Disaster, duplicity and deception

God only knows how someone could watch scenes like those which played out live on TV yesterday, showing a tsunami striking Japan, and then go about doctoring photographs of such a disaster for their own twisted entertainment.

As the tsunami made landfall in the north of the country TV pictures show it didn’t so much as blink. The ocean swamped low-lying farmlands at a speed too great for those on the coastal motorways to outrun it but cruelly, just slow enough for them to be able to try.

And within minutes started the falsifications, misrepresentations and internet hoaxes.

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Getting your foot in the door

I am probably not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say it’s gotten very difficult to break into newspaper photography. Hiring of new staff has reduced to nearly non-existent and work for freelancers has dried up almost entirely too.

Redundancy programs and uncompensated attrition for a decade has meant many newspaper photo departments are less than half their former selves. But what hasn’t changed is the number of people who want in, and while it’s not impossible to get hired, long gone are the days when you could just fall into the trade.

As discouraging as this sounds it’s not entirely grim. In Australia there continues to be a strong appetite for newspapers and while that remains publishers will continue to produce them. Whether it be in print or online, those publications will need pictures for which they’ll continue to need photographers. The trade will survive — there will just be less of us.

As far as getting hired is concerned, where there’s a will there’s a way. Here are some tips to help you get your foot in the door.

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Mother Nature the great leveller

Shooting weather is a great leveller for photographers. It’s one area in which you don’t need accreditation and authority to get in, it doesn’t involve expensive travel to get you there, nor does it demand the latest and greatest in cutting-edge equipment for you to have the opportunity to make pictures that are as good as any.

Unlike many other photographic pursuits, you can produce awe-inspiring weather pictures pretty much regardless of your resources. It’s far more a test of your individual vision and skill than your hardware.

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You only need one

The arrival home of a particular young sailor the weekend before last brought with it a lot of public attention throughout Australia. Some was sincere, some contrived by media companies that had spent huge sums on exclusive rights. But at the Sydney Morning Herald we hadn’t opened our cheque-book to cover Jess Watson’s solo-sailing record attempt so we were on the outer from the outset.

In the final week of her voyage, as she neared the heads of Sydney Harbour which would mark a full lap of the globe and the end of seven months of solitude at sea, media and public interest started to build at a rapid rate. But if you were not a party to that commercial arrangement, you would have to locate the sixteen year old and her 34-foot yacht somewhere in the Tasman Sea without any assistance from her land based management team (or should I say “media management” team?).

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Camera insurance never looked so good

Pro cameras can appear pretty expensive compared to the semi-pro variety. Sometimes there mightn’t seem to be much difference in the megapixel stakes, the frame rate or picture-quality. But there’s one other measure that accounts for some of those extra dollars — build quality.

Drop a prosumer camera off your shoulder and you’ll probably need a new one. Drop a pro body and as long as the lens survives you’ll likely not miss a beat. The latest and greatest Canon has 76 gaskets and seals making it rain proof. The top Nikon is built like a tank. But for this you pay.

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For when nothing less will do

Here’s one from the rare equipment file. It’s the biggest* fully autofocus SLR lens ever built and probably the most expensive. I had the opportunity to give it a run a while back and I thought some of you might be interested in hearing about it.

First introduced in a manual focus variant for the 1984 LA Olympics and later updated to an EF model in 1993, Canon’s 1200mm f5.6L USM lens is a $120,000, 16.5kg technological masterpiece. It reportedly takes a year to grow fluorite crystals of a scale necessary to build its grand elements, and it’s completely hand-built, resulting in lead-times of about eighteen months on orders.

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When a picture seems too good to be true

Like a lot of things in life ethical journalism only gets public attention for its absence. The high standards of the majority of practitioners would possibly shock a lot of people because — again — like a lot of things in life more of the bad gets reported than the good, and this tends to overstate the existence of the problem.

When Reuters moved pictures on Friday of volcanic ash from the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in Iceland and the consequent disruptions to air travellers that this caused world-wide, one picture stood out from all of the others — so much so it was the clear choice for our coverage in the Herald. Well, we wanted it to be but something about it didn’t seem quite right.

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