Newspaper photog uses iPhone 4 to cover immigration protest
Working where I do allows me some great opportunities. The coolest one is working next to supremely talented people who will try anything in the name of getting and presenting the news.
It’s what that in mind that I post the latest real-world report on how technology can help us do with we do. I give you a submission from Arizona Republic photographer Jack Kurtz.
This a photog who has literally traveled the globe to take gripping pictures he has combined with gripping narratives. Today he was nice enough to write something for me about his experience covering the recent immigration protests in Phoenix with his iPhone 4.
You can find more about Jack by going to his twitter page, where he links to his own online portfolio. The man has traveled the world.
First up, though, is a sampling of his iPhone photos. Click to make them bigger. It’s a two-photo slideshow. Here is the slideshow all our photographers contributed to.
By Jack Kurtz
Marchers walk through central Phoenix during a protest against SB 1070. Taken with the iPhone camera.
Chicago voters were, famously, urged to “vote early and vote often.” Being a newspaper photographer these days is a little like being a Chicago voter. We’re told to “file early and file often” when covering major news stories like the recent 1070 protests that have taken place across Phoenix.
Newspapers’ internet sites are insatiable beasts that need to constantly fed; when there’s a major story taking place the website is updated several times an hour. Our photos are the chum that draw in readers.
On one hand, the technology we have – our MacBook Pros, our Sprint aircards and Canon digital cameras – make it easier than ever to file frequently. On the other hand, when you’re covering a march through downtown or standing on a sidewalk in front of the courthouse for hours, opening a laptop and editing 20+ megapixel raw files from a state of the art digital camera is just not practical.
That’s where the iPhone comes in. It’s the perfect electronic accessory for covering these events. The built in 5 megapixel camera doesn’t come close to equaling the quality of the Canon 5D Mark II.
It’s photo handling software and ability is nowhere near as good as the MacBook Pro running Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and it’s transmission speed, using ATT’s 3G network, isn’t as fast as the Sprint aircard. But in this case the sum of the parts is much greater than the whole it substitutes for.
The trick to using something like the iPhone as a newsgathering assistant is to use a logical workflow and figure out how to overcome the inherent shortcomings of using a phone as a laptop.
The biggest problem with the iPhone’s photo handling is that Apple, for some reason, has blocked access to the metadata portion of a photo in the iPhone’s operating system. The metadata is where the caption is stored, so we can’t write captions for photos.
For photojournalists, the captions are almost as important as the photo. At the Republic, we can’t run a photo, either online or in the paper, without a complete caption. Which means we can’t send photos directly into our archive from the iPhone. This has the potential to be a deal breaker. (And if anyone from Apple is reading this – come on dudes, give us access to the metadata!)
The workaround is to write a complete caption in email, attach the photo and email it to an editor, who opens the photo in Photoshop and then “cuts and pastes” the caption into the photo’s metadata.
It’s a little awkward, but it works. If we had access to the metadata, we would be able to write a complete caption in some yet to be developed app and ftp the photo directly into our archive.
I have four “apps” that are essential parts of my iPhone workflow.
My text entry/note taking app is SimpleNote. It’s free and it’s spectacular. It synchs to a web app, so I can prewrite captions and notes in Safari on my MacBook Pro and it automatically synchs to SimpleNote on my iPhone. I take notes on the scene in SimpleNote and it synchs back to Safari so I can access my notes on my MacBook Pro when I have chance to sit down for serious editing. Tres cool.
I use the iPhone’s camera for picture taking on the street. It’s lens has about the same perspective as a 35mm lens on a “real” camera – not very wide but a nice focal length for street photography. The low light high ISO capability of the phone is not great, but for outdoor photos in Arizona it’s fine.
When I’m using the iPhone for newsgathering, I usually make five or six photos, get ID’s and caption info in SimpleNote and then step aside to edit.
First I go into SimpleNote and copy the prewritten caption into the phone’s memory. Then I use the iPhone’s built in photo storage app, Photos, to select the pictures I want to send back to the paper, I open the photo in Photoshop.com Mobile, also a free app, for making adjustments to exposure and cropping.
After I’ve tweaked the photo, it’s saved back into the Photos app. Conveniently it’s saved as the last photo on the roll so it’s always very easy to find the photo.
In Photos, I tap on the photo to select it and then tap on the email option. This switches the phone to the Mail app and places the photo into the email. Then I paste the caption into the body of the email and send it.
It takes me less time to complete this process than it does to describe it.
Filing photos isn’t the only thing I use the iPhone for on stories like this. Having the whole World Wide Web in pocket is very handy, I use it for keeping abreast of breaking developments on a story using either Safari or Atomic (a more full featured and faster web browser than Safari, but at .99¢ not free).
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