Afghanistan’s female footballers from Ed Jones on Vimeo.

“Is this normal?” I strained to ask the US soldier opposite me, as the military transport aircraft violently pitched and rolled in the skies above Kabul, picking its way between the mountains.

I was returning to the Afghan capital following a two week embed with US forces in the country’s troubled southern city of Kandahar; a trip originally intended to coincide with a NATO offensive aimed at pushing the Taliban from their spiritual home. 

Now – with just over a week to spent at the AFP bureau in Kabul, I was keen to find a video opportunity which didn’t feature soldiers, weapons, or the bleak colours of desert camouflage. 

It’s not compulsory for AFP photographers to shoot video, but it’s something that I enjoy – and find myself doing more and more; not just short segments of news footage, but also fully-voiced features. 

A colleague had arranged a chance to visit the Afghan national under-18 women’s football team during training, and with the World Cup under way it seemed the ideal time to attempt a short video report on the team. 

It was a particularly hot afternoon as we made our way to the football ground, past hastily fortified police checkpoints and through the flour-like dust thrown into the air by the slightest breeze or vehicle – of which there were many, vying for passage along streets laced with razor-wire. 

Arriving at the sports ground on the fringes of the NATO headquarters in Kabul after a short but dehydrating walk felt like discovering a desert oasis: but in this case it was a quiet, verdant, field disrupted only by the distant patter of gentle competition and flecked with red tracksuits; a colour in harmony with the expanses of blue and green that lay above and below.

The girls, thoroughly enjoying themselves, were a poignant sight as one group took part in an informal game while another practiced shooting goals. I immediately set to work — there wasn’t long to shoot, and I wanted to catch the action while it lasted.

Ed on assignment in Afghanistan

I had two Canon 5DmkII’s with me, a 16-35L 2.8, and a 70-200 F4L IS which I had bought before my trip instead of the far heavier f2.8 version: I find the weight and image stabilizer on the lighter lens ideal for video, though I didn’t realise at the time that the sound of the stabilizer was picked up by the camera’s internal mic. Although it was not particularly loud, I could have been done without it.

I had gathered a good selection of action sequences and was framing up a long shot when, without warning, two US Blackhawk helicopters roared overhead, descending on the pitch and scattering its occupants. 

I had been shooting with the wide lens looking upwards, when a man appeared behind me and bizarrely grabbed my tripod mounted with one of the 5DmkII’s. I chased after him but he couldn’t hear me over the thunderous sound of the choppers getting ever closer, and carried on running away with my gear to the side of the pitch.

“No photo, no photo!” yelled the unidentified Afghan man as I frustratedly re-acquired the camera and tripod. I thrust my ISAF media badge at him, showing I was cleared to photograph the area, but he persisted with his slogan, so I changed position to continue shooting.

After landing for no explicable purpose, the helicopters promptly lurched back into the sky leaving the bemused footballers to regroup – and having suppressed my false sense of security.

I thought about using this as the centrepiece to the video, but when it came to editing I found a more endearing angle in the lighthearted narrative surrounding the observations of my interviewee – and I hope that viewers can relate to her comments, which show a down-to-earth, ordinary girl, but touch on the struggle faced by women in Afghanistan.

Many of the players were understandably reluctant to speak for the camera, and so I used just one subject for my sound bites. To record the sound I used a cheap Panasonic stereo lapel microphone plugged directly into the camera, its one-metre cable limiting my lens choice to the 16-35 2.8L on a tripod. 

The microphone, which I had picked up in New Delhi on my way to Afghanistan, works brilliantly and was extremely useful when, during the embed, I had been able to very quickly clip it on to soldiers either for interviews, or for on-the-spot briefs during operations.

A simple interview setup - Panasonic wired lapel mic

Click pic to see Ed's report from Kandahar using the Panasonic lapel mic

I edited the footage upon return to Hong Kong, where I wrote a script and spent many, many hours behind the microphone trying to get a good take: we all hate the sound of our own voice, right?

The result is extremely simple, short, and hopefully snappy enough to be ingested by viewers easily. Creating pace and rhythm to my videos is something I am keen to master – and I’m extremely fortunate to have the AFP TV department on hand to help me achieve this by refining my scripts and offering objective advice when I edit my footage.

The feature is not particularly creatively shot, because with all the time constraints I usually face during filming, the confidence to try a different approach has to come with more experience – much like it did when I first began taking photos. 

