It is interesting who jumps on board with the latest gadget and who remains skeptical. Some staffers that you would never expect to be on board couldn’t be happier, while others who seemingly pride themselves on how hard they work want nothing to do with it. Hopefully, they will all find some use for it, be it for video, as a scanner, or even if it is just as a mobile hotspot.

Okay, technically it is a child theme of the popular TwentyTen theme, but, as you can see from the before and after above, they bear little resemblance to each other. Creating a photoblog here at The News Journal has been on the to-do list for myself, the assistant new media editor Andre Smith and our photo editor Suchat Pederson for some time now, but it wasn’t until the new iPhone initiative came through that Andre and Ashley Barnas brainstormed the format as seen above (previous iterations all took the form of a more traditional photoblog, similar to The Big Picture).

While a typical photoblog would have been nice, because we lack a traditional photo editor (Suchat does far more shooting than photo editing, and would not have the time to scour the wire to put together photo packages) and with the increasing focus on breaking news and sending images from the field, we decided to create a frontpage that displayed the latest photographs from all of our photographers. To make things easier, each photographers is his/her own category, and thumbnails are automatically created from images inserted into a post, for use on the frontpage, archives and category pages. While most photographers will update their images once they are done with a shoot and back in the office, the blog is set up in a way that it can receive images via email from a smartphone (that they will all now have) or pull in from Flickr directly to the appropriate category (the first, thanks to Postie, and the latter thanks to ifttt).

In keeping with the focus on social media, photographers will all have a Twitter follow button next to their name. On posts and category pages, custom sidebars feature content for each photographer … a headshot, short bio, set of thumbnails (currently set to random, but possible latest), latest tweets, etc. Some of this content is hard-coded to “photographer proof” it, but below the hard-coded area is a widgetized sidebar that each photograph can personalize. Also, because we have a strong focus on video, if the most recent post in a category is a YouTube video, it will be playable on the front. When it moves from that latest post spot to the recent post on the front (there are three smaller thumbnails below each main image) it reverts to a thumbnail. Initially, I had that playable as well, but it just seemed too small to be worthwhile. If the embedded video isn’t from YouTube, it will still create a thumbnail for use in both the main and secondary slots on the frontpage.

Plugins used:

• Auto Post Thumbnail
• Custom sidebars
• Featured-video
• Postie
• Twitter Widget
• Video Thumbnails

As with anything I’ve done on my own time, from my first Vuvox timeline of Drake basketball to the small jQuery project I worked on in November, I have no idea where this will end up. If anything, it was good practice and gave me a better understanding of what makes up a WordPress theme and how to manipulate it. What do you think? Not bad for a first effort? What features would you look for in a newspaper photoblog?

Live demo

Even a digital-first journalist such as myself has a few reservations, such as if the money used for the accompanying iPhone rig could have been better spent elsewhere. The allure of the iPhone is its portable, do-it-all nature … but hand a reporter the OWLE and a cheap tripod and suddenly the iPhone doesn’t feel like the freedom inspiring tool it is, and more like a ball-and-chain dragging slowing them down from the work they feel they should be doing.

In general though, I am all for our staff having smartphones. Reporters (hopefully) can begin to treat their Twitter account like their notepad, adding observations on the scene and returning to their stream when writing their stories (one of our reporters, Beth Miller, is already adept at this, and I hope that she can spread her knowledge to some of the more skeptical members of our newsroom). As a photographer/videographer, I can use the phone as a hotspot to send both video and photos back to the office wirelessly (currently I think we have two working wifi cards to spread among both reporters and photographers). And, as the main emphasis for this push seems to be a focus on breaking news, everyone can shoot video and upload it directly to our Brightcove account via a related app.

I have no idea just how this experiment will end … On it’s face, it seems like a no-brainer … replacing pen and paper with something smaller that can also act as a camera, video camera, audio recorder, radio scanner, etc. But perhaps it will end up as Gannett’s previous video initiative did, with only a few properties actively using smartphones. Follow-up to come in a few months…

“The reason it didn’t succeed was not for poor training. The training was very good. I wouldn’t be a multimedia journalism professor today without that first workshop from Lane and Harvey. They did a fine job, and taught us all of the best practices for video journalism.

But after Lane and Harvey packed up and left my newspaper, the message got muddled. It wasn’t a conscious muddling; more of a gradual decline. One photographer let go here, a writer there. Soon, all we had time for was run-and-gun junk.?”

Ahmad also wrote that only 5 to 10 Gannett papers stuck with video, and I happen to be working for one of those. Why does video work here when it has proven unsuccessful elsewhere. For starters, it doesn’t hurt that there is no Delaware-based television station. Aside from that though (because I run into news crews from Philly and Maryland all of the time), I think we do a good job of recognizing what videos play well and focusing on those. Sports, crime and weather … Those have always been the bread and butter of our video offerings and they continue to be what we push. That’s not to say that we don’t give 100% to in-depth reporting that we assume won’t get the type of traffic that it deserves. My own sleep-deprived face following two three-day investigative series (along with Hurricane Irene coverage) serves as proof that we focus on what we should be covering as well.

