michalinhillsboro

The video venture begins

2009-04-05T11:07:00.000-07:00

The same reporter who served as an excuse to end my venture into multimedia self-education stepped up to my desk at the newspaper Friday and handed me a plausible excuse to reignite my interest: a Flip Video. This is a sleek little camcorder about the size and shape of an iPod. Frankly, I sneered at its lack of features and the likely quality of video it would produce, but this little gadget was being issued to our newspaper by the statewide webmaster who controlled our local website with the notion that "we" should start contributing videos for posting.

What I thought I knew about digital video production for newspapers was that it involved lots of complicated and expensive equipment and editing software which demanded even more expensive high-powered computers to run – none of which our little newspaper could afford.

Last November I bought my first digital camcorder just to record our only grandson living within range of weekly visits. I bought the Canon FS100 based upon its sole distinction of being the only point-and-shoot camcorder I could find equipped with an external audio jack. Soon after, I bought my first shotgun mic. Nearly six months later, however, I hadn't gotten past figuring out how to convert the Canon video files into viewable clips on a Mac. There never seemed to be enough time or energy left after work to scale yet another learning curve.

A couple of months ago my iMac died, leaving me at a crossroads on the issue of what direction to take in pursuing multimedia development. Should I simply replace my Mac with another budget computer and stick with the audio-slide show format, even though these seemed like more trouble than they were worth, or should I upgrade in order to give myself room to grow into video work? I upgraded with the best of intentions to new 20-inch 2.4 Mhz iMac with 2 Gig of RAM, but my camcorder has used very little, and the new shotgun mic not at all.

I've managed to look over the tutorials on the iMovie '09 that came with the new computer, but the task of learning yet another software program just seems too daunting, given my work situation.

The unassuming little Flip Video, however, has prompted second thoughts in terms of the minimal equipment and software I used to teach myself the basics of audio-slide show production. Maybe my newspaper has given me a prime OJT learning tool.

I'm still here . . .

2009-01-04T09:16:00.000-08:00

A lot has happened in the past seven months. It is time to consider whether to continue this blog, and if so, what purpose it might serve.

At the end of September, in the wake of steadily declining circulation and ad revenue, management at the newspaper made the inevitable cuts to its small staff: one from classified and two from editorial. Clearly there had not been enough editorial space over the past year to justify two full time staff photographers, but what I had expected was a reduction in hours for one or both of us, rather than outright elimination. Thankful as I am to be left fully employed, I am now left with a workload spanning six and seven days a week and the certainty that – given the grim turn in our national economy – the next shoe will land on me. When the newspaper's budget needs to be cut again, a seasoned community photojournalist will be viewed as a luxury in light of reporters with cameras and a steady supply of photos submitted from outside the staff that can fill editorial space so much more economically.

Like so many other community newspapers across the country, our newspaper is dying, and apparently management anticipates no future beyond newsprint. There appears to be no preparation in the works for a transition to a next life on the Internet, which is what most community newspapers are scrambling to achieve. I'm left to contemplate what future I have beyond this newspaper and what preparations I should be making for that inevitable transition.

I'm now working as long and hard as I did at my first newspaper job, but that only serves to remind me just how much I relish the role of community photojournalist and how much I will miss that work in the event I'm laid off or the newspaper closes. Apart from the prospect of finding another income, I need to develop a practical outlet for documenting my community. If this blog has taught me nothing else, it is that I don't want to devote the sheer production time and work necessary to produce decent audio slide shows. I'm not even sure I want to take the time and effort to write about my community. I'd rather be out in the community shooting.

Perhaps the blog can become such an outlet.

Like someone rolling a large stone uphill

2008-05-04T22:20:00.000-07:00

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks stewing unhappily over the situation with my first production posted on our newspaper’s blog. In my view, a succinct audio-driven slide show that took a lot of work was given equal weight to an overly long, unedited and pointless piece of video shot YouTube-style and slapped together by a reporter. I even offered to incorporate some of the reporter’s video into the slide show if he would just remove his video. He said he’d be glad to swap my original slide show with one that included video, but adamantly refused to remove his own video because it was “fun” and had received a lot of hits on the blog. Never mind that most of those hits resulted from my posting our side-by-side slide show and video on three different forums devoted to multimedia production, inviting comments on the contrast between the two. Nor would it have made any difference to the reporter if I showed him some of the scathing remarks on the video.

Quality control was not the issue. The issue was who held the territorial rights to the newspaper's blog.

This particular reporter was in charge of the newspaper’s blog. He initiated it and kept it alive. It was his baby and he had the final say on it. He was its editor. My greatest source of frustration with the whole business of producing newspapers, large and small, has stemmed from the clash between my professional ego and 'someone else in charge' – editors. The fire-bucket style of teamwork involved in newspaper production depends upon its editors serving as gatekeepers. The editors in charge set the standards for quality. All too often, more especially on smaller newspapers, the only thing that matters is being in charge.

I don’t know why I thought this paradigm would change with the transition from newsprint to Internet.

All this has left me very discouraged. Over the past year I've spent countless hours teaching myself the basics of audio slide show production, using somewhat less than basic means. I think I've accomplished what I set out to do with my own blog. If there is no meaningful future outlet for these efforts at my own newspaper – with no access to its website and no standards set for content on its blog – then there isn't much reason to continue.

The irony of success

2008-04-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

One of my primary motivations for starting this blog last June was due to our newspaper’s website not allowing the display of anything but text – regurgitation of stories already published in newsprint. If I wanted an outlet for teaching myself how to produce multimedia stories, it would have to be on a blog of own or on someone elses website, someone who actually wanted to post one of my slide show productions.

The prospect of this symbiotic relationship with someone elses website has been in the back of my mind for each one of my story projects.

My first audio story on a garage band workshop was offered to the city parks & recreation department for use on their website. They loved the production but never posted it. My first audio-driven slide show about an annual chalk art festival was offered to the sponsoring art association for use on their website. Again, the slide show was praised, but the organization never actually got around to posting it. After finally completing a slide show last month on an elementary dual language program, one that I was ASKED to produce for use on the elementary school’s website, it has yet to be approved by the school district administration.

That made three for three of my slide shows that went unpublished outside of my own blog, so the irony was not lost on me that my first successful placement of a slide show was on the news blog at my own newspaper. That sense of success, however, was short-lived.

The blog at my newspaper was started last fall by a staff reporter out of his frustration over corporate restrictions placed on our newspaper’s website. He was instrumental in gaining approval to set up a blog from the newsroom for “breaking news” and bgan doing some interesting things with it that we weren't allowed to do on our own website: using photos, graphs and even short pieces of video – mostly all his stuff. Officially, it was the newsroom’s blog but he was the gatekeeper and practically the blog's sole contributor. My efforts to contribute to what had become essentially "his" blog didn’t get much response from him.

Not until I got assigned to shoot the photos for one of his pet stories and thought of a way to benefit our mutual interests.

His story was a somewhat whimsical outing to the Portland International Raceway in the company station wagon to see whether Oregon’s mandated E10 ethanol gas actually costs drivers only 3% more gas consumption than standard gasoline, as the state claimed. Our newspaper wanted to do an entire page on this “challenge” to the state’s claim. On the way out, I casually asked the reporter if he was interested in my doing a slide show on the challenge for use on the blog. Sure, he said.

I spent the next two hours documenting our excursion in audio and images without planning or preparation. That was on a Monday afternoon. Our next newspaper production day for the issue that would carry the full page on the challenge was Thursday, giving me only three days to complete the slide show production in order to have it ready for timely posting on the news blog – in stark contrast to the three months my last production took.

Production workflow had to be compressed, starting with the story line. The story to be told was simple: A reporter conducts a test to tell whether one type of gas gets significantly better mileage than another. Does it or doesn’t it?

Production workflow was further simplified, inadvertently, due to my under reporting in both images and audio. I should have gotten a wider variety of driver shots instead of shooting only from the back seat. I could have traded places with the second reporter and shot side views of the driver and even grabbed a few shots from immediately in front of the driver. I should have miked the driver and conducted a running interview rather than settling for the casual banter between the two reporters – audio that was mostly unusable due to background engine noise. I should have had more specific coverage – audio and visual – of the test’s methodology and the switch between the two types of gas. As for the post challenge interview, I should have thought through my interview questions instead of letting the reporter do his own stand-up routine.

In short, my lack of planning limited the amount of material available for the production. Nonetheless, I decided to go ahead with what I had on hand and set the priority of expediency over quality, just to see whether I could meet a three-day deadline. Constructing the audio storyline took more than half the time, starting and ending with some of the stand-up monologue from the reporter. The rest was ambient audio of gas being poured into the tank, external engine audio of the car pulling away, audio of the car passing by on a sharp curve, and brief-but-relevant excerpts between the two reporters from inside the car. I had to develop info slides to explain the testing process and to conclude the storyline, due to the fact I that I had neither the audio nor the images to do this efficiently.

At one point, the reporter offered to let me include video he took with his point-and-shoot camera through the windshield from the front passenger seat. I explained to him that the slide show production software I used – Soundslides – couldn’t include video clips. Actually, I knew video clips could be incorporated with video editing software, QuickTime Pro, after converting the Soundslides production to video, but the reporter’s video was pointless and uniformly poor in quality – a shaky, handheld record of lap driving and incidental conversation between the reporter and another reporter assisting him with the driving. I didn't give it another thought.

