Dan Chung and I attended online roundtables with three of the WPP judges yesterday to discuss the judging process of this year’s contest and some of the issues that arose. Below is the official press release, more discussion to come soon on the blog.

The international jury of the 2nd World Press Photo Multimedia Contest has given the First Prize to the production ‘Afrikaner Blood’ by Elles van Gelderen and Ilvy Njiokiktjien from the Netherlands. The multimedia production follows young white Afrikaner teenagers in South Africa who attend a holiday camp set up to teach them self-defense and how to combat a perceived black enemy.

The prizewinning productions can also be viewed here.

The jury chair Vincent Laforet called ‘Afrikaner Blood’ “an incredibly well crafted and nuanced piece with a very cohesive structure and refined execution.” He added: “We as the jury appreciated the restraint that the authors demonstrated in the telling of this story. All of the multimedia elements and careful attention to detail served to push the narrative forward, as opposed to distracting from it.”

The judging was conducted at the World Press Photo office, where the jury viewed all the entries and discussed their merits over a period of four days. A total of 287 multimedia productions from 48 countries were entered in the contest, organized for the second time this year.

Managing director Michiel Munneke said: “This year, participation was open for photographers and producers and we are glad to have had such a broad field of entries from around the world. It is clear from the discussions with the jury that multimedia is continuously moving and developing and there are no set definitions yet. We are delighted that World Press Photo, through this contest, can contribute to the development of the medium and of the visual journalism profession.”

2012 Multimedia Contest winners

1st Prize
‘Afrikaner Blood’
By Elles van Gelder (videographer) and Ilvy Njiokiktjien (photographer), the Netherlands

2nd Prize
‘Half-Lives: The Chernobyl Workers Now’
By Maisie Crow, USA, photographer and videographer

3rd Prize
‘America’s Dead Sea’
By James Lo Scalzo, USA, photographer

Half-Lives: The Chernobyl Workers Now from VQR on Vimeo.

America’s Dead Sea from Jim Lo Scalzo on Vimeo.

Special Mention
In addition to the three prizes, the jury awarded the interactive multimedia production ‘Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer’ by The New York Times and videographer/photographers Shayla Harris and Marcus Yam with a Special Mention. Made over a period of six months, the production explores professional ice hockey player Derek Boogaard’s tumultuous life and untimely death from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs and alcohol.

Chair of the jury Vincent Laforet commented: “Several dozen videos, documents, and photographs found their way in what was a very thorough examination of the long-term health effects of bareknuckle fighting in the NHL and was delivered in a classic interface with straightforward navigation.”

Michiel Munneke explained, “Even if the contest concentrates on linear productions, we also wanted to make space for and reflect on new developments and trends and recognize excellence in the field of non-linear, interactive multimedia. For this purpose, we invited the jury members to nominate productions they felt would be interesting

2012 Multimedia Jury
Chair: Vincent Laforet, France/USA, director and photographer

- Claudine Boeglin, France, multimedia director Thomson Reuters Foundation
- Iatã Cannabrava, Brazil, photographer and director
- Jessica Dimmock, USA, documentary photojournalist
- Keith Jenkins, USA, supervising senior producer for multimedia at National Public Radio
- Wang Jingchun, China, director Visual Center of Southern Metropolis Daily
- Poul Madsen, Denmark, photojournalist and multimedia producer Bombay Flying Club
- Anna Zekria, Russia, co-founder and managing director Saltimages

Secretary: Alan Stoga, USA, president of Zemi Communications

You can find out more about the jury here.

Dr D J Clark is a leading photojournalist and educator, training students across the globe in the use of DSLR video for news reporting. He is also course leader of the new MA International Multimedia Journalism starting this year in Beijing,China run by the University of Bolton (UK). DJ has been working with World Press Photo foundation helping cover the news surrounding World Cup 2010. He also works with China Daily’s website.

Chinese newspaper photojournalists are increasingly shooting multimedia assignments

Dali is one of China’s best loved destinations and it’s also home to one of the country’s most prestigious photography events. Now the International Photography Festival has launched a multimedia contest to celebrate the best work from China and abroad. The competition is designed for, but not exclusive to, photojournalists working in the news industry and is driven by 26 of the largest commercial newspapers in China, who have made the festival their annual meeting place to discuss developments in the newspaper photography business.

