By Dan Chung

Many thanks to all those who came to my ‘HDDSLR in the real world’ training workshop at Jacobs Pro lounge in London last week. One unexpected pleasure was to have some top Associated Press and Bloomberg news photographers along as participants.

Also a big thank you to Nick Millen of Canon UK for coming along to support the event and bringing his expertise as well as the latest lovely L lenses with him on the day. We had a good discussion on a range of topics as well as gear available to try from Manfrotto, Jag35, Zacuto, Redrockmicro, Genus, Pinknoise Systems and IDCphoto.

Apologies to those we could not accommodate this time; we felt it was much better to keep the class small and more personal. As it was oversubscribed, Jacobs and myself are organising another session on July 1st. Again it will be open to all, but those of you who were on the waiting list last time and didn’t get a place will have the first option to attend this one. As before we are keeping numbers below ten.

This is what news photographer Jason Alden had to say about the workshop – “I had an excellent day on Dan’s course, it really helped answer all the questions that I would otherwise have to learn through making mistakes. The course was ideally pitched for the working Editorial Photographer who just needs technical direction to get them on their way. Well worth the time and money; I’m certain it will prove a good investment.”

The workshop will be £150 for the day ( 10am-5.30pm ) and will take place on Friday, July 1st at the Jacobs Pro lounge, 74 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1EU.
 
To book a place please contact Henrietta or Donal on 0207 436 6996.

I’m back in London this month for a workshop at the Jacobs Pro lounge, helping photographers and videographers improve the way they shoot real world events. There are only eight places available as we want to be sure everyone gets some hands on tuition – so please book quickly if you want to come.

I’ll cover both the technical side and the journalistic one. I’ll go over the basic kit I use day to day including the use of ND filters, audio adapters, support rigs, led lights, sliders, LCD magnifiers and EVFs (I’ll have the new Zacuto EVF with me for people to try). I’ll also discuss my approach to shooting, illustrated by examples of my work, with plenty of tips learned from experience on assignment. There will be sections on slow mo and time-lapse too.
 
Participants should bring their own equipment if possible but there will be a limited amount of demo kit on show too.

 
The workshop will be £150 for the day ( 10am-5.30pm ) and will take place on Wednesday 8th June in the Jacobs Pro lounge, 74 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1EU.
 
To book a place please contact Henrietta or Donal on 0207 436 6996.

 

I’ve been using a Teradek Cube HD camera top transmitter for a while now but one thing that has limited its usefulness has been its sensitivity to WiFi interference. Well, the clever team at Teradek have now solved this in their newest version by supporting dual band WiFi. They have also fixed an issue where a stream from the 5DmkII would be broken by entering (or stopping) record mode – the 5DmkII functionality is also available on older Cube models via a firmware upgrade here. For my setup this means I can now use a Cube equipped 5DmkII B-camera during shoots and wirelessly monitor its output on my Ipad – great for interviews and long lens shots where a cable run is impractical.

They have also massively lowered the price of the basic Cube to $1199 and launched the 250 (HDMI) and 150 (SDI) with dual band 2.4/5.8GHz WiFi. The dual band allows for longer range and better handling of interference, often eliminating the need for a WiFi router. Also added is a USB port, allowing WiFi, 4G and Ethernet from the same box. Another improved feature is a mic level audio input with manual control and compression (while keeping line level audio in). As with other Cubes the new versions are also capable of streaming straight to livestream.com

By Stephen Alvarez

‘Nashville: Up From Prostitution’ came about because I was looking for a story to tell that would be very different from the photo essays I normally shoot for National Geographic. I wanted a human-based, in-depth story; something that I couldn’t tell through photographs alone.

I’d learned about the Magdalene Program for prostitutes in Nashville last year – it has a phenomenal success rate and is becoming a template for other programs. So I asked NPR’s Jacki Lyden if she wanted to cover the story with me for the network. We had worked together on an NPR/NGM coproduction so knew each other well. She said yes immediately and NPR got behind the idea of the film. The network’s belief in long form journalism is wonderful.

In all, I shot for about 14 days on this story, in four trips. Most of the reporting was done on two long trips with Jacki. We worked very closely together, splitting producing and reporting responsibilities. By the end of the assignment we were finishing each other’s sentences.

As in all film work the really hard part fell at the end, in editing. I flew to DC and met with my editor Claire O’Neil and we roughed out an edit. Claire was nearly done with the edit when one of the principal characters in our film returned to the streets and was involved in murdering someone. I took a final trip to Nashville for some follow-up interviews and we reworked the film.