Three days later, the ethanol slide show [click to view] was complete. It ran just under two minutes long and received rave reviews in the newsroom. That was very satisfying even though I knew it wasn’t my best work. It was a newspaper assignment converted to multimedia and completed on schedule, and I was proud to have my slide show placed on the newspaper’s blog.

Imagine my dismay the next morning to discover that the reporter added a production of his own – more than four and a half minutes of essentially unedited video right next to my slide show.

Mountain biking – Part II

2008-04-06T21:40:00.000-07:00

The four-week class introducing kids to mountain biking culminated in a group outing to our county's only state park, 1,650 acres of rolling forest perched on the eastern margin of Oregon's Coastal Range. The trails there were not particularly formidable, but before the trek was over, it was clear that I'd put a lot more thought and preparation into my equipment than into the logistics of my coverage, much less my own conditioning.

If I had thought through the project like a producer instead of a newspaper photographer, I would have foreseen the value of scouting the trail ahead of time. The class instructor mentioned in our phone conversation the night before that he and a park ranger had ridden the trail that morning just to be sure it was suitable for the kids. I hadn't been invited along because I hadn't mentioned that such knowledge of the trail would help me plan my coverage – knowledge such as only the first mile of the five-mile trek would actually involve anything resembling a steep, rugged mountain trail. The other four miles of the trek would be spent on a smooth, asphalted path that was once a railroad bed.

For a slide show on mountain biking, I needed the mountain trail images, and not so much the smooth, nearly flat images of the fortest path.

What I also failed to impress upon the instructor was the necessity of my getting ahead of the group – frequently – in order to shoot them riding toward the camera and across the frame, rather than mostly away from the camera. To do this, I had to find a suitable site ahead of the group to stake out for photographing and audio recording as they rolled by, then get ahead of the group again and do the same thing. The instructor didn't seem to get this at all. Once they swept past the initial site of my coverage at the top of the mountain trail, the group only stopped once to rest during the initial one-mile descent. That gave me a chance to catch up, but I had to skip the breather they were taking and keep riding to find the next site of coverage.

This went on for the next four miles. I knew I didn't have enough images of kids riding on an actual mountain trail, but figured I'd have a second chance on the way back up – and the climbing shots would be even more crucial to the slide show than images of their breezy descent.

That descent was deceptively breezy. Retracing the gradual four-mile incline of smooth path back toward our starting point soon left me panting. It got much harder to catch up with the group as I fell further and further behind. I knew the group was scheduled to stop and rest at the base of the final one-mile stretch of mountain trail. I planned to confront the instructor there and convince him that unless he gave me a better chance of getting ahead of the group frequently enough on this last leg of the climb, I wouldn't have enough images for a slide show.

Imagine my disappointment to find no group of kids waiting at the base of the mountain trail. They had gone on without me. Instead, another adult was waiting to tell me that I could either chase them up the mountain trail or take the park road – a "short cut" – back to our starting point and try to head them off near the top of the trail. The road was probably only a half mile, I was told. I chose the road and began peddling hard to salvage the slide show.

The road back wasn't a half mile. It was 1.25 miles of steady incline that rose more than 400 feet, and I didn't really have a good understanding of how to work the 15 gears in order to cope with that. I finally reached our trailhead – gasping for air – only to see the last of the kids coming off the trail.

I had enough material to produce a full-page feature for the newspaper (finessing the fact that I didn't have any decent mountain trail shots), but I had missed the main point for a slide show about mountain biking!

Taking another crack at a slide show

2008-03-30T21:29:00.000-07:00

In the past two weeks I’ve managed to crack the screen on my little camera – again, solve a persistent wind noise problem on my ersatz shotgun mic, and fail at yet another slide show project.

After such a long production time spent on the DLP Learning project, I wanted to try to complete the next slide show as fast as possible from scratch. The next subject to catch my attention was a new city parks and recreation class about mountain biking for kids. All that remained of the class was one session of instruction before the the group of kids ventured onto a real mountain trail to test their new skills. One class and the outing would be all the material I’d need for a slide show.

Participation in that one class taught me three things. For openers, 1) Riding a mountain bike is considerably more complicated than riding my vintage 1979 street bike – not just the additional gears, but the whole body language involved in negotiating uneven terrain. Of more immediate concern, however, 2) You shouldn’t try to operate a camera while riding a bike over uneven terrain. I nearly lost my balance going over a hillock and smacked the camera against the handlebar in the lunge to recover. The same camera that just come back from repair for a cracked screen last week, now had its screen cracked again, and I had to shoot the rest of the class without a viewfinder.

The third revelation from the outdoor class came when I sat down to review my audio: 3) Wind noise that may not sound so bad in the field on ear buds, sounds a lot worse in production. Nearly all of the class audio was tainted with the scratchy rumble of wind noise. Something had to be done to improve the wind screening.

I knew from reading about audio quality control that fluffy “dead cat” windscreens were considered the most effective defense against wind, so I bought a small patch of fake fur from a fabric shop and improvised. Starting with a new Swiffer duster handle to get the benefit of its full extension, I used a heavy rubber band to secure the cabled mic head to the end of the handle extension, then Velcroed the furry ‘sock’ over that.

It worked beautifully – no more wind noise!

Unfortunately, lavender was the only color of fake fur I could find that didn’t have a scratchy glue base that might rub against the mic head. Consequently, my primary piece of outdoor audio equipment was now a fluffy, lavender eight-inch sock at the end of a corded, purple three-foot-long Swiffer handle.

So much for looking inconspicuous.

As for the other two problems, I’d have to separate my bike riding and equipment operations, and I’d have to devise a way to access and secure both microphone and camera as quickly as possible. The camera was simple enough. I used the same Lowepro REZO 15 camera case that attached to my belt with Velcro and a snap, reattaching that to a wrist sweatband on my left hand. With the camera strap already around my wrist, I could simply pull out the camera in one movement and be ready to shoot left-handed.

The audio equipment was another matter. I had to pack and unpack a three-foot shotgun mic at the end of a six-foot cord for each recording session. This is where the Swiffer handle’s combined folding and telescoping design came in handy. The cord could be wrapped around the collapsed handle which could then be attached to a belt loop with a snap ring added to the end of the handle, and Velcro-strapped to my right thigh. I could strap down and unstrap my audio equipment within seconds.

The setup made me feel like Steve McQueen’s bounty hunter with the sawed-off shotgun strapped to his hip in the old “Wanted: Dead or Alive” TV series . . . except maybe for my color scheme.

DLP slide show completed + minimal gear reaffirmed

2008-03-16T11:07:00.000-07:00

Image sequencing for the Dual Language Program production went smoothly enough, but for the frustration of having shot hundreds of images and still coming up short on key shots for points made in the audio track. How could I cover three DLP classes and not shoot more images of Hispanic and non-Hispanic students working together? I wound up relying heavily on informational slides. That was a disappointment, but then again, the production was meant to be expository rather than tell a story. What was surprising was how much time it took to write and rewrite the copy for those information slides. I had to keep the flow of written material supplemental to the audio track without being too wordy or redundant.

For the entire four-minute production, I wound up using only 42 slides due to holding the info slides on screen a bit longer to provide reading time. For this production, I shot everything horizontally and matched the info slides in size to give the entire image sequence a consistent flow. I don’t know if there is an optimal file size for use on the Internet, since Soundslides automatically resizes everything, but I standardized on a 6x4.5-inch frame at 200 dpi.

As for the Soundslides process, I wasted a lot of time adjusting the image intervals, then making changes in the sequence, and then having to readjust the subsequent changes in image intervals. I should have nailed down a final sequence before fine-tuning the timing. What helped with recalibrating after each image shuffle was my project spreadsheet. I wound up using the numbered sequence for images in the first column (a pain to have to renumber with every change, but ultimately useful), then listing the time lapse for each transition, then transcribing each audio segment, and finally, noting the duration of each audio segment.

Here’s my final project spreadsheet in Excel.

Even so, it only took a week to finish the first edition of the slide show, from image sequencing to final image timing. I spent another week incorporating suggestions made by several key people who viewed the initial production, and delivered the final edition of my DLP slide show on March 14: “Learning en dos lenguas.”

A few follow-up thoughts on equipment and quality control . . .

During the lengthy process of repairing auto-leveled audio, I lamented over not having a more professional digital recorder. I even went shopping for the next step-up in audio gear, one that would justify an investment in a decent shotgun mic. I came up with three good candidates: the Zoom H-2 retailing for $200, the Edirol R-09 for $300 and the M-Audio MicroTrack II for $350. Any one of these might be worthy of attaching an Audio-Technica AT897 shotgun mic (another $275).

But then I looked at the quality of images produced with my little Fujifilm Finepix F30 and thought of the sharp, full-toned images I see in most of the slide show entries for the NPPA Monthly Multimedia Contest.

It makes no sense trying to optimize my audio quality when I marginalize the quality of my images with a point-and-shoot camera. I decided to stick with the minimalist gear.

My choice in gear may seem like reverse snobbery, but using equipment with such a low profile in the field is liberating. Rather than entering a story project laden with the heavy-duty slr and totebag of accouterments common to all media photographers, I can walk through a crowded room wearing all my equipment for a slide show project, and not even draw a glance. I can certainly work a room full of kindergarteners or fourth graders without disruption. Imagine trying to shoot with a 35mm camera only inches away from the ear of a five-year-old. The point-and-shoot is silent and the child doesn’t even look up. My “listening stick” draws more attention (Swiffer-mounted microphone – see Oct. 5 blog), and even that doesn’t hold much interest for long among kids.

