NWR feature - Three Steps to Becoming a Photographer

Here's the very last thing that I'll ever do as part of my course at Winchester. It's been sweet. Link to article at the New Winchester Review.




Photography is now a more accessible hobby than ever before, providing you've got some time and a few hundred pounds to spare. While film cameras may have a certain prestige and have become something of a reserve for purists, digital cameras have some useful innovations and the ability to store thousands of photographs without the need for expensive rolls of film and a dark room full of poisonous chemicals to develop them in. Becoming a photographer will completely change your world view; it will allow you to appreciate small details that you might otherwise miss and identify beauty in situations that might otherwise be incredibly bleak (read up on the Afghan Girl for a great example of that.)

Step one - choosing your kit

It's essentially a choice between a DSLR (digital single lens reflex) or a compact camera. Which one you should get depends on what you want to do - if you want to point, click and not worry about settings then a compact is the one for you. If you would like more creative control then a DSLR is the better option.

Compact	DSLR
Cheap < £100	Expensive > £400
Light	Heavy
Easy to use	Requires more training
Not customisable – self contained. Some modifications exist but they can be bulky and imprecise	Customisable – can swap out lenses and extend its working life and functionality, attach external light sources, etc
Limited settings – most will be automatic	Full control over settings
Low maintenance, durable	High maintenance – requires cleaning to remove dust
Not good in low light conditions	Great in low light conditions
Slow to respond – can miss shots	Fast – captures an image almost immediately after pressing the shutter

Step two - what you need to know

Here are some core principles of photography and image composition that you should be aware of.

The rule of thirds

The rule of thirds is the concept that, for whatever reason, the human eye finds it more comfortable to look at an image that is intersecting these imaginary lines than an image that is dead centre.

Image credits Adam Browning

Applying this to a picture of a landscape would result in a picture that is two thirds sea and one third land or vice versa. This isn't an absolute rule and you're encouraged to break it but it's the easiest way to make an image look well composed, balanced and professional.

Focus

Focus in a camera emulates what the lens in your eye does when focussing on an object. The focus can be adjusted so that one point of the shot is crisp while the rest is blurry.

Image credits Adam Browning

However, it's not that simple. Focus is dependant on aperture and depth of field, elements which relate to camera exposure.


Exposure

Exposure is the amount of light that your image is exposed to. Whether it is under-exposed (too dark), over-exposed (too light) or correctly exposed depends on three things: aperture, ISO and shutter speed. Both under and over exposures are bad because fine details are lost and even though the picture can be 'saved' in a graphics program, the over all quality is poor. Getting the exposure right takes practice.

Aperture

Aperture is the amount of light that the camera lets through the lens - it's like the pupil in your eye. It is represented on your camera as something called an 'f-stop' and you'll see it rendered as f/1.4, f/9.8, etc. The smaller that number is, the wider the opening. Conversely, the larger the number, the narrower the opening.

You can expand or contract this opening depending on the kind of shot you want to take. To take a landscape shot, you'll need a larger f-stop number/narrower opening to ensure a deep 'depth of field', which will capture the maximum amount of detail.


On the other end of the scale, an extreme close up requires a smaller f-stop number and a wider aperture opening. This creates a shallow depth of field, where one point is in focus and the rest is blurry. However, on this picture of a damselfly, a narrow aperture was used to compensate for the magnification of the lens. The red ring shows roughly where the boundary of the aperture opening was in the camera that took the picture. Inside of the ring the image is sharp; everything outside of the ring is blurry.

Shutter speed

Shutter speed is the amount of time that the camera allows the light to come in and be recorded. You might also hear it referred to as a 'long' or 'short' exposure. It is measured in seconds (or fractions of seconds.) You would use a fast shutter speed to capture action shots, like at a football match. Another example is in nature documentaries where you might see a slow motion sequence of a hummingbird flapping its wings - the shutter speed would have to have been extremely fast in order the capture the detail in each individual shot without it looking blurred. A slow shutter speed will produce photographs which look 'smooth'. Two identical scenes are compared below:

Faster shutter speed - 1/5th of a second

Slower shutter speed - 110 seconds

ISO

ISO is the amount of work that the processor in your camera is putting in to negotiate the effects of low light. A higher ISO number will increase the sensitivity of the camera sensor, but unfortunately it'll also make the image look grainy. If the light is fine, then the ISO number should be kept as low as possible. ISO exists as trade off between being able to take a picture in dark conditions and image quality, if you need it.

