Chapter 6 Summary
This chapter focuses on visual storytelling with photographs. Journalism without photographs is like writing without verbs. Your audience doesn’t just want to read the story, they want to see it too. This chapter covers the basics of digital photography, editing and publishing photos, and how to tell a story with those photos.
Digital Photography
Most disciplines have units of measurement. For photography, the unit is pixels. A pixel is essentially a small square on a matrix that makes a computer image. A picture is comprised of hundreds or thousands of pixels.
The second major concept to understand is resolution. Resolution is the number of pixels in an image. The higher the resolution, the better the picture will look. However, the larger the resoultion, the longer the picture takes to download. This is why some newspaper who post online use low-resolution pictures. Those same newspapers, however, run into trouble when a certain image looks blurry when altered because it is low-resolution.
Like all material published to the Web, newspapers and other organizations maintain ownership of the pictures they publish and put copyrights on them. The irony of this is that the new age of Web culture is all about sharing. In order to protect those who share their pictures, the Creative Commons Project was created. With this project, artists can mark their work with whatever rights they wish to reserve.
People take pictures with two types of digital cameras.
- Point and shoot cameras: more compact, easier to use, and cheaper. Includes built-in lens and flash, and usually comes with video capabilities.
- DSLR cameras: Usually capture better photos because its image sensor is 10 times larger. However, it’s not as user-friendly and it is expensive.
The camera has 4 basic functions:
- Camera modes: Including action, portrait, or landscape.
- Zoom: Either digital or optical
- Flash: Auto flash or force flash
- View/delete
Once you have captured your photos, the next step is editing. Some great outlets for editing photos include Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. However, ethics comes into play. It is morally and legally wrong to remove objects from a photo to alter it. Improvements in technology have made it easier to not only to improve the quality of photos, but to transform a lie into reality.
Organizing your photos is important as well. You can organize photos from your computer using programs such as iPhoto for Mac or Windows Photo Gallery for PC.
Before you can publish a picture, there are a few steps one should take:
- Edit a copy of the photo
- Crop the photo
- Resize the picture
- Modify the resolution
- Edit the color of the picture
- Save a Web copy
- Keep it simply
When you’re ready to publish to a blog, there’s a few things to remember: wrap your text around the photo using the align function, use intuitive alternative text, and add links and screenshots to your photos.