I’ve chosen to work in film with DSLRs for the simple reason that I came to this type of reporting as a still photographer. Moving from stills to video is complicated enough so I didn’t want to learn to see again with a new piece of equipment. I’ve spent nearly 20 years learning what my 24mm f 1.4 and 50mm f 1.2 look like. The DSLRs keep that acquired knowledge relevant. There is something reassuring about having a familiar visual tool when you are stepping off into a new medium.

Another bonus is that the 5D MK II gives me excellent low light capability in a tiny form factor. I really appreciate the flexibility to have one visual machine that I can use on a tripod for interviews, on a shoulder support in the field or just held in hand when space is tight, like in the back of an undercover police car.

The camera’s shortcomings are well known. I record sound from a shotgun mike and a lavaliere onto a Tascam DR-100 then send the sound back into the camera with a downpad cord. Of course I am also working with a radio reporter so she records her own sound and we synch everything up in post. The biggest issue for me is the 12 minute clip length. We recorded hours of interviews and 12 minutes in an interview flies past, particularly when I’m paying attention to what the subject is saying and what the next question should be.

Is the DSLR the right tool? Well, TODAY yes. True, there is a whole new generation of large sensor video cameras that have a similar look and fix the major DSLR issues (sound, form factor and clip length). However, they don’t shoot still photos. My 5D mk II, besides recording beautiful video, is also the best still camera on the market.

You can see more of Stephen’s work here www.alvarezphotography.com and here www.picturestoryblog.com

Marshall were showing working prototypes of their new range of monitors featuring improved resolutions and a novel interchangeable input/output module with options for HD-SDI. They all feature HDMI loop through to allow output to a second monitor or external recorder.

Shot by Seppe Van Grieken and Johnnie Behiri.

Joseph Jang of Korean firm Cineroid demonstrates the latest upgraded version of his company’s Electronic Viewfinder (EVF) and as well as a range of new Metal versions with enhanced construction and options for HD-SDI input and output. The company were the first to sell a HDMI EVF for DSLR use earlier this year and these models are an upgrade on the original.

Most interestingly he also showed a small remote control accessory which straps onto a rig and allows the user to adjust the EVF’s settings like the magnify function.

Video by Johnnie Behiri and Seppe Van Grieken.

Korean rig manufacturer Varavon demonstrate their Armor mini lighweight run and gun rig for Canon and Panasonic dslrs. The most interesting feature is that they have developed a way to attach a loupe to the flip out screen on cameras like the Eos 60D and still have it rotate. They have versions for most Canon dslrs and also showed a soon to be released version for the Panasonic GH2.

Video by Seppe Van Grieken.

Comment by Dan Chung

I did not expect or intend this particular video to trigger the debate that followed on Vimeo and elsewhere in the blogosphere. It feels strangely beside the point to be continuing it when what matters is that 10,000 people have died and many more are missing due to the earthquake and tsunami. But, given the reaction, I feel I should explain why I made it.

The whole piece is honestly the closest I could bring you to what it felt like standing in that place. It’s one thing I’ve found hardest to do in video and to judge from some of the comments, perhaps I have not succeeded. I am not seeking to manipulate the viewer or to tell them how to feel – I am trying to convey how it feels to be there. Yes, it is uncomfortable looking at the ruins of people’s lives. If a disaster doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable then you are not human.

It was not frantic – it had a strange sense of calm. When faced with a scene of devastation like this, as I have been many times, you feel dazed, like you are not really there. It feels like it’s all a bad dream. Watching the survivors I think a lot of them feel the same – it’s shock. I felt the use of camera movement with a slider conveyed this sense of displacement.

Some of the commenters seem to think I am using news as an opportunity to make art. It is the opposite. I have been covering news for a long time and it frustrates me that people do not respond to it. I am trying to use cinematic techniques to make people connect to and care about news, not using news as an opportunity to make cinematic pieces.

There is nothing about a standard news package that is “real” or “authentic” or “unstylised”. It has its own conventions. What worries me is that I think there is often a disconnect from what is ‘on the news’ because it is presented in a pre-packaged way. People are used to it and know what to expect. They stop responding. Just because something IS real, doesn’t mean it ‘feels’ real to the viewer.

TV news rarely gives you a real sense of being in a place as cinema can. Because cinema has a language easily understood by audiences, they do not have to learn a new or alien visual language as they do with other multimedia. The difference is that while cinema uses these techniques to make you suspend disbelief and take you to another world – I am trying to take you to a place in the real world.

