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Photo Finish

Oct 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Tom Patrick McAuliffe and Cynthia Wisehart

Will HDV define the future for newspaper photo departments?

In the 1980s, most photo news rooms embraced digital still photography — some did it kicking and screaming, but it was seen as a positive and productive change. With the recent introduction of high-definition HDV video cameras, today's newspaper photojournalists are again embracing new digital technologies. Overall, they are finding that, while little has changed when it comes to good storytelling, everything has changed with the way content is distributed. This time digital is not simply about changing tools, but changing paradigms.

One of the best examples can be found at the heart of a community that is synonymous with disruptive technology — Silicon Valley's San Jose. Photographer Richard Koci Hernandez,35, has been with Knight Ridder's The San Jose Mercury News for the past 12 years, along the way collecting a range of acknowledgements from local, national, and international photojournalist organizations. Hernandez was recently named the paper's deputy director of photography/multimedia after spearheading the creation of the website mercurynewsphoto.com, which highlights the video and still (via slide shows) work of the paper's photojournalists. The site was a home grown departmental effort that logged an amazing 100,000 unique visitors last month. In 2005, the site won honors in the National Press Photographers Association's Best of Photojournalism awards.

“Web video and HDV allow photojournalists a new way to distribute their stories and reach more people,” Hernandez says. And that's a great thing as more newspapers find it increasingly difficult to allocate the space for extended picture stories.

But Hernandez's vision for a website of photo and video essays ran into the usual corporate hurdles. “The powers that be were less than enthusiastic about giving the keys to the kingdom to a few photographers and were unable to dedicate any resources to it,” he says. “So we decided to prove to them that it could work.” They did. When Director of Photography Geri Migielicz and the newspaper's management saw the effectiveness of the new website, they became enthusiastic supporters. They now provide the resources needed to keep the site up to date.

The journey to that point began 18 months ago, when Hernandez and fellow photographer Dai Suagno started teaching themselves Adobe Flash and Dreamweaver on their own time, taking the content produced by the photo team at the paper during the workday and repurposing it as slide shows and web videos. Because The Mercury News website (www.mercurynews.com) already used a Flash player for MP3 audio content, and because Flash adoption was so ubiquitous, Hernandez decided to standardize on Flash — although many of the site's videos are also available on QuickTime. “Flash is expensive for the photographers to buy, and many of them just prefer to put their videos up as QuickTime,” Hernandez explains. Hernandez himself re-encodes selected videos to Flash in order to use them in the site's featured sections.

The initial video workflow was a marvel of improvisation. Hernandez found a forgotten Sony Hi-8 film camera and a PD100 in the department's stash of gear. For the early videos, he ran the Hi-8 footage through his television/VCR combo, recorded it to DV tape, then FireWired it into his computer through the PD100.

Once the site was designed and built, the next obstacle was storage and distribution — the paper did not want mercurynewsphoto.com to share the internal server with mercurynews.com. Hernandez recalls that “someone in IT” suggested an outside service — aplus.net — which, for $20 a month, turnkeys hosting for mercurynewsphoto.com. Again, the initial workflow was essentially a workaround. Hernandez and Suagno, who did all the site building and updating themselves, uploaded the rebuilt Dreamweaver HTML to the Aplus FTP site at least once a day. (You can see the original site design by following the homepage link on the right nav titled 2005 Mercury News Photo Archive.)

In May, the team switched over to the WordPress Content Management System (CMS), which enabled the present site design and, more importantly, allowed all the photographers to do their own uploading. The CMS also allowed Hernandezto start monitoring his traffic to learn more about what his users liked. “One of the first things I noticed was that the number one click was something called RSS feeds — what is this and why are people clicking on it?” (It means Real Simple Syndication. Find out more at digitalcontentproducer.com/dcc/revfeat/simplifying_rss_feeds.) Hernandez then taught himself to enable RSS feeds so people could sign up to get new content when it became available.

When the photo department showed up at an Apple's press conference to cover the launch of something called “podcasts,” Hernandez went back to the office and went to work on his first podcast (an Arnold Schwarzenegger piece). “We submitted it to iTunes and it was rejected on some technical thing,” he recalls. Now Apple has approached the photo department to open a conversation about working together on both distribution and on potential web tools for still photographers.

