Capturing and Culling a Photo Journalist Scene

Lately I've been enjoying photojournalism as a hobby. After decades of being a software engineer I find the experience quite grounding. It gives me a reason to interact with locals and to go to events; things that are easy to skip when one works remote and otherwise lives a "virtual" life.

I though it would be nice to share how I approach a scene, how I choose which shots to take, and how I choose which ones to delete.

I do shoot a lot of planned events, such as protests and parades, but I also walk around with a camera most of the time and come upon random events worthy of news in the local paper, like the ones in this post.

For these photos I was taking my kid to school. Across the street is a construction site where we'll often watch construction workers and I'll narrate what's going on. However this morning there wasn't any construction and instead most people were standing around holding signs.

We had come upon a strike!

I just so happened to have my Sony camera and the Sigma 25-200 super zoom lens that I specifically bought for shooting outdoor events and protests. I held my toddler with my left arm and my camera with my right arm. This was the first time I shot anything like this while holding my kid and I would never bring them to a major protest. Luckily I could estimate and adjust the focal length before taking each shot.

For this event I took a total of 14 photos and 5 were deemed "keepers".

My goal with the photos was to submit them to local news organizations and to sell them online as editorial stock photos. Of course, you'll probably have your own goals, so keep in mind how many you'll want to collect based on that. Just keep in mind that no editor is going to sift through 50 photos of the same thing.

Early Shots

When approaching a scene like this it's important to first grab a few shots immediately, even if they're junk. The thing is, you never know if shit's going to hit the fan with an event like this. Perhaps police arrive and everyone splits. Or maybe someone drives off in a truck and people race after it. Or maybe you're told to leave by security. Or maybe your camera dies or gets broken.

At any rate, grab a few shots immediately, even though they probably won't be keepers. In my case I took a photo as soon as I had my camera out (and in this case it was a keeper).

If you're into software engineering it's sort of like exponential backoff for error retries. The overall length of time (how long the event happens, how long until the error resolves) is unknown and could be a minute or a few hours. Since you don't know the time denominator, assume the worst and start shooting.

My first 3 photos were taken this way and the first photo was a keeper.

Try to capture multiple elements

There are a few important things when it comes to telling a story, especially when it comes to photo journalism and covering strikes or protests or marches.

• Where is the event happening?
• How many folks are participating?
• What is the extent of the inconvenience?
• What organization is affected (if any)?

Of course, it's pretty easy to capture individual photos with each of these elements. Take a photo of a road sign to convey where it is. Take a very wide shot to capture as many people as you can. Zoom into the street to show how many cars are backed up. That said nobody wants a bunch of one-off photos like this. Instead you need to somehow capture all of these elements while combining as many into a single photo as you can.

For this event the where was a neighborhood in San Francisco. The how many was a total of 11 striking I.B.E.W. Local 6 union members (though there were non-striking people present as well). The inconvenience was that a construction site was standing still not making progress and costing money. The organization affected was J O'Driscoll Electric, but it was also Thompson Builders. The exact relationship between the three organizations is unknown to me but the ideal photo captures all three names.

During this phase you're doing lots of walking around, trying to get better angles, and orienting yourself to grab as many of these elements in the foreground and the background as you can. Keep in mind which items you've captured as there's no reason to capture one element a dozen times while skipping out on others.

I captured 8 photos during this stage, 3 were keepers.

Capture a single perfect shot with all elements

Once you've grabbed photos with different combinations of elements you need to focus on getting one with as many elements in one. This is the photo that is the most likely to be shared. If you're making a social media post with several images this may be the first.

In my case I wanted a photo with many striking union members holding signs (and the signs mention who is protesting). I wanted to show where the event happened in relation to downtown San Francisco. I also wanted to show a non protesting member and some of the job site. Finally, I wanted to show the name of the job site.

I captured 3 photos during this stage, 1 was a keeper.

This photo contains many useful elements for telling the story:

• Eleven striking union members, easily counted, all have their signs visible
• San Francisco skyscrapers are visible in the background
• The traffic controller is still working which shows money is being spent
• The job site is sort of visible on the left
• Idle construction equipment is visible
• Road cones and a Road Closed Ahead sign is visible

Unfortunately it's not quite perfect:

• Scrambling foremen aren't shown
• No legible road names on signs
• The name of the job site isn't visible

Note that it isn't always possible to capture every single important element in a single photo. Sometimes everything won't fit into view. Sometimes you'll need a drone or a lens wider or longer than what you have with you. At the end of the day you'll need to do the best with what you have with you.

Of course, the more time you spend on location, the more likely you are to get a winning photo.

Parting Thoughts

Figure out the Story

Try to figure out what the story is with an event. This is important for combining elements into one photo and also for writing a caption. You might already know the full story before you arrive on scene, like if you're invited to photograph a launch party. Other times you will only know part of the story, like if you know the headline for a protest but the signs tell another story. And in my case I didn't know any of the story about this strike.

Here's what I assume the story is for this strike:

11 members of the I.B.E.W. Local 6 union work for J.O'Driscoll Electric (JODE). These union members were striking at a job site managed by Thompson Builders (TB). While striking there's basically not a lot of work getting done, but TB is still flipping the bill. The three foremen and two sign holders are getting paid wages after all. There's also a schedule to maintain which will start to slip. It also reflects poorly on JODE as far as TB is concerned and the longer the strike the longer the reputation damage.

A lot of this is assumptions though and a caption should only contain verifiable information. You don't want to be found libelous after all. Ultimately the caption I wrote is as follows:

San Francisco, USA. 30th Jan 2026. Several construction workers held a strike at the Thompson Builders 300 De Haro St job site in Potrero Hill, San Francisco, California, holding signs referencing unfair wages paid by J O'Driscoll.

Photo Count

The ideal number of photos you should keep for an event is not a function of the number of photos you take. Or in other words, if you take 10 or 100 photos, the number you should keep doesn't change. In fact, the number that you should keep can often be guessed ahead of time.

This event was a small strike, one that I was going to be at for less than 10 minutes, and one with about 20 people present. The ideal number of photos for this event is probably around three.

In a sense, each photo is a liability. It takes time to go through them all, to flip back and forth between two photos, and pick which is the best. Editing them and writing an applicable caption based on the content also takes work. Practice makes perfect here and the more you shoot the better you'll get at taking keepers. Note that it can also help to delete or rate photos in camera during your trip home.

Thomas Hunter II is a Software Engineer with 18+ years building scalable, production-grade systems. Deep expertise in Node.js, observability, and developer tooling, with a strong track record of driving architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, and improving customer facing technical documentation. Author of 5 books (including O'Reilly), certified by the OpenJS Foundation, and frequent international conference speaker.