No, the sense my minimalist gear makes is that all of this – equipment, software, early morning hours and even this blog – is for the sole purpose of providing an alternative to my work for the newspaper. It isn’t practice for freelance work because I don’t expect to earn any extra income from it. It isn’t self-development for the prospect of professional advancement – not at my newspaper, not at my age. It is simply for the hands-on challenge of teaching myself something new about a rapidly changing profession.

Okay, maybe there's just a little genuine snobbery in trying to get the most out of the least amount of “professional” gear.

DLP audio production finally completed

2008-03-02T08:13:00.000-08:00

It has taken a ridiculously long time to complete the audio part of the Dual Language Program production, and the end result runs just over four minutes in length. That is more than a full minute over the conventional standard for audio slide shows on the Internet.

Oh, well.

The chief problem with delay in the process of production isn't procrastination or distraction or any variation on writer's block. It simply comes down to lack of work flow discipline. Disorganization seems to be the greatest detriment to my productivity. I can't get up if I don't have a clear task in mind: This morning I will complete this specific task. A good work flow plan sets up the order of what needs to be done, but something as simple as creating a Post-it note at the close of every work session establishes specifically what needs to be done NEXT.

As for the production process itself, if I can't speed up the editing, then audio slide show projects aren't going to be worth the effort, even if the newspaper does eventually develop an outlet for them on the Internet. I see an occasional fully-faceted gem among the monthly entries in the NPPA Multimedia Contest, and I wonder how many hours of editing time are involved. Something as simple as better equipment and perhaps even better software would speed up the process. I spend hours just repairing the dips and clips rendered in audio recordings made with the little WS-300 series Olympus recorder. Without a means of setting the recording level, there is no way to avoid volume clippings and dropouts created by the recorder's auto leveling. Investment in a decent shotgun mic would be pointless under this circumstance, and I can't invest the $300 it will take to move up to the next level in digital recorders. Until I can significantly reduce the learning curve involved in audio slide show production, the minimal equipment I do have will have to do.

The recording sessions themselves went smoothly with both DLP families. The father of the English-speaking student had a very distinctive, guttural voice, but I decided let it stand on the merits of what he had to say. The father 0f the Spanish-speaking student spoke English well enough that I had no trouble conducting the interview. Even so, I had him reply in Spanish, as well. The idea was to go back and dub in his daughter's voice translating his replies to English. When it came time to arrange for her recording session at the school, I also invited the other English-speaking student, too, and recorded them both introducing themselves and speaking in their non-native language. My daughter suggested that prospective new DLP parents might like to see examples of how well their own child might do with a second language skill by the fourth grade.

All of this stretched the audio content well beyond what was originally intended, but then again, this whole project has taken on a life of its own.

Here is what I've added to the original DLP narration track from January 13: Learning final audio.

DLP narration + classroom audio

2008-02-10T09:45:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-03T14:48:00.000-08:00

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.

Gain a grandson, lose a camera

2008-01-27T18:56:00.000-08:00

Monday morning I finished the rough audio edit on the English side of the Dual Language Program classes. I even sent email attachments of two brief MP3 files in Spanish to my daughter for translation at her convenience. Her baby, however, had other plans for her. That Monday evening was the first of three mostly sleepless nights spent waiting at the hospital for her delivery. Of course I took my little camera, strapped securely to my belt. It was during the early morning hours of that first night stretched out across one of those hard, undersized waiting room couches that I rolled over on my side. The best news of the week was that we eventually wound up with a healthy new grandson. The bad news was that the LCD screen on my camera was shattered.

No serious problem, I thought. Most point-and-shoot cameras aren’t worth repairing, and I’ve had the little camera for two years now. Maybe it was time to upgrade the camera, or more likely, replace the broken one with a more affordable used camera of the same make.

Several days of research on the Internet left me better informed about my dilemma, but no closer to a decision on whether to repair or replace.

It seemed the FujiFilm Finepix F30 had become something of a cult camera for its singular ability to render good images in low light. Two years ago I paid a little over $200 for the camera brand new. I could now find only three used F30s on Amazon.com, ranging from $440 for “refurbished” to $550 for “like new.” Ebay auctions for F30s started around $300.

For that kind of money, why not upgrade to the current incarnation of the F30, right? I discovered that the Finepix F50fd that retailed for more than $500 brand new, could now be had for as little as $220 on Amazon – and they offered no less than 30 used.

What?!!

Backtracking through the reviews on the successive generations of the F30 revealed that not only did FujiFilm fail to market a truly unique niche camera, they moved away from their innovative image sensing technology in pursuit of mass consumer point-and-shoot standards. They now trailed the pack, at best. The F30 begat the F31fd, adding a marginally useful “face detection” (fd) feature and a little extra internal memory. The F40fd boosted the 6.2 megapixel sensor to 8.3, but only for an effective ISO of 2,000 (compared to the F30’s ISO of 3200 at full resolution). The only significant improvement was allowing the use of the more popular SD memory card, but gone were the aperture and shutter controls, as well as the sturdy metal casing and the topside control design that worked so well for my left-handed operation. The F50fd continued the sensor expansion to 12 megapixels (now limited to an ISO of 1600) and an LCD screen size to 2.7 inches – current standards among point-and-shooters. The optical zoom range remained at 3x, however, while most other compact cameras now offer 4x zooms. Reviewers agreed that the F50fd was “nice but unexceptional.”

Back to the option of repair: The LCD screen would cost $127 for the part alone, plus $50 labor, but the part was backordered until “at least March.” Parts-only F30s were going on eBay for more than $70, but with no guarantee that the salvaged LCD screen would work at all.

All of which put me back at square one. I’ve been partial to FujiFilm color technology since clear back in the day of film, but their shift to pursue the mainstream consumer market will likely force me to search other camera lines for a suitable alternative.

New digs for an old prospector

2008-01-20T08:17:00.000-08:00

Over the past week I've been slammed with a double work load at the newspaper due to the other staff photographer being on vacation for three weeks, my expectant daughter thinks she is due for delivery "any day," and I bought a new computer. The new computer is actually a used iMac, but one that runs at 1.25 GHz with an 80-gig hard drive, has the all-purpose CD/DVD Superdrive, the wireless Airport Extreme and a 20-inch flat screen. The seller even threw in the original OS 10.4 installation DVD and the iLife '06 DVD (including Garage Band), all for $475. Seems he was a young work-at-home graphic designer who had just replaced his two-year-old system with the latest thing Apple had to offer. I've been playing with his old system ever since and wondering why my newspaper remains entrenched in OS 9 software.

The distractions to my production schedule have been intense, but I managed to work up an outline of the first two stages for audio production. It is an outline that I will very likely come back and revise, as needed.

PRODUCTION OUTLINE – [Word file updated 3/16/08 to include slide show production]

For as long as it takes

2008-01-13T21:05:00.000-08:00

Rather than start yet another slideshow project, I decided to continue working on the dual language program (DLP) production for as long as it takes for completion. I had already figured out that I didn’t want to pour considerable time and effort into another slideshow production only to have it sit largely unviewed on my humble blog. Each production would need a target website that could carry the slideshow as part of its content. This was an afterthought on the “Chalk” production, but when I offered the slideshow to the Valley Arts Association, sponsor of the chalk art event, they were delighted to have it for their website. I proposed the DLP slideshow project to Minter Bridge Elementary as something that could go on the school’s website to provide a brief introduction for parents who were considering enrolling their children in this program. Finding similar symbiotic relationships for future slideshow productions would lend a good deal more purpose to the hours and hours spent on editing, than mere practice.

The DLP production project quickly outgrew the single kindergarten classroom where it was being introduced at Minter Bridge Elementary. Had I confined it to that, it would have been relatively simple to pick out two kindergartners – one English-speaking and one Spanish-speaking – and develop parallel storylines. However, I thought the subject of DLP needed broader treatment to give the viewer a sense of direction for a program that expected at least a seven-year commitment of its participants. That meant not only covering the kindergarten class at Minter Bridge, but also covering one of the upper classes at the other school where the DLP program had been running for five years. It also meant having to find an appropriate person to interview for the narration to provide the production’s framework, similar to what was done for the production of “Chalk.”

I wound up going to the district office to interview the ‘executive director of school improvement’ – in charge of both the Dual Language Programs and English as a Second Language program. The interview went smoothly and the subsequent editing resulted in a narration track that ran just under two minutes, but it took well over a week to achieve. In the process of shuffling files from desktop computer to laptop and back – trying to edit at every chance I had during a day – files got lost, including the original recording of the interview. Not only the randomness of my work schedule worked against me, but the process of trying to edit audio without a clear step procedure left me disoriented each time I sat down to work. Editing the interview into narration under these terms was a challenge. Trying to edit the several recording sessions at two schools was a disaster.

Creating a specific schedule of work was my first breakthrough. I managed to stay on schedule over the past week – for the most part – although just getting into a productive daily routine was the high achievement for the week. It gave me a sense of progress, however tortoise-like. Five in the morning my alarm goes off. I get up, get dressed, get coffee, read the paper, feed the dogs and then sit down to my laptop by six and work until eight. That’s the schedule. I edit only on the laptop, transfer files to the desktop for backup, and then to the external hard drive for archiving. That’s the flow.

Working up a practical step procedure for editing will be the key to proficiency, and that is evolving. I keep a procedural outline handy, along with a scratch pad to note little efficiencies that come up in an editing session. For instance, I discovered this week:

• that the Mac operating system I use (OS 10.3.9) allows me to select the option “Show Item Info” under View on the Finder Menu, a feature that automatically posts the length of an audio file (all but the Windows files my little recorder produces, of course – these have to be converted to MP3 files). I don’t have to open the file to get this information.