Last year the discussions were largely about developments in multimedia news stories domestically, but this year the organisers are seeking to expand the event beyond China’s borders by inviting a group of international speakers and setting up the country’s first international multimedia competition. In doing so they are hoping to contextualise the progress of what is happening within Chinese newsrooms with the rest of the world.

The competition is divided into three categories:

1: Spot News: A video of no more than five minutes covering a live news event shot expressly to be shown on a digital platform (website, mobile, tablet) by a single photojournalist

2: Feature: A video by one of more people no more than ten minutes on a newsworthy subject shot expressly to be shown on a digital platform (website, mobile, tablet)

3: Interactive: A project by one or more people that includes multiple videos, audio, graphics, slideshows or both. Flash, HTML5, interactive projects and Apps should be entered in this category. Videos included
in the interactive section can not be entered into other sections

There is a top prize of 10,000 RMB (around £1,000) in each category and a special grant of 20,000 RMB for the best emerging multimedia journalist to work on a project to be screened at next year’s festival.

Entry is free. You just need to send an email to: contest@dipephoto.com with

· Your name & phone number
· The category you want to enter and whether you are a Chinese or International entrant
· The link to your multimedia entry

All entries must be received before midnight (Beijing time – 5pm BST) August 31, 2011. More information about the festival and contest at http://en.dipephoto.com.

Chinese multimedia award nominees at the Yang Xiaoguang multimedia workshop in Beijing

The F&V Light Z96

A simple interview setup with a single Z96 LED light

I have had two cheap generic LED lights for the last year and normally carry one of them in my bag when on video assignments for China Daily. At first glance the F&V Light Z96 looked much like those, which are similar in size and also have the 16:9 shape. But with two months use I have discovered that the Z96 is a very different piece of kit.

I borrowed it just a couple of days before a trip to south western China, heading off into the hills on an assignment to look for a rare monkey. My camera backpack was already overloaded, but the Z96’s compact size meant I was able to squeeze it in.

As its name suggests, the light has 96 LEDs in a relatively compact unit. Mine had a large Sony-style lithium battery that I got with the light; it can be slipped off and replaced with 5 internally fitted AA batteries instead, making it lighter and smaller. It’s also about 40% brighter than my other lights and is fitted with a dimmer switch – and it seems to run for ages. The light quality is very good, not green as other cheaper lights often are. It also comes with two magnetic clip-on filters: a CTO and a diffuser.

The next evening I left my flash in the hotel room and mounted the Z96 onto my 5DmkII (the light comes with a hotshoe mount in the kit) and set off into the streets of the old town of Dali to photograph its fire festival. I was shooting stills for the paper and found the Z96 fitted with the orange (CTO) filter worked well as a fill-in to capture the festivities in the street, looking much more natural than a straight flash. I also found it stood up to having liquids and fire thrown on it as I mingled with the rowdy festival goers (not so my arm, which picked up a nasty burn).

Using the Z96 as a fill light for stills shooting at the Dali torch festival

For my type of work the Z96 has been most useful on assignments away from home. I have carried it with an extra small tripod to light interviews over the last month and either used it along with window light, for a little creativity, or on occasions just by itself in a darkened room. The pictures below are from a “behind the scenes” video I put together in a few hours last week after a five day multimedia workshop at the Orange International Photography festival. It’s a very simple set up to do at night in a large room without the need for backdrops. The diffusion filter combined with the adjustable clean light of the LED gives a strong effect without being too harsh.

Orange International Photography Festival Multimedia Workshop from D J Clark on Vimeo.

Another nice feature of the light that I have yet to test is that you can attach multiple Z96 lights together and power them off just one Sony style battery. As standard you can stack two with supplied clips, but the manufacturer sells a small bracket so you can stack four or even six or nine Z96 lights together to form a single big light source.

Four Z96 lights attached to form a single big light

I have been delaying this post for some weeks now, not out of laziness but purely because I don’t want to give the light back. It’s a step up from the generic cheaper LED lights I was using before and highly recommended for multi-taskers like myself, looking to lighten the camera bag.

There’s more info on the Z96 in this short infomercial.

Dr D J Clark is a leading photojournalist and educator, training students across the globe in the use of DSLR video for news reporting. He is also course leader of the new MA International Multimedia Journalism starting this year in Beijing,China run by the University of Bolton (UK). DJ has been working with World Press Photo foundation helping cover the news surrounding World Cup 2010. He also works with China Daily’s website.

