Photojournalism

Today we’ll be workshopping your pitches as a class.

For Thursday’s class:

Please edit your photos from the practice assignment using Lightroom on your browser (if you haven’t already done it on your own computer) and send them to me via WeTransfer by class time.

Essay Pitch:

As you may know, the current events in my country Turkey on February 6th 2023 have deeply affected me. A 7.8-magnitude earthquake followed by a 7.5-magnitude earthquake left my country in ruins. Around 30,000 people have lost their lives to this earthquake, many of whom I know. As the death toll continues to mount, thousands are displaced, while survivors remain buried beneath the rubble. During this time they are in dire need of help and aid. For this project, I intend to raise awareness. The Turkish Consulate Center is where donations are collected for Turkey, so I plan to visit there. 

Some ideas for photos could include:

• People packaging items
• People sorting clothes
• Taking images of people collectively 

My photo essay pitch:
One of the last Bolivian restaurants in New York is “Bolivian Llama Party”. Opening in 2012, it’s been recognized for its innovative take on Bolivian Cuisine. It is a place where Bolivians still have a chance to try foods that from their homeland and introduce non-Bolivians to the unique tastes of Bolivia. Other bolivian restaurants like“Puerta Del Sol” have closed. Others like “Civecheria NYC” have geared towards more Peruvian cuisine. Keeping the Bolivian spirit isn’t easy when you have all eyes on you to keep the community alive. I hope to capture a day in the workplace and interview the owners, 3 Bolivian Brothers, about their efforts to keep the community unified despite the lack of Bolivian recognition in New York.
Being Bolivian myself, this restaurant is deeply important to me. It is the closest thing to a Bolivian community I can identify with, and I know from talking to other people of Bolivian descent that they feel the same way.
https://www.blp.nyc/

Potential photo opportunities:
-Photographing workers/Food Processes
-Photographing owners
-Photographing ambience in their colorful outdoor seating arrangement with customers

Idea:

Lately, it seems like small businesses are forming at a higher rate. The effects of the pandemic — the loss of jobs, employment rates dropping, and people not wanting to work inside an office anymore — have really impacted the people to build a community of their own through their small business. As someone who works for a small business myself and knows other small business owners, I wanted this photo essay to be an insight on what it’s like to run one. One of my good friends started a teddy bear business that really picked up in the recent months. I wanted to follow her day to day journey of what it’s like to be in her shoes and her community. 

Images I plan to take:

1. The surrounding location of where the studio is
2. The studio itself
3. The people who work with her
4. Multiple, dynamic shots of the process of making the teddy bears
5. The stories behind the teddy bears
6. Portraits of my friend and her mother, who started the business
7. Their day to day operations
8. How they end their days

Story Idea: Fiber artists have always established themselves as community activists. Winter months are considered peak knitting and crochet months and so there is much activity among the fiber arts community right now. For my story I would like to profile fiber artists that leave marks on their neighborhoods. I would like to focus on two organizations/artists: one is a woman @Carmencommunityartist who has spent the past few years “yarn-bombing” her neighborhood and offering free crocheting classes. The other organization, called Knit the Rainbow, is based in Washington Heights and they provide handmade knit and crochet winter garments to homeless LGBTQ+ youth in New York City. 

Potential Images: 

• People knitting and/or crocheting
• A yarn-bombed neighborhood 
• Knit the Rainbow collecting garments 

Photos of the Week: The aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/06/world/turkey-earthquake-damage.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2023/02/turkey-syria-earthquake-photos/672958/

Caption Writing

Photojournalism may be a visual medium, but that doesn’t mean you get to be any less thorough than any other journalist when it comes to actually talking to people, and getting names, facts, dates, etc. You must always make sure you get names (first AND last), locations, professions, ages (if relevant) to include in your captions.

Washington Post guidelines:

“A caption should briefly and clearly describe in a complete sentence what is happening in the picture, including an active verb (‘someone does something’). This will allow our internal systems to take sections of the sentence and automatically create keywords. In many cases, a single sentence will suffice. A second sentence is acceptable if it adds additional information, follows the required formula and does not editorialize.”

