Visual Journalism

Guy Reynolds, the photo editor at the Dallas Morning News who found the altered golf image of Matt Bettencourt has talked with the (now) former Getty Images freelance photographer who made, altered and transmitted the image. (Reynolds’ original post is still online which explains how he found the image and what he did.)

In the update, Marc Feldman claims Bettencourt’s caddie said one of the images would be better if he (the caddie) weren’t in it. Feldman quickly removed him from the image to show what it would look like and thought he saved the image to his desktop, but instead it ended up in a send folder and found its way to Getty Images.

It all seems plausible and I’m sure that’s exactly how this whole event transpired. That’s not sarcasm – I’m sure he’s telling the absolute truth here.

But the fact that he’s telling the truth bothers me even more.

There are several ethical and professional issues at play here.

Visual journalism is under fire quite a bit these days. There’s a persistent belief that because it is so easy to manipulate images and because there’s a need to produce more compelling imagery to get noticed in our visually-saturated world that photographers (and editors) are willing to do whatever it takes to get an image to sing. Feldman, even with his 26 years of experience, decided to show off. Had things not gone wrong, his smallest problem would have been reinforcing the idea that digital manipulation is so easy that everything should be suspect. That alone is a huge problem – when we’re fighting for our credibility, why would you demonstrate how easy it is to erode that credibility? Why not say, “Maybe it would be a better image without you in it, but this is the way it happened?”

The second ethical problem comes up with a twist. Getty Images holds contracts with both news organizations – to produce editorial content – and professional sporting organizations – to produce public relations material. It’s unclear which of these sides Feldman was shooting for (and, unfortunately, it’s likely he was producing for both), but if it was the editorial side what was he doing showing the images off? It could pose shield law problems in some jurisdictions and, at the very least, puts him in an awkward position if the golfer says he doesn’t like the image. Does he then kill it? Find another frame? Ignore him?

And then there’s a professional problem with the workflow that both Feldman and Getty Images have in place. Why was there no double-checking of the images in his send folder? A quick glance would have brought it to his attention. And why did no one at Getty Images’ photo desk catch this? It’s the same moment, from the same angle, just a different crop – it’s pretty clear something is amiss.

In my early freelance days, I worked for the Associated Press for several years. Now we can fault the AP for many things, but one of the things I will sing their praises about was the photo desk staff in New York. They went through my images – and captions – with a fine-toothed comb on every single image I transmitted. (I remember one very long Independence Day conversation with an editor over whether I had a 105 mm or 75 mm howitzer cannon in a photo. I ended up calling the National Guard for an answer before they’d send the image off the satellite.)

So what can we learn from this? Several things … if you’re shooting for an editorial client, no one but you and the client sees those images … if someone suggests “cleaning up” an image would improve it, explain that in journalism the truth improves everything … and, for goodness sake, check what you’re sending – and receiving.

Otherwise, Feldman is absolutely right in what he told Reynolds:

“Sometimes you make a mistake and it’s fatal. I made a fatal mistake.”

For instance, Anssi Vanjoki, head of sales for Nokia, said at a recent news conference the the cameras in, ahem, cell phones will make other “system cameras” obsolete. By which he means digital single lens reflex cameras.

Yes, I believe that small-sensor, small-lens cameras using the processing power available in a handheld cellular telephone will be able to render the shallow depth of field, high resolution and dynamic range of modern full frame cameras in … ha. Haha. Hahahahahaha … I can’t even finish typing this sentence …

Now, can they make a 10, 15 or 20 megapixel chip that’s the size of the sesame seed on the bun of a Big Mac from McDonalds? Yes. Can they make it with low noise, high sensitivity and attach a lens that allows for a high degree of separation between foreground and background? No – that would violate several laws of physics.

But it is nice to dream, eh?

Scott Bourne has a small rant up about Olympus and the non-standard connecting cables they ship with their latest cameras. I have to say, I agree completely with him. While everyone thinks they have a better way of doing things, sometimes the standard way is a standard because it works for the largest number of people out there.

Compromises suck. But what is even worse is when almost everyone does something one way and you choose to do it another way. And then your way stops working – and no on else can help you out. There’s a reason 35 mm film was the choice for so many people for so long – widely accepted and standardized, everyone used it and the market flourished. Going into a good camera store 20 years ago yielded dozens of film choices.

So, really, do we need manufacturer specific cables? It makes sense, to some extent, in lens mounts and maybe highly-marketable areas like TTL flash control. But in connecting cables?

(Of course, this still has quenched my lust for an E-P2 … I’ll just be sure not to lose the cable.)

Kodak’s Chief Blogger, Jennifer Cisney, tweeted a few moments ago that Kodak today announces it’s latest technological breakthrough – and it’s one I might have sniffed at a few years ago, thinking it was a foul idea. But, in today’s market, where there are a million things to see and here, this could be the one piece of technology that allows us to see, hear and smell home while we’re on the road. Take a deep breath before clicking that link – you won’t believe it.

(If they move the link off the front page of Kodak.com, you can find it here.)

I’m not sure if this is brilliant or an unbelievable indictment of where our world has gone – you can now hire a team of paparazzi photographers to follow you around on your night on the town.

I am all for finding new ways to generate income to support the journalistic work we know needs to be done, but it also saddens me that there are people vain enough to want to pretend to be famous like this.

Not a typo – we need to save the newspaper itself and, by extension, the industry. At least according to this panel on The Onion.

How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?

(Thanks to David Noah for the link and laugh.) (It’s a joke, you are supposed to laugh.)

There are a lot of things that happen during my photojournalism classes – philosophy and sociology discussions, rambles about roads, ponderings on psychology. Sometimes, they even relate to photojournalism … but today, well, today we went off track.

