I dislike news photography as I am forced to do it at the paper.

It often lacks the one thing I think it should champion and that is authenticity.

The set-up shot is, by its very nature, not authentic. The people are, their reason for being in front of the camera and even their props usually are, but the staging of the photo is “old school” news reporting.

“Say cheese”.

Advice has been given to me by others who are fully entrenched in this way of thinking, but I cannot bring myself to do it.

I think we can do better.

Over thirty plus years of seeing things and grabbing them as I go have given me speed, intuition and accuracy, all mostly wasted as it goes when “manufacturing” an image.

I have felt trapped in a world not best suited to my skill set or one I want to adapt to necessarily, trying to find a decent compromise between set-up and “as I see it” shooting.

Skating the thin ice over a lake of “what has been before and should be for ever more” basking in the fresh air of genuine naturalness. My usual go-to is to put people in their happy place and let them be themselves.

Video has changed this for me or more to the point, video has made this a more normal state.

People it seems have been trained over the years to expect “the usual”, so ironically I have to sometimes re-train them to be themselves, sometimes with near comical results, but that just helps break the ice.

A couple of handy things are small, silent cameras that can be shot from many angles and I hate to say it, but getting to my age you tend to become invisible. Handy.

People do not want gimmicks any longer, posed images, fakery.

They want authenticity.

The world is full of manufactured perfection.

Look at the work of the young, they are trying to be natural, but they are flooded with not natural-natural media, but they want natural and in a world of AI, authenticity is even more under threat.

It may at the moment be one way of doing something that is at odds with the norm, but in the very near future, it may be the only way.