Re: Fly on the Wall (was A room for everybody)

[Fred Ward <fward@erols.com>]

Answering Glenn re: available light shooting in the White House....

There were no ground rules as such, but to maintain intimacy and to get
the look and feel of the place and its occupants, I decided to shoot
entirely by available light (TV when it was there, room lights when
there was nothing else).

I have a 50mm Summilux and had a 35mm Summulux then in addition to my
35mm Summicron. (I have since sold the 35 Summilux since, like several
of you, I found it to be inferior to the other Leica lenses.) I also had
a 90mm Summicron but found that it was just unreliable in focusing it in
dim light where subjects moved around some and trying to get anything at
f/2 or 2.8. So, for that kind of short tele I used an SLR. 

Anyway, to get the slow shutter speeds to work for me, I used my own
Soft Touch releases on all Ms, curled my forefinger over the Soft Touch,
and squeezed carefully for each exposure. No pushing down, just a gentle
squeeze. I also took a lot and selected the sharper images... 

The problem pictures were the ones done at 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2. Many of
them did not work out. But enough did to make it work. I was up on the
Truman Balcony one night with the President and the Polish head of
state. There was NO light out there (mainly for security reasons), and
the only illumination was a bit of room light spilling out, and the
Washington Monument in the distance was the brightest thing in the
picture, several times brighter than the two men. Still, I backed up
against the wall, held my breath, and shot a few at 1/2 sec. Some were
OK. I know they were at 1.4 because the Monument is out of focus. 

Practice is all that makes this work, and a gentle release on a camera
with no mirror bounce and no noise. I would shoot private meetings in
the Oval Office with people who would then come out, see me on the couch
outside the Office, and ask if I was going in for some pictures. When I
told them I had already been in, got the pictures of the President and
the people asking me at the time, and had come back out, they usually
expressed great surprise, saying they never saw me come in and work. 

That is what a photojournalist loves to hear. 

Fred Ward