• that the best way to open an MP3 file in Audacity is to first create a new, blank Audacity file and then Import the MP3 file. Actually, I knew this already. I just forgot.

• that the Audacity’s Label Track can have only one label open at any time. If you suddenly can’t add or edit a label to your Label Track, it’s because you have another label still open somewhere in the track. Go back and look for the label with the box around it and close that one before adding or opening another.

So at this point I’ve managed to go back over all the classroom audio in English, cataloging and screening for usable segments that can be worked into the narration track. The week(s) ahead will entail selecting and placing the English segments from both schools. That done, I’ll conscript my bilingual daughter into helping screen the classroom audio in Spanish for segments that can complement the English segments. After that, I can decide whether to include brief interviews with English-speaking and Spanish-speaking parents of upperclass DLP students about their experience over the years, and perhaps even prepare a parallel translation into Spanish (via my daughter) of the finished production for viewing by Spanish-speaking families.

And then I will look for a much, much simpler slideshow project for my next production.

Coping with a crisis in confidence

2008-01-06T09:06:00.000-08:00

A hiatus has been necessary in order to regroup after a series of discouragements over project setbacks and distractions from the original purpose of my blog. The original idea was to teach myself how to produce good audio-driven slideshows about community life in my area. I got off to a good start by learning first how to produce a decent audio story ("Hillsboro School of Rock"), then by learning how to produce a fully-developed slideshow ("Chalk"). I kept good notes on both projects in the blog, but then I got distracted first by trying to stimulate discussion on the journalistic protocol involved in audio editing, then by soliciting exchange of views on entries in the NPPA Monthly Multimedia Contest. While these are both worthy blog projects in themselves, the silence was numbing.

Add the fact that I couldn't seem to produce another slideshow for more than two months, and the result amounted to a crisis in confidence over the whole endeavor. Of the two, the project setbacks have been most frustrating.

Hooked on Flies – Something as simple as a loose cable connection completely unnerved me during the initial interview of a man who spends most of his spare (indoor) time tying his own fishing flies –hundreds of them. The sound check revealed a steady hum in the recording, and I could not figure out the source. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the microphone cable several times without results. We tried shutting down his computer, his wife’s computer, his son’s electric guitar and even their refrigerator, all without effect on the hum. I wound up recording an unusable, buzzy interview just to gather background information, but the technical snafu so thoroughly demoralized me that I couldn’t bring myself to reschedule another interview. It wasn’t until I did the sound check on my next production project that I realized the microphone-to-recorder cable connects at both the recorder AND the microphone. The hum was coming from a loose connection at the microphone end, not from the recorder end.

Dinner for 9,000 – One of our area communities has hosted an annual sausage and sauerkraut dinner for nearly 50 years. I made the mistake of trying to cover this one-day event on the same day I had to shoot no less than seven assignments for the newspaper. I just don’t have that sort of stamina any more. Besides, I had already missed a significant part of the story, the preparations for that dinner. Instead, I wound up simply hanging out for a couple of hours to practice working left-handed with the little camera while operating the ‘shotgun’ equipped recorder with my right hand. That was fun. In the end, I came up with a plan to cover their 49th dinner this coming fall in a two-part project. Part one would document the preparation leading up to the big day. Part two would portray how the entire community turns out to orchestrate the dinner, from the youngest school kids to the oldest seniors. The two slideshows could then be used to promote their 50th dinner the following year.

Expectant Fathers – A class for new fathers at the local hospital seemed like a good, straightforward subject. I cleared the hurdles of gaining permission for an audio-slideshow production from the hospital and the instructor, but decided at the last minute that I had a personal reason for not following through with the coverage. My own son-in-law was enrolled in the class. My presence as an observer would affect his participation. All I could do was interview the instructor and wait for the next time the course was scheduled. During the interview I realized that the course was entirely classroom-based, which would make dull visuals. Unless I could come up with a storyline to pursue outside of class, the production had little prospect of engaging viewers visually. I shelved it and moved on to the next project.

Dual Language Program – My own expectant daughter proposed the next project: a new dual language program started at the kindergarten level in the school where she teaches. This is now the second school in our district to develop what is also called two-way language immersion education. Half the day in the classroom is spent teaching in English and the other half is spent entirely in Spanish. I plunged into this project, interviewing two people at the administrative level for a narrative frame along with multiple visits to both schools for both the English and Spanish sessions. I managed to develop the narrative frame in short order but bogged down trying to sort through all the classroom material. I couldn’t seem to get organized even on the English sessions, never mind that my knowledge of Spanish is minimal. When a software glitch wiped out what little progress I had made on the production audio track, I hit the wall and shut down for the holiday season.

I am now refocusing the blog, developing a strict workflow for production, and establishing a disciplined work schedule.

The blog will be limited to accounting for my own production efforts, the production workflow will start with step procedures for processing audio and developing the audio story first, and the production schedule will consist of five to six two-hour sessions per week on mornings before leaving for the office. I’ll devote Sunday mornings to the blog.

If I can’t develop a reasonable amount of discipline and consistency, and still enjoy the challenge of learning new skills, then I’ll have to give up on multimedia and let the profession leave me behind along with my newspaper.

It’s that simple.

The worst part of being your own producer is being responsible for your own productivity. The second worst part is having to recognize and solve your own problems.

Multimedia exchange

2007-11-18T21:02:00.000-08:00

Only last month did I discover that the National Press Photographers Association has a multimedia counterpart to its Monthly Newspaper Clip Contest. I do read the NPPA monthly magazine, but somehow I either missed the announcement of the new contest or simply wasn't interested in multimedia enough a year ago to take notice. I'm fairly certain of the reaction most of my colleagues had at the time, though: "Great. Just what our profession needs. Another contest."

We do need this contest, because it can help establish the standards for what our profession is becoming. The NPPA Multimedia Contest consolidates the most current multimedia examples contributed by NPPA members and opens the monthly judging to the entire membership. Over the past year, NPPA's new contest program has accumulated three dozen examples of good multimedia journalism in each of its five categories. This is a valuable resource for those of us just learning the ways of multimedia production.

In an era of inter-connectivity, however, I think the website for this program needs one logical development to make it an even more valuable exchange of ideas among NPPA members about what makes good multimedia. By enabling NPPA members to post comments on individual entries, the program could establish both peer-based feedback on the work of contest entrants from one month to the next, as well as an example-based discussion of what constitutes "good work." This could take the form of a provision for comments attached to each entry on the contest website or perhaps adding another NPPA forum discussion group devoted to exchanging critiques and opinions on current contest entries and winners.

In order for a contest to be educational, it is not enough simply to see what is considered the best by those doing the judging, but to understand why.

In that spirit, I'll declare my own choices among the current "November" entries (actually October productions entered in November competition) for the one category in the Multimedia Contest that I can enter: Individual Audio Slideshow.

First Place: "Jehovah's Witnesses Rebuild in 4 Days" by Kerry Maloney of the Idaho Statesman. This production could serve as an archetype for good multimedia journalism. Maloney's audio delivers a clear telling of a remarkable story about a religious community that normally doesn't even like to be photographed. His visuals support the audio story, but not in a lock-step, obvious manner. He even makes a nice, appropriate use of flipbook action, but uses no pointless pans or zooms. At the end, I am awed by the industry of this church community and understand their faith a little better.

Second Place: "Down to the Corps" by Bradly J. Boner of the Jackson Hole News. You gotta admire the photographer who can bring fresh treatment to a threadbare subject. How many times have we seen the basic training story? And yet, by seeing the experience through a letter written to a recruit's father, a trite subject is transformed into a story about a relationship. The images are all spot-on and coordinated with a near professional reading of the letter by the father. His laconic tone reflects humor and pride. Even after viewing this production several times, I have to shake my head over the sheer logistics involved: travel between Jackson Hole and San Diego, time spent covering the camp, acquisition of the letter and arrangement for the father to read it aloud, and the anticipation of visual points made in that letter. Wonderful work!

Third Place: "A Yankees fan in Red Sox nation" by Mike Dean of the Gloucester Daily Times. Oddly, one of the attributes of this production that appealed to me is its brevity – less than 90 seconds. Dean doesn't belabor his subject. He introduces an irrepressible, though displaced, Yankees fan, establishes his mission in life and takes us through his skirmishes, concluding with an excellent closing image.

All 52 entries for November will be posted on the contest website and can be viewed until Dec. 1. After that, only the three selections for first, second and third will be available. In the interest of full disclosure, I entered "Chalk" but in my own estimation, it ranks somewhere in the middle of the pack.

Multimedia mascot – parrot or lyrebird?

2007-10-28T12:38:00.000-07:00

The remarkable creatures of Australia have fascinated me for most of my life. I was delighted years ago when Dirck Halstead embraced the duck-billed platypus as the principle icon in his crusade for still photographers to diversify their skills and learn the ways of video. The lure of his Platypus Workshop is learning how to use new, more effective tools for story telling in preparation for becoming producers rather than mere photographers.

Personal websites, blogging and podcasting now make the possibility of self-publishing available to anyone. Newspaper photographers simply don't need the structure of a newspaper any more in order to publish their work. The opportunity to produce ones own stories in new ways, however, presents ethical challenges for the photojournalist grounded in familiar journalistic standards and editorial hierarchy. The one-man-band multimedia journalist becomes responsible for adapting old journalistic standards to new forms of telling stories.

