York Times‘s Assistant Managing Editor for Photography. Scroll down to the section headed with the question “How do you feel about distracting elements in a photo…?” McNally’s answer covers both framing and focus. It explains how lopped off limbs and blurry blobs can make a good photograph and is illustrated by some excellent, if small, example images. (In the same article she also discusses the NYTimes‘s policy on digital tinkering.)