Category Archives: Photography

Innovations in Journalism – one-click image uploading from Skitch.com

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We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today’s candidate is Skitch.com – an easy way to upload your images.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Mark Pearson and I work for plasq – a company of about 10 people spread around the globe.

We work to make fun, intuitive and expressive software, and are best known for “Comic Life”, an application which makes it easy to turn your digital photos into photo comics.

We’ve now developed Skitch and Skitch.com:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60dQekmsEGg&feature=related]

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Skitch makes the screen grabbing process enjoyable and very fast.

Journalists involved in the tech industry often need to take many screenshots. Skitch supports many common formats including TIFF, which publishers often need for magazines. If the journalist produces content for online use, jpg and png are available too.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We are just getting started! We recently released two new features to allow you to email images to Skitch.com as well as send images hosted on Skitch.com to twitter.

Combine these two features and you can send images from your camera phone to Skitch.com then automatically have them appear on twitter.

4) Why are you doing this?
To improve and speed up sharing images with others.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Currently while in beta, it is free.

6) How will you make it pay?
We haven’t announced our pricing yet.

LA Times creates ‘visual journalism’ department

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The Los Angeles Times has integrate its print and web picture desks and video operations into a new visual journalism department.

The move is the next phase in the Times’ alignment of its web and print operations, which will see mergers across the continuous news desk and main metro news desk this month.

The new department will be headed by Colin Crawford, who has been promoted to deputy managing editor for photography.

“Combining these three departments under the umbrella of visual journalism will improve our ability to present multimedia storytelling in an even more engaging way, and take greater advantage of our outstanding photo staff,” editor Ross Stanton said in a memo to staff.

Innovations in Journalism – a plug in to ease sorting through web images and video from PicLens

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We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today, it’s searching easily though web images and video with PicLens.

image of piclens plug in website

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hi, I’m Alec Jeong from Cooliris.

We’ve developed PicLens, a plug-in that transforms your browser into a 3D environment where you can search, drag, and zoom around thousands of images and videos across the web.

PicLens makes your online media come to life in a full-screen, cinematic presentation that goes beyond the confines of the traditional browser.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Journalist regularly search for photos and videos on the web, tediously clicking in and out of web pages and image search engines to find the perfect image or video.

PicLens changes all that, by allowing you to search and view 100s or even 1000s of online photos and videos in an instant.

Need to see the photo in detail? Just click a toggle button and the photo or video will go full screen. Jump to the corresponding page of the image or video? No problem.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
There is much more, much more to come. In the coming months, we will be adding features that will completely transform the way you use online media.

4) Why are you doing this?
We asked ourselves the question: What would the web be like if, rather than having to browse click by click, we were able find and share information quickly and directly through a single, rich media navigation layer that frees you from the confines of the traditional browser window and web pages?

We believe that you would discover that the web is richer than you’ve believed before, and that the added spatiality would enable you get much more from the rich online media and from your social connections.

5) What does it cost to use it?
PicLens is free to use and available for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.

The “3D Wall” interface is available now for Firefox and IE and is coming to Safari soon.

6) How will you make it pay?
Our goal has always been to focus on providing the ultimate user experience. With several million downloads of our product in just the past few months, we are on a fast trajectory to bring in the next generation online media experience.

Wired: Flickr groups reject new video feature

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Several user groups on Flickr have been set up against the introduction of video to the image-sharing website, which was announced earlier this week.

Users are concerned that there was no pilot stage for the service, which allows ‘Pro’ subscribers to submit 90-second video clips alongside images.

By Thursday the ‘We Say No to Videos on Flickr’ group had more than 22,000 members.

News.com: Flickr video launch – pleasing but limited

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Flickr video has arrived – after what seemed like an age – and CNET’s Dan Farber is impressed with the results, even if users are limited to 90 seconds of videos. Crazy, for my money.

‘It’s the video analog of Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters. It’s a fine communications constraint, but it doesn’t apply as easily to video content,’ says Faber.

While Flickr have been dillydallying, as Faber points out, YouTube has rocketed ahead with its offering.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: lessons in UGC, follow the crowd

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Image of Kristine LoweKristine Lowe’s (left) Online Journalism Scandinavia this week looks at the (weird and wonderful) challenges of soliciting readers’ contributions.

Local newspaper readers more keen to submit photos of their own kids than of world champions, that’s what one online newspaper in Norway found out last month.

Mecom-owned Drammens Tidende (DT) invited its readers to help them cover this year’s World Cup Ski Sprint in Drammen, but found their readers were more interested in the Children’s Ski Cup that took place a day prior to the international event.

image of reader submitted photo from ski race

(Reader-submitted picture (above) and the pro snap (below) – both courtesy of DT)

image of world cup ski racing

“In retrospective, we might have done better to put more of our resources into soliciting pictures from the Children’s Cup,” said Geir Arne Bore, editor-in-chief of DT, a Norwegian regional newspapers headquartered in Drammen.

“The traffic to our news site doubled on the day of the World Cup, and the shots submitted by readers garnered quite some interest, but people were particularly interested in viewing and submitting pictures from the Children’s Cup.

“Our experiences confirm the general impression which is taking root in Norwegian media: user generated content does not come unsolicited, and if it does come it is on issues people are very passionate about, or as a result of substantial marketing.

“I guess you could say this in line with the trend described in ‘The state of the news media 2008’,” Bore added.

DT is one of the early testers of ‘The Readers Newspaper’, an online portal where readers can upload text, pictures and video. It’s developed by Edda Media, Mecom’s Norwegian arm, and is still in Beta.

So far, DT’s readers have mostly uploaded text and pictures about entertainment events, while Budstikka.no, another early tester, has attracted more content about local sports events.

The portal is expected to be rolled out to all of Edda Media’s regional and local papers over the coming months.

BBC stance on pulling images from social networks

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The ease of availability of a picture does not remove the BBC’s responsibility to assess the sensitivities in using it, according to the editor of BBC News online.

Writing on the BBC Editors Blog, Steve Herman stated that the question of the ethics of pulling pictures from social networking sites has bee raised by colleagues during an editorial standards meeting.

As a result of that meeting a newsletter is produced, he wrote, summarising  discussions circulated to staff to offer guidance.

The advice offered to BBC reporters is that because material has been put into the public domain does not necessarily give the media the right to use it, primarily because the BBC would bring significantly greater public attention than would normally be expected.

The newsletter added that consideration on the original context and the impact of re-use to those who may be grieving or distressed must also be applied.

Legal, copyright and accuracy of the image should also be at the forefront of reporters minds when considering use of images from social sites.

Canon developing built-in watermarking system for photographers

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According to site OhGizmo, camera manufacturer Canon has filed a patent for a camera that will take a photo of a photographer’s iris as they take a picture.

This iris image will then act as a watermark and could help snappers identify unlicensed use of their images – particularly online.

On the copyright theme, Kevin Smith, co-founder of picture agency Splash News, discussed with Journalism.co.uk the merits of Scan X – the technology employed by the agency to track their content online and protect revenue.

Smith admitted that the procedure was expensive for Splash – as such putting it out of reach for independent and freelance photographers. However, patents such as Canon’s could see this technology dripping through to a more affordable level.