What comes to mind is an argument between a parrot and a lyrebird.

The lyrebird is an Australian bird of near mythic musical powers. Among all the birds of the world, there is no more accomplished mimic than the lyrebird. Its song – unique to each lyrebird – is comprised of the many, varied sounds in its environment, which each lyrebird combines and recombines and weaves into a new sensibility. The lyrebird literally gives meaning to what it hears. Its song, in effect, tells the stories of its community.

We all know what a parrot is. The parrot is the reporter in us all. The parrot is the bird that keeps repeating in our ear: "Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy." Reporting is a discipline built upon accuracy. Story telling, on he other hand, is an art form, and the lyrebird is the artist in us. This is the bird that uses its own ear to pick and choose from what it hears in its perception of the story. This is the bird that makes sense of it all for the rest of us.

That’s what audio editing should accomplish. It should make as much sense to the ear as photo editing makes sense to the eye.

There is a fundamental conflict of interest between rote reporting and story telling. There is a dialectic tug of war between the duty to adhere to documentary accuracy and the impulse to interpret. Both birds are necessary in the production of multimedia journalism, but they are not the same, the parrot and the lyrebird. They have different roles. Sometimes that is the difference between accuracy and truth.

Crossng the line . . . wherever that is

2007-10-22T18:31:00.001-07:00

I’m comfortable with all but a few decisions I made editing the audio story for the slide show production of “Chalk," but in at least one or two instances I think I crossed a line between journalism and everything else.

Since completing the production, I’ve managed to find very few specific sets of guidelines on the Internet for the ethics of audio editing. Having read everything I can find now makes me wonder what I was thinking with some of these decisions. Evidently, I was thinking more about how to achieve effective story telling in an unfamiliar medium, rather than transferring familiar standards of responsible reporting. The issue isn’t a question of trade offs between the two, but of telling a story in any medium in the right way.

Case #1 – “Chalk is such an easy medium to embrace “

In “Truth in audio” posted on the website Teaching Online Journalism, Mindy McAdams offers the same cardinal rule for audio editing as for written journalism: Never change the meaning of what the person said.

In my interview with the chalk festival chairman I asked what the appeal about chalk was for young and old alike. She started talking about its use by children and went on to explain how the appeal of the chalk festival itself was its primary purpose in having fun. The original segment [click boldface type to listen] lasted 53 seconds, which I cut in half for the production segment. Part of what I cut out was the context of her wonderful, lyrical pronunciation of the word “chalk." However, by dropping out her specific reference to children, I generalized the meaning of her statement to apply chalk’s appeal to everyone, young and old.

Case #2 – Cutting to the bone or beyond?

On the website for The Canadian Journalism Project, Mary McGuire provides more specific applications for audio editing in her article “Ethical guidelines for editing audio.” In her view, it’s okay to cut out most forms of “verbal stalling,” reiterations, and subordinate clauses. It’s okay, according to her, to make edits that help someone sound sharper, tighter and clearer.

In the interview the chairman spent a full minute talking about the event’s growth. I cut the original segment – complete with stalls, reiterations and unfinished sentences – down to less than 15 seconds for the production segment. I left the selected parts in their original order and hopefully preserved their context and meaning, but just where do you draw the line before the cutting becomes excessive?

Case #3 – Shuffling for effect

Not only did I cut down the original segment of the chairman’s reply to my question about the next day’s weather, I shifted parts of her response around her laughter to give a more ironic edge to her reply in the production segment. I have genuine schism over whether this juggling was ethical, because it clearly improved the audio, even though nothing was added. Only the order of the components was changed, but did this change also shift the meaning of what she said, however subtle? If this were a photo, I’d know my ethical limits. You don’t shift pyramids in order to improve the composition of an image. With audio, I’m not so certain about the rules on rearrangements.

Case #4 – A little background music

On the website Pointeronline, Al Tompkins lays down one unequivocal rule in his article “Sliding Sound, Altered Images.” His first edict for audio editing is utterly simple: Do not add. He further cautions against the use of music in journalistic productions if the music was not ambient sound gathered at the same time and place of the story.

I recorded the guitarist playing at the chalk festival, knowing the music might make good a unifying background for the entire production. I added this music track as one more layer of audio for the production, and even had to loop it out to the production length of two and a half minutes, due to its original recording length of only one minute and six seconds. I don’t know what the rules are for the use of ambient sound as imposed background, much less the sort of manipulation involved to make it fit my production needs.

It seems to me that ethical grounding for audio editing is even more important to those of us learning the ropes of audio-driven slide show production than for those learning video production, because we have to start by producing an audio story before adding visuals. Without firm guidelines, the temptation to manipulate audio in the editing process will prove as seductive as the opportunity to “improve” images in Photoshop in our early days of going digital.

I was not surprised to discover that the only audio file I could find posted by the National Press Photographers Association on its website from the 2007 Summit multimedia immersion workshop is the panel discussion on the complex ethical issues emerging from newspaper photojournalism’s transition into multimedia journalism. Nor was the significance lost on me that the one-hour-and-13-minute audio recording was posted in its entirety – unedited.

Workflow for editing "Chalk"

2007-10-15T16:43:00.000-07:00

Since no one has yet written a playbook for multimedia production, it seemed worthwhile to keep notes on the work flow that evolved in the production of “Chalk.”

By now I've viewed dozens upon dozens of sound/slide shows on the Internet and most of them are forgettable. I didn't even finish viewing a lot of them, brief as they were. Mostly it came down to the difference between an audio-driven slide show and slide shows with sound. The difference depended upon good editing, starting with audio. In fact, that seems to be the primary difference between newspaper work and multimedia work. With the slide show you start by thinking how you can tell the story, and THEN you think about what you are showing.

• Rough cuts – I began my audio editing by organizing the converted files into separate interviews (one per artist and one long interview with the chairman) and supporting files (registration and two different guitar numbers). The basic idea was to break up the long narrative interview with brief interludes from some of the artists. I then opened the chairman interview in Audacity and cut out everything I knew I would not go into the production, leaving silent gaps in between the usable material. I made similar cuts on the artist interviews and supporting files, eliminating some of the less promising interviews.

• Content tags – To the several Audacity files I added Label Tracks, noting the content topic under each audio segment. Once I figured out the editorial value of tagging, I stopped wasting time trying to transcribe audio during the editing process. Instead, I started tagging audio segments as part of the rough-cut process.

• Project file – Once all the audio resource material was prepared, I opened a blank project file and saved it with a working title.

• Assembly of story segments – I started the production by importing the registration segment. Even before beginning to edit the chalkfest material, I had both my opening and ending in mind, as I had for “School of Rock.” Knowing where you’re going to start and where you’re going to wind up makes story editing so much easier! I recorded several people registering for their sidewalk space as the obvious place to begin coverage on the day of the event, but not until the next day's rain did I have my ending. I knew the irony of the rain had to be covered in the follow-up interview, so I planned the interview questions accordingly. Switching from staff photographer to multimedia producer meant learning to think as an editor from the start of coverage to conclusion of the production.

• Story tags – I added a Label Track to the project file to keep track of the story development until the basic storyline was completed. Without the story tags in the development of “School of Rock,” I was constantly having to relisten to segments or refer to handwritten notes to remind myself where I was in the storyline development.

• Additional audio tracks – In the “School of Rock” audio story, I added a parallel track fading additional segments in and out of the main storyline, rolling from one to another. In “Chalk” I wanted more separation between the separate components. For continuity I used music recorded at the festival, which went on a separate Audio Track. Rather than use an identifiable song, I used melody-free music that could serve as background for the entire length of the production, fading down beneath the various speakers and back up between the segments.

• Trim & fine tuning – With “Chalk” it proved more expedient to wait until the basic storyline was assembled before making any serious effort to trim and fine tune individual audio segments. It was the trimming and fine-tuning decisions that proved most problematic in terms of the journalistic protocol involved in audio editing. As with the audio notes edited from the seminar, I had no firm guidelines for what was allowable within journalistic standards. (Perhaps specific instances can be addressed in a future blog entry.)

• Transcription – Unless the success of the production depends on precise coordination of visual content with the audio storyline, it shouldn’t be necessary to fully transcribe the audio before assembling images for a slide show. I felt this was necessary for “Chalk.” The best means I found was adding the transcription to the project story tags in the Label Track. I exported the expanded Label Track to a text file, which included the exact timing of each entry in the audio track, and then transferred the text file into an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet gave me the advantage of calculating time segments. With this precise audio log I could start assembling my images.

• Assembly of images – Editing images for a slide show is quite different than for a photo layout. Instead of developing a visual story in terms of spatial relationships, you are assembling a linear progression complete with transitions. And then there is the sheer volume of images involved in producing a slide show. For “Chalk” I had nearly 300 images to edit. I started by separating the images into categories to correspond with the story segments, each divided by a blackout. I composed the title and credit frames in Photoshop, selecting a suitable typeface. The last step in assembly was to number the individual frames in their order of appearance and place them in one folder.

• Soundslides – The real value in this $40 program is its simplicity: Import the Audacity project saved as an mp3 file and then import the folder of numbered jpegs. The program presents a storyboard of your production that allows you to adjust the order and timing of individual images, as well as the type of transition between the images. For an additional $30 you can go “Pro” and add the spiffy Ken Burns movements, among other features.