Over the past two years World Press Photo, Free Voice, Africa Media Online and Lokaalmondiaal have been training print, radio and photo journalists to ready themselves for covering the World Cup. The aim has been to provide African media with stories created and edited by African journalists – a counterpoint to the mainstream ‘western’ wire services; an African voice for an African event. Over 120 journalists from 34 different countries trained and of these, 18 were chosen to join a journalistic ‘Dream team’ in South Africa during the World Cup itself.

Award winning photojournalist Jonathan Torgovnik and myself were tasked with the job of choosing the best African multimedia journalists to be part of the project. We held one workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa and another in Lusaka, Zambia, training 20 of them to work on short projects and demonstrated how I used the Canon DSLRs to produce multimedia.

Using the Canon 7D at the Twenty Ten workshop in Johannesburg

During the workshops we concentrated on training the journalists to be able to produce a short form multimedia story in two to three days. Technical skills covered shooting, sound, editing, compression and uploading to the Twenty Ten project website. As the website featured images, audio and text as well as video, each participant needed to supply a package including all these elements from one story so it could be distributed to media outlets. Another key component was to figure out a look and feel for the 2010 multimedia so that the videos could be run as a series as they were produced. This was not easy as there was an equal mix of photographers and TV cameramen – with differing visual styles. It was also the first multimedia workshops run by World Press Photo and they obviously felt the need to ensure that still photography played a part in the final output. In the end we settled on a mix of stills and video and encouraged participants to use focus pulls, natural wipes, timelapse and video portraits to identify the product as something very different to a TV news package.

DJ Clark shows students a basic Canon 5DmkII video kit

Using a Zoom H4n recorder and Sennheiser radio mics for audio

Work from the workshops can be seen on the Road to Twenty Ten website – the standards were very variable. With equipment costing sometimes two or three times more than in developed countries and agonizingly slow internet speeds it was quite a challenge for us to help the entrants produce work of any quality.

Despite this, of the 20 trained, two were selected for the final ‘Dream Team’; Shravan Vidyarthi and Simone Scholtz won the right to cover the tournament for the project. During the World Cup the work of Shravan and Simone can be seen here.

Aside from training in Africa I have also been working with China Daily, which has just published an eight part series titled ‘Reacting to climate change’. You can see it along with some of my other multimedia here.

Any international visitor to a Chinese photography festival should come prepared with the best the camera market has to offer, as anything less will leave you feeling markedly underdressed. At the meeting of newspaper photographers in Dali this year it was the turn of the Canon 5DmkII, a camera that has taken the Chinese news industry by storm as newspapers introduce multimedia onto their websites. One Canon rep told me they were selling around 2,000 units a month in China, and I have heard rumours of double this number in peak months.

The Southern Metropolitan News in Guangzhou, like many of the 2,200 national and provincial newspapers in China, has invested heavily in the 5DmkII. They now have 12 photographers shooting both stills and video as well as a dedicated multimedia team working on longer term projects (see http://umedia.nddaily.com/#20090912-12 and click around). Technically the stories are well produced but creating compelling narratives is proving much harder. However The Southern Metropolitan is making progress and has invited Mediastorm founder Brian Storm twice now to run workshops with their staff which has made a noticeable difference.

Canon too has not missed the opportunity, offering free workshops and supporting a new £5,000 multimedia award for young Chinese photojournalists. Most newspapers have a mix of Canon and Nikon equipment making it much easier for them to buy into whichever camera system offers them the best product. Canon China have put aside twenty-four 5DmkIIs along with lenses, sound equipment and computers exclusively for training news photographers around the country and the results are starting to come through.

The video below (without the Chinese subtitles) was shot this summer by Changsha photographer Liu Zhe, who attended the first 5D workshop in April.

This is the best video I have seen by a Chinese newspaper photographer to date and there is still plenty of room for improvement, however given the Chinese newspaper market is yet to see the kinds of revenue drops now being experienced in the West, there is no doubt in my mind that we will see far greater investment in this kind of reporting in China over the next few years.

D J Clark is director of Visual Journalism at the Asia Center for Journalism and course leader for the University of Bolton – MA Photography (international photojournalism, travel and documentary) that runs in Dalian China.