The mistake that photographers make most often when shooting video is that they try to be filmmakers. I hate to break it to you, but 99.99% of the time, you are a news videographer. Ahmad writes that “even the best editors spend about one hour on a polished minute of video.” Other photographers complain of spending hours to days editing and exporting a video piece. We can turn a crime video around in fifteen minutes, twenty if it needs a voiceover. During our hurricane coverage, I turned out ten videos in three days while editing on a laptop and sending through a cell phone.

We aren’t doing any Vincent Laforet stuff here, we are recording a scene and getting interviews, then turning around and laying that interview down and putting the b-roll over it. Working on a project for three days should serve as a sign that you need practice, not that the task itself is impossible. This seems to be most frustrating to photographers because the amount of post-production with their photographs is usually nowhere near the amount of work needed to edit a video (as opposed to writers, who perhaps are more used to sitting down after the fact and spending time crafting a piece).

Of course, video will always be better if shot and produced by someone whose sole job was to focus on that. When I shoot both stills and video (which has become more and more frequent) one or the other suffers … but the more you do both, the easier it is to recognize which moments are best suited for which medium. In the end, it is about meeting readers’ needs and expectations. As Miami Herald Managing Editor Rick Hirsch said in this Poynter article on video traffic, “This isn’t rocket science, but do video on the things that people come to your site for,” he said by phone. “You may think, ‘This would be a really great thing to do video on,’ but if it’s not on a topic or area where people are already consuming content, then it’s going to be hard to draw an audience.”

For what it’s worth, our highest video last year had just under 14,000 plays. This year, we have nine videos with play totals higher than that, with the most viewed having just under 100,000 plays in Brightcove. If you take into account Youtube plays, our most viewed video of this year has just over 500,000 views.

For me, the best way to learn something has been to find a project to work on. I learned html/css first through customizing my Blogger blog, and then by building my own website (the iteration before the current one). Most recently, I wanted to build something to help readers navigate our recently created financial literacy page. As it is now, stories are sorted based on the date they were published, even though they can be written for very distinct age-based audiences. I had recently read a tutorial on using jquery to show and hide content and utilize hover effects, and thought it could easily be translated to an interactive that allowed users to show and hide content after selecting a particular age range.

My advice if you want to learn a new skill. First, find a project that you know you want to work on and that will hold your attention through the distractions that are bound to come up. Then, determine what skills will be needed to complete that project and go from there. It has been much easier for myself to address a need that already exists as opposed to trying to create a need because someone has said this is a skill I should have.

Rhythmic Motion Typography

My friend Shaminder is convinced that this is overdone, but I still enjoy the effect. You’ve seen it in everything from Ford commercials to the initial Cee Lo Green F*ck You music video (not to be confused with Skee-lo).

Animated homage to Bruce Lee

An extension of the previous tutorial, this one includes additional animation and camera moves along with the kinetic typography.

Cinematic opening title

This tutorial shows you how to utilize scripts in After Effects to pair an effect with some external file or database to create an interesting 3D fly-through effect. It could be paired with something as mundane as text from a speech, or perhaps graduating seniors and their senior quotes, or something as serious as a list of casualties from Iraq. Koci used it to great effect in his Interrupted Lives piece on Iran (the effect is just about 1:00 in).

Dynamic Bar Graphs

This one seems straightforward enough … You could use it to add a little interest/graphics to an issue story filled with numbers.

Map your destination

This tutorial has arrows jumping from point to point as you move along in your travels. I’m not sure just what I would use it for yet, but hopefully you have a story that it would be useful in. Similar to this is the Trim paths tutorial, that features an animated red dashed line instead of arrows.

Motion tracking your golf swing

I doubt you are going to be filming a golf video anytime soon, but motion tracking comes in handy for a number of things, from effects like this (if you were profiling an athlete for an all-state prep sports feature) to using it for image stabilization.

Twixtor faux-slow motion tutorial

Twixtor (a $300 plugin for After Effects) takes video shot at 60fps and slows it down to 1000 or even 2000 fps. The tutorial gives some guidelines on how best to shoot prior to importing into After Effects, and then what settings are recommended once you are using the plugin. There also exists a built-in plugin called Time Warp, though I read that its algorithms are not as sophisticated and result in more artifacting when video is slowed down.

Endlessly zoom into your own Droste Effect

This one just seems fun.

Bend flash video in After Effects

This tutorial shows you how to take a flash video and bend it around the geometry of an object that you have in a background photo. I could imagine using something like this if I was trying to build out a landing page and had some sort of looping intro video that I wanted to appear integrated into the scene.

Virtual 3D Photos

This tutorial reminds me of the sort of movements seen in the RJD2 music video for 1976 on MediaStorm … or perhaps of those NBA Where Amazing Happens commercials. It involves cutting up a still image into different layers and having them move at different speeds in relation to each other.

