How soon they forget.

I received an e-mail from a business owner the other day that made me shake my head. I have reposted it here, but omitted his name to protect the ridiculous.

“Hey Paul, why not publish pictures of the new stores on Main Street, not just the ones that are closed????? Katie’s article and your pictures tend to chase away new business owners and shoppers, let’s try to be a bit more upbeat not DOOM and GLOOM”

The story was about the rash of businesses that were leaving Main Street in Annapolis. I was assigned to shoot a business owner who was closing up shop. While waiting for the assignment, I thought a cool slideshow idea for the paper’s web site would be to shoot all the empty stores on Main Street.

I made my shots, the story was the Sunday centerpiece, and life went on for me at The Capital. Then the comments started coming on our website. Some were about why shopping on Main Street was less than desirable; some defended shopping on Main Street. Some, like that e-mail, questioned why we would run this story.

Well, the answer is we try and tell both sides of the story. In nine years at The Cap, I personally have shot the new businesses moving in and moving out story many times over, even in the same store front.

This brings me to this blog post. My e-mailer must think pretty highly of my position at the paper if he thinks that I choose what we publish or even photograph. Sure, I have some say on how an assignment is photographed, but I usually work off an assignment sheet that tells me where to go and a general idea of what the story is about. Now if I had gone to Main Street and there were no empty stores or businesses moving out, I could not make it up, but they were there and I shot them.

But what made me shake my head was that the person who e-mailed me had a story and a photo in our paper a few short weeks ago about him and his new business that had just opened on Main Street.

And the Mobbie winner is...

My photo blog Photo Monkeys has been nominated for a Mobbie award on the Baltimore Sun's website http://data.baltimoresun.com/mobbies/#Photography. I would like to thank the academy and say that it is a honor just to be nominated. I would also... like to thank whom ever nominated a small town guy's humble blog that has been rarely updated lately. I promise to do better. And if I beat out the likes of the awesome blogs like the Strobist himself I will have a Sexy Party.

Beware Ireel.com

Update - Someone actually posted that this sounded like a fair deal to them and we were the ones who screwed up. I figured I would show the screen where it asks for the CC info. Now I know you should always read the fine print, but come on, they make it very hard to find. Nowhere on the sign-up page does it mention cancelling in 5 days and it says that you will only be charged if you upgrade or purchase. From their site "Signing up to iReel is FREE! Credit card information is only required to facilitate future purchases. No charges will be applied to your credit card for signing up as a regular member. Today's charge: $0.00" and "Never any hidden fees We make sure to provide our members with a detailed transaction history so that they know what they are paying for. Credit card information is required to facilitate future purchases only. No charges will appear on your credit card statement, unless you upgrade to Premium Membership or you make a purchase from iReel."

I have not posted in sometime and I am sorry, but these people pissed me off . I wanted to warn anyone who still reads this blog.

Do not sign up for an ireel.com free 5 day preview. The site is for watching movies and videos online. If you do not cancel in the 5 day period they start charging you 34.95 a month until you cancel. I found this out the hard way tonight when checking my bank account online. After 16 minutes and 3 people I got them to refund the money with threat of contacting the States Attorney General.

The Sad State of Newspaper Photojournalism

Well the mighty misguided ax of management fell once again on our lowly photography department at The Capital newspaper. My wonderful colleague Colleen Dugan was called to the managing editor's office right as she was about to start her shift yesterday. At the same time our chief photographer/photo editor told fellow shooter Joshua McKerrow and myself that Colleen was being let go. The bean counters strike again.

This has been a tough year for our little photo department. We went from having a staff of six, one Photo Editor, four Capital Photographers and one Maryland Gazette Photographer, to a staff of three, a chief photog, who is basically strapped to a desk all day and can't go out and shoot, Joshua and myself. So the paper now, basically, has two full time shooters to cover an entire county and a seven day week. We are a 41,000 circulation paper, having just two shooters is ridiculous.

How this will be accomplished, at least so I am told, is that we will be shooting less mundane assignments, leaving them to reporters with point and shoot cameras. We have to train them in the basics of composition and what makes a good picture. I guess that is when they will be able to cut Josh and myself loose.

OK, so Josh and I will be doing the good stuff, I'll believe it when I see it. That does not tell me how we are going to cover a seven day work week and have someone available in both the morning and evenings. The way we think it will work now is one shooter will have Friday and Saturday off, leaving one shooter those days. We used to have four shooters on Friday and two on Saturday. The other shooter will be off Sunday and Monday. Sunday, always had only one shooter and there was two on Monday. There are a lot of gaps in this plan. I am not sure how they will fill them, I guess with reporters with cameras.