• Final production format – Instead, I opted to buy the additional Video Plugin ($20) that allows you to Export a Soundslides production in the Quicktime format. Ironically, the video plugin can’t capture any of the additional Ken Burns movements you pay for in the Pro version of Soundslides, but the advantage of converting to one self-contained file in a widely popular format outweighed that limitation. [UPDATE: Since producing "Chalk" I actually read the entire manual for Soundslides. Not only does Exporting to the Soundslides publish_to_web preserve the integrity of your production (including the Pro features), the total files amount to less than half the size of the one Quicktime file and typically runs much more smoothly online.]

Chalk up my first audio-driven slide show

2007-10-10T12:39:00.000-07:00

Imagine several city blocks of people – young and old – spending most of a day drawing something on a sidewalk square just for the sheer fun of it. No competition, no prizes, just the opportunity to take colored chalk and draw whatever they wanted.

My newspaper covered the annual Forest Grove sidewalk chalk art event for most of its previous 16 years, so when the time came around again, I got the inevitable photo assignment. Since we ran a front page centerpiece last year from the chalkfest, I knew there was little chance of getting similar page one display this year. No extra space was set aside in the coming issue for a photo package, so I knew our coverage this year would amount to one or two photos somewhere inside the ‘A’ section.

But what a visual feast for a photographer! Just add audio and I could have my first real slide show production, right?

I left the 35mm equipment at the office and used only the point-and-shoot Fuji. That alone enabled me to blend in with the casual spectators throughout the morning, rather than looking like a one-man walking media event. Normally I’d shoot an assignment only up to the point of knowing I had “something” worth publishing. That morning among the several hundred busy chalk artists, I got so involved in shooting that I was actually startled when the camera simply stopped recording images. For the first time in my career I had maxed out a one-gig card. Working with the little camera was so effortless and unobtrusive, it was like taking visual notes, instead of looking for one "best" photo.

Audio was a different matter.

My first inclination was to build the entire slide show production on a string of brief sidewalk interviews portraying the variety of artists, and maybe toss in a few spectator comments. However, after fumbling my way through the first few interviews, I had to back off for a cup of coffee and second thoughts.

The audio equipment wasn’t the problem. The Swiffer ‘handheld’ mic worked fine. I was getting good audio technically, despite the general murmur of the sidewalk crowd and the background music (local musicians set up on Main Street to play while the artists worked). The problem was my own awkwardness. On any typical photo assignment, I’d endeavor to establish a working rapport quickly with my subject to help the person forget about the camera. Small talk, a joke, pertinent questions – whatever it took to put the person at ease. I couldn’t seem to do that in the interview mode, and the uneasiness carried over to the interviewees.

By the end of my shoot, I had about eight or nine so-so interviews and a firm conviction that these interviews alone wouldn’t make a very good slide show. The interviews needed something more than a string of images to tie the production together. I stepped back into the street and recorded a guitarist picking through a delicate sprinkling of notes. This could provide musical continuity for the production. Still, the whole thing seemed disjointed and incomplete.

What was needed was a narrator to explain the event, and who better than the event chairman? I found her at the end of the day tired but willing to talk about her event. Instead, I scheduled an appointment for a sit-down interview the following week so she would be fresh. I went to that appointment prepared with an outline of questions and the resolve to relax and turn the interview into a conversation. The recorded interview lasted about 18 minutes, but both the preparation and the new mindset helped put me at ease enough to provide the narrative storyline for a two-and-a-half minute slide show – "Chalk."

Meanwhile, my newspaper wound up publishing one three-column-wide photo in black and white on page A5.

Of shotguns & Swiffers

2007-10-05T20:52:00.000-07:00

There is no substitute for a good shotgun mic. That said, I could neither afford a really good shotgun mic, nor did I want to pack around the equivalent of a walking stick. It contradicted the whole notion of minimalist gear.

My first thought was to find the smallest shotgun mic on the market. What I found was the Japanese TECT UEM-88, touted as the "world's smallest ultra-powerful shotgun mic system." Attributes of this "high quality miniature electret condenser microphone" included a 50dB acoustic gain and a 200-15 KHz frequency response, all powered by one standard AAA battery. The whole thing measured nine inches long. Unfortunately, it retailed at well over $100 on the Internet, and I could find no reviews on this bit of audio hardware to justify that sort of investment. Like anyone else on a budget I checked Ebay and found one available at the opening bid of 99 cents with no reserve limit. Imagine my astonishment several days later to discover that no one else placed a bid! I got the amazing micro shotgun mic for less than $12, including shipping, but that was the good news.

To make a long blind alley short, the little shotgun mic simply couldn't produce quality audio recording. The range-tuning device was difficult to operate and imprecise, at best, and any audio I could record came through a curtain of white noise.

In lieu of using a good shotgun mic, the only alternative was to get a microphone as close to the audio source as convenient. I had to find a way to extend the reach of the little microphone I was using with the Olympus recorder – something better than holding the mic out at arm's length.

Okay, I share house cleaning duties with my wife. She vacuums. I dust. I found myself extending the Swiffer duster handle to reach places a shorter-than-average man can't normally reach, and the solution came to me.

I removed the duster pad, trimmed off the long pad prongs and scraped off the "Swiffer" label (I mean, why invite wisecracks in the field, right?).

The two pieces came apart to fit nicely in my camera bag. Reassembled, with the lavaliere clamped to the end of the primary handle (reinforced with a rubber band), I could extend the reach of the little mic to more than four feet. Using the modified Swiffer handle alone gave me the equivalent of a handheld mic that could be folded and tucked into the front pocket of my pants when not in use, the extender stashed in a hip pocket.

Once I had weathered the derisive laughter of reporters at the newspaper office over such a humble improvisation, I felt compelled to try out the new audio accessories on my first attempt at a full-blown audio-driven slide show production: the 17th Annual Sidewalk Chalk Art Festival.

School of Rock revisited – weaving a tapestry of audio

2007-09-18T23:34:00.000-07:00

Having completed the project of editing the multimedia seminar recordings, I felt ready to attempt producing my first audio story. This meant either finding a new subject to record or trying to salvage an audio story from the material recorded at the rock and roll workshop. Family matters had prevented me from recording the concert at the end of the two-week workshop, so I knew I was missing the logical story ending. Upon listening again, however, I decided the material had possibilities, both for story and for exploring Audacity beyond Cut, Paste and variations on “Repair.”

Even though I had only captured half of the reporter’s interview with the two directors, I recognized that their easy banter provided material for the story’s narration. Finding the opening for the audio story was easy. One director recounted how he came up with the idea for a workshop on rock and roll for young would-be musicians, then casually mentioned the idea to the city parks and recreation department. I broke up the interview with cuts from the workshop, using the Envelope Tool on a second track to fade up audio of kids wailing on drums and piano, beneath the voice of the first director and down again under the voice of the second director talking about how they worked so well with each other. From there, I segued into one of the directors laughing over the absurdity their committing to a public rock concert at the end of such a brief workshop.

That set the premise for the whole story. One of the directors described the structure of a workshop day and the value of the program. Beneath his voice I ran the steady beat of his drilling a class on rhythm. The rest was filled in with various components of the workshop, including one director’s frustration over an apparent lack of progress with his young rockers in light of having to be ready for their concert the following week.

The whole point of the story was the iffy prospect of that concert, but I didn’t actually have any concert audio – and thus, no ending for my story.

It took three weeks of emailing, phoning and face-to-face pleading just to get a copy of the recorded concert, simply due to the nature of top quality high school teachers at the outset of another school year: They’re very busy!

One of their students finally came through with a CD of the 20-minute concert. I wound up using the greeting to the concert crowd, then cutting down a song by one of the workshop bands to just under 23 seconds. That alone was a great learning experience, trying to blend together various brief cuts from the song “We Got the Beat,” and still keep the beat intact.

I punctuated the entire piece with one of the directors speculating over the next year’s workshop.

The completed audio story ran about 30 seconds over my three-minute target length, but as a story, it seemed to hold together very well. [To listen to the MP3 file, click on the boldfaced title: "Hillsboro School of Rock"]

In the course of the hours and hours spent editing this story, I learned quite a lot – mostly about practical work flow and the eccentricities of Audacity. I learned not to waste time trying to transcribe in order to remember tracts of audio, but to save (Export) usable segments and sound bites as small, separate files – all well tagged for subject and length. I learned to end each editing session by Exporting a copy of the project as an uncompressed file to backup Audacity’s .aup files. I learned that moving Audacity project files off the desktop and into folders often produced an intractable “Error opening file” message when I tried to open them later. I learned to use the Envelope Tool only on secondary tracks and never on the primary track. For whatever reason, when the Envelope was applied to the primary track, it could not be undone. Any subsequent attempt to Cut a selection in the primary track would collapse the entire track. I also learned to make an Audacity project-in-progress more stable by Exporting and Importing segments rather than Cutting and Pasting.

Perhaps I was finally ready to move on to my first audio-driven slide show production.

Audio editing – cut for content, paste for continuity

2007-09-10T21:31:00.000-07:00

The multimedia seminar presentations recorded back in June yielded eight packages of audio notes between two to three minutes each – the results of hours and hours of edit time spent listening and cutting and occasionally shuffling parts around for continuity.

I learned how to listen not only for content, but for the connective remarks that gave context to each sound bite. I also learned about the discipline needed to keep cutting and cutting in order to achieve the two- to three-minute standard advocated at the seminar. The cutting process turned out to be the easier aspect of editing. The harder task came with trying to assemble the bits of audio into a coherent, finished piece with an opening, a development and a conclusion – the basic components of any good essay or story.

