Reuters
By Baz Ratner
June 23, 2011
During photographer Baz Ratner’s second embed in 2011, he covered the 22nd royal regiment, the last Canadian combat force to leave Afghanistan. His most remembered photo from his second stay depicts soldiers firing a 155mm howitzer artillery piece. Published online, Ratner’s photograph was shot using a wide angle, and quick shutter speed in order to depict the surprising effects of warfare, not on the victim’s end, but the attacker’s side.
Ratner specifies his use of a 16 mm lens, which allows his image to capture the entire scene as a whole. In photography terms, this would be known as a wide angle, or in other words, zooming out. By including the smoggy sky, the many soldiers in the background, the massive artillery with its equally hefty ammunition, and the soldier flinching from the suspended pieces of gravel flying back, Ratner portrays the chaos of war. His focus is on the soldier reloading, the shock in his body language implying his surprise from the force of the artillery’s recoil hitting the ground, causing all nearby sharp and potentially dangerous gravel to fly up. Ratner’s wide field of view adequately captures as many as possible of all the little details of seemingly safe, long-distance warfare.
The photographer also states his choice of using F5 in combination with a shutter speed of 1/3200 sec, allowing him to have the background in focus. F5 is the setting that allows for a large depth of field and automatic slow shutter speed, but Ratner’s decision to shoot with a fast 1/3200 sec shutter speed implies the importance of capturing all the little details: the smoke, the cannon, and the gravel with clarity, emphasizing the chaos and stress soldiers are forced to function under. Ratner’s camera clearly freezes any action in the scene for the public to experience all the feelings of confusion, surprise, and fear in that moment of firing at the enemy from afar.
By shooting the entire scene with as much clarity on both the soldier tasked with reloading and the chaotic background, Ratner effectively depicts a shocking moment for the audience. Ratner prompts the onlooker to make sense of his photo, to ponder about how the gravel is flying, why the smoke blanketing the ground looks more like fog, or what the soldiers are thinking or feeling. In this photo, it’s not about the enemy soldiers, innocent men, women, and children victims tragic losses from the artillery’s shelling, but about our own soldiers and how they suffer physically, mentally, and emotionally from the magnitude of the artillery’s recoiling effects. As Newton once concluded: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
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