Photojournalism | Behind The Scene | China’s President Xi Jinping Visit To Malaysia
© 2013 Wazari Wazir | Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak and China’s President Xi Jinping
Things really can go wrong sometimes but luckily this time it gets right even though a scary start to begin with. This is a maiden visit of China’s President H.E Xi Jinping to Malaysia since taking office in March 2013, everyone, especially the photojournalist really wanted to get a great picture of Najib Razak and Xi Jinping to document this historical visit.
This is a normal “Photo Op” or photo opportunity for the photographers whereby the Prime Minister will pose with his counterpart, shake hands and show his counterpart some part of the Putrajaya. The place where they stand is a bit hight just outside of the main door to Prime Ministers office, from their vantage point, they can see some part of Putrajaya, especially all the government buildings.
The photojournalist always hope there is nothing between them, we wanted a clean background, but most of the times, those who set this things up can’t see what we had seen from our lens. They might think that they have steer clear enough from the main subject, but unfortunately they are still within the frame.
The photograph above were taken using 300 mm lens, that is what exactly what you will see from 300 mm lens on full fame camera body, I did not do any cropping here, just to level the horizon line. Some photojournalist did use 400 mm and 500 mm lens and they will get a tighter shot than 300 mm to be sure but then if there is someone behind our main subject, then the picture will be ruin.
The Prime Minister, can’t see what’s happening behind him, he will do is to pose for a photographers, talking with his counterpart and then move on, sometimes we just get less than ten second of photo opportunity, sometimes we get lucky but normally this photo op rarely get’s more than 30 second and during China’s President visit, we are very lucky to have close than 30 second of photo opportunity, thanks to EXIF Data, so I can check the time accurately. Sometimes we only get around 15 second of photo opportunity at this location.
The lady with the handbag, if I’m not mistaken is a translator for China’s President and we know that she can’t stay afar from the president. ANyway she is not the problem here and in fact there is no problem during this photo op, but what I’m trying to do with my post here is to let someone, especially from the protocol to have a clear view of what’s really happening within the frame of the photographers.
I believe everyone wanted to have the best picture for the President and our Prime Minister especially, I believed someone will be proud to show the boss on how beautiful the photograph with their setting but most of the times they can’t see what we saw within our frame, so with this picture, hopefully they can set a mark up there, where someone should be standing when the Prime Minister pose for a photograph.
I believed if the Prime Minister happy with the photograph, everyone will be happy. And one more thing, hopefully someone will guide The Prime Minister to stand a little bit to the front, close to the end of the red carpet there, so we can see his shoes. Otherwise if we published a full body shot, it won’t came out nice without the presence of the shoes.
There will always a room for an improvement, sometimes things can get wrong, but we can planned for the best and yes I did get a quite good photograph on that day.
*You can see the final photograph after some cropping HERE