The set of audio notes I wound up with varied considerably in technical quality, mostly due to my ineptitude at recording.

One object lesson rose quickly above the rest: There is no point in gathering audio of poor technical quality, no matter how good the content.

To listen to the audio notes, click on the boldfaced titles.

• Rich Beckman on the future of newspapers – University of North Carolina professor of multimedia journalism talks about who our future (young) readers are and how we aren’t likely to attract them in our present condition.

• Dirck Halstead on the future of newspapers – founder and editor of digitaljournalist.com makes a case for the imminent death of newsprint and the life hereafter available to those newspapers.

• Tom Kennedy on the future of newspapers – managing editor for online journalism at the Washington Post discusses how newspapers can and must prepare for the future.

• Seth Gitner on getting started in multimedia – chief organizer of the NPPA Multimedia Summit and multimedia editor for The Roanoke Times outlines how individuals can help get their newspaper started in multimedia journalism.

• Rich Beckman on the new tools of journalism – details the importance of learning how to use the various tools available to journalists online.

• Jim Seida on audio gathering techniques – multimedia producer for MSNBC covers some of the basics in audio skill building [ironically, my worst audio technically].

• Rich Beckman on the role of the multimedia producer – lists the duties of the newspaper multimedia producer.

• Dirck Halstead on becoming a multimedia producer – advocates photojournalists becoming video producers at their newspapers, whether large or small.

Minimalist equipment revisited

2007-08-10T13:21:00.000-07:00

I continued fumbling with my new audio gear at random, trying to get used to working as an audio journalist. I needed to find one a story project to get the feel of working with the equipment in a variety of changing situations and having to solve audio problems on the fly.

The opportunity for my first audio story came with a community workshop for youngsters wanting to learn how to play rock and roll music. I knew both the organizers, who gave me come-and-go access to the entire program, because they knew me, my role at the newspaper and my work habits. Even though I had explained my intentions, I drew questioning looks from both upon my arrival.

Instead of a Nikon and camera bag slung over one shoulder, I had only one small point-and-shoot camera either dangling from a strap on my left wrist or snugly bagged on my belt, along with an MP3-sized recorder wired from its own case on the other side of my belt. And then there were those over-the-ear headphones hanging around my neck. By the end of the first day, even I had second thoughts about those.

The whole point of minimizing gear – other than a tight budget – was to keep things simple enough to concentrate on learning the technical process of multimedia production. I wanted to think visually with only one camera and one lens – I mean, look what Henri Cartier-Bresson did with one camera and a 50mm lens! – and I didn't want to be encumbered with a conspicuous set of headphones that felt so awkward clasped around my neck when not in use.

I downsized.

What I wound up using was a high-quality set of ear buds [Philips SHE9500] with soft rubber caps (three sizes provided for a proper in-ear seal) and a fairly short cord, one of the strands being longer to stretch around the neck to the other ear. The shorter around-the-neck cording helped considerably to alleviate the cord tango I'd been dancing the day before. Not only that, but I could unplug one or both ear buds and just let them hang without looking like an out-of-work audio tech.

Two more days at covering the workshop left me convinced that I had at least one more piece of audio gear to acquire: a shotgun mic.

Moving from band room to small classroom to auditorium stage to hallway meant shifting tactics in order to gather decent audio. More than once I found myself holding my tiny Olympus microphone by its tie clasp at arm's length, straining to get better definition of different speakers involved in a group discussion.

The last straw came with my attempt to get a clean recording of both organizers in a sit-down interview with our reporter. This took place on the auditorium stage while a handful of staffers stood around somewhere upstage discussing the day's events. Without the ear buds I could hear both of the directors clearly. With the ear buds in place, I could also hear the upstage discussion, loud and clear. I wound up losing about half the interview for usable audio before clipping two separate lapel mics on the two interviewees, wiring them both into the recorder, and switching the recorder to "Dictation" mode.

That worked, but a shotgun mic might have been so much easier.

For the week's work I wound up with enough good images on the workshop to lay out a nice photo page for my newspaper, but I did not think I had the makings of an audio story, much less the images for a slide show production.

Audio editing

2007-08-05T11:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve discovered that audio editing takes an enormous amount of time. Not just in terms of the learning curve involved in getting acquainted with new software, but in the sheer time and concentration required for listening and relistening.

In terms of choosing which audio editing software to use, I settled very quickly on Audacity 1.2.6. It was recommended at the NPPA Summit, and it was free. I also had a 2004 version of the iLife’s Garage Band – and that may come into play in the future – but the obvious place to begin learning about audio editing was Audacity.

Along with the software and a plug-in necessary for dealing with MP3 files, I downloaded the online manual and every tutorial I could find, then printed them off for a “text” book nearly an inch thick.

Since I already had digital recordings of various presentations from the multimedia seminar, this seemed like good material to help me learn the basics of audio editing. I wanted to convert the lectures into brief sets of audio notes that could be “reviewed” quickly to keep myself enthused and focused.

Almost immediately my aging G4 Mac announced that its “startup disk” was nearly full and I should do something about that. Audio editing, it seemed, required a lot of memory, not to mention adequate processor speed. How would my Mac react when I finally got ready to put audio together with visuals? How would my wife react if I announced that I’d have to invest in more RAM, a bigger hard drive, and perhaps even a new Mac?

Well into the night and my shortest lecture file, it became clear that I also needed to develop a systematic approach to an audio editing project.

First and foremost, I needed to SAVE my work frequently to avoid having a lot of work wiped out by a disastrous software crash. (Audacity is reported to be very stable, so I presumed the occasional crash was due to the inadequacies of my computer.)

As for an overall editing strategy, I divided the task into three parts: 1) a rapid rough cut to select the parts I liked, then 2) a trim down session to tighten the selections as much as possible, and finally, 3) the fine tuning edit to even out the audio quality and smooth transitions between cuts.

Without this basic strategy, I spent a couple of hours boiling down a 30-minute presentation by Seth Gitner on “How to get started in multimedia.” The audio track revealed two immediate problems with the tiny Olympus WS-300 recorder: generally uneven levels of recording throughout the talk, and little patches of dead silence between the audible parts. If the speaker paused, the level of recording seemed to drop out entirely, then over-adjust its volume level when the speaker resumed, occasionally also dipping the volume with the leveling adjustment. The little silent gaps were easy enough to remove with the Select and Cut procedure, but I had to "Normalize" each swing and dip in the volume level of the recorded audio in order to obtain a consistent level for playback.

At the end of the evening, though, I had less than three minutes of audio notes – a nice, tightly-edited summary of what I wanted to remember from Gitner's presentation – in his own voice.

The trade-off was an uneasy feeling that what I wound up with probably could not be termed “documentary audio journalism.” It sounded “of one piece,” but was not. Most of the natural pauses for breathing were removed, as were inevitable pauses for thought, and initial sentences broken mid-sentence to be rephrased.

I even shifted some parts of his talk out of sequence, perhaps even out of context, in order to make more sense to my own ear.

Clearly, software for audio editing offered as many opportunities for manipulative abuse as software for photo editing.

The basic rule for the use of photo-editing software has been based upon prior experience: Do nothing to an image that you would not normally have done in the darkroom.

I had no prior experience editing audio. Where were the lines that should not be crossed?

Conversion from WMA (What, Me Accommodate?)

2007-07-16T00:15:00.000-07:00

Even before learning how to use any audio editing software, I discovered yet another technical issue: Olympus WM 300 series recorders save audio files in the Windows proprietary WMA format, which can't be opened with any of the free- and shareware audio editing software available to Mac users.

The WMA files would have to be converted into a compatible file format before the audio files could be opened by editing software available to me, and saved in the mp3 format before they could be used by the Soundslides software. There seemed to be very few cheap and easy ways for a Mac user to convert WMA files.

Although Internet searches for WMA-to-MP3 converters for Macs turned up no freeware, I did find a few interesting prospects among the shareware and one free website-based service. I wound up comparing the cheapest shareware I could find, EasyWMA for $10, to the free file format conversion service offered at media-convert.com.

It took EasyWMA seven minutes to convert an eleven-minute WMA file (2.5Mb) into a MP3 file of the same size. The online converter took 2.5 minutes to convert the same WMA file into a 10.1Mb MP3 file. The online service took about one third as long to produce a file four times larger than the shareware.

I don't know what to make of the difference in the sizes of the MP3 files, but the savings in conversion time was significant.

Second thoughts from the weekend

2007-06-26T15:20:00.000-07:00

Since I was going to be at the weekend Relay for Life event any way, I volunteered to shoot something for the newspaper. After more than 30 years in newspaper photography, I can usually walk into most situations and see the feature photo even before raising a camera to my eye.

I stepped outside the tent where my wife and her sorority sisters were encamped at the edge of the stadium track, and there was my page-one image: the long shadows of late afternoon cast by relay participants walking around the track. It was that easy. Later that evening I gathered a few more images for a small, three-picture layout: someone kneeling in the dark along a row of luminaria, a closeup of one luminaria sack bearing the words “my brother” (the candle inside highlighting the Relay for Life logo), and a third image of someone standing before the word “HOPE” spelled out in luminaria sacks arranged in the grandstands.

For years I’ve been parlaying one-picture assignments into photo packages – one strong image to go on the front page with the story (if a reporter has also been assigned), and another three or four photos to run inside, either with the story jump or as a related photo layout with captions only. Why? The extra work makes my job at a twice-weekly newspaper more interesting. I’ve become almost as facile at crafting these little photo clusters as I have at spotting stand-alone images. The point is, my job has become quite breezy: Either shoot for one good image and gather enough information to write a decent caption, or look for a few more supporting images and gather a little more information to put together a small layout.