There is still plenty of room for ‘straight’ TV style news reports, but there is also room for something else. In text journalism you have stories full of facts and analysis, but you also have colour pieces. There are some excellent pieces of ‘traditional’ multimedia from photojournalists like myself – combining stills, audio and often music – but all the evidence I have seen suggests they do not reach a mass audience.

People have asked why we didn’t speak to locals. We did: it was in the news piece. This is a different piece. My colleague Jon had the option to narrate. We both thought it was better with the music.

(The Guardian decided to re-edit my video into the piece below – adding the voices of some of the survivors. Some commenters preferred it to my original. For me the piece didn’t work at all, mainly because it failed to convey what it felt like to be there.)

Photojournalism tells a story without words; who ordained that news video has to follow a prescribed format? ‘Straight’ TV news is not even a format that has always been around – back in the days of Pathe and Movietone newsreels people would watch a sequence of images with music without objection. That changed in large part because the technology changed. As the technology changes again, news should and will evolve too.

Some have suggested it was inappropriate to set up a small slider and a DSLR in the middle of a disaster zone, but it is surely no more disrespectful or intrusive than the large Japanese news crews and four-person BBC teams present. Nor is it more artificial than a photojournalist shooting stills in black and white, when the world is in colour – something few people question.

As for the music – again, it’s an attempt to convey what it feels like in those places. I guess it is partly a matter of taste but I strongly feel it was the right choice. I’d also add that it’s much more common to use music in Asia, where I live, and perhaps it seems more natural to me than others elsewhere. I often use all natural sound or dialogue when I think it works better. Take a look at my recent Arizona shootings video below.

Below is one of my earlier attempts to convey the feel of a place using cinematic journalism. This was the day the Olympic Bird’s Nest stadium was unveiled to the press. (Back in 2008, shot on a regular camcorder)

People will not like everything I do – some people may not like anything I do – and considered criticism has helped me improve my work. I am grateful to those who have spoken up for me, some of whom did not like this piece but respected my intentions. I feel there has been a valuable discussion around this video and despite some of the negative responses to it I still believe cinematic journalism is a way to involve audiences in world affairs more.

About Dan Chung:
Dan is a Guardian photographer and videographer. He also runs www.dslrnewsshooter.com

By Duncan Sharp

Egyption Revolution – Duncan Sharp Sky News from duncan sharp on Vimeo.

This was supposed to have been a one-day wonder: a knock-on protest following the success of the uprising in Tunis a week earlier. We planned a quick “in and out” to cover the demonstration in the Egyptian capital. Instead, this first protest lit the fuse that ignited two weeks of sustained street violence that toppled the Mubarak government and left 140 crew members and journalists injured and an Egyptian reporter dead.

Cairo seemed calm that morning before the crowds began to gather. There was a heightened police presence on the streets but nothing overwhelming. We didn’t know where the protests were going to occur, but we knew the plan was to march to Tahrir Square. So we hooked up with one group and stuck with them down to the Square. There wasn’t much aggression – lots of shouting and chanting but certainly no violence. The police presence was pretty low-key. I certainly didn’t feel threatened and was moving between the police and the protestors, getting pictures from both sides. I even did what you really shouldn’t and got in between the two groups. It was all fairly low risk. But that was to change. Unfortunately we had to get back to the hotel to edit a piece for 17:00 GMT. Once we had got back to the hotel and I started loading the pictures, you could hear the volleys of tear gas down in the Square.

I really wanted to go back out and get more pictures but we were locked into the feed for the 17:00 GMT, one of the most important bulletins of the day. Our hotel was overlooking the square and although I couldn’t see much I could hear that things had definitely picked up. Our flights were changed that night to come back Thursday.

Wednesday, the police presence on the streets had tripled from the day before and we had to be reasonably careful since we were on tourist visas and had no official permission to film in the country. We drove around Tahrir Square (when you could drive round it) and filmed the lines of armed police through the taxi window. Again we didn’t know where exactly these protests were going to start, only that they were aimed at getting to Tahir square. We heard rumours that there were some protests outside the press syndicate building. On arrival you could feel that tensions were mounting. It certainly didn’t have the same feel to it as Friday. I started filming behind the police as they became quite hostile hitting the protestors with long sticks and truncheons.

