We all have people who inspire us, by their approach to life and through the work they produce. Over the next year or so, I want is acknowledge some of those who make me try to do better, as a photographer, writer and storyteller.
I want to start with four photographers whose work astounds me, not just with what that work contains, but because of the sense of humanity their images carry. And that drives me to do better, to try to come closer to what they are doing. You won’t find any of their images here, not because I fear the copyright police, but because I want you to go look.
In no particular order:
Tatiana Cardeal
On her web site, Tatiana calls herself a “photographer, visual artist and a dreamer.” She has shot around the world, and produced a body of work that is rich in detail, colour and meaning. I can spend hours exploring the images at her site.
From her About page: “Tatiana’s photography is in search of a visual language to enhance human development, a photography that seeks the humanity existing through different socio-cultural identities, with emphasis on inequality, human rights and environment.”
For me, the key words are “a photography that seeks the humanity.” As well as being wonderful images, her light-drenched, rich photographs, in the tradition of countryman Sebastião Salgado, she allows the dignity of those she photographs to shine through, an idea and approach that resonates.
John Lehmann
John is a Vancouver-based visual journalist for the Globe & Mail. He’s spoken to a couple of my classes and I’ve had a beer or two with him, but even if I’d never met him, I’d still consider him an inspiration.
There are a number of galleries at his website (which, unfortunately opens with some autoplay music). I’d suggest you start with People to see a photojournalist at the top of his powers. (Go look; I’ll still be here if you come back.)
What inspires me are two different aspects of his work: closeness and space. He works close, close, close to subjects, sometimes brutally close, by which I mean the reality is sometimes brutal and unflinching; and he works, too, with photographs that use space as an element that invites a long exploration of the stories he is telling.
Take a look, too, at 2011 in focus: Best B.C. photos of the year at the Globe & Mail site, which features nine of John’s photos from last year and his stories that go with them.
Melissa Lyttle
Melissa is a photojournalist who toils for print and online for the Tampa Bay Times (which was the St. Petersburg Times until yesterday). Her portfolio is rich with images that get inside the lives of her subjects.
A lot of her work is black and white, in the fine tradition of documentary storytelling, but look at her images from Haiti and Mexico: her use of colour ranks, for me, with the likes of William Albert Allard. Her vision is clear and sharp.
In her work, I see someone paying full attention to the story she is telling. Her long-form documentary work is as real as life gets.
We’ve never met, but we’ve exchanged occasional e-mails and tweets and, this semester, she sent me a detailed e-mail on her approach to storytelling after I used her piece Motel Families in a storytelling class I taught. Through her blog, The Life of M, and her work with A Photo a Day, she shares constantly, and promotes the discovery of other photographers. (By the way, “He discovered and shared,” would not be a bad inscription for a gravestone.)
Mihailo Radičevič
I’ve only recently come across the work of Mihailo Radičevič, on Google+, which, I’ve discovered is chock-a-block with great photographers. Mihailo, who calls himself an holistic photographer, shoots in Serbia. And, man, does he shoot.
Take a look at any of his galleries. I like his Nature and Bricks and Portals collections, which are wonderful explorations of shape, space, mood and tone, images worth exploring in depth.
I find four of the galleries special: Faces 1 & 2 and Street 1 & 2. All of these images bubble with life. Some feature humour, some speak of pride, all speak of the everyday. And, again, they treat subject and viewer with honour and respect.
That’s inspirational: to take on daily life in a straight-forward way that rises to the level of art through respect.
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I could go on: there are dozen of people who inspire me and push me every time I pick up a camera. And then there are the writers…
More, as they say, later.
Robson Square skating rink
Over the past year, I’ve aimed to shoot a good photo a day. I’ve missed five or so along the way for a variety of reasons – illness, too many other demands, laziness – and the photos have not always been good, but many are.
I’ve shot with two different iPhones, three different Canons and, most recently, an Olympus. There have been phases: exploring the effects of Hipstamatic and other iPhone apps, for instances, or shooting exclusively with a very wide angle lens. My camera has been to concerts and other events, but mostly it’s been on the streets, capturing people, architecture, signs, abstracts and whatever else caught my eye.