Included in the final edit are a couple of shots by Asrar Ghani, an AFP TV cameraman based in Kabul, of general street scenes: shots I had overlooked but should have remembered to get. But Asrar’s footage is great, and gives context to the finished video.

During my time in Afghanistan, myself and an AFP reporter visited policewomen and female students in Kandahar, and heard first hand of the inspirational determination of the country’s women to overcome years of repression. 

My video of footballing females will never be a game-changer in illuminating this struggle, but with any luck it will offer a tiny, but uplifting, glimpse of progress. 

Ed Jones is a staff photographer with AFP.

I had initially rejected the idea of shooting video of the project in anticipation of the (copyright) complications which might be associated with gathering footage. But it became clear that the makers of the film were laid back enough to allow me to publicise their latest creation in whatever medium I wished.

And so myself and a reporter spent the afternoon observing the rehearsal and subsequent takes of a fairly tame love-making scene in a faux cave-turned-love-nest adorned with erotic artwork and constructed around a giant phallic fountain.

World’s First 3D Porn? from Ed Jones on Vimeo.

My video equipment is efficiently basic – a Canon 5d Mk II, a tripod and a Sony URX-P1 wireless lapel microphone for interviews. I don’t carry an LCD viewfinder, follow focus rig or external microphone for ambient sound, essentially because I haven’t found the need for these things yet (though I’m sure I may in the future). And for the moment I’m keen to keep my setup minimal, which makes things easier when rapidly switching between stills and video.

I went back and forth between the two formats constantly, trying to build a rough mental storyline for the video while simultaneously censoring what I shot in anticipation of the cultural sensitivities of AFP‘s global clientèle. I didn’t intend to document two and a half minutes of pixellated bodies writhing around the love-cave in its entirety, but hopefully to capture something more subtle and tongue-in-cheek.

As usual I successfully managed to ruin a couple of great shots by being indecisive and pressing the shutter in the middle of a video sequence for fear of missing an endearing photo – but once I got myself in check I was able to methodically gather the material, helped by the repetitive nature of the rehearsals and takes.

Once the safe shots were out of the way and I knew I had enough video to construct something watchable, I turned my attention to capturing more candid moments and began planning the positions for the interviews.

In the past I have conducted the interviews myself, but this time I coordinated with the reporter and we agreed an interview method. We would pause in between questions, allowing me to change camera angles, and the interviewee would start the answers with the question, providing more complete soundbites.

I have tried this approach before and found that too many interruptions can impede a natural-sounding interview. But for my Japanese adult video subjects, accustomed to fornicating on film, the sight of my less-than-intimidating lens was no cause for a sudden bout of self-consciousness.

Sony Radio mics were all that was used for sound

Despite the noisy surroundings, the URX-P1 wireless lapel mic I had brought along was more than sufficient to isolate excellent sound quality from the interviews; I had adjusted the levels in the camera manually first. Ambient sound quality using the camera’s built-in microphone was not really a concern, as I knew that the eventual voiceover would be the more prominent sound.

In any case, the relatively narrow dynamic range of the built-in mic was actually helpful in cutting out some of the less welcome low and high frequencies found on a busy film set in a reverberating warehouse.

Upon return to the office I immediately turned around a ‘webclip’ of the day’s footage, as the text and photos were slated to move to clients with the following morning’s features. A ‘webclip’ is a short, simple, 30-60 second series of unvoiced shots featuring descriptive captions that clients can embed within a website or cut with other footage to supplement a story.

The final video would be sent to broadcast and internet-based clients two days later on Monday, which left me the weekend to write a script and prepare three versions of the video: one voiced (complete with voiceover), one for natural sound (for foreign language translations), and one for web clients – the version which affords the most creativity because it is not likely to be altered or re-edited (like the previous two), but rather embedded within websites.

After ruthlessly culling all unnecessary information and sound bites from the script, it was sent to the news desk for subbing. Then I recruited two colleagues to provide the English language voices of the actors in my interviews and added my own voice to the rest of the sequence.

Ed Jones with his Canon 5DmkII kit

From the camera, the video files were downsized into a more manageable and editable 720 x 1280 format using the pro-res codec. The footage was edited in Final Cut Pro, using almost no colour correction, grading or ‘looks’. Minor levels adjustments were made to some shots, and compression was added to the voiceovers. Finally the sequence was exported using Final Cut Pro’s Compressor, keeping the dimensions but changing the codec to H.264.