Along the way, mercurynewsphoto.com has gone from 2,000 unique visitors to last month's watershed of just more than 100,000. After a “tooth and nail” battle to get a link on the paper's main site, mercurynews.com is now the number one traffic driver; number three is a MySpace address. The site also offers the chance to download wallpapers and buy prints (“That click is in the top five every month,” Hernandez says.) Last month, Knight Ridder sold The Mercury News to MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton, who made clear his intention to use the paper as a test case for the emerging print-web business model. According to Hernandez, the entire Mercury News web presence is being redesigned to embrace more multimedia content, and mercurynewsphoto.com now has its first ad.

In retrospect, this was all a big leap for Hernandez, who remembers being a “die-hard still photojournalist.”

“The watershed event for me was when a photojournalist named David Leeson from the The Dallas Morning News stood up at the Associated Press Managing Editors conference last year, held up his HDV video camera and said, ‘This is the wave of the future,’” explains Hernandez, who received an HDV camera from Tony Ridder last Christmas. “When the change from 35mm film to digital happened, they had to pry my old still cameras out of my hands. I did not want to go digital. So I'm not someone who just embraces change just for the sake of change, but the advantages of HD video are too big to ignore.”

To those that argue that using video lessens the results, Hernandez says they can save their breath and the need to reexamine the technologies available today. “For me it has really always come down to just one thing and one thing only — the moment,” he says. “I don't care whether it's a moment in a great film or captured in a still image, the moment and the feelings it creates is what is important to me. The still image I grab from HDV video is still a still, and it either captures people's hearts and minds or it doesn't. Video is just one more tool in my tool bag. It's one more brush I can use to paint my stories with. I'm a believer.”

The man who provided Hernandez with his inspiration echoes those thoughts. A professional newspaper photographer since 1977, David Leeson has reported with imagery from around the world including South Africa, China, Bosnia, Turkey, Sudan, Kuwait, and Iraq. He's been a staff photographer for The Dallas Morning News for more than 20 years, and in 2000 he became one of the first newspaper photographers to use video full time. Over the past five years, he's created more than 70 video short features and a half a dozen full-length documentaries. His hard work has been recognized with numerous awards, including a national Edward R. Murrow award, a regional Emmy award, and, in 2003, the Pulitzer Prize for his work in Iraq.

“Video represents a new era of newspaper photojournalism that will reflect the traditions and ethics of the old while providing the rich content required for the future,” Leeson says. “This movement is gaining momentum and will continue to evolve.” When it comes to what video offers that still photography doesn't, Leeson says it's simple. “Motion and sound. I'm not being glib, but I look at the use of video as just two additional layers of information now available to me as a still shooter. I tell our video staff at The Dallas Morning News that we remain as we were — still photographers whose photos both speak and move,” he says.

Leeson has found that the quality of video frame grabs holds up, and hasn't really changed the way The Dallas Morning News works. “Our process provides us with stills from a Sony HVR-Z1U HDV video camera that's just shy of the quality we get from our Canon EOS1D Mark II [12 megapixel] still camera. So, yes, the quality is there and we're regularly using these images in our newspaper as large as five columns. Our images are 67.8MB at 203 resolution when the process is completed,” Leeson says. “Photographers return with their footage, import into [Apple] Final Cut Pro; choose the best moments from their footage via a three-step proprietary process designed by my son, David Leeson II; import the final frames into Photo Mechanic software; caption; and export to SCC MediaGrid for publication use.

“Most folks who make the argument [against using HDV video for still work] know very little about video,” Leeson says. “I usually smile and ask them to make the same argument to old timers who used a one-shot Speed Graphic. It's actually amusing to me to hear photographers whine about frame rates while holding a still camera that shoots at 8fps. Surely they must also know that, traditionally, increases in the popularity of still motor drive speeds has not been met with an equal growth in photographers able to capture ‘the moment.’ The bottom line is you either get the moment or you don't. If you can't find it with an 8fps still motor drive, I'm confused as to why people think a shooter would be able to find it at 30fps with video.”

Leeson also points out that video offers new revenue opportunities for publications and more in-depth communication with readers. “High-definition video provides a scalable platform for reporting,” he says. “As the final product, we can produce a video for the Web, stills for the print publication, or audio for podcasts or we can also do combinations of all three. I believe we've only scratched the surface of what the future will bring in terms of digital reporting capabilities. The move from a 35mm digital SLR to an HDV camera is just one step in that direction.”

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© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.