That was my whole newsprint paradigm before attending the multimedia seminar.

What struck me from the past weekend is just how much sheer work would be involved in producing a decent two- to three-minute slide show.

I’ve studied a few good slide show productions found on the Internet and learned that they average about 12 images per minute – one image every five seconds. For a two- to three-minute production, that means having to gather between two and three dozen decent images . . . in addition to gathering enough clean audio material for story construction.

And that only amounted to the time spent in the field. There would also be a considerable amount of editing time needed to build the audio story and then assemble and coordinate the accompanying images.

What was I getting myself into here?

In the headlong rush to jump on the multimedia bandwagon, I don’t think newspaper photographers have paused to consider what a huge investment this promised to be in time and effort compared to routine newspaper photography.

The surges of silence, hmmmmm

2007-06-26T12:58:00.000-07:00

For the past five years my community has staged an annual Relay for Life in our new stadium, 24 hours filled with team participants and individuals walking round and round the football field to raise funds for the American Cancer Society. For the past few years, my wife has served as a team captain, so I knew I’d be involved one way or another.

Why not bring the audio equipment and practice gathering good, clean audio – perhaps even enough to produce my first audio story? During the multimedia seminar, those of us just starting to learn these new skills were advised to start with audio. First learn the techniques of gathering good audio, then learn how to build a good audio story. Learn audio before trying to produce an audio-driven slide show.

The stadium setting with music blaring over its public address system proved to be a challenging environment for interviews. I was equipped with a decent set of headphones now, so I could detect audio problems. I found that the simple use of a lapel mic worked well to subordinate the blare of music, rendering crisp audio of the person being interviewed. I could hear that much over my headphones. What I could also hear, however, was the background music raging back at full volume each time the speaker paused, creating a seesaw effect with the recording levels.

By the third interview I realized the surging music was probably not a problem that could be edited away. The audio surge needed to be fixed in the field, but how?

Back home in bed for the evening (the overnight relay being my wife’s project, after all, not mine), I settled into re-reading the manual for the Olympus WS-300 series digital recorder and found there is no way to set a recording level manually. The little recorder does this automatically. All you can do is switch the microphone sensitivity between Conference and Dictation. I had the recorder set on Conference, making the microphone as sensitive as possible. With no up-front speaking voice to level during pauses, the little recorder was apparently switching over to the music in the background and re-leveling. Would the lapel mic set at the less sensitive Dictation solve the music surge problem?

Back at the stadium the next morning, I planned to test my theory: find someone to record twice, once at the Conference setting and again at the Dictation setting, to learn whether this resolved the surge.

Interviewee and headphones in place, I pressed Record.

Even before asking the first question, I noticed a steady, low buzz. Something was creating a hum, and I knew from experience that the hum would trump anything else I tried to record. The hum hadn’t been there the day before, and several attempts to relocate the interview within the stadium revealed there was going to be no escape. [I figured out much later after combing forums and tutorials on the Internet that the hum was most likely due to a poor connection with the 1/8” jack on the external microphone. Apparently these small jacks are notorious for imprecise connections that can produce an auditory hum.]

I put away my recording gear reluctantly – defeated again – and helped my wife pack up her sleeping bag and tent for the return home, all the while telling her about the problems I was having with recording.

The weekend left me wondering whether this was how my summer would go, tripping over one technical snag after another?

My wife, however, seemed oddly unsympathetic.

About those headphones . . .

2007-06-20T12:43:00.000-07:00

Just having an expert tell you how you should develop a new set of skills, doesn’t necessarily constitute a lesson learned.

Case in point: an early effort to get good, clean audio from a brief interview.

I gave myself a Father's Day photo assignment for the newspaper to cover a father and child enjoying an afternoon performance at a traveling circus in town. This could make a nice front page centerpiece for our next issue. I wound up getting a much stronger image of a circus performer juggling three lit torches, which became the centerpiece with the father-and-son image subordinated. I had caption information on the father and son, but none on the circus performer, which meant I had to return to the circus.

So why not take the opportunity to practice gathering good audio by interviewing the ringmaster, right?

Even before setting foot on the circus grounds, I decided that wearing the recommended over-the-ear headphones might look rude, if not a little weird for a newspaper guy, so I opted to wear ear buds, instead. Once face-to-face with the ringmaster, I lost nerve even to wear the ear buds. I simply used the little directional mic plugged directly into the recorder and hooked that over the top of my shirt pocket so both hands could be free to take notes. Why? I’ve been sabotaged too many times in the past, thinking that taking notes weren’t necessary as long as I was recording an interview.

I wrote the caption from my notes, as usual, then sat down that evening to listen to my audio recording. The interview itself took less than five minutes. At the time, I didn’t notice the light breeze blowing across an unshielded mic, nor the plane landing at the airport next to the fairgrounds, nor my occasional shifting from foot to foot apparently swinging the sensitive little mic away from the interviewee.

[heavy sigh here]

Okay, I get it now: headphones – the big, honking, over-the-ear kind.

Minimalist gear for multimedia

2007-06-17T12:49:00.000-07:00

I was encouraged to find on the Multimedia Shooter website that the digital audio recorder recommended was the one I already had. Not only that, but I discovered the point-and-shoot camera I had was a distinct improvement (in my view) over their recommended camera.

In the section on getting started, the tiny Olympus digital voice recorder WS-300M is recommended for recording sound "on the cheap." For a digital recorder no bigger than most mp3 players, the audio quality is impressive. Last year I bought the Olympus WS-320M model with one gig of storage and added a tiny "noise-canceling" directional microphone (Olympus accessory ME52W) that can double as a lapel mic. Other than a problem with this digital recorder being more sensitive to interference than any other recorder I've used, the Olympus gear is the best I've come across for price and portability.

As for the camera, Multimedia Shooter recommends the Canon PowerShot SD500/digital ELPH at about $350. Months ago I bought the much less well marketed Fujifilm FinePix F30 for about $100 less. According to the Steve's Digicams website, the ELPH provides a little more pixel power (7MP compared to 6.3MP), but the F30 offers a far wider ISO range of exposure indices (100-3200 compared to 50-400), true macro capability rather than digital macro, twice the battery life, and even a larger monitor (2.5" compared to 2"), despite the F30 being only very slightly larger than the little ELPH. Of even greater significance to a photojournalist is the lack of aperture- or shutter-priority modes on the ELPH, much less manual control. The F30 has all three.

Although my first attraction to the F30 was its extreme ISO range, it was the design of its controls that endeared this camera to me. I started out in street photography back in the early 70s, making those grainy, off-the-hip grab shots in black and white. (My newspaper work has disciplined me over the years to shoot much more precisely.) Even though righthanded, I can fully operate the F30 with my left hand alone, giving me the kind of free-wheeling sense of discovery I used to enjoy. Setting the mode dial to Anti-blur, the F30 provides a suitably high shutter speed while optimizing the ISO for the lighting. This often results in the use of a higher ISO setting than I'd normally select, but the image quality and color rendition on the F30 are both quite acceptable. As for the inevitable digital noise in images in the ranges of 800 and above, that, too, is almost nostalgic.

I'm Old School. I actually like photojournalism with a little grit.

What I have in mind . . .

2007-06-05T23:47:00.000-07:00

Individuals on the newspaper staff, its local management and, indeed, the corporate office, all have their own agendas, and my job at the paper is defined by those agendas.

My agenda here is to learn what I can about the future of community photojournalism and find some form of practical adaptation. I can neither afford the HD digital video equipment and software advocated at last weekend's seminar, nor do I think my small newspaper likely to employ such for the duration of my career. My format will have to be the audio-driven slide show, and I want to learn how to produce these slide show stories using the bare minimum of equipment: a Fujifilm Finepix digital camera and an Olympus WS-320M digital recorder.

Toward the end of the seminar, I mentioned this idea to an intern at the newspaper in Tacoma. She gave me a look of disgust. What she didn't understand is that sometimes you have to employ guerrilla tactics in order to bring about revolution.

Back in the late nineties I shot most of my daily assignments with a Nikon Coolpix for more than a year, simply to demonstrate to my newspaper the sheer efficiency and economy of going to all-digital photography.

The Fujifilm/Olympus gear might demonstrate the viability of the sound-slide format for community journalism and help hasten the development of our website into the inevitable alternative to newsprint.

An introduction of sorts . . .

2007-06-02T23:12:00.000-07:00

So here I am, 60 years old, 32 years into a career in community photojournalism – the last 26 years spent covering the same few communities for a twice-a-week newspaper. That's a long, long time to look at people and activities that remain essentially the same from one year to the next, and still retain a sense of mission.

This evening at an awards banquet I ran across an old acquaintance, someone I met the first year I joined my newspaper. He was the staff photographer – only a few years older – for a community newspaper in a nearby town. He told me he was retiring within the year. I replied that I couldn't afford to retire. I probably had another ten years of work ahead of me.

That, however, isn’t the real problem. I don't know whether my newspaper has the same amount of time to survive the rapid changes taking place in community journalism. I've spent the past two days at a seminar listening to one speaker after another forecast the end of traditional newspaper culture in general, and the imminent demise of newsprint in particular. I am convinced that the Internet offers the only future for community journalism.

This humble blog is my personal commitment to understand and embrace the changes taking place in my profession.