Shooting every day has been an incredibly good, and relatively painless, way to learn how my various cameras really work (and how digital photography really works). Exploring each of them has made all those dials and menus more or less fade into the background – most of the time, but not always –, so that I can concentrate on making the image.
It’s also been an adventure in seeing. Not just looking, but seeing what’s there. (This is the argument I have with those who mutter, “Put the camera down and pay attention to real life.” This is how I pay attention to real life.) I’ve come to enjoy walking around seeing juxtapositions, patterns, colours, people, scenes. Some days, it seems as though the pictures are presenting themselves. All I have to do is snap.
There are pictures I’ve missed, sometimes because I wasn’t ready when I should have been. And sometimes it was because my ability to shoot from the hip needs a lot of work, and I still quail at the idea of staring down a stranger through a camera lens. I’ve learned that about myself.
I don’t know if I’m a better photographer than I was at the start of the year, although the act of seeing and snapping over and over again, day after day, suggests I may be. Practice rarely makes perfect, but it does make better.
I don’t have the artistic vision of a Richard Koci Hernandez, whose challenge to photographers everywhere was the inspiration for my 2011 vision quest. But shooting every day has been inspiring, challenging and, above all, fun. As an exercise in creating, I highly recommend it.
Final note: My photos from the past year – not all of them, but the chosen many – are online at my Tumblr blog. There are 490 of them so far.
The Tascam iM2 — a set of stereo condenser mics with pre-amp that plug into iPhones and iPads — that I bought when it was first announced, arrived earlier this week but I didn’t get a chance to try it out until today, when I gave it a very quick workout.
First impressions are that while it appears to record nice audio, it’s a bit of a hassle to use and the included “manual” isn’t helpful. It didn’t, for instance, make any reference to the downloadable Tascam app.
I had to remove the case from my iPhone 4S in order to seat the mic. The phone needed to be in Airplane mode before it would record and, because I didn’t change my settings, the iPhone kept going to sleep in mid-recording. I was able to monitor the recording through earbuds, but not Apple’s earbuds which have a built-in mic.
Recording with the Tascam app was easy: press the record button once and set the levels and then once more to start the recording. Files were automatically saved.
Once the recordings were done, the only option under sharing in the Tascam app was to send the files to Soundcloud; I had to plug the iPhone in to my laptop and download the audio files to get them into an editor. I was, however, able to record directly into Monle, an audio-editing app on the phone, and then use a wireless connection to download that file.
The audio quality of the recordings is good, although there were differences in the volume of all three files I recorded (embedded below): the first one was relatively quiet, the second started much louder and distorted, and the third, recorded with Monle, was the the quietest of all. As much as anything, that may have been a problem of my mic technique. Handling noise was a problem, as it is with all handhelds.
The only changes I’ve made to these files was to open them in Amadeus Pro and normalize them. The first two, recorded in the Tascam app, were normalized to 0db; the third was normalized to -3db, because the 0db setting caused it to clip. (Warning: there are volume differences in the three: there first is very quiet and there is some distortion at the start of the second.) One note about the files: the low level hum at the start of the third clip is from the hot air duct that was about three feet away and that started pumping air when I started recording.
First test
Second test
Third test (with Monle)
Final thoughts: The iM2 is something I’ll throw into my bag for spur-of-the-moment use. If I set out to do serious audio recording, I’ll pack my Zoom H4. Given the set-up hassles, I’m not sure I would recommend it, especially for students. For about the same price, you can pick up a fairly capable low-end Olympus digital recorder which, while it doesn’t produce quite the quality of the iM2, does well enough with a little massaging in an audio editing program.
Product link: Tascam website; details on the Tascam app.
In the last-but-one class of the Storytelling course I taught this semester, I shared some ideas for doing better journalism. I’m sure none of these is original; I’ve likely stolen them from several sources.
Find inspiration: There are many people, blogs and tweet streams I follow for the inspiration they provide. Brainpickings, by Maria Popova, is one. Richard Koci Hernandez is another, and I love Melissa Lyttle’s life of m. Find your own sources: websites with RSS feed, on Twitter, Google+, Tumblr or Facebook. Visit often. Have fun.
Write every day: Blog. Tweet. Play (write bad metaphors). Write a scene, a description, a snatch of dialogue. Write a poem or a song. Set a goal and hit it. Write it, read it, make it better. Have fun.