Every week we do a “VizCamp” – it’s a 10-15 minute presentation by a student on something they think everyone else should know. The idea (based on the “bar camp” idea) is to add a little knowledge about photojournalism that we wouldn’t normally cover. (Don’t tell them, but it also helps them work on presentation skills.)

Well, today … today our presentation, lead by Emily Gomez, was titled “De-stressing though Dance.”

Ahem.

Yeah …

Ten minutes later, the whole class was up and learning how to dance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

I have never lost control of a class so badly … nor thought it was such a wonderful thing to see.

JOUR5370 dances to "Thriller," Athens, Ga., March 4, 2010. (Photo/Mark E. Johnson, www.mejphoto.com)

JOUR5370 dances to "Thriller," Athens, Ga., March 4, 2010. (Photo/Mark E. Johnson, www.mejphoto.com)

It is T-day – January 27, 2010. In just over four hours, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will walk onto a stage in San Francisco and tell us all … something.

No one knows exactly what it will be, or won’t be, or even could be – but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying to speculate on it. (Here, search “apple tablet” on Google, even limiting it to news sources you get more than 22,000 hits. The only thing that will get more speculation is the second coming of Michael Jackson …)

But since everyone else has chimed in, I will too. Because I love a mob. Really, I do.

The proposed tech specs seem to have congealed around a 10 inch screen, no keyboard, WiFi and wireless (probably 3G, maybe 4G, maybe on AT&T, maybe on Verizon, maybe on both).

Here’s my hope … it can’t be a $1,000 device. It has to be cheaper to really succeed. (See? I’m bad at speculating, because you know it’s going to be $1,000 and sell like crazy … but I look at the results my colleagues got on a Kindle research project where the $500 price point freaked people out and think it has to be lower, even though the Apple device will do way more.) (If it exists.)

If it can get down under $500, even without the wireless side, it’s a game changer. Imagine some of the following …

• With WiFi readily available, iTunes-like subscriptions to news. You fire it up and here comes today’s New York Times, Wall Street Journal and anything else you’d like. Easily read, portable. Would you pay for that? I would. More than a Kindle subscription? Yes, because I can get the interactive graphics, multimedia content, high resolution photos … everything I can get at my desk, I can get at the coffee shop or kitchen table.
• Text books. Some reports have talked about Jobs’ commitment to education, here’s where it can be huge. Imagine being able to highlight text in your school books, click on them and write a note. Or instantly send a question to your professor. Or rely on the “wisdom of the crowds” and have a note pop up in an online community, filtered by your class, college or major … Or do a web search on an unfamiliar term. Or be able to watch an animation of how the human heart works. Or be able to zoom in on a photo or graphic so you can explore more detail.
• Medical notes. The only place tablet-like computing has really worked is in the medical field. My mother has been in and out of hospitals the last few years and I’ve watched doctors scrawl notes and been afraid, very afraid, that someone would misread them. I’ve also seen that at some hospitals, like Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston, that they have a computer in every intensive care unit room. Full patient records – medications, procedures, schedules, all the stats from all the monitors. Everything available with a couple of keystrokes. Imagine the nurses walking into a room and being able to pull up every piece of your medical history, to be able to do a quick search for drug complications … maybe even show you video or photos from a procedure you just went through or are scheduled for. (How many times have you been handed some printouts off the web about whatever it is that may or may not be ailing you? Any comfort in seeing your doctor on Google?)

And that’s just scratching the surface.

I think, if it exists, it’ll revolutionize three big areas first – journalism, education and medicine. So my boss knows about the announcement and I’ve already told him to prepare for me in his office asking for funds to get one in-house. Because, at the intersection of journalism and education is us – journalism educators.

The technical specs don’t really matter, it’s the possibilities of the platform that get me excited. How much better can I teach with this sort of tool? How much better can we deliver stories with this sort of tool?

Of course, it’s also possible there will be … nothing. That everyone has this wrong, that we’ll get new iPods and processor bumps in laptops and maybe the Beatles on iTunes.

Which would be okay, I guess. Sergeant Pepper can sing to all of us in the Lonely Hearts Club Band …

Over on the Los Angeles Times’ On The Media column, James Rainey has a long list of the ills befalling creative people – not just us photographers, but writers, graphic artists, musicians and even architects. He talks about outsourcing and cheap stock libraries, too.

Which is great, and it’s all true. And, in my opinion, it’s a totally useless piece that just wastes photons and is symbolic of why journalism is in such trouble right now.

Go read it. Then tell me how it made your life better. Did you learn anything new from it? Did it help you connect any dots? Make your life better? Offer up any solutions? Give good examples of people who are surviving? (To the last question, yes – one guy who did corporate event work is now shooting rodeos. Thanks.)

Journalism’s greatest failure in the last few decades has been it’s loss of relevance in our day to day lives. When your newspaper subscription runs out and you don’t even notice, that’s bad. That’s really bad. When you can read a couple hundred words about what the city council talked about last night and not know how it might affect you, that’s just a travesty. And it lays the groundwork for the erosion of our democracy, as well.

So as to not become just like them, here’s my recommendation for journalism, the same one I’ve made over and over again: MAKE IT RELEVANT. Make sure your readers feel they have to know about whatever you’re writing about. Make the connection for them, put your stories in context. It’s not about the city council meeting, it’s about the effect of increased parking rates your readers will pay when they shop downtown.

Carry this over to everything else. Raines talks about sunsets. Great, you want to shoot travel and do sunsets? Go do it. But do SPECIFIC sunsets. Do sunsets no one else does so when they write about the sunset over some specific building on the island of Yap, you’re the only one who has that. And you can charge them accordingly.

At the end of each semester, in my congratulations-you’re-out-of-here lecture, I plead with my students to not be average. I’ll do the same with all journalists, all creatives – don’t be average. Be specific. Be relevant.