That is pretty damn weird, but the "highly specific settings being enabled to even have a chance of capturing" is kind of a myth. Photographers often try to grab long sequences of shots, which is something you can do on your phone. The top-left thumbnail might even be from a video IIRC. If it was a very high shutter speed you'd see the bullet clearly and not a streak.
He had a Sony A1 camera and had the shutter speed set to 1/8000th of a second. I’ve heard back and forth on justifications for such a high shutter speed, but amazingly he was able to capture the 3 image progression of bullet>wince/hand raise>bloody hand
Why wouldn’t he set shutter speed that high if he could get away with it? The reasons to have a lower shutter speed are as follows:
To allow motion to be blurred—not something you usually want for news photos of a speech, so that’s out
To let more light in in order to increase the exposure. Obviously, the photos don’t look underexposed, so he’s fine there
In order to allow for a sharper depth of field. Again, not a huge concern for news photos, but the focus in the photos seems fine, so as with exposure, no problem there.
The simplest explanation seems likely to be that he sets his shutter speed as he can and likely takes hundreds or even thousands of photos of every event he covers, then uses the most visually striking.
That is pretty damn weird, but the "highly specific settings being enabled to even have a chance of capturing" is kind of a myth. Photographers often try to grab long sequences of shots, which is something you can do on your phone. The top-left thumbnail might even be from a video IIRC. If it was a very high shutter speed you'd see the bullet clearly and not a streak.
Short video interview with the photographer:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/14/politics/video/doug-mills-trump-rally-photo-src-digvid
He had a Sony A1 camera and had the shutter speed set to 1/8000th of a second. I’ve heard back and forth on justifications for such a high shutter speed, but amazingly he was able to capture the 3 image progression of bullet>wince/hand raise>bloody hand
Why wouldn’t he set shutter speed that high if he could get away with it? The reasons to have a lower shutter speed are as follows:
To allow motion to be blurred—not something you usually want for news photos of a speech, so that’s out
To let more light in in order to increase the exposure. Obviously, the photos don’t look underexposed, so he’s fine there
In order to allow for a sharper depth of field. Again, not a huge concern for news photos, but the focus in the photos seems fine, so as with exposure, no problem there.
The simplest explanation seems likely to be that he sets his shutter speed as he can and likely takes hundreds or even thousands of photos of every event he covers, then uses the most visually striking.
You can have multiple terabytes of data saved on a SD card that's smaller than the nail on your pinky finger. Why wouldn't you take advantage of that?