Iteration the Second

(Reposted from our website)

This one comes up quite frequently on the courses I teach. The snappy answer (sorry) is: around 1/250th of a second at F5.6. If you take a photo, and someone buys it, then voila!, you are a pro. The trick lies in finding the someone willing to pay you. If your shot is of, say, Elvis riding Shergar down Glastonbury High Street you will retire in utter luxury (or should demand your money back from whoever sold you the mushrooms). A seventeen-year-old amateur recently earned around £20,000 for his shot of a car used in a failed bombing in London; this was a poor quality picture taken on an ordinary phone. The point of it, and what made it so valuable, was its rarity. It was news. And news sells.

Most things, though, are not news. Your dog is not news (unless it bites Elvis), nor your baby (ditto), even if it is the most beautiful in the world (and it is!). Even things that are news are not news if you don't have your camera with you, and know how to use it. Although the more excitable tabloids may be persuaded run a story about the aliens that landed in your back garden to ask directions to Venus, real newspapers will only be interested if you can supply evidence. Contrary to popular belief, we who eke our living hacking away at the word-face go to great lengths to ensure that what we write is, well, right. I'm not saying fakery doesn't happen, because it does. But - witness what happened recently to the Express and the Star in the 'Maddy' case - papers that try it get brought before the Beak. Journalists have been jailed for fabricating stories, and quite right too.

And so it is with pictures. These days, I rarely feel the need to bite anyone but have been known to grow distinctly tetchy when people suggest that a picture of mine owes more to Photoshop than my ability to drive a camera. Sure photos are Photoshopped - they have to be, in the same way that back in the Stone Age pictures had to be processed by fumbling about for endless hours in a smelly, sweaty dark-room using poisonous chemicals (care to guess which I prefer?).

And yes, it is now easier to fake photos than it used to be, but then photos have always been susceptible to a touch of judicious tweakery - do you think those Hollywood types from the Thirties really looked that good?

A photo in a newspaper does the same job as all those words. It tells the story. It helps to sell the paper. And - important point this - it will be as accurate a representation as we can make it.

So can you become a press-snapper? There is no reason why not. Photography isn't inherently difficult, but it does take time, dedication, attention to detail, a desire to stand around on cold, muddy football pitches and so forth, as well as a good eye, and the field is extremely competitive (as well as crowded), but as long as there are newspapers, there will be news photographers. And that's going to be a long time.

Jon Ryan

Edited by: Moderator on 28-Aug-2008 16:23