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:

1. To allow motion to be blurred—not something you usually want for news photos of a speech, so that’s out

2. To let more light in in order to increase the exposure. Obviously, the photos don’t look underexposed, so he’s fine there

3. 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.

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:

1. To allow motion to be blurred—not something you usually want for news photos of a speech, so that’s out

2. To let more light in in order to increase the exposure. Obviously, the photos don’t look underexposed, so he’s fine there

3. In order to allow more room to play with depth of field effects. 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.