Is photojournalism dying?

[shadowfox]

You mean, prepare your questions, shoot a well-lit meaningful interview without background noise, edit it down to the 1:30 the editor permits, write and record a introductory voice-over (again without background noise), and sound and look good at all of it (so that you don't need an extra talking head in your team for the smooth voice, looks and hair-do). And all of that it in the time it takes so shoot twenty photographs, select one of them and write forty words of accompanying text?

The media industry would love to create the one-man (or more often one-woman) video news team - but there is a fair deal more to condensing what once was a eight man team into one person than to reducing the former two-some of writer and photographer into one...

Wrong context.
Read the post that I was responding to.

The situation was real time coverage of an real time event for a news paper, no talking heads was discussed.

Let's take for an example, covering a shoot-out between the police and a bad guy:

You can either shoot 20 frames with your camera, or you can take one sweeping video in less amount of time without having to stick out your head 20 times potentially in a bullet's path.

Send the video back to the office with one editor standing by to pick several frames from it.

And remember, we are talking *in the future*. Anything could happen in the future.

 

[sevo]

You can either shoot 20 frames with your camera, or you can take one sweeping video in less amount of time without having to stick out your head 20 times potentially in a bullet's path.

Send the video back to the office with one editor standing by to pick several frames from it.

And remember, we are talking *in the future*. Anything could happen in the future.

That is not the future, it is the past - PJs already were semi-close to that (limited by the short film and need to reload) since motorized Nikons took over in the late sixties, and it has been the standard work procedure ever since you could put a card drive into a D1 and fire away for three minutes non stop.

But whether 5 or 24fps, that is not video, in that the results are of little use except for stills. If you want to make it video, you need a tripod, or at the very least a stabilized body support system - which requires the videonewsgrapher to stand upright in the path of the proverbial bullet for the whole duration of the take.

And there are even more issues limiting the feasibility of simultaneous video/still recording - motion picture productions still cannot do away with the set photographer, as using one recording for both motion and still photography has one or the other hampered by a lack respectively excess of motion blur. Maybe cameras will evolve that can simultaneously create a (1/25s exposed) MPEG and a stream of short exposure JPEGs - for now, you'll inevitably deliver something considerably flawed in one domain.

In any case, where publishers talk of a move to video they are not into stills gathering through high-speed series shooting, but they indeed mean TV (or web TV), with talking head and all - they aren't concerned with better output, they want a second market...

 

[emraphoto]

Wrong context.
Read the post that I was responding to.

The situation was real time coverage of an real time event for a news paper, no talking heads was discussed.

Let's take for an example, covering a shoot-out between the police and a bad guy:

You can either shoot 20 frames with your camera, or you can take one sweeping video in less amount of time without having to stick out your head 20 times potentially in a bullet's path.

Send the video back to the office with one editor standing by to pick several frames from it.

And remember, we are talking *in the future*. Anything could happen in the future.

perhaps in the future such an approach will be possible however today, not really possible. the amount of compression needed to send video around the world, or even a region, is immense and frame grabs after that would be of extremely low quality (not that this stops some).

the grab tech is there, the transfer tech in the field is not quite as widespread.

photojournalism isn't dying. it just isn't a trade for the masses as it once was. Ironically, with all the digital madness, one can now shoot whatever they please more often. dumping to the wire is not my primary agenda these days and as such i can shoot whatever medium i please. longer term stories? the more medium variety the merrier!

 

[NLewis]

I think photojournalism as a traditional career is about dead. Employers of photojournalists -- news magazines and newspapers -- are themselves dying, and, if not cutting off photojournalists altogether, at least trying to pay them as little as possible.

Photojournalism, or documentary photography, will of course be around as long as people take pictures of things around them. If anything, we have more access to this stuff than ever, due to flickr or blurb books or whatever. It will become more like art, more like Salgado rather than a job with a pension at the New York Times.

 

[Sureño]

I think its not dying, its evolving.
Today many photojournalists are being asked to write also the articles (you get paid more too) so why not to add video? video recording is closer to photo than writing.
Probably it WILL die in many years as newspapers drawers vanished when photos appeared on the newspapers. The question is, did they evol and became photojournalists or they just let the new technology to fade away their skills?
The answer is in the hands of the photojournalists now.

 

[Turtle]

I don't think it will be dead at all, but the convergence with 'art' is inescapable as it loses its ability to make the perpetrator a regular wage. The 'artists' will make their money from prints, not commissions or salaries paid by newspapers. In other words, photojournalists and documentary photographers will service a different end consumer and, yes, most will not make the cut.

I think the unpaid interns are already showing their shortcomings and I expect the industry to continue to polarise with mainstream consumers getting ever more frustrated by the coverage they receive, while a niche of talented individuals produce great work which arrests people in galleries just as they always have.

Video is no substitute for stills. It never was and never will be. Thats not to say video will not displace a proportion of stills, but to make extinct? Not a chance.

Video cannot grace your walls like a photo/painting and this will increasingly be the end state for such images (and in collections in dark storage!)

 

[Phil_F_NM]

Yeah, this conjecture is just that. Someone's bitter opinion on change. Like it has been said, it's evolving.
There is definitely a market for still photography and still photo based reportage. There are things that one photo can say better than a video. There are certain technical and tactical issues of control and capture that necessitate the still photograph.
It's not dying at all.

Phil Forrest

 

[35mmdelux]

Who has time to look at a video when 1 picture can tell a thousand words?