Read every day: Read critically, for style, for content, for structure, for use of quotes and dialogue, for language, for rhythm. Save the pieces you really like so you can go back to them. Have fun.
Take a photograph a day: Not just a snapshot, something that gets you more familiar with your camera and your image-making. Push yourself. Try low light, flash, silhouettes, more. Set a goal or a challenge before you head out. Have fun.
Once a week: Take your digital recorder out and record the world: snatches of conversation, sounds of the street, a merchant at a farmer’s market, anything. Learn how your recorder works best, learn about isolating sound, learn about handling. Have fun.
Once a month: Interview someone (friend, family, neighbourhood grocer, etc.). Have a subject and a goal so it’s a real interview aimed at getting real information. Record it and then transcribe it. What worked? What didn’t? What questions could/should you have asked? Which type of questions garnered the best responses? How was the flow? Have fun.
Once a month: Shoot some video. Work on gathering scenes that will work together. Work close, work medium, work far. Pick a topic — harbour ferries, Yaletown dogs, a day at the beach — and shoot to tell a coherent story. Have fun.
Publish often: Get your stuff out where people can see it and, more importantly, react to it. Promote yourself on social media to get feedback. Listen to and weigh the feedback. Don’t publish everything: be tough on yourself and only publish what you consider the best, or the stuff that’s giving you problems. Give yourself deadlines and practice hitting them. Have fun.
2011 has been a year for photography. I’ve been taking a photo a day (well, almost every day; I skipped a couple here and there), and posting the results at my Tumblr blog. It’s been interesting, fun and challenging, and I’ve learned a bunch along the way. More on that later.
Now it’s almost 2012 and time for a new challenge. I’d like to get back to storytelling and make it my year for journalism.
Among the projects I’d like to tackle in 2012:
- A long-form audio piece, something I’ve wanted to do since the early ’80s and never had the chance to.
- A longish (5-8 minute) video doc. Up until now I’ve played with video; it’s time to do something serious.
- At least one piece of long-form narrative journalism.
- A serious photo-essay, possibly self-published as an iPad “book.”
All of this will take work and energy and, as I repeatedly tell my students, journalism is a young person’s game. I’m out, in part, to prove myself wrong.
Posting this is a way of handing myself a to-do note. Putting out in public may produce the occasional so-how’s-it-going comment during the year to further goad me along.
After four frustrating hours of fighting with WordPress, databases and FTP, the blog is back. I haven’t checked all the posts yet, so it’s likely that there are still missing images and files, something I’ll have to see to over the next couple of days.
Note: Any bookmarks you have to any of these pages may be broken as there’s been a small change to the site structure. That’s something else on the list of things to fix. And, I just noticed, it’s also broken any links from Google, which may mean I no longer exist. I hate those who hack blogs with all my heart.
I’m in the middle of developing a new Computer Programming for Journalists course for the spring semester. I want to put some of my thoughts on this out there so that people who are smarter than I am can prod it a little, point out the holes, make suggestions, etc.
This is an exposure course. No one will come out of it a fully-fledged programmer. Students will dive into various programming “pools” — and to various depths. The goal is to give students enough understanding of the possibilities to allow them to work effectively, as journalists, with programmers; understand the possibilities that coding brings to journalism; and have a strong enough grasp on some basics, so they can at least modify code. If, in the process, some of them discover that in their journalistic heart of hearts they’d rather write code, they’ll have a pretty good idea about what they have to do next.
Here are my thoughts so far.
The course would have three sections. In the first, students would build a basic portfolio site using HTML and CSS, and then layer in JQuery, using and modifying available script packages. In the second, we’d use HTML, CSS and JQuery (or other libraries) to build an iPhone web app. In the third, we’d move onto using programming for data visualization, using a variety of scripting languages and tools.
That’s barebones. It would be a mostly a doing class, but there’d be some minor lecturing on programming concepts, strengths of various scripting and programming languages, available tools and frameworks, etc.
It sounds a little ambitious but doable, I think.
So, smarter folk: What do you think? What’s missing? What’s not needed? What seems reasonable and what seems unreasonable? Any and all comments are welcome.
