The only thing you can control is you

Guaranteed: Most news shoots won't go as planned. Locations will change at the last minute, extra people will turn up and others won't arrive, outside shots will be driven inside by bad weather, elaborate 15-minute shots will become 60-second quickies, kids will cry, equipment will fail, etc, etc. If it's outside your direct control then you can't count on it, but you need to be ready to deal with it.

A lot of that "dealing with it" will only come with experience, but hopefully the example I'm going to give today will illustrate how a few simple tricks can help overcome some fairly major obstacles.

I was meant to be photographing a film-maker and a writer at a small independent studio. This should immediately put ideas in your head for how you might do the shot: You've got two people so you can have foreground and background interest. You'll have the studio setting with props like lights and cameras, to immediately convey the idea of film-making. This should be a fairly easy shot, so you can put all of your effort in to making it as dramatic and interesting as possible.

But… I arrived at the location to find the studio locked and the film-maker apologising that the writer couldn't make it. So we're stood there on an industrual estate, on a gloomy, overcast day, missing 50% of the subjects and 100% of the location. Not good. But somehow the picture needs to get done.

Almost always, when you're working in a location with ugly backgrounds, the first thing you're going to do is look up and look down. What is the sky like and what is the ground like? If you can get low enough or get high enough then the sky or the ground can be your background. You can light people from behind to cast shadows in front of them, which can make a wet tarmac road look amazing. You can under-expose the sky to create a perfectly smooth, dramatic backdrop. Pretty much the only limit is your own imagination. And if you hit that limit then just try random things and see what happens.

The next trick is focal length. Shoot wide or long. Wide can help to keep the subject dominant in the frame while making background objects and buildings appear small and far away. Shooting telephoto can help to blur an ugly background, or you can keep distractions out of the frame entirely. As a general rule, the more extreme the angle, whether it's wide or long, the more eye-catching the photo will be. I usually shoot at 17mm or 200mm. Work the extremes.

And of course, the most effective solution of all: Lighting. If you can light the subject then the shot gets easier. If you can light the background, and it's appropriate to do so, then the shot gets easier again. Remember that lighting the subject can usually let you turn the background black, which is effectively two levels of lighting that you can control using only one light.

Time to put my money where my mouth is and show you what I came up with from the film-maker shoot. The darker shots were all lit with a single flash. Note that in the first one there's a mess of trees and buildings in the background, but you don't really notice them because the wide angle takes your attention straight to the camera and then up the leading line to the subject's face. In the last photo, the 'safety' shot, the background was a mess of ugly buildings, car tyres and junk metal, but with a shallow depth of field and a careful telephoto shooting angle, the viewer would never know that any of that stuff was there.

One more quick example on the same theme. A couple of weeks ago I was meant to be getting a picture of a drama workshop where a group of kids were making props and costumes for an upcoming play. When I arrived they had nothing. So I had to find an interesting picture of a group of kids in a school hall with no props and about 30 seconds to do the shot so no time for interesting lighting.

That's pretty much my definition of a nightmare shot, especially the extreme time limitation. But by taking the photo from the top of an 8-foot ladder, using the floor as a background, and getting the kids and the drama teacher to "just do something with your hands", I got a shot that wasn't too bad.

The point of showing you that drama workshop picture is this: I think the film-maker pictures are very good but I don't consider the workshop picture to be good at all. However I do consider it to be the best that was possible with the time and location limit. I hate coming away from a job with a picture that I don't like and a feeling that I failed, but I came away from that workshop with a picture that I didn't like and a feeling that I had succeeded.