Okay, but the real question here: What'd he shoot it with?
(Old photographer joke: You're shooting by a lake on a cloudy day and you happen on someone drowning, and have to choose between dropping your gear to run to the rescue and getting a shot to sell the local paper. So - what f-stop do you use?)
I'd be more concerned about shutter speed. If the drownee is flailing their arms, dragging the shutter slower might yield a more dramatic look with the motion blur. Too high of shutter speed so the action is frozen might look more like someone rehearsing their part in a synchronized routine.
Keeping the subject in focus is more important as a decent telephoto will get you an out of focus background. Unless you're just a dick and use a wide angle but wade out into the water to get a decent framing.
With f/8 on a cloudy day you might get problem getting sharp image of the arms or have to settle on grainy image, regardless of the lens.
I would use fastest aperture I can that is still sharp and just shot a bunch of frames very quickly in hopes I can get arms in just the right, dramatic position.
As to whether to shoot wide or tele, if you feel you have enough time try to get subject to fill the frame first, while he still looks lively, and then quickly change the lens to get some additional shots with the background.
Actually, I am a skipper and because of that I had to go through quite thorough training of which large part is focused on saving people in Man Over Board situation.
I estimate full 1/3rd of entire training was devoted exclusively to getting a person back on the ship if they happened to fall into water while underway.
It is said "people do not splash" because if you are focused on looking for flailing hands and splashing water and shouts for help then your are missing most people that drown.
But it doesn't mean people don't shout and don't flail. They do. Just not most of the time.
I'm definitely not sacrificing my gear for a PM. They can send an email requesting a meeting about being saved, and then get upset that nobody accepted the meeting
Depends on which stage of drowning they are in. If they've just fallen in, they might still be flailing away. If they've been flailing for a minute already, then, yeah, thy might be tired. Plus, it's hard to shout when your lungs are full of water. I can't do it with a mouthful of water let alone lungs. My ventriloquist dummy on the other hand won't shut up while I'm drinking water.
"Directly behind them, not 10 feet away, their 9-year-old daughter was drowning…
How did this captain know—from 50 feet away—what the father couldn’t recognize from just 10? Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television."
someone in the process of drowning, as in exhaustion and/or panic causing ineffective motions that do not get the head far enough above water to take an adequate breath won't be able to splash or yell.
Someone who is not exhausted and not technically drowning yet but who will be if left for another 10,15,60 or whatever minutes does have the ability to yell and splash.
dragging the shutter slow enough to get motion blur would also make up for any difference in light loss. would require some sort of stabilization though. if you don't have a tri/monopod, you can set it on the ground and use some rocks or sticks (you're near a lake) to prop up the lens. also, i'd suggest using a 1 second shutter release delay to not have any bounce from you pressing the buttons on such a slow shutter.
also, digital cameras could just compensate slower f-stop with higher ISO if necessary
For film, I'd go with "cloudy 11" and lose a stop or two of shutter speed, but I haven't shot film in thirty years, so who knows if I'm full of it or not.
(And thank you all for bringing the back half of the joke in such inimitable style!)
Only film I ever shot was disposable 35mm and the older 110mm. Nothing to be adjusted to get your Cloudy 11 or Sunny 16. The one I do use in dslr world is Rule of 500 for astro stuffs. I'd say now to just ensure shooting RAW so you can adjust the white balance in post. Camera defaults for cloudy are just too cool to me.
(I'm never one to shy away from answering obvious rhetorical questions in a joke)
I don't know about all that. It's not like shooting in the dark at ISO 32000. It's a sunny day that you've stopped the aperture down a couple of stops. Which means you're probably already shooting at low ISO100. Cameras can easily push to ISO800 with no noise being introduced. Newer sensors can easily go higher than that. Hell, my BMD camera's base ISO is 1600.
So I'm just going to come out and say claiming that pushing the ISO and introducing noise during a daytime (albeit cloudy) shoot and pushing the ISO a few stops to counter stopping down is fake news and scaremongering.
I learned from other responses that a drowning person won’t necessarily splash about. See the other comment about how a father couldn’t spot that his daughter 10 feet away from him was drowning - he’d been conditioned by television that a drowning person would splash.
With the lensing of a GoPro, you might as well use a CameraPhone. Otherwise, anything further than 20' away will only be a few pixels in the GoPro image.
(Old photographer joke: You're shooting by a lake on a cloudy day and you happen on someone drowning, and have to choose between dropping your gear to run to the rescue and getting a shot to sell the local paper. So - what f-stop do you use?)