As part of Brunel University’s Art criticism in the Digital Age Study Day, our MA journalism class was divided up to report on the day in different forms of media. Some students were commenting on the day via twitter, others took vox pops whilst some wrote articles reporting on the day. I usually choose to play it safe and rarely venture into new mediums. I see writing a report as the easiest and least troubling option. Having spent the past two months exploring new media and the various platforms available to journalist in the digital age I thought I should try something different.
Photography has always been something that interests me, particularly portrait photographs and images of real people, in natural situations capturing spontaneous reactions. I therefore decided that volunteering to take photographs of the afternoons events would be an intriguing venture.
The day got off to a shaky start as Danny (the morning photographer) and I, were unable to borrow one of the university cameras and had to use a camera Danny had bought from home. The lecture format of the event didn’t lend itself well to particularly interesting or original photography. The hall was large and looked sparsely populated despite the good turn out and the various pieces of technical equipment which littered the room, along with people constantly milling in and out, meant that shots could be obscured and cluttered.
At the end of the day I took the camera to the
computer suite to upload my images, only to find that half of my photographs had disappeared and the others appeared decidedly nondescript. Pushed for time and unsure how to use any editing program I merely cut and pasted my bland images into word and accompanied them with short captions. I was unable to get more than one image in each document and so had to submit 20 words documents, each containing a photograph I was less than pleased with.
The following week I was introduced to the very basic photo editing program Picknic. I was still disappointed with the photos I had produced and was keen to see if I could improve them with this program. It is free for users to upload and simply edit photographs and even though the applications are basic, the small changes made a vast improvement to my images.
There is an auto fix option in Picknic but i wanted to add to
photographs myself and didn’t feel that this option
changed the image dramatically. The main thing about the photographs which disappointed me was the dull colo
urs. The beige background appeared to merge with the skin tones of the people and the overall affect was very boring. On Picknic I was able to alter the colours by changing
the temperature and saturation to create a much warmer image.
The images also appeared quite flat but I was able
to use an advance setting on the exposure application to adjust the highlights and shadows in the image to give sharper definition and depth. The adjustments are made simple through
the manual sliders which allow you to drag the cursor the precise setting you want.
As the setting for the arts criticism day was quite cluttered a lot of my photographs were very busy and the eye was not drawn to the main focal point of the image. I used Picknic to crop the images, erasing unnecessary background
and centring the eye more on the part of the photograph I wanted to capture most.
These very simple editing tools allowed me to produce set of photos which although far from perfect I was much more pleased with. As a tool for serious journalists Picknic is obviously basic, although with the applications available on the paid-for service I am sure it would possible to greatly enhance and alter images. As a journalist should produce photographs which are truthful, Picnick’s simple tools would allow you to sharpen and crop images to make them more eye-catching and focused without enhancing them beyond a truthful representation. It would be a very useful tool for a journalist working under pressure and with limited photographic
material, to create a competent image to accompany an article.
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