Step three - finding something that you care about enough to photograph

This last step can be the most difficult. Adam Browning, who has taken the pictures used in this article, specialises in macro images of insects. He does this because he says that insects and their adaptations fascinate him and that he enjoys capturing them in detail. Your passion might not be creepy crawlies - it could be sprawling landscapes, animals or other people. The only way to find out is to get out there and start taking pictures; it doesn't even matter if they aren't that good. Just make sure that you always have your camera on you - you never know when you might stumble across something interesting.

Notes - image licensing 

Girl with camera 

Compact camera

DSLR camera

Adam Browning's photographs used with permission - http://500px.com/adambrowning

Confessional Interview: Life with a Cleft Lip

Watch the video here:

As I meet Lizzie Cooper outside Winchester train station in the April sunshine, she strikes me as happy, articulate and beams at me as she describes her soon-to-be-husband. But had you known her at the tender age of 15, by her own admissions she would have been nearly unrecognisable. She was bitter, angry and withdrawn - a description that could match just about every other teenager in the history of the world. But she perhaps had a better reason than most for feeling so down.

Lizzie as a newborn

Lizzie was born with a cleft lip and palette, a condition where parts of the mouth do not form properly in the womb. The result is a facial disfigurement which can, after several rounds of surgery, be rendered completely unnoticeable. She spent her formative years in and out of surgery and in the waiting rooms of various consultants. She has had eight operations in total – the first when she was four months old, the last when she was 22. She hates hospitals but, as a child, accepted that these are the cards she had been dealt. The bullying and rude comments from strangers, however, were a little bit harder to handle.

She tells me about her first day at school. “I came home and I sat my mum down and I said, “Mummy, what’s wrong with my face? Kids keep asking me what’s wrong with my face.’”

She says that her mum told her that she should go back and tell the other children that she would be able to get a “designer” nose when she grew up, whereas they would be stuck with whatever they had. It didn’t do anything to stop the bullying, she says, but it gave her a mechanism to cope with it; it gave her some hope in the form of thinking that whatever made her stick out could one day be ‘fixed’.

Four year-old Lizzie

It wasn’t just other children she had to be wary of, but adults too. “I remember them pointing out my face to kids, ‘Look darling, look at that girl, look at the way she looks.’ Society as a whole can be quite judgemental if you look different. Looking back as an adult that made me really quite angry, but as a kid it just made me want to cry. I hate it when adults can be judgemental because adults should know better.”

She hesitates for a bit, and then says that if she has kids, she would never raise them in such a way. “I’ve been there and I’ve done that and it’s not a nice thing to be judged on how you look. It’s shallow and it’s stupid.”

I ask her about family, and she says that they were very supportive and up front about the kind of challenges that she would have to face in her life. She feels lucky. “They never made me feel like it was something wrong with me.”

She tells me a story of a man she knows from CLAPA, the Cleft Lip and Palette Association, of which she is an active member. She says that this man was not as lucky as her, and that his father never accepted him. The dad apparently had turned round to his mother when has was born and told the mother that their son must have gotten it from her side of the family. Lizzie tells me that he had been an extremely bitter man for most of his life, and that this was the root of it.

Bitterness seems to be a recurring theme. In a previous phone conversation, Lizzie told me that she was absolutely fine about having a cleft but that some people had “real chips on their shoulders” about it. I ask her what she meant by that. “I think some people ask why they were even born like this and why couldn’t their parents have taken the opportunity and just have gotten rid of them before they came in to this world.”

She says it’s definitely a case of “why me”, especially in the situation that occurs when a person with a cleft has reached self-acceptance, but is still being bullied for looking different. Lizzie’s breaking point was the second year of university. She was sick of feeling the way she did and sought some counselling. The first session made her feel much better – she cried, she shouted, but she felt lighter.

Lizzie and husband Chris

This was the point when her life began to turn around. Working through some of her deep-seated issues about her foul treatment at the hands of other people had done her some good, but meeting her fiancé helped, too. “It was quite alien to me that someone could find me attractive because I didn’t view myself that way. He definitely helped open my eyes in seeing that I’m not the monster I sometimes see in the mirror, that there are qualities in me that are worth something.”

She describes the state that she finds her life in now as a “nice shock.” She tells me that as a 15 year old, she had already resigned herself to a lonely and bleak existence. She believed that she might never go to university, get a job or get married. But she says that despite the heartache, she would not change anything about her life. It has shaped who she is and she is happy with who she has become. “I’m content. I’m quite happy with life in general, you know, it could always be better. But at the end of the day, I feel quite proud of being a ‘clefty ‘, as we know ourselves, and I’m absolutely fine with it. I’m in a job that pays, I’ve got a little flat with my other half and I'm about to get married, so life is good.”

Basingstoke Gazette - A Day in the Life of News

As part of our degree, Dan Mackrell and I had to film a 'Day in the Life of News' to contribute to a bigger documentary shot by our entire year group. Here is our day at the Basingstoke Gazette.

Magazine module editor interview: 360 Gamer

Hello - it's been a long time since I posted anything here, so why not break the spell with something mandatory?

As part of the assessment for our magazine journalism module, we had to interview the editor(s) of any magazine of our choice and edit it in to a ten minute video.

Being the big old nerd that I am, I chose 360 Gamer, a mag that reviews Xbox games and has two co-editors running the show. I trekked up to their respective home offices and asked them about what it was like to do their jobs.

This is one of the last things that I'll ever do for my degree, and I'm reasonably happy with it, but you should probably watch it for yourself.

(God forgive me for the cheesy music. It was either this weird 80s synth or some sad piano music. I actually kind of like it.)

Law 2: Confidentiality and privacy

Confidentiality and privacy sound similar, but they are very distinct in terms of the law. The latter as a legal concept is relatively new, but the ramifications of it are wide reaching.

Confidentiality arises from the circumstances in which the information is given: privacy is more intrinsic, and a value judgment is made on the quality of information itself and whether it should be categorised as private and therefore not disclosed.

A good example of a private document would be a diary you happen to find lying on the street - to publish the contents of that would be an infringement of someone's privacy. There was no obligation of confidence between you and that person, so it's not a breach of confidence.

UNLIKE LIBEL, the burden of proof lies on the claimant to prove that they have been damaged by a breach of confidence.

What makes something confidential?

• The information has to have the necessary quality of confidence, in that it's not just some trivial piece of gossip, e.g. Cheryl Cole has herpes v.s. Cheryl Cole said she hates cats
• The information must have been imparted in circumstances that imposed an obligation of confidence i.e. a doctor's office as opposed to a public forum
• There must be an unauthorised used of the information (in most cases, publishing) to the detriment of whoever communicated it.

Governments, businesses and individuals use confidentiality law to protect things that are official or commercial secrets, or private. Injunctions are often used to stop the confidential material from being published.

Why would you want to publish confidential information in the first place? Well, it'll often be information that is very much in the public interest but something that the company/government/person will not want you to know. For example, a whistleblower could leak information to you which proves that a company is producing a harmful product and not warning anyone of the dangers.

When the story has been published and the injured party sees it, they and the courts will come after you and demand that you reveal the source of the leak, because the source has illegally broken their obligation of confidence with their employer.

N.B - you pretty much always have a contractual obligation of confidence with your employer even if it isn't outlined as such. It is an implied term in every contract that you won't act in a way detrimental to your employers interests.

At this point you, as a journalist, must point blank refuse to reveal your source. Protecting sources is a pretty serious deal - you've got to be prepared to pay hefty fines or even go to prison over it. Without sources, we're nothing, and so if it is widely known that we turn sources in as soon as it gets a bit rough, nobody would ever tell us anything ever again. When you're dealing with a legal argument over sources, you have to try and put aside what a nightmare it will be and remember that you're representing your entire profession here.

Case study

Bill Goodwin worked on a magazine called the Engineer and during his time there he used a source to reveal that a company called Tetra was in a bit of a financial pickle, which was at odds with the statements released by the company itself. This is in the public interest as, if the leaked documents were genuine, it showed Tetra to be hypocritical and deliberately misleading its stakeholders.

He tried to rely on Section 10 of the Contempt of Court Act, which gives journalists a legal right to protect their sources (unless it's necessary to disclose the source 'in the interests of justice, prevention of crime or disorder or if it's a matter of national security.')

The courts were unsympathetic and rationed that Goodwin was contrary to the interests of justice by protecting the source who had, according to Tetra, falsified these documents just to damage them. He still refused to reveal his source.

Bill was fined £5,000 and was forced to go to the European Court of Human Rights to appeal against the ruling, but seven years later he was finally out of the woods. They also ruled that the fine violated his right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of European Convention on Human Rights.

Seven years and £5,000 sounds like a lot of hassle, but because of journalists like Bill, members of the public who want to expose some wrongdoing will continue to trust us, and that's the most important thing.

The injunction problem
As mentioned briefly above, injunctions can be taken out to stop confidential information from being published. The real pain in the backside for journalists arises from, in the pursuit of making your story balanced and fair, the need to seek comment from the person or company you're writing about. Once they suss out that you may have confidential information they will immediately get an injunction out against the publication of your story.

A possible way to get around it is to base your inquiry on information that's already in the public domain, but that's not always possible.

Injunctions are granted overnight and irrespective of whether the courts were right to do so in certain cases, the injunction will typically drag on long enough so that the story they were trying to hush up is no longer news by the time it expires.

Privacy

The European Convention on Human Rights recognised a human right to a personal private life, and in 2000 it was incorporated in to English law.

Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life
 
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society

• in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country
• for the prevention of disorder or crime
• for the protection of health or morals, or
• for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Article 10 - Right to freedom of expression

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society

• in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety
• for the prevention of disorder or crime
• for the protection of health or morals
• for the protection of the reputation or rights of others
• for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or
• for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

Article 10 and Article 8 are in constant opposition with each other. Article 8 is what people will use against you and Article 10 is your defence.

The Princess Caroline of Monaco case in 2004 was a landmark ruling in favour of Article 8 and from then on photographers and journalists had to respect a right to privacy in a public places. She was being photographed in her daily life and not performing some public duty.

However - in 2012, Princess Caroline lost her latest press privacy fight. The ECHR ruled that that the contested photo of her and her husband walking along in a ski resort was in a public place, and that the lives of 'well-known figures' are of legitimate interest to the media.

The ruling tips the balance back from Article 8 to Article 10, and could present some very interesting common law to protect journalists for years to come.

Case study

The News of the World (RIP) published a story about Max Mosley taking part in a Nazi-themed sadomasochistic orgy with five ladies and put the secretly filmed footage (...ugh) on its website. Their source was one of those women who had taken part in the orgy.

Mosley said there was no Nazi theme and that the activities were all consensual and just a bit of a laugh, really. No harm done.

The judge ruled that the woman informant was in breach of her transitory duty of confidence that she owed to Max. He could not find any evidence of the Nazi allegations which he said would have been in the public interest if true, but that as it stood there was no public interest defence to justify the filming or the intrusion. The material was private and there was no good reason to publish it.

Mosley announced in 2008 that he would challenge the UK's privacy laws in the ECHR to make it compulsory for newspapers to notify someone before publishing private information about them. He said that no-one from the newspaper had sought comment from him and he hadn't had a chance to get an injunction.

Law 2: Investigative Journalism

Investigative journalism is the umbrella term for stories which have been initiated by journalists; it's about not sticking to the traditional news agenda mix of parliament, court, local government, and so on. To paraphrase Chris in our lecture: "We're not just on the treadmill of news, we get off it and make our own news."

Because of this, it's good to categorise investigations as 'news features' - features aren't scheduled, and neither are investigations. The only difference here is that news features would still be editorially led.

So, if you've got no agenda, then how do you come up with lines of investigation in the first place? Usually most big investigations flower from tip-offs or whistle-blowers within an organisation that know something crooked is going on and want the corruption to be exposed through an appropriate agency: you. You, the big, clever, handsome Hero Journalist.

However, lots of investigative journalism stems from a suspicion on the behalf of the journalist that something isn't quite right with a particular individual or organisation, and who then sets about to uncover the truth.

Chris used Louis Theroux and himself as examples of this kind of method. Both examples were pretty similar - investigations of the supposed re-branding of certain political groups.

While working on Michael Moore's TV Nation series, Louis Theroux thought he'd just mosey on along to a Klan meeting to see if their new-and-improved Kuddly Klansmen image actually had any truth to it. The KKK had been trying to claim that the old lynchin' days of yore were long gone, and instead they are simply a white civil rights group.

Theroux's meeting with them highlighted that they were, perhaps, taking creative liberties with the phrase 'civil rights' and that they were still racist idiots.

The premise of Chris's investigation for his book True Blue was similar. He said that he didn't quite believe that the Tories had succeeded in their supposed metamorphosis from a toffee nosed, cravat-wearing old boys club to... well, whatever they were meant to have changed in to. He and another journalist, Dave Matthews, went 'undercover' and signed up for a membership at a local Conservative club.

