How digital is changing photojournalism.
Friday, 7 September 2007
Edmond Terakopian, a photographer working with AFP and Polaris Images, gave a lecture for Apple on Aperture and how digital environment is changing the way photojournalists work. “The shift to digital has changed the way we work,” he said. “It has been both negative and positive. The downside is that picture desks want to see pictures earlier. It makes it harder to do anything more than scratch the surface of the story, as you need to file images sooner. “ On a daily newspaper, with film you had until 4pm when the courier arrived to take away your cassettes. You could work the story in more depth. Digital has also opened the world to the low-end paparazzi who bring the whole industry into disrepute in the way they work.” However, he said that there have been many positives, otherwise it would not have made such a major change to the industry.
“If a massive story breaks near deadline, it’s possible to still get it into the next day’s papers by shooting digitally. It’s also opened up whole world of colour photography by removing the need to change films during a shoot for colour balance or ISO speed. I haven’t shot film for around six or seven year now as the positives of digital far outweigh the negatives.”
Aperture is seen as a RAW viewer and converter software, but Edmond said that this is a mistake and underestimates the abilities of the software, pointing out that he shoots in JPEG most of the time. “People don’t realise that Aperture gives you almost the same amount of control over a JPEG file as it does over a RAW file,” he said. “For my work, JPEGs are more than enough and having the control means I don’t need to shoot in RAW and have the associated extra file size, and download time and processing time.”
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