Once this was done, a dopesheet detailing dates, names, a shotlist, and a transcription of the script and interviews was embedded in the IPTC information of the video file, before being handed over to the AFP TV department who checked everything over before beaming the package to the agency’s subscribers.

As the video hit the wires, I was able to watch the climax of a frantic weekend, as my own low-budget production popped up on websites, and hopefully TVs around the world. Other AFP bureaus in Europe, South America, and the Middle East were able to translate the feature for clients in their regions, giving added momentum to my two-minute insight into what is probably the world’s first 3D porn film.

Ed Jones is a staff photographer with AFP.

Hong Kong women shrug off tattoo taboo from Ed Jones on Vimeo.

After getting to grips with the DSLR video function, it wasn’t long before I was proposing a video feature to the Hong Kong bureau chiefs. Newspapers have been at it for a while; photographers already gathering video for two or three years perhaps; a timeframe which increasingly seems to constitute ‘a while’ in the conveyor-belt culture of technology and it’s blossoming relationship with the word ‘obsolete’. AFP has been slower to pick up steam with photographer-generated video, but with good reason: the agency already has a television service capable of producing features and a some select news coverage, and until recently the technology was simply not malleable enough to squeeze into the workflow of AFP’s hundreds of photographers without detriment to the very things that keep it competetive: the speed to meet the neverending deadlines of 24 timezones, and unsurprisingly; cost.

Now thanks to some extremely clever chaps in the upper-echelons of the agency, it is possible to transcode, compress, and transmit HD footage from a DSLR to a desk on the other side of the world as fast as a few photos. My latest video-based endeavour was much less demanding: being a feature I had more time, and as such I decided to provide a text story and photos in addition to the video.

I also wanted to see for myself what it would involve to tackle the feature as a full-on multimedia journalist and be self-sufficient in providing the story. Using around two minutes of footage, 500 words, and maybe six photos or more, I would tell a brief story about the increasing number of conservative Hong Kong women getting tattooed. My equipment was as minimal as possible – I wanted gathering the video to be simple and quick: a DSLR body, a tripod, 70-200mm and 17-40mm lenses, a reflector, and an external sennheiser mic — enough to fit in a small camera bag.

Ed with his personal Canon 5DmkII kit

Ambient light in dingy tattoo parlours was a concern, but the reflector and a wide aperture was easily sufficient to keep the interviewees lit. It was the language barriers, the tiny parlours still trading as I conducted my interviews, and actually finding a Hong Kong woman who was conservative enough to be included in the story but liberal enough to talk about her love of ink in English, that proved the toughest challenges.

Unlike shooting news footage where a short period of time must be forecefully divided between gathering photos and video, I found that without these constraints I shot far too much footage; a scattergun approach that meant I ended up with lots of material but not enough real quality. The shooting time of the video comprised of a couple of two-hour video interview and photo-taking sessions, and another two hours to gather extra footage on the street and to return to one of the studios for some action shots.

The editing took a little longer, and was done in small sessions spread inbetween my usual work schedule across five weeks – a delay partly due to the need to comply with the agency’s video style which I was learning for the first time. This meant compiling three different edits of the footage for television and web-based clients. The broadcast version should be able to be re-edited by TV clients, with a package of extra footage in case they should need more choice. No cut-away shots during an interview, and no overlapping audio called for less creative freedom, but essentially retains flexibility for whoever wants to use it. The web version allows much more creativity in the edit so that the product can be directly uploaded to websites with the minimum of intervention. On top of all of this is I have to submit a heavily detailed shotlist, a document explaining when and where all the included shots were taken, and details of the interviewees. The shotlist also includes the text story and the voiceover script as a reference for clients.

Once finished, it was extrememly satisfying to see the story, photos and the video appearing on websites and in publications around the world, and whilst the feature is not as polished as I would have liked, I will refine my approach for future stories – for which I already have a few ideas.

Upon reflection, I feel increasingly fortunate that it is the tools of our trade that are now capable of such attention-grabbing video results – the opportunity to continue to visually record the world firmly cemented in the hands of photographers. From weather features to war stories, the ability and the need to implement video segments into our workflow is here. At AFP photo editors are already handling video alongside pictures. From now on, the challenge for news photographers will be to gather and transmit footage fluently and with the minimum of hassle…and then let the desk worry about it.