DLP narration + classroom audio

I finally completed the task of adding classroom audio from both schools to the narration for the Dual Language Program production. Finding suitable clips from the classes in English was not a problem, of course. I even managed to glean what I needed from the Spanish side of the kindergarten class, but I could only get the bare gist of the Spanish at the fourth grade level. That last hurdle was cleared when my bilingual daughter came over to listen to the few audio clips I had prepared from more than an hour's worth of recording. As a brand new mother, my daughter's time and attention span was limited, so this meant sitting down with her at my computer – grandson in arms – and reviewing three brief audio clips that had sounded promising to my ear.

What contributed to the final decision had more to do with extraneous classroom noise than with content. Although I had carefully monitored my recordings in the classroom, I was astonished over the general noise level that remained in the audio: a warbling wall of student babble in the background, punctuated with goose-like noises from desks and chairs scooting across linoleum. Our choices of clean sound bites were severely limited, but I settled on an exchange between the Spanish teacher and the entire class going over a point of Spanish grammar. This would roll out of a brief clip of the English teacher discussing a vocabulary word with his small reading group. Those few seconds of classroom audio were all that would be used from a couple of hours spent with the Spanish portion of the fourth grade class, but that was all that was needed.

So now I had both narration and classroom audio combined for the production, and it all timed out at 2:48. In order to complete the audio, I had two more interviews to line up: one with the English-speaking parents of a fourth grader for quotes on their initial reservations about signing their kindergartner up for the DLP program five years ago and how it seemed to be going for their child now, and the other with the Spanish-speaking parents of a fourth grader on what their child had gained from dual language education. It would be a challenge to add all this to the audio and still keep the production time down around three minutes, but I'd deal with that when the time came for the final tightening edit.

And regain an interim camera

This has been a very bad week for sound slide production. I haven't spent a single morning working on audio. Instead, I mostly slept in during the last of three weeks covering for the other staff photographer on vacation.

Meanwhile, one interesting development that occurred at the newspaper was an announcement by the publisher in our mid-week staff meeting that all of our news reporters would be provided with point-and-shoot cameras this year. They would be expected to keep these cameras handy at all times and use them frequently. This notice was given amid a litany of issues that were brought up by the corporate CEO during a recent visit with the publisher.

I was given the responsibility of making the camera thing work for our reporters.

Having already done my research on replacing what I had considered the best point-and-shoot camera for photojournalism – the FujiFilm Finepix F30 – I took another look at their F50fd, and then I broadened my search to include all 12-megapixel compact cameras.

Imagine my surprise to discover that FujiFilm had already introduced the successor to their F50fd, due to hit the market in March: the F100fd!

The 50 units of improvement between their F50 and their F100 included an 8th generation image sensor to capture a greater range of detail in shadows and highlights, improved face detection technology, an ISO range of 64-3200 at full resolution and up to 12800 (!) at reduced resolution. The F100 also sported a 5x optical zoom lens providing 28-140mm coverage (albeit, with a maximum aperture of f3.3, compared to the F50's f2.8 for their 3x lens).

The only serious wrinkle with the F100 appeared to be that FujiFilm dropped the Aperture and Shutter Priority modes offered on the F50. However, their F10 retained the Manual mode. The problem with the F50's Manual mode is that it allows manual control of everything EXCEPT aperture and shutter, so it isn't a true manual control in the conventional sense. If the F100 provides true manual control of aperture and shutter, then this might actually be an improvement for serious point-and-shoot photography.

That was the oxymoron for the week – "serious point-and-shoot photography" – but since I was expected to equip and train our reporters to become more than visual duffers, it seemed to apply.

Once again, I found no significant alternative to the FujiFilm Finepix F series for available light shooting in a truly compact camera, one a reporter wouldn't mind sticking in a pocket or purse and actually using.

I did find a very interesting website regarding the march of the compact camera industry toward ever higher megapixel counts (http://6mpixel.org/en/). It provided evidence that for the tiny image processors used in compact cameras, about six megapixels proved to be optimal (as in the 6.3-mexapixel F30). Stretching 12 mexapixels across such a tiny processor actually degrades the quality of image capture.

By the end of the week, I had arranged through the newspaper to send my F30 to the FujiFilm factory repair service in New Jersey with a total repair estimate of $85 – including part (no problem on part supply, I was told), and a three-week turn around on the repair. I was also given the go-ahead to buy one F50fd locally at $250 for staff training, and wait and see what reviews revealed on the $380 F100fd.

At least that would provide a camera similar to the F30 for me to complete the shoot on the Dual Language Program slide show.