What’s your photo sharing strategy?

Posted on March 28, 2013 by wasim.ahmad at 7:48 pm

I spotted this infographic about the Twitter vs. Instagram wars and thought about it – I hate clicking through on the Instagram links on Twitter. I love looking at them inline on Facebook or on Instagram itself.

It wasn’t always this way – Instagram and Twitter used to be friends, and Instagram images would show up inline on Twitter. Then when Facebook bought Instagram, suddenly Twitter and Instagram couldn’t be friends anymore. Facebook wanted to funnel more traffic to its own properties, and so it dropped support for Twitter, forcing people to click through to Instagram. Take a look at the info in the graphic – more people on engaging on Facebook and Instagram. Less on Twitter.

Instagram and Twitter

Facebook won. The user lost.

When a company is blatantly user-unfriendly, such as Bank of America adding a debit card fee, or when Verizon decides to add a $2 “convenience fee” for online bill payments, the user backlash is palpable. So much so, that BoA decided to reverse the idea.

While this move isn’t a monetary issues, it’s certainly a mindshare issue. I realize that as much as I hate to admit it, Facebook has a lot of my mind – I’m on Instagram quite a bit these days. I still share Instagram photos to my Twitter feed, but it’s more a robotic act than anything else.

What’s your flow?

I end up posting to Instagram, then sharing it from there to Facebook and Twitter (which results in me having to remove a duplicate post from Facebook as my Twitter feed flows automatically into Facebook, but I do this instantly). While I wish I could share it in a nice format in Twitter, I don’t end up taking the extra time for embedding photos directly into Twitter, and I don’t want to have to create another archive of photos there.

What do you do? Do you not use one of the services? Do you do something else entirely? Do you Flickr?

Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Camera buying guide updated / D7100 released

Posted on March 26, 2013 by wasim.ahmad at 7:16 pm

The camera buying guide for student journalists has been updated again – a pair of new models from Nikon have hit the market since my last post, and I’ve expanded the list of microphone recommendations. I talk about the new Nikon releases (well, one of them anyway) below.

In the future I’m hoping to get my hands on a high-end Micro Four Thirds model soon to write up a decent look at one of those for journalism. I have limited experience with the Panasonic GH2 (My former student, Amanda Douville and I put together this piece on our high school summer camp with it) but I wouldn’t feel confident enough to do a full writeup after just one small video with it, so I’m holding off until I can get a GH3-caliber camera for review. I certainly felt like the GH2 had a lot to offer to the student journalist. Panasonic, want to help me out?

D7100 released

I’m highlighting this specifically out of the camera buying guide for a couple of very big reasons. Back in the day, I had a Nikon D300s that I loved very dearly. It had a professional autofocus system trickled down from the top Nikon model of the time, the D3. Nikon repeated this with their D7100 – essentially borrowing from the D4 with its autofocus system. Likewise, they also borrowed from the playbook of their professional camera from 2005, the D2x with another feature – the ability to “crop” the sensor and add a little bit of extra zoom to your lens in the process. This also increases the cameras burst rate to 7 frames per second from its usual 6. Both of these developments bode well for sports shooters, especially.

But for the student journalist, since that’s what the guide is about, the biggest news is the headphone jack. You can now monitor your audio live in the field. Finally. As far as I know, this is the lowest-price camera on the market to offer this feature, something that is critical for video.

DSLR shooters have been making do without this feature for a while. But now we don’t have to anymore.

I’ve added the D7100, and the new D5200 to the guide.

Check out the guide by clicking here!

R.I.P., Google Reader

Posted on March 21, 2013 by wasim.ahmad at 11:42 pm

Google Reader warns you of it’s impending death on login.

Ever hear of RSS feeds? No? I have. I use them all the time. You can add this site into an RSS reader and it will flow in the news, like magic.

But RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has a mindshare problem – it’s so transparent, so good at what it does (flowing news to you like e-mail, only better) that people forget it’s there after setting it up. In fact, I just realized that a redesign of this site I did a few months ago dropped the RSS feed from the menu – apparently even I, RSS’s biggest fan, forgot about it.

And that’s why Google is shutting down what is arguably the world’s most popular RSS reader – Google Reader. Starting July 1, it’s gone.

And that’s a scary thing.

You see – many will argue that Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ (ha!) are replacements – that people get the news delivered to them curated by their friends and groups they have “liked.” But that’s a poor substitute for RSS.

A shot of my RSS feed. You can see what I like to read about.

You see, RSS had no master, no curator. It was blind and impartial in the way it delivered updates from sites to your mailbox. You add the site, all the stories for the section you add come in. You can group sites into folders and read all of the news from those sites in one convenient place. It wasn’t elegant for sites, which in some ways (good headline and nut graf-writing) had to work that much harder to drive traffic directly to the site, but in many cases, it would also result in more click-throughs to the parent site where there would have been none at all. In the end, the user wins. The site wins. Everyone wins.

Except Google Reader, I suppose.

You see, Google Reader was great. I loved Google Reader. But I can’t remember the last time I logged in before today. That’s because Google Reader suffers a similar sort of fate that brick-and-mortar stores face against large online retailers – people only walk in to window shop. While that’s not an entirