The future has arrived
September30200706:06 AM
The future
arrived via UPS in two large cardboard boxes at the
newspaper last week. Both had overnight shipping
stickers affixed to their slightly battered
exteriors. Inside were two Canon 
video cameras and
related accessories.
Their arrival marked the start of a new era in photography at the Yakima Herald-Republic, an era in which photographers and reporters will be shooting video as well as our usual still digital photographs. The video will be posted on this website as well as the newspaper's main website, www.yakimaherald.com. The inclusion of video into the visual mix will be one more way of bringing more information to the reader and making our Web sites the place to go for both written and visual information.
Those two boxes included more than just video gear - they included both an opportunity and no small amount of angst. I, along with the rest of the photographers and reporters at the Herald-Republic, will now have another way to tell stories. We can use the power of those moving pictures to bring the stories of people, places and events to our readers. Truth be told, there are some stories which can be told better with video than still images. Now, with video cameras, we have the opportunity to tell the story in the best fashion possible. I'm very excited about that.
I'm pretty sure that Roberts Imaging (the place we bought the cameras) didn't mean to, but they included anxiety in those boxes along with the cameras. We now have to learn a whole new set of skills to take advantage of the power of video. Shooting video includes many of the same techniques we've learned as still photojournalists so that part shouldn't be so hard. But editing video is something most of us have never done and it's going to take some serious study and work to get it right (and that's where the anxiety comes in). I'm going to make some mistakes and shoot some bad video but in time I'll learn how to do it and do it right.
Video has been coming our way for the last couple of years. As its arrival neared over the last couple of months I've been doing some hard thinking about my job as a photojournalist and how I view myself in that job. I'll admit it -- I've been a journalist longer than some of our reporters have been alive. My first professional camera was a beat-up Nikon F2 with a motordrive that used AA batteries. And I shot film -- all black and white Tri-X. With that camera and a Domke bag full of fixed focal-length lenses (all manual focus -- there was no autofocus in those days) I embarked on my professional photojournalism career in the early 80s. Since then I've been a still photographer believing in the power of the single image. I have always worked to make that one single, powerful image that tells a story and connects with the reader. For me, still photography has always been the most pure, most honest imagery. It has taken me years to learn how to make those decisive images, years to learn exactly when and how to push the shutter button to capture the best photograph.
Video? That was what we all saw on the evening news. There was the very occasional story-telling piece but most news video seemed to be B roll and a stand up by a news person. I never got a real sense of the people and their stories. The video camera vacuumed up all the images, not focussing on any one decisive moment to tell the story. It simply wasn't powerful in the way a still image can be powerful.
I never envisioned carrying a video camera and I am still having some difficulty with that image. But cameras, after all, are just the tools (albeit they are really cool tools) we use to tell the stories. Video cameras will be just another addition to our visual tool kit.
I continue to fervently believe in the power of the single still image to capture the emotion of a moment in a way that no video can capture. But video can and will play an important role in my job to tell the stories of Central Washington. I am still a photojournalist, just now a photojournalist with a different type of camera. And I'll just have to get used to carrying a video camera.
--Gordon King
video cameras and
related accessories.
Their arrival marked the start of a new era in photography at the Yakima Herald-Republic, an era in which photographers and reporters will be shooting video as well as our usual still digital photographs. The video will be posted on this website as well as the newspaper's main website, www.yakimaherald.com. The inclusion of video into the visual mix will be one more way of bringing more information to the reader and making our Web sites the place to go for both written and visual information.
Those two boxes included more than just video gear - they included both an opportunity and no small amount of angst. I, along with the rest of the photographers and reporters at the Herald-Republic, will now have another way to tell stories. We can use the power of those moving pictures to bring the stories of people, places and events to our readers. Truth be told, there are some stories which can be told better with video than still images. Now, with video cameras, we have the opportunity to tell the story in the best fashion possible. I'm very excited about that.
I'm pretty sure that Roberts Imaging (the place we bought the cameras) didn't mean to, but they included anxiety in those boxes along with the cameras. We now have to learn a whole new set of skills to take advantage of the power of video. Shooting video includes many of the same techniques we've learned as still photojournalists so that part shouldn't be so hard. But editing video is something most of us have never done and it's going to take some serious study and work to get it right (and that's where the anxiety comes in). I'm going to make some mistakes and shoot some bad video but in time I'll learn how to do it and do it right.
Video has been coming our way for the last couple of years. As its arrival neared over the last couple of months I've been doing some hard thinking about my job as a photojournalist and how I view myself in that job. I'll admit it -- I've been a journalist longer than some of our reporters have been alive. My first professional camera was a beat-up Nikon F2 with a motordrive that used AA batteries. And I shot film -- all black and white Tri-X. With that camera and a Domke bag full of fixed focal-length lenses (all manual focus -- there was no autofocus in those days) I embarked on my professional photojournalism career in the early 80s. Since then I've been a still photographer believing in the power of the single image. I have always worked to make that one single, powerful image that tells a story and connects with the reader. For me, still photography has always been the most pure, most honest imagery. It has taken me years to learn how to make those decisive images, years to learn exactly when and how to push the shutter button to capture the best photograph.
Video? That was what we all saw on the evening news. There was the very occasional story-telling piece but most news video seemed to be B roll and a stand up by a news person. I never got a real sense of the people and their stories. The video camera vacuumed up all the images, not focussing on any one decisive moment to tell the story. It simply wasn't powerful in the way a still image can be powerful.
I never envisioned carrying a video camera and I am still having some difficulty with that image. But cameras, after all, are just the tools (albeit they are really cool tools) we use to tell the stories. Video cameras will be just another addition to our visual tool kit.
I continue to fervently believe in the power of the single still image to capture the emotion of a moment in a way that no video can capture. But video can and will play an important role in my job to tell the stories of Central Washington. I am still a photojournalist, just now a photojournalist with a different type of camera. And I'll just have to get used to carrying a video camera.
--Gordon King