They found that Conservatives were mostly still cravat wearing.

Miscarriages of justice

"Who guards the guardians?"

Some of the best investigations were those that sought to uncover a miscarriage of justice. People find miscarriages of justice to be so incredibly mindblowing because it means that somewhere in the production line of justice, in the police or in the courts, something has gone horribly wrong.

While journalists have no legal or constitutional right to hold police accountable to mistakes or corruption, it's taken as a given that the press have a duty to do this. We can be the bloodhound, as well as the watchdog.

The Birmingham Six were six men who were convicted of bombing a pub while working for the Provisional IRA in 1975. Their convictions were later quashed by the Court of Appeal in 1991. World in Action broadcast a series of programmes throughout the 80s which cast serious doubts on the convictions of the six men who were then rotting away in prison; it is argued that without the interest World in Action drummed up in their case, that it would never have been reviewed by the Court of Appeal.

The evidence gap

The evidence gap is where all the good stuff happens.

In a civil court - the court that deals with libel - the standard of proof is 'on the balance of probability.'
In a criminal court, the standard of proof is 'beyond all reasonable doubt.'

It is in the gap between 'probably' and 'almost definitely' that investigative journalism flourishes.

A great example of this is the Daily Mail's front page about Stephen Lawrence - a teenager that was killed by a gang in 1993. Those accused at the time were never convicted, but the evidence against them was strong: strong enough that, should the Daily Mail have been sued for libelling these men as murderers, it was likely that a jury would rule in favour of the Mail. That's because based on the evidence available, they probably are murderers, and so their reputation is not being damaged by the Mail.

Remembering that it's 'probably', not 'definitely', is important. The investigation carried out by journalists should always be thorough, accurate and in the public interest. The evidence they come out with should be incredibly compelling, but it doesn't have to be so compelling as to be admissible in a criminal case because that is not our job.

We're not the police, we're not worrying about double jeopardy and getting a conviction. We don't need to convince the public that someone is guilty of wrongdoing beyond reasonable doubt because that isn't our duty. Our duty as journalists extends far enough to prove that corruption or hypocrisy is probably happening, but then we hand over to the authorities to do the rest.

Sometimes, the police will specifically tell you to write about someone who they know is a criminal but can't quite catch yet with their limited evidence, because the publicity can help to identify witnesses. If a eyewitness comes forward and is willing to testify, then a conviction becomes that much more likely and the police will feel braver to arrest and charge and a a known criminal.

Veronica Guerin

Veronica Guerin was an Irish crime reporter who was murdered in the pursuit of a story. As such, she's often thought of as a 'saint' of journalism, and with little wonder: even though she had previously received numerous death threats and had been hospitalised by the organised criminals she was trying to report on, she still kept at it and ended up being shot three times in the head for her trouble.

She had identified that the police and the local crime lords were in bed with each other, and so to prove this she started writing features asking why certain officers who were on > £13,000 per year and men with no declared income had such luxurious lifestyles.

This attracted extremely negative attention, but she was determined to expose the collaboration of the police and criminals in Ireland.

Subterfuge

Subterfuge is a method of obtaining evidence for a story by pretending you are someone else, and definitely not disclosing that you're a journalist. The most prevalent example is of 'hidden camera' footage that you'll regularly see on shows like Panorama. This is obviously quite unethical, and so before setting out to secretly film people you have to prove that you absolutely will not be able to cover this story without the footage. You also have to prove that it is conclusively in the public interest for you to do so.

The Secret Policeman is a great example of fantastic investigative journalism that used subterfuge - reporter Mark Daly spent 18 months of his life committing himself to becoming a police officer, and when he did he exposed the racist beliefs of his colleagues on camera. His piece was broadcast on Panorama in 2003.

He would have argued to his editor that you can't simply ring up the police and ask 'Hey, are you guys still racist?' - the secret filming would have been the only way to make the story work. It's in the public interest because no one wants racist police, and it was without malice because there was iron clad proof that the assertions Daly was making were true.

The thing Daly would have to have been careful about was not entrapping the officers in to saying racist things - he could only ever participate minimally in such conversations and not deliberate solicit such comment.

In summary, use of subterfuge must be:

• very much in the public interest
• without malice
• approved by the editor
• the only way to make a story viable