March 18, 1998

YOU JUST NEVER KNOW

by Dick Kraus
Newsday Staff Photographer

I’m sure that I am no different than most news photographers. I am given an assignment and in the time it takes to get from Point A to Point B, I have considered in my mind, some ideas and options as to how I want the image to look. I consider what I think I will find when I get to the scene and in my mind I imagine what that scene will look like using a very wide angled lens or a super tele lens. I imagine the angle and lighting conditions and I try to visualize what camera angle will best tell the story. Naturally, when I get to the scene, most of what I had visualized just doesn’t exist. It took me a long time before I learned not to lock myself too tightly into my “mind’s eye view” because when it fell apart, I found myself unable to find some other creative avenue and I would shoot the most mundane photos of my career.

One day in June of 1994, after months and months of front page stories and tv coverage, the O.J. Simpson murder trial was finally coming down to the wire. The media was informed that a verdict was in and would be announced sometime after noon.

My paper is 3,000 miles from the courtroom where the long awaited announcement would be made. Naturally, any self respecting editor will try to find a local hook to an big story like that, and my newsroom was no exception. Several of our photo staff were put on alert for local reaction to the verdict announcement.

I had a bunch of political headshots to make in the morning, but I was told to be ready to go to a nearby upscale community after noon to photograph the verdict being watched by wealthy white patrons at a gym. I finished up my head shots and decided to return to the office to soup and scan the early assignment and get it out of the way. When I finished, the Day Photo Editor sought me out and informed me that the game plan had changed. I was to meet a staff reporter at a hair salon in a black community and get the reaction there.

Just before the appointed hour, I headed for my assignment. Naturally, I began to visualize how I would shoot this. I saw a wide angle shot with the patrons of the shop watching the verdict on a tv screen, which I hoped that I could include somewhere in the photo.

I arrived at the location and didn’t have a lot of time to set up. The reporter was all ready there and had gotten permission from the owner and the patrons to do what we had to do.

I quickly set up my tripod and placed my Nikon F-4 with my 15mm lens on it. Let me explain first that I will go to great lengths to avoid straight, on-camera flash. I detest the chalky, washed-out objects in the foreground and the darkish objects in the distance. It is so unnatural, and it destroys the mood of most photographs. So, where ever possible, I bring in my sticks (tripod) and try to use the ambient light to capture the mood and I use a flash held off the camera, set to one and a third stops less than the exposure from the ambient light, just to open up any shadows and throw some light into the eyes. This necessitates the use of very slow shutter speeds. Sometimes as slow as a half a second, and that is why the sticks are so important. I can only use this method if there is little or no movement on the part of the subjects. And, I didn’t anticipate much movement in this case. I was certain that the jury would announce a guilty verdict and I figured that the patrons of this black hair saloon would just sit there kind of glum.

With that in mind, I placed my camera and very wide angle lens low so that the tv screen would appear in the far right corner of my frame and large enough to see the face of Simpson as the verdict was announced. That element was as important as the reaction of the public, because it gave the picture the relevance it needed. The rest of the frame included a group of people sitting in the hairdresser’s chairs and one woman seated in the waiting area to my left. The room was dimly lit, but because I was using such a wide angle lens, I didn’t have to stop down much for depth of field. If I recall, I was set at about f5.6. The dim light in the place required a shutter speed of an eighth of a second. That should do it since I didn’t figure on much movement with a guilty verdict.

While I was making the final focusing adjustments the tv screen in the corner of my photo began to show activity as the jurors filed into the courtroom. I lifted my Nikon SB-24 flash which was linked to my camera synch shoe with an extension coil cord as the jury foreperson read the verdict.

“NOT GUILTY!” The patrons in the store exploded out of their chairs in exultation.

“Oh, Shit!” was my reaction as I pressed the shutter button. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. I didn’t have time to reset the camera. Pandemonium erupted around me and all I could do was keep hitting the shutter button, knowing that my slow shutter speed would never capture the jubilation that was so free and natural in that tiny shop.

I’ve been in this business a long, long time and I know that I had to come back with something. When the exultation died down, I took the camera off the sticks and set my exposures for straight flash and tried to get some close-ups of happy black faces. I had something that we could use in the paper, but it certainly wasn’t going to be the dynamic photo that I had let slip out of my grasp because I had locked myself to tightly into a shot that just never was. And I kicked myself for assuming a guilty verdict. I had to consider that this frame of mind might be a form of racism, and I try hard to be neutral in my coverage.

Well, what’s done is done. I called in and was told to return with my photos. It was a painful 20 minutes while my film went through the Fuji Processor. In the meantime, all of the Photo Editors came up and asked if I had anything good. I mumbled some murky, noncommittal answer.

When my film emerged from the machine, I threw it on the light table and grabbed a loupe.

The Photo Editors were ecstatic. As I threw the image onto the computer monitor to work on it, news editors, on hearing about the shot, came into the scanning room to look over my shoulder. We ran the photo in black and white, even though we shoot everything on negative color film, but it ran a decent size. The bonus came when the wires picked it up and it ran in black and white and in color in several papers around the country. Newsweek ran it in color across the top of one page and then again across two pages in their year end review some months later. The German magazine, Der Stern used it in color across one of their large pages. And this photo won me a number of prestigious awards.

I willingly explained to anyone who would listen, what a fluke it was that I got what I did. I hate to take credit for such unplanned and unmitigated luck.

But, you just never know.

Dick Kraus

Newsday Staff Photographer

March 18, 1998

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