The people that run papers across the country are cutting them to the bone and then some to keep the paper profitable or god forbid from losing some money during a recession. We have lost staff like crazy in the last two years. Sure the web has a large part in the newspapers demise, but it also short sighted management. They must realize that cutting staff, pages, local news content and other things from our product, they are giving people a reason not to buy the paper. Why would someone pay more for less? We need to keep our staffs so we can be in the local area, gathering the local news, that our readers want. And you can't tell me that with all the cuts we can keep up the same level of coverage for very long. We are getting burned out and morale is shot.

This brings me to my point for this post. If you care about quality photojournalism in you local papers, and I am not just talking about The Capital, make your concerns known to the management. Write letters and make phone calls telling them the pictures are just as important as the words. Tell them that you don't want reporters shooting bad photos, just to have a photo with their story. Reporters that can shoot are few and far between and just like I don't want to write a bad story, they don't want to shoot bad photos. Finally, don't cancel that newspaper subscription just because you can get it for free on the web. Without the printed paper, we can't pay for the web.

Photo Monkey's - The Get Together?

Plans are in the works for a Photo Monkeys Get Together in March. I am still working out the details. If anyone can suggest a topic or guest speaker please contact me. I am thinnking about possibly having it at Elle's Place in Millersville. They have a room that looks like it would be good for a group meeting and they have wings and beer. I have not contacted them yet so we will see. If not there we may have it at my house.

Anyone interested in possibly attending drop me an email.

Paul

Furlough Day?

I spent three hours of my first nonpaid furlough day editing sound for an audio slideshow that probably will run Thursday. While I know that I am a sucker for doing Capital work at home on a nonpaid furlough day, I really wanted to get this slideshow done and done well.

The story is about a black church service I shot on Sunday. I made some really nice images and recorded some sound while I was at it. The audio is not mandatory for the paper, but I wanted to use it to tell more of the story. So that is why I did the editing today.

There just is not enough time to get this kind of thing done in a normal amount of lab time. It took me an extra hour Sunday just to get the images prepped. I told myself that I would use my furlough days to work on bettering my craft, whether it be working on a new portfolio, researching potential freelance clients, looking for other staff opportunities or in this case, editing audio for a slideshow. I figure that if I am learning sound editing as I go, it will make me a more versatile photojournalist.

I will post a link to the finished product once it runs in the paper and online. Stay tuned.

The Obama Quilt.

You never know when a quick hit-and-run assignment can turn into a nice little story. I was assigned to shoot people sewing a quilt that had scenes from Barack Obama’s rise to power. It was scheduled at 3:15 p.m. for a community news assignment, meaning that it had no story to go with it and most likely would be one picture, used inside the paper, black and white.

I went into the job thinking it would rank just above a grip-and-grin assignment, but as soon as I walked in, I had a feeling it was going to be more. The first thing I noticed was the beautiful natural light coming in from the large windows. This got my creative blood heated up. I then saw that there was a large group of women sitting around a colorful quilt. Now my creative blood was boiling.

I started shooting and was told that if I wanted to I could go up into the loft for an aerial shot. I did, and it was a nice scene setter. I then started to make some nice shots of the people sewing and some tight shots of just hands and portions of the quilt.

During my time shooting I was listening to Dr. Joan Gaither, the woman who started the project. She was talking about the different sections of the quilt and what they meant. I made some shots of her speaking and then she told me about the journal that people wrote in who worked on the quilt. The journal would travel with the quilt and people wrote what the election of Obama meant to them and how they felt on election night.

The Internet department has been pushing us to work on more multimedia projects at work, and this was a good candidate for an audio slideshow. I asked Dr. Gaither if she would sit for a quick interview and she agreed. We found a quiet room and started recording. The Capital does not provide audio recorders for the photographers to keep with them, so I use the back of my camera and the built-in memo recorder. It is rather limiting since it is not made for interviewing people. The built-in microphone is less than perfect and I am limited to one minute of recording at a time, but I made it work. She talked a little about herself and her project and read a couple of journal entries.

I went back to the office and put together a nice audio slideshow. After the editors saw the shots and heard of the slideshow, they assigned a reporter to write a story. It ran on a Saturday as the lead story and got played nicely.

So have a look:

http://www.hometownannapolis.com/slideshow/1232032712TheObamastoryquilt

I also stitched the letter P for Paul in the quilt.