What started out with the police keeping protestors inside the press syndicate soon changed to them being surrounded on three fronts. This got interesting because there was really no safe place to be. As I approached a group of secret police grappling with a protestor I got grabbed, the police trying to take the camera out of my hands. I got it out of reach just in time, then I was forced through the police lines and pushed into a group of protestors. As I looked up another cameraman using a large ENG camera was having to fight for his life to stop the police taking it and smashing it on the group.

Then the secret police approached the protestors for what can only be described as a smash and grab. Watching up to 6000 protestors scatter when approached by only about 8 men was quite astonishing. Things were getting very nasty very quickly. We hurried back to the hotel to edit and just made the 17:00 bulletin. The next few days brought the most noticeable change to Cairo’s streets. Shops were shut on normal working days. The hotel we were staying at had started to board up its windows, all in preparation for Friday’s protest.

That day started off like the previous few, quiet in the morning, not much going on, but we were waiting for Friday prayers to finish, knowing that this would bring a lot of people out onto the streets. The afternoon was the turning point. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets and the clashes with the police were very violent, lasting for hours. Several buildings were burnt down and shops looted. Hundreds of cars were set on fire across the city.

As a television crew the most frustrating moment of the trip occurred later that day when the government cut all internet connections across the country. We had no way of sending any of the pictures back to Sky and had to wait until a BGAN sat dish was brought into the country. That didn’t happen until the following evening. Our hotel, because of its location, took quite drastic steps to keep the guests and property safe from looting and fighting. The lifts stopped going down to the lobby, they made a makeshift barricade across every entrance to the hotel and also cut the lights to the first three floors. This made leaving and re-entering the hotel nearly impossible. The next day they had even called on the chefs armed with meat cleavers to guard the lobby.

Over the next few days things calmed down a bit, but the scars still remained across the city. The next flash point and probably the most dangerous turning point during the whole revolution, was the emergence of the ‘pro-Mubarak’ protestors. For the first time protestors were actually targeting foreign journalists. This made covering the story very difficult and there were numerous reports of journalists being assaulted or killed. By this stage the world’s media were in Cairo and the internet had been restored so it was far easier to get pictures out. The Army made no attempt to try and break up the fighting between the two warring factions. They just hid in their tanks and waited for the storm to blow over.

I spent the next few days within the square, which the time was probably one of the safest places to be. The protestors had set up checkpoints and were looking for weapons and any pro-Mubarak supporters that were trying to infiltrate the square. They seemed very happy with the foreign journalists’ coverage of the events and it gave me a chance hear more from them and get some nice images.

I left Cairo a week later and as I was flying back to the UK I really thought about the kit I brought, how well the 5D mkII performed and whether I would have done things any differently. My conclusion? Probably not. What really stuck out in my mind was how well the Canon 24-105 f4.0L IS lens performed and how steady all the shots were with no Zacuto Z-finder or support rig to speak of. Recording audio separately for all interviews and pieces to camera was very much out of my comfort zone, but after using it in anger for the first few days I was really happy with the results. I highly rate the Tascam DR100 recorder – it performed very well, although I was always worried that the levels would be too low or the mic could become unplugged. Of course I would prefer onboard audio with monitoring but I found that this worked just fine. The onboard mic was fine for background sound – we all know it’s not great but it was more than adequate. The key I found to shooting these kind of events with a 5D mkII is having a lens with an image stabilizer and also stopping down the aperture as much as you can. I was in no position to start following focus, so I dialled up the ISO and was consistently shooting in the late F-stops from f11 to f22.

As a consequence of this trip, I’m now looking into the video performance of the Panasonic GH2. I find that the main issue with the 5D mkII is the time it takes to get pictures into Final Cut before you can start editing. When working under such tight deadlines it’s the difference between staying on the ground that extra hour rather than returning to the hotel early to edit. I also feel that I was regularly wanting more telephoto range on my lenses and although fast, the 70-200 f2.8 lens just doesn’t offer enough range.

I’m sure it won’t be long until I’m back in the Middle East covering another revolution, the only difference being that maybe this time it will be with the Panasonic GH2.

Duncan Sharp has been at Sky News for 7 years as a Cameraman/Editor covering stories in Afghanistan, Libya, Burna, Sri lanka, India and South Africa. He also spent a year working in the company’s Beijing Bureau. He is working on solutions to covering news that don’t involve using traditional ENG cameras.

LCD monitor manufacturer Marshall have just launched their latest model with a couple of great new features for DSLR shooters. The first is a HDMI loop-through function; the second is a DSLR ratio adjustment feature. Vincent Laforet has the full scoop over on his blog.