Photojournalism From A Student’s Eye

Like many of my friends I didn’t really know what to think of Twitter. I use IM clients, have a blog and have a facebook account which lets me update my status. I didn’t see any reason to sign-up for a program that would let people know what I was doing 24/7. However, when I finally signed up a week or two ago I found that the service had many more uses than the micro-blogging it is known for.

Of course, Ryan Sholin has been praising the alternate uses of Twitter for some time now, including but not limited to his tumblelog based approach to covering the Wharf to Wharf race in Santa Cruz.

Another example is seen in Twitter’s potential to cover spot news, as seen when David Armano witnessed a teen save an elderly woman from being hit by an oncoming train. Armano posted updates of the events to his Twitter account immediately after it happened, long before either the Chicago Tribune or CNN posted their stories.

Prior to signing up, I already knew that you could text message or IM in both text and audio messages. After signing up I learned that you can also receive “tweets” and notifications to your IM or phone based on keywords you want to track. You can also follow specific twitter accounts, receiving updates on your phone or IM client whenever they post a new tweet. For example, I am following the LA Times fire coverage at http://twitter.com/latimesfires and if I want to follow Greater Alarm fires I can subscribe to the Los Angeles Fire Department’s Twitter account. Other Twitter accounts I ran across include NPR, various sections of the NY Times have their own Twitter accounts, CNN, BBC, etc.

A fairly comprehensive list of news services that use twitter can be found on the Twitter pbwiki. Also, the Big Juicy Twitter Guide is a good place to learn more about Twitter features and the various things you can do with a Twitter account.

As you can tell from this blog, the NPPA Flying Short Course is fast approaching (and if you’ve run in to me in person, you are VERY aware).

To keep with the theme of multimedia, we thought it a good idea to create a web presence for the weekend, with the ability to feed in flickr photos tagged “sjsushortcourse,” provide information to those coming in to San Jose for the weekend, and allow participants a space to share their thoughts on the weekend and multimedia.

Making the site also allowed me to try video blogging for the first time (something I am hoping other people will also try out this weekend). I ended up using a service called viddler, instead of iMovie or Quicktime Pro because iMovie was not recognizing the built-in iSight and we do not have QT Pro. It also saved me the hassle of having to export the video and then upload to a service such as Youtube or blip.tv, as I recorded directly into the viddler interface.

You can view both the flying short course site and my video attempt at sjsushortcourse.wordpress.com.

This video scares me. As the video below states, the idea of content-aware resizing of (non-photojournalistic) images seems great for images that will appear in different browsers on different displays. The worrisome part, for me, comes at 3:42 in to the presentation, with the object removal procedure. I realize that this can already be done in Photoshop with a variety of tools, but removing an object with this seam carving procedure is so simple, it could potentially tempt photographers to quickly edit out objects in their images.

If you noticed my recent post titles, you know that I have been watching too much Scrubs lately.

I get my news in a variety of ways which usually do not include the actual newspaper. I have my RSS feeds, I watch the Daily Show occasionally, and I have been browsing the AP wire much more frequently at work.

Recently, though, I have been getting my news from a much more unconventional source; my Wii. Never before have I taken as much enjoyment in browsing the news as I do now, using my remote to explore different parts of the globe. Here is a good video that shows how the Wii News Channel operates:

For all of Sony’s talk about the PS3 being more than just a gaming system, a true home entertainment system, on my Wii I can also check the weather, upload and view photos, send emails, work up a sweat playing Wii Sports, and browse the internet (though you have to purchase the internet browser application from the Wii Store to do this). Soon, I will even be able to have structured workouts with Wii Fit. While I doubt I will ever purchase that product, I think that it shows the versatility of the machine, much like the Nintendo DS which can be used to give you step-by-step cooking instructions, albeit in Japanese.

I am definitely happy with the investment.

I will keep this short because so many people that know so much more about the subject have already weighed in, including Detrich himself. Hearing about the sheer number of doctored photos that Detrich not only turned in, but that ran, reminded me of a comment that SJSU photojournalism student Neal Waters made in an ethics panel we had last September.

We had, of course, discussed the doctored Reuters Lebanon photograph as well as the LA Times Iraq photograph. Neal wondered, with the growing technical capabilities of each edition of Photoshop, how many altered photographs make it to print because the photographer is smart enough not to clone smoke so obviously or clone a man into the same photograph twice?