Recently in Photography Category

C'mon, Coalition, if you really believe in Big Society and civil liberties, turn this around. 

Trying out a little project to boost internal knowledge sharing and communication. I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow.

For example, the season finale of House is being shot on a Canon 5D digital SLR camera.

Amazon will sell you one of those for £1,700. That's pretty cheap for a TV camera - and you can shoot magazine quality stills with it, too...

If you subscribe to that, you tend to allow people chance to correct their mistakes, and it's in that situation that you'll discover their true character.

Take the issue of using other people's photographs in your work. This morning, I found this article in my feed reader:

"That picture look awfully familiar, I though." Oh, yeah. Because it's one of mine. And it isn't attributed. The picture is Creative Commons licensed, so people are free to use it, but there's a requirement for attribution. 

Fair enough, I thought. Techcrunch has made a mistake. Let's give them the chance to correct. I contacted the author, Jason Kincaid, via Twitter. And this was his response:

And sure enough, within minutes, my attribution was in place:

And that's a model of how to do it. This is the second time I've had to do this recently, and the reaction I've got both times contrasts sharply with that sometimes displayed by the mainstream media. 

This is not hard. But it does require you seeing yourself as just one of a community of amateur and professional publishers. Why do traditional media types find that so hard?

For some reason, my pics from the various incarnations of Le Web seem to get used more often than anything else...

For the first time in an age, I managed not to schedule any meetings and take myself off to the Tuttle Club this morning. In fact, I've been so bad at going that I have missed the ICA phase entirely, leaping straight from the Coach and Horses to Leon in Spitalfields.

I'd blocked out the morning in my diary anyway, but I was delighted to learn from Lloyd that Canon would be sponsoring the morning, as I'm a long term Canon SLR and DSLR user, and getting the opportunity to play with their new kit was too good to be missed.

On the whole, people at work tend to know me as a champion of the "quick'n'dirty" approach to photos and videos in reporting. And I think that's valid. The social media era is pushing journalists towards being multi-media workers, and basic kit is (a) great for learning (b) easier to use, and thus gets used more and (c) often enough for most journos. But there are specialist tasks and situations which demand better kit. And some journalists will continue to have a bias towards particular elements of multimedia.

The observant amongst you might have noticed the appearance today of a handful of panoramic shots of the venue, like this:

And, indeed, this:

These are the result of me acquiring a rather lovely little iPhone app called AutoStitch. That does all the picture matching, assembly and cropping actually on the phone. It's one of the first apps I've come across that really takes advantage of the fact that the iPhone is basically a computer with a camera attached to really offer a new photographic opportunity. You'll probably be subjected to a good few of its results until I get bored of it...