Visual Journalism

John Loengard has a guest post over on Scott Kelby’s site, and it’s an entry that every aspiring photographer and picture editor has to read. The role of the picture editor is, perhaps, the most misunderstood one in the communication industry. No one likes their picture editor – not the photographers nor the editors on high.

But the role a good picture editor can play is so crucial it amazes me that there is not a great university program designed to produce great picture editors. Many schools have a class, but none (of which I’m aware) have an entire program dedicated to the art and business of visual editing. (Are you reading this, boss?)

A few quotes lifted from Loengard’s piece …

Other editors, with the story’s text in hand, may judge photographs by what they have read. Don’t join them. The reader sees before he ever reads and may never read if there’s nothing interesting to see.

The number of complaints I received as a picture editor from the word and design side regarding the photos not matching the story, with an assumption we had gotten it wrong, was uncountable. And asking, “Are you sure the reporter got it right? Where they there?” never went over well …

Before I became a picture editor, I assumed that “good photographers” took “good pictures” because they had a special eye. What I found was that good photographers take good pictures because they take great pains to have good subjects in front of their cameras. (Reflect a moment on what cameras do, and this makes sense.) Good photographers anticipate their pictures. What good picture editors do is help them.

I will admit I was a good photographer and probably a better picture editor (though I enjoyed shooting far more than editing). Where I put so much of my energy was in helping my staff get into the right place to tell a story. Once I had opened as many doors as I could and led them down the right hall, it was up to them.

Text editors do their work after the fact. But because photographers have something in common with Babe Ruth-they either hit the ball or they don’t-almost everything a picture editor does is done before the pictures are taken. What can you do after a home run except smile?

Another dilemma photographers run into. In the newsroom, the reporters are slaving away over their keyboards while the photo staff is relaxed, jovial even, at their work stations. The reporters response to this, verbalized or not, is that the shooters have it easy. What they fail to understand is the photojournalists who are no so relaxed are unwinding from having to tell an entire story in a split second, from having a massive amount of pressure dropped on them and then removed. There are no re-shoots in news, a picture editor can rarely rework an image to get a better story out of it. The timing of the pressure point is different. In fact, it may not even be a pressure point for the reporter as their agony can be dulled over time. For us, it is instantaneous and the bitterness of failure lasts a very, very long time.

Well, Robert Niles over at the Online Journalism Review has presented almost all of my ideas in one handy post. All five of his ideas are solid and, if you’re not already doing them, it’s time to get going.

Several of these have been incorporated into my advanced class and, next semester, may trickle down to the introductory courses, as well.

Steve Fox up at the University of Massachusetts has a post up about why students need to be blogging. You need to read it, even if you’re not a student.

Why? Let me quote …

… students should blog because it allows you to practice your writing and your multimedia skills. And, like anything, the more you practice, the better you get. In the process, you are creating a body of work that you can show those looking to hire you for an internship or a job. Remember, your blog is part of your digital footprint. Take it seriously.

I try to blog something every day, here it is what’s called link aggregation, but elsewhere I try to create content. My goal for this academic year is to create more. Harass me if i don’t.

My colleague, Prof. Barry Hollander, was walking around with a sheet of these journalism warning labels from Tom Scott this week. Very entertaining stuff, but it got me thinking, do we need a set for photos?

Time to put your thinking caps on and create a few. My contributions:

• Warning: This brilliant photo is a total fluke. It’s the only sharp image I shot this week.
• Warning: We found this image on the web, we have no way of knowing if it is real. Also, we don’t have permission to use it, so don’t tell anyone.
• Warning: An editor with no knowledge of this story selected this photo. It may or may not make sense in the context used.
• Warning: This image was provided to us by Aunt Sally’s cat, who fell off a bookshelf and landed, paws down, on her 1973 SX70 Polaroid. Had we not eliminated our photo staff, maybe we would have had a photo of the cat falling.

Over on the NPPA listserv, Mark Hertzberg posted links to a pair of stories that come out of England about a soccer team that is not credentialing photographers this season, instead telling them to buy them from the official photographers.

Which lead one paper to, brilliantly, have an illustrator draw the key action moments from the game. A new market for courtroom sketch artists, perhaps?

We’ve talked before about Steve McCurry’s being given the last roll of Kodachrome ever made, now there are some more details about what he did with it. Can’t wait for the National Geographic special …

Rick Norsigian may not be so lucky of a man.

Norsigian, you may recall, is the fellow who claimed to have possession of a lost batch of Ansel Adams’ negatives with a purported value of $200 million. Now, Adams’ grandson and others are questioning whether the negatives were actually made by the master photographer.

It’s getting ugly …

We celebrate our shooting colleagues all the time, through Pulitzers and Best of Photojournalism awards … but behind almost every great shooter is an editor, a task-master, a coach, a friend. One of the best in the business has been Rich Clarkson and NPR has a short story up on a recent reunion with his proteges. There’s also a web site with more photos and stories, worth spending time on.

I’ve never met Clarkson, but I hope to.

Rick Norsigian is a very fortunate man.

In 2000, he found a two boxes of glass negative plates at a garage sale, marked for $70. He talked the seller down to $45 and carted them off. Turns out, they were shot by, ahem, Ansel Adams and had been though destroyed in a fire 70 years earlier. Their estimated value now is $200 million.

I think I need to go to more garage sales … and I really hope they publish those images.

As with so many others, I cut my photographic teeth on Kodachrome. It was what my dad shot when I was a kid in the 1970s, so when he started to teach me, it was what I learned on. Little yellow and red boxes of Kodachrome 25 and 64, usually in 36 exposure lengths but occasionally in the shorter 20 frame packages … we’d pack up a bunch of them before every summer camping trip, ready to be loaded into his trusty Pentax Spotmatic.

I still have that camera, I still have the nearly 8,000 edited slides he shot before passing … and I really want to order up a few rolls and shoot my kids on them, just so I have them.

Meantime, Steve McCurry traveled the world with the last manufactured roll of the stuff, shooting 36 final frames, and then took it to the last place that will process it, Dwayne’s Photo Service out in Kansas. As the film that defined color for National Geographic, I sure hope the magazine runs the images … all 36, really, not just a few.