Ambulance Night Shift

Trainee Ambulance Technician Kelly MacRae with Paramedic Alistair Theobold

This was a rather impromptu shoot which evolved rapidly while I was at Broadford Hospital to photograph the doctors, nurses and other staff working at night.

I was introduced to the ambulance crew in their ready-room on the ground floor of the hospital, where they wait for the call to action to come through. I described the Skye At Night project, and showed them my layout copy of the book that I always carry with me, and I was delighted when they agreed to join in.

Once I’d finished photographing the medical staff, I dropped in to see the ambulance team again with my friend Paddy who was assisting me on this shoot. We pulled together a swift plan to shoot outside with one of the ambulances at the Accident and Emergency entrance to the hospital. This would allow me to get two shots, one of the ambulance in motion and the other a portrait of Kelly and Alastair in situ.

Slow shutter ambulance drive-by

For the motion shot, a slow shutter speed was key to get an image that looked dynamic and exciting. I wanted to be quite close to the passing ambulance to emphasise the motion and light trails as it drove past, so used my Sony A7III and 16-35mm lens at 16mm.

I dialled in a shutter speed of 1/13th to get a good balance between being able to see the ambulance itself, and getting the motion blur I wanted. With that set, I balanced aperture at f/4.5 and ISO at 1250, and set the camera to fast multi-shot shutter so I could just mash the button and pan as the ambulance drive by.

Unfortunately we’d forgotten to tell any of the hospital staff what we were doing. With the ambulance driving around several times with blue lights on, it must have looked like a massive incident kicking off. One of the administrators came running out to check so we had to reassure her that all was in hand. That’s a lesson for next time!

The result was a really nice selection of varied images, with different levels of flashing blue lights, direction, blue and detail. I picked the one above as the best of the set, partially because of the lovely blue lens flare, and the fact I wanted a portrait-format shot for the shape of the space I had reserved in the book.

The setup for the portrait image.

Then it was onto the portrait shot. With the ambulance positioned just by the unloading area outside A&E, we got on with setting everything else up. Amazingly, the inside of the ambulance has selectable multi-colour lights so obviously we set those to blue, and got the flashing blue lights on the roof going as well. Alistair and Kelly dropped the tailgate and wheeled the stretcher out - it all looked great.

As you can see in the behind-the-scenes shot that Paddy took above, the effect of the bright lights in and on the ambulance silhouetted the two subjects. This meant that I had to light them manually. I anticipated that I’d need to do this so had my trusty mini-octabox and wireless flash triggers with me.

I do like a single light setup like this. It’s really fast to set up, and when positioned close-in the resulting light is soft and flattering, and allows you to bring out shaping and contours really nicely as you can see from the folds in their uniforms in the shot at the top of this article.

With the flash positioned just to the side, I made sure they were both positioned in my plane of focus as I wanted to shoot at f/1.7 using my Leica Q3. The intention was to throw the background slightly out of focus while ensuring the subjects were nice and sharp. With a narrow depth of field, it was important to keep the subjects at the same distance to ensure they were sharp, but I did so knowing that Alistair on the right would be slightly less let than Kelly on the left. I elected to go with this and boost the exposure on Alistair slightly in post-processing, rather than risk one of the subjects being slightly out of focus.

The camera settings for the Leica Q3 were 1/60th, f/1.7, ISO 800 and 28mm.

I tried a few different compositions. With the ambulance lights flashing it was all quite “interesting” as the background light was changing all the time. As well as shooting at head height, I also wanted some low shots to emphasise the importance and standing of Kelly and Alastair in the community.

I ended up picking the low shot shown at the start of this post. As well as lovely expressions on Kelly and Alastair, the shapes of the building and ambulance fill the screen really well, and there’s space for the book’s fold just down the right door of the ambulance. You can see the final page layout in the image below.

What a privilege to be able to meet Alastair and Kelly, and spend some time with them. Lovely people.

Here’s how the double-page spread is looking in the book layout, with the fold straight down the chevrons of the ambulance door.