Lists of books that journalists or journalists-to-be should read aren’t hard to find. Inspired by one of the latest (A Reading List for Future Journalists at the Columbia Journalism Review), I asked second-year students what inspired and informed them. They came up with a great list and solid explanations.
Two things: There is a wide variety of interests, sources and inspiration, and my students — encouragingly — are a well-read bunch.
(Along the way, I discovered that while in high school they were assigned many of the same books I had to read 40+ years ago ‐ Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, etc.)
Here’s the list. I jotted down their explanations on the fly, so they’re telegraphic and short on nuance.
Learning to write
- Writing With Power, by Peter Elbow — good advice about the writing process that makes sense
- The Book of Your Voice, by Julie Elizabeth Leto — good writing advice on finding your voice
- Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, by Roy Peter Clark — easy to understand and some uncommon advice
Non-fiction
- What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, by Malcolm Gladwell — explains complex stuff vividly
- New Kings of Nonfiction, edited by Ira Glass — compilation of great long-form writing
- Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936, by David Clay Large — deep, well-researched book on the 1936 Olympics
- Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler — Not for inspiration, but because you need to read to understand. (This addition to the list provoked, as you can imagine, some great discussion.)
- Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich, by Mark Kriegel — great, deep biography, extensively sourced
- Punk, compiled by Mojo — read for interest and understanding
- 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann — Great popular science writing
- Songbook, by Nick Hornby — Showed me that I could be a journalist and write about music
- The Damage Done: Twelve Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison, by Warren Fellows — short and powerful; profound storytelling
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson — inspiring, got me excited about journalism; showed me you can be different.
Fiction
- 1984, by George Orwell — for the storytelling and the writing
- The Jade Peony, by Wayson Choy — finding and telling good stories that haven’t been told
- Brokeback Mountain, by Annie Proulx — writing for story and emotion
- The Road, by Cormac McCarthy — writing in different prose style, playing with structure and sustaining poetic flow
- Obasan, by Joy Kogawa — fiction based on reality
- The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova — writing about different places and customs
- Schismatrix, by Bruce Sterling — the creativity needed to create new worlds
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams — how to write humour
- Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov — precise, inventive use of language
- A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey — a different structure that works
- The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill — empathetic writing and writing in other voices
- On the Road, by Jack Kerouac — a peek into the life of a writer of his time; inspirational
- King Rat, by James Clavell — good storytelling about human nature
- The Plague, by Albert Camus — a journalistic style that gives it the ring of truth; it reads like it could had been a true story.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde — shows the importance of phrases and sentences that stop you
- Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts — great writing
Most of what follows is pretty close to conventional wisdom, at least among the folks I talk to and read. I don’t have any particular claim to expertise: this is the result of closely following a decade or more worth of news about the news, thinking as deeply as I can, and absorbing what I read, hear and see on the streets. It doesn’t cover everything about newspapers, but it represents a ground floor of sorts and, as always, the chances that I am wrong, in large or small measures, is not insignificant.
Newsprint is with us for a while yet.
Yeah, inevitably, the print format will go away, but it remains a potent method of delivering information quickly and relatively cheaply. Habit plays a role, too, whether it’s the old habit of picking the thing up off the doorstep, or the newer one of grabbing a free daily on the way into the subway. Long term, traditional newsprint economics do not compute; for now, they do, although shakily.
The current newspaper – thinner, lighter staffed, its newsrooms serving print and online masters – appears to be the future newspaper, too.
Creation of large chains by assuming large debt, credit crunches, recession and internet disruption have created current conditions but they mask, to some degree, changes already afoot, including the long downward drift in readership and the slow atomization of mass audience. I remember numbers from the first decade of the century: Advertising revenue was increasing for all Canadian media, but slowest of all for newspapers.
Newspaper chains, most emerging from bankruptcy, still drag around debt and, in some cases, still lose money. It seems inevitable that revenue for newspapers will remain smaller than it was; the “missing” money will continue to be reflected in smaller-staffed, skinnier publications. “We’ll get over this and get back to where we were” is an unsupportable wish. Post-recession recovery will likely not take newspapers back to where they were.
There is no magic bullet.
I’ve heard from people who should know better, that “someone” will figure it out, as though there is a single cure for the manifold and differing illnesses affecting newspapers here and there. (To their credit, those who should know better and are saying this, often have a wistful tone.)
