This week, we started going over the basics of Photojournalism, an integral part of journalism as a whole. More and more, papers and presses are relying on hard-hitting and relevant pictures to accompany news articles to make people pay more attention and affect them even more than normal.
Taking, for example, the story today of the riots at Millbank, there are a lot of things to remember about photojournalism in those instances. Although riots make front-page worthy news, for photojournalists, it can be a very risky business. Firstly, photos taken in these instances can be used as evidence for both the rioter and the police if they do something wrong, so any photographers have to be careful where they take pictures from and what of, as the police can sometimes not be able to take any actions until all photographers are off the scenes. Obviously, any photographers in the immediate vicinity of the action are in danger of being hurt the second anything major kicks off, and as such they can possibly get arrested if any of the police suspect that they are also part of the action taking place since they are so close to what is happening. On top of that, photographers can sometimes get arrested on suspicions of inciting any violence in the first place, as if they are close to the centre of the action and are taking pictures of protesters, someone might make the radical statement to break a window or start a fire for the camera as they know that they will get noticed and get their message out there. In this state, the photographer might well be blamed for inciting the violence as the person has taken to this violence particularly to get noticed by the camera.
All magazines and all papers need photos, and as such they are an important part of the news pieces. There are different styles and categories of pictures. There are both Editorial and Advertising photography, but since we are focusing on the more News-based photojournalism, we won't look at Advertising. Within Editorial photography there is News and Features Photojournalism, which are both very different styles from each other.
News Photos consist of two major types:
--> Action pictures, which depict something happening or in the process of happening, and is proof of actions that you mention in your article.
--> Identification pictures, which are used for identifying people that are in your article, in both positive and negative ways. These can consist of pictures from mug shots to recognisable photos of celebrities.
The things to avoid whilst undertaking photojournalism paths are mostly things like taking what is called "Tourist Pictures", which mostly consist of mid-distance shots of subject that are perfectly squared in the frame. These are not interesting shots of interesting things - they may be an interesting subject, but a dull shot makes the subject itself dull too. However the three rules you SHOULD stick to are:
* GET TO THE ACTION (without getting yourself hurt/killed)
* KEEP TAKING PICTURES (the more you have, the more likely you are to have a winning shot!)
* GET IN CLOSE (but to a safe distance)
Features Photography, on the other hand, is generally guided by the generic type of the feature. So, for example, an Interview feature will have similar style pictures of the person being interviews, an investigative piece will have more candid style shots, etc. Shot of faces are the most useful to use, as the face is the most emotive part of any picture and it is what people will identify with the most. As soon as you see a picture of someone in an article, you will immediately be able to tell what kind of tone the article follows by the emotion expressed on their face, and therefore these shots are the most useful to your piece as they also create a humanising aspect to the article as well. It says a lot about the emotional content of your piece, and how it will affect the audience.
After this, we went on to discuss Content Management Systems, and how useful they are to us and our writing. Content Management Systems are part of the Open Source Movement of websites such as Wikipedia, in which the public can add or change the content of the website through moderators. The website construction server Joomla is what WINOL is built on, and this allows people to be added to the server and add or change the content of the website. What Joomla also does is link other websites you have also built through them together so that it creates a higher amount of traffic so that the various different sites that are linked through the same server direct traffic to each other. This also links back to the Search Engine Optimisation we went over a couple of weeks ago, and is beneficial to that also.
very good notes
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