Caption example:

BEVERLY HILLS, CA – JANUARY 11: Actress Kate Winslet holds her award at the 66th Annual Golden Globe Awards on January 11, 2009 in Beverly Hills, California. Winslet won the Golden Globe for best supporting actress for her role in “The Reader,” as Hollywood set aside labor strife and a recession to honor the year’s best performances. (Photo by Rich Lipski for The Washington Post)

Notice how the first sentence is in present tense, describing what is literally happening in the photo, and the following sentence is in the past tense, giving background and context. The full caption, with that second sentence, would be necessary if the caption is accompanying the photo as a standalone image. But if it’s published as part of a larger photo essay, that crucial extra context probably makes the most sense to run along with the first photo in the series. Think in terms of the vital information (the who/what/where/
when/why) you would put into a nut graf in a print story, and make sure that info makes it into the first few captions so the reader/viewer of your photo essay knows what’s going on, and why it matters. (What is a nut graf?)

In a photo essay, the captions play the additional role of shaping a broader narrative. So while breaking news photos submitted in a batch to a wire service might all include very similar captions because most likely they’ll only be used one at a time, your captions in a photo essay will need to follow a somewhat more narrative shape. Meaning, the first one will include a lot of the 5W’s stuff, while the following image captions might fill in the blanks some more.

Photo Essay #1 (due Tuesday, March 14)

The photo essay should consist of 15-20 images, with detailed captions, including at least two direct quotes from the sources you photographed and interviewed. They can be in either slideshow or scrolling format. The story can be related to the topic of your choosing, but there should be some news element to the story, and it should have a clear angle. (What makes something newsworthy? What’s an angle?)

Do yourself a favor and pick a story that lends itself well to a visual medium! Don’t pick a story that’s going to be hard to photograph, like people working in a bland office setting.

Photo essay examples:

Fashion Amplified: A look inside the mind behind @cunyoutfits.

Welcome to Брайтон Бич, Brooklyn

The Last Anointing

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Assignment: Pitches for Photo Essay #1

Pitches for your first photo essay will be due on Tuesday, Feb. 14. Please post your pitch on the blog by class time. We will workshop your ideas together as a class. Your pitch should include not just a general idea for your photo essay, but also your angle, and a vision for the types of images you anticipate getting.

Editing RAW Photos in Lightroom

A RAW file is like the digital equivalent of a film negative. It needs to be processed or developed using software like Lightroom or Photoshop. The benefit of this format is that you can adjust various attributes such as contrast, saturation, sharpness, white balance, and others without degrading the image. Afterwards, it can be saved to another image format like TIFF (uncompressed, higher quality) or JPEG (compressed, easier for sharing and storing).

The changes you make during RAW file editing are called “non-destructive” because the alterations are not embedded into the file itself; they exist separately as a sort of roadmap for the image, and then you can export the processed image into a new file. Typically when you file your images to your editor, you file them as JPEGs because most online and print layouts of news publications are too small for the uncompressed image file to be necessary. But if you’re planning on submitting your work for a gallery show and it’s going to be shown as huge prints, you’re going to want that lossless file.

If time is of the essence and you need your images to be usable immediately, then you might want to consider shooting in JPEG instead so that you don’t have to spend time processing them before filing them to your editor.

RAW format can allow you to give your images an almost HDR effect, because of the increased ability to lift shadows and recover detail in highlights. Just be mindful that too much editing/processing can become controversial in the world of photojournalism, so it’s often best to use a light touch with this stuff.

The chairman of the World Press competition judges, Santiago Lyon, director of photography at the Associated Press, has said of all the winners: “We are confident that the images conform to the accepted practices of the profession.”

These accepted practices normally mean that photographers cannot alter the sense or the content of a photograph by moving any pixels in their images; a very easily understood rule.

AP Photographer Fired For Editing His Shadow Out of a Photo

Steve McCurry Photoshop Scandal

AP pictures must always tell the truth. We do not alter or digitally manipulate the content of a photograph in any way.
The content of a photograph must not be altered in Photoshop or by any other means. No element should be digitally added to or subtracted from any photograph. The faces or identities of individuals must not be obscured by Photoshop or any other editing tool. Only retouching or the use of the cloning tool to eliminate dust on camera sensors and scratches on scanned negatives or scanned prints are acceptable.

Minor adjustments in Photoshop are acceptable. These include cropping, dodging and burning, conversion into grayscale, and normal toning and color adjustments that should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction (analogous to the burning and dodging previously used in darkroom processing of images) and that restore the authentic nature of the photograph.

Changes in density, contrast, color and saturation levels that substantially alter the original scene are not acceptable. Backgrounds should not be digitally blurred or eliminated by burning down or by aggressive toning. The removal of “red eye” from photographs is not permissible.

Associated Press Code of Ethics for Photojournalists

In-Class Assignment: Process your photos from your homework assignment in Lightroom. When you’re satisfied with them, export them to .jpg and send them to me via WeTransfer. No captions needed, just the images. We will look at them together on Thursday.