It’s easy to be seduced by the fact that newspapering was, with minor variations, the same everywhere, but that may no longer be the case. Consider paywalls and you run up against issues that range from selling the public one the idea of a paywall for a site run by a newspaper that is distributed free of charge, to the question of who will pay and how much, not universally, but in the local marketplace. (There’s no argument that journalism, and particularly newspapers, are vital to society, but “somebody needs to pay us because we are important” is not a business model.)
The biggest difficulty publishers face, I think, is that, absent the magic bullet, there needs to be a basketful of methods for funding the beast and that they, generally, can’t depend on someone someplace else putting together a single basket that will serve them all.
Tags: future, newspapers, revenue
What follows is the first draft of an article I intend to direct students to. It’s not a manifesto, or in-depth teaching philosophy, or anything of that sort: it’s more a collection of observations. Other teachers — and students — are encouraged use the comments to react to these, argue against them or add to the document.
• Why are you here? You need to answer that. It’s not about us making you be here, it’s about why you chose to come here, what you came to learn, whether it’s specific or as general as I want to explore. (Although even at that, you still need to ask why.) What’s driving you, what excites you, where’s the sweet spot for your passion? Let me know; I’ll try to feed it.
• Here’s the deal: I’m responsible for the teaching; you’re responsible for the learning. If you’re not learning, it may be because I’m not holding up my end of the bargain in a way that works for you. You gotta tell me about that, though, so we can work it out.
• The recipe for success remains the same: show up, pay attention and engage, and do the work to the best of your ability at the time.
• Oh, and presume that everything will be on the test.
• They may matter to the scholarship folk and your parents, but once you go looking for work, no one will ask about your grades.
• Individual assignment grades assess how well you’ve done given your abilities, the time you’ve had available, the effort you’ve made. (I don’t grade on curves, by the way. I have no preset ideas about how many of you will excel, or how many will fail.) A low grade means you need to work harder. So does a high grade, because it means my expectations have been upped. A+ is reserved for excellence.
• We all have great days, good days and not-so-good days. Me, too. I expect you to extend the same consideration to my not-so-good days that you expect me to extend to yours.
• When you tell me you can’t come to my class because of an assignment you have to do for someone else’s class, you’re telling me that class is more important than mine. Think about that. If I ever assign something that can only be done during someone else’s class, tell me and I’ll change the assignment. If someone else assigns you something that can only be done during my class, tell them.
• It is considerably odd how many medical professionals only offer appointments for routine matters during the hours I teach.
• The number of things I don’t know would fill a (somewhat large) book, and that includes some aspects of what I’m trying to teach. That means, in some cases, we’ll be learning together, and in some cases that you’ll know more than I do. Feel free to share.
• Assume that some of the things you know are wrong. Be prepared to challenge not only the ideas of others, but your own as well.
• ”I always do my best when I do the work the night before an assignment is due.” Unless you have sincerely tried doing it any other way, how do you know that’s true?
• Journalism assignments can fall apart: Subjects won’t phone or e-mail you back on time, the original idea doesn’t fully pan out, the source you thought was gold turns out to be lead. Start your assignments early, so if they do fall apart, we can work together to salvage them before they’re due.
Update 1: Added at the suggestion of Tim Falconer (@timfalconer on Twitter, for those who indulge): When I criticize your work, I am criticizing your work, not you. Don’t take it personally.
Update 2: You should recognize that progress rarely happens in a smooth, straight line. It happens in fits and starts, greap leaps and stalls. Sometimes, frustratingly, the line seems to run backwards. Don’t fret too much; it’s that way for all of us.
Update 3: Regarding those missing classes. It happens. Life gets in the way. But if you miss a class, I don’t really have time to reteach it. And you’re responsible for knowing what, if any, assignments came out of that class. So find a study buddy you can tap.
Update 4: We all crave certainty, but sometimes the best answer I can come up with for your question is, “Possibly.” If you ask me, “What’s two plus two?” I’ll answer, “Four.” If you ask me, “Is it best to bring this fact into my story this early?”, I’ll answer “Possibly,” and we’ll talk about structure and intent and readers and all the rest and try to come to some sort of understanding. Possibly, that’s the best way because there are as many ways to tell stories as there are storytellers.
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