Recently in Photojournalism Category

Photoshelter's Grover Sanschagrin's blog 15 Digital Point-and-Shoot Cameras Used By Pro Photographers:

Do professional photographers really use point-and-shoot cameras? Surprisingly, yes. 
Using Facebook and Twitter, I just completed a little of my own unscientific research. I wanted to find out which digital point-and-shoot is the camera-of-choice among professional photographers. Just over 50 professional photographers responded, and most of them are included...

The blog includes my contribution, on my favourite point and shoot, the Pansonic Lumix FZ28. And for more indepth information here is the original blog post on shooting the FZ28 during the Olympic Torch demonstration in Toronto.

You have to contrast the peaceful and professional way the Toronto Police Service contained that anti-Olympic demonstration in December 2009, with attacks by various police services during the G20 in June 2010 in Toronto on peaceful demonstrators, on the supposed free speech safe zone at Queen's Park and the blocking of hundreds of people during a thunderstorm at Queen St. and Spadina Ave.

Here is a photo gallery from the News Photographers Association of Canada of the G20 events, including images by accredited photographers just doing their jobs (and not interfering) who were attacked by the police.

There's a huge controversy in my Toronto neighborhood at the moment over plans by the Toronto Transit Commission to build second exits at a number of the subway stations on the Danforth line.  As the engineers explained at a stifling and noisy public meeting last night (July 12, 2010) in this security conscious era, second exits are necessary if subway stations and trains have to be evacuated.  However, this was not taken into consideration when the subway was originally built and so now it appears as if the second exits may have to be built in residential areas at the expense of some people's homes.

I shot last night's meeting for Openfile.ca.  You will find reporter Janet Money's story at Residents fight back against TTC plan.

Some of the photographs are part  of that story. Here is my gallery of the evening's events.


It was a stifling hot night at  the crowded and unairconditioned Danforth Collegiate and Technical Institute as neighborhood residents demanded answers.


The early part of the evening was a highly technical and sometimes confusing engineering technical briefing. Pat McCarthy, who lives on Strathmore Blvd. listens to the presentation  on the expansion of  Greenwood subway station. Later at the  information and protest meeting, McCarthy asked for clarification.

Bruna Amabile, whose parent's home on Strathmore Blvd  was threatened by expropriation, listens to answers from TTC officials.

Elaine McLellan  of Strathmore Blvd raises an objection. (Robin Rowland)

Community activist Lisa Dymond, Strathmore Blvd,  outlines objections to the TTC  plans

Slideshow from the News Photographers Association of Canada conference 2010

Today, March 24, 2010, Adobe began the promotional campaign for its Creative Suit 5, to be launched on April 12  At this point it appears that the feature that Adobe is most proud of, and is already promoting is something they call "Content Aware" which is actually an intelligent enhanced and combined clone and healing tool that can manipulate an image in just minutes.

See Adobe's CS5 Launch

This UK site. PC Pro, has a mini-review and the YouTube Video

Photoshop CS5 demonstrates its stunning new party piece.

Those who use Photoshop for creative work are already celebrating this feature in tweets.

Visual journalists, however, only see disaster ahead.   As the video shows, whereas it once took hours to manipulate an image, the intelligence in the software is now completely "aware" of the surrounding content of the image and thus it takes only a few minutes to manipulate that image.

That will be a disaster, for once the public, already suspicious of photography, realizes just how easy it is to manipulate an image and once the unethical  start practicing manipulation with Content Aware on news, current affairs and historic photos, photographers will face even more accusation of manipulation and forgery.

In this polarized, paranoid era people who are ignorant of basic optics now yell "manipulation" at photographs taken with a long telephoto or a super wide angle lens on photos that have had minimal, basic Photoshop processing.

What was a tedious operation to eliminate or change the elements in an image in George Orwell's 1984, and was hard work up until now  with Photoshop CS <5, will be very simple from now on.

Adobe is welcoming Big Brother to 2010 with CS5.It's another case of software engineers creating a product without considering all the implications.

Clearly the creative photographic and graphic arts community are celebrating their new tool (which means there is a market for this). The creative community will continue to celebrate, at least until someone in that community is caught with major manipulation and finds themselves in a social media storm.

It would help, however, if there was little less hubris from Adobe and a little more awareness of the Pandora's box that company has opened. Like the demons Pandora released, the feature is here to stay (there are already less powerful ways of doing this with other software) so visual journalists and documentary photographers now have to be even more careful.  There have been suggestions that every image be shot in Raw and every image archived just to provide a trail if there are ever any accusations of manipulation.

So with the hype comes a headache.

Update March 26.

The hype among the silicon crowd is growing.  PC Magazine quotes Adobe and goes on to say:
 

"One of the biggest requests we get of Photoshop is to make adding, removing, moving or repairing items faster and more seamless," Adobe said. "From retouching to completely reimagining an image, here's an early glimpse of what could happen in the future when you press the delete key. How might you use this new capability in your workflow?"

If you're a photographer who works with Photoshop this tool is nothing short of life altering! It's something you would have been asking for forever if you'd only thought of it first.

Life-altering is right, PC magazine, it's going to make a visual journalist's life absolutely miserable.

The celebration continues among the Adobe fans (if they are all Adobe fans and not employee ringers)  as seen on  the numerous enthusiastic comments on this John Nack on Adobe blog.

The comments like "amazing," "fantastic work," "Mind boggling. Great job, Photoshop dev team:" remind me of the old 1960s Batman TV series with it's "bam" "powie" text graphics. Except, of course, we're now dealing with the Joker, right? Or as one other comment on that site puts it: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke." Black magic, black hole.

I wasn't assigned to cover the Olympic torch relay on the evening of Thursday Dec. 17, 2009, but ran right into it as I was heading from work to work out at the downtown YMCA.

I got to College subway station and saw the crowd waiting for the torch. 
As I was preparing to make my way through the crowd to the Y, I heard yelling. Then I saw that a group of demonstrators had rushed onto Yonge Street south of College yelling slogans like "No Olympics on stolen native land"  and waving signs.

I didn't have my main photo gear but  had the trusty small camera I always carry in a fanny pack, the Panasonic FZ28.

With the FZ28, as I have in the past, I pushed the Panasonic Lumix to its limit to shoot the demonstration using available light.  ISO 1600, EV +1.5, shutter priority at 1/40 and 1/50 of a second.

The crowd then congregated at Yonge and College Streets.



Demonstrators opposing the Olympic torch relay gather at Yonge and College streets in Toronto on Thursday night.  (Robin Rowland/CBC)

As the demonstrators moved up Yonge Street, I called the CBC news desk to tell them what was going on. 

Brett Gundlock of The National Post grabbed shot of a demonstrator as I passed by talking on my cell phone to the CBC Live Desk.



Toronto police at first tried and failed to stop the demonstration at Yonge and Grovesnor Streets when the protesters ran into the first two police cruisers escorting the torch parade.  (Robin Rowland/CBC)

Further up Yonge Street, a cordon of police officers with bicycles stopped the protest a block south of Wellesley Street.