Magen David Yeshivah HS Graduation
Magen David High School Graduation 2026
Documenting a Brooklyn Graduation: Behind the Cover Photo for Jewish Image Magazine
An evening graduation ceremony at Magen David Yeshivah High School in Brooklyn, NY, produced a photograph that was later selected for the cover of Jewish Image Magazine's September edition.
The Evening: Inside a Brooklyn Graduation Ceremony
Evening graduations have a different feel than daytime ones. The light shifts throughout the ceremony, the room fills with a different kind of energy, and documenting it well means constantly adjusting to the moment rather than working from a fixed setup.
The ceremony brought together graduates, families, and a wider Brooklyn Jewish community celebrating a milestone together. Events like this are as much about the people in the room as the moment on stage, and capturing that fully means paying attention to both.
The Technical Challenge: Lighting a Room with High Ceilings
One of the defining challenges of the venue was its very high ceilings. This matters more than people realize: high ceilings absorb and scatter light rather than reflecting it back into the room, which means a single flash source, on-camera or off, won't evenly light the space.
The solution was to place a flash in each corner of the room, angled to bounce and fill the space rather than blast light directly at subjects. This off-camera lighting setup meant the room stayed evenly lit no matter where the action moved, rather than requiring light to be chased around the space in real time.
Precision Over Instinct
Photos like this one, the cover of Jewish Image Magazine's September edition, aren't the result of luck. They come from anticipating the light, the movement, and the moment before it happens, then making sure the technical setup is already in place to capture it. That kind of precision is built through years of documenting events exactly like this one.
Read the full article, written by Yvonne Orfali, in the September edition of Jewish Image Magazine.
