Photojournalism turns HD

Posted on August 5, 2007 by Melissa Worden

An interesting magazine crossed my desk this week: The premier (May/June 2007) issue of “HDVideoPro,” a magazine about high-definition technology.

In it are equipment spotlights and reviews (small HD cameras, tripods and lighting) and features about Web video, the difference between interlaced and progressive scanning, an explainer on recording formats and an interview with David Leeson of the Dallas Morning News on how he uses a video camera to capture BOTH moving and still images. (Note: Richard Koci Hernandez does this at his paper, the Mercury News, too; and in doing a Web search, I found that Hernandez also wrote about this magazine a few months ago and highlighted this story by Leeson on Sports Shooter.)

Leeson, winner of an Edward R. Murrow Award, a National Headliners Award and a regional Emmy for best television documentary, is a leader in video storytelling. He has been shooting video for the newspaper since 2000, developing a new methodology that is rooted in how still photographers work.

“Let’s throw out the idea of what we think video is and let’s begin to think about what it is when it’s in the hands of a photojournalist,” says Leeson. “Think of the vast amount of resources available to us at that point. We don’t have to retrain people in what they think.”

Change can be difficult and scary for some. Are photographers ready to leave their still cameras at the office?

Says Leeson: “Remember when we went from black-and-white to color? I remember thinking, what am I going to do with color? I never had to deal with color before. I thought about it and realized that color was simply an additional layer of information. Black-and-white is the basic information, then here comes color, which gives us more information; now we know that’s a green sweater a person is wearing rather than a blue sweater.

“I began to look at the video camera as providing two additional layers of information: motion and sound. And that’s all it was, a camera that, in addition to everything else, can give us motion and sound.”

Leeson’s son also works at the Dallas Morning News, and he developed a process that will allow the paper to take frame grabs from the HD cameras that can run five or six columns. Here’s how, as described in the HDVideoPro article:

1. Find the frame to capture in your video editing software.
2. Increase the size of the edit window, filling up the monitor.
3. Take a screen grab of the enlarged window.
4. Open Photoshop, paste your screen grab and flatten and crop the image.
5. Enlarge the image to 30 inches wide and 600 ppi.
6. Resize the image to a normal size at 203 ppi.
7. Process photo as you would a still in Photoshop.

But Leeson maintains moving from still to video cameras will not signal the end of traditional print photography.

“Still photographs will be with us forever — video doesn’t replace the still photograph — but the demand upon still photographers, especially at newspapers, is to produce video and still at the same time. we must keep in mind that if you don’t approach video with the eyes of a still photojournalist, looking for and recording those decisive moments, how are you going to pull a frame from that video that’s going to have that moment in it to provide a great still photograph?”