INVASION DAY RALLY (Patreon)

These are just a few of the many portraits I captured at a rally (protest/demonstration) yesterday. I shared these images to many photographic forums online (I am expected to do this as part of my Sony Ambassador contract, hash tagging Sony Australia in the process).

Most of the responses are positive but, as is often the case, some people want to post negative comments that are not about the camera gear or creative approach I have taken to make these images. One comment criticised the number of images I was sharing in my post (60+ images) and someone else wanted to know my religion. Someone asked me to 'take the images somewhere else', the implication being that I was promoting a political viewpoint they did not agree with.

This rally could be described as a 'political rally', but it is a mistake to assume that the photographer who documents an event like this, also  shares the political views, religious persuasion or sexual orientation of the participants of any particular rally. 

I have documented events where I have been accused of promoting cruelty to animals, homosexuality or political views that upset the viewer who is looking at the photographs, e.g, I have been taken to task for images I have made at a rodeo, but the viewer has no way of knowing whether I eat meat or whether I am a vegetarian. My own views play no part of the document I have created.

I often include multiple images in a post (I rarely post a single image). This is because I want to convey a narrative, rather than just present a single hero file. When submitting images to a picture-editor I would often give them a choice of 60 images for them to choose the 5 or 6 images they want to use in a photo-story. These would include establishing shots (where are we) action shots (what are the people doing), portrait shots and detail shots. 

Presenting so many shots, also demonstrates that the Sony gear I am using (and my PAL workflow) is consistently reliable at capturing 'usable' images that are sharp and correctly exposed. If I take a look at my one-star rating in the Lightroom Library module (the rating that I give to any image that I consider technically correct and visually compelling to look at) I can see that my 'success' rate at this event was approximately one image every minute for a 2.5 hour working period.