Some highlights from my first year:

• Photographing NASCAR (I had no idea just how loud it would be)
• Shooting both stills and video for a three-part series on crime in Wilmington
• The opportunity to cover the president and vice president
• Phillies opening day
• Covering Hurricane Irene … editing in the field and racing from place to place to try and cover as many locations as we could (I ended up putting up 10 videos in three days).

Some stats I learned during a recent visit from corporate:

• We averaged around 30 videos a week
• The News Journal ranked in the top three among Gannett newspapers for video plays
• Our video plays tripled in the past year

The day after Hurricane Irene passed through Delaware, my photo editor and I went up to Lewes to survey homes damaged by a tornado and cover a press conference by Governor Markell. The event went as you would expect, a few quick interviews, shoot some b-roll, etc. Forty-five minutes later and we were back in the car, hopes of sleeping in my own bed for the first time in a week floating through my head. Just as I was about to drive off, I caught a cameraman walking up the street towards the damaged homes. “Poor guy,” was all I could think as he approached the governor’s SUV (just about to drive of as well).

What I saw next amazed me. Charlie, the cameraman, later told me that he asked if the governor had any time to jump out and say a quick sound bite. Instead, I saw Governor Markell and Senator (and former Governor) Tom Carper jump out of the vehicle and make their way back to the most damaged home.

The icing on the cake? Senator Carper was carrying Charlie’s tripod. Only in Delaware…

I like to think that video is one of the things that we do well at The News Journal. From what I’m told, we are among the top fifteen for video plays among Gannett properties (90+ daily newspapers and 23 television stations) and among the top five when comparing newspapers alone. Back when Gannett papers first started to shoot video, the company purchased video kits in bulk to equip all of their papers. I am not sure exactly when this happened, but I did use the kit back in 2007 when I was interning at the St. Cloud Times.

Fast forward four years and the Sony HVR A1U I currently use is a Frankenstein amalgamation of parts from fallen A1U’s. You can imagine how I felt when I heard that we may soon be ordering replacements to the trusty A1U. Initially, I thought that what we ordered as a replacement would be a no-brainer. As a still photographer, I obviously wanted an HDSLR. I wanted the low-light performance, the vibrant color and, of course, the shallow depth-of-field. It was around this time that I bought a 7D to use for some of my projects at work. Six months of HDSLR use later, and I’m honestly not sure I would recommend purchasing HDSLR’s to replace our A1U’s.

That is not to say that my 7D is without merit. It is an amazing camera. The color is great, the image is sharper than anything I will ever get out of an A1U and there is nothing quite like attaching a 300mm 2.8 lens and shooting video. With the 7D, I am a much more versatile journalist. If I am shooting both stills and video, I can do so with one less piece of equipment. If I am using the A1U, I can use my 7D as a second camera to record cutaways while also shooting stills. Even when I am only shooting video, still screengrabs from the 7D video can be used in the newspaper and are virtually indistinguishable from a still image.

If newspapers cared only about producing beautiful, cinematic pieces, choosing what to purchase wouldn’t be a choice at all. The reality is, newspapers care about numbers and money. According to the numbers, our video traffic is driven by breaking news and high school sports. When shooting breaking news, the A1U can be operated with one hand, leaving my other hand free to hold a stick mic for interviews. For sports, The A1U’s auto focus lets me follow a play if it moves down the field, approaches me or moves away from me. And for both news and sports, the A1U’s 10x zoom allows me to cover the focal range of at least two lenses if I were shooting with my 7D. It would be impossible for me to shoot a long drive at a football game without missing the running back if he ran down the sideline I was shooting on, or to go from a shot of traffic backed up to a wide shot of an accident using my 7D (not to mention trying to zoom smoothly without a rig and a follow focus). As for the money, purchasing a Rebel T3 with a kit lens sounds great at $500 – $600 (we upload our video at 720p already). However, considering that we couldn’t repair a 70-200 until it literally broke in half, I’m not sure how many new ones we would be able to purchase to go along with the T3′s (and it definitely isn’t as effective on a day to day basis with only an 18-55 3.5-5.6).

Could not have been shot with my 7D:

In the end, an HD camcorder makes sense for the types of stories that drive the most traffic at our paper, though I do think that we should have one or two HDSLR’s available when shooting longer projects and feature stories.

50 Who Matter is a series that we do twice a month that profiles someone working to improve their community. Despite its recurring nature, we typically shoot it all in one day. In this instance, I was given two days to shoot, and I think it made a huge difference. Initially, it was going to be like most other 50 Who Matter’s … shoot interviews and whatever broll I can get in an our or two, and then scrounge for additional broll using archive footage. I wasn’t going to shoot any broll at the all-star game because it was on a Saturday, and we prefer to have everything done by Friday (video publishes on Sunday). In order to assuage the fears of my editors, I put together a version on Friday that could go up if I didn’t have to to re-edit for some reason on Saturday. Having completed my interviews during media day for the high school football all-star game, I had a better sense of what scenes I needed to shoot the day of the game and had everything I needed before the start of the game.

As it is the Fourth of July, I thought it only appropriate to share some relevant videos. The fireworks video was the second of two assignments that I had within an hour of each other, both of which required photos and video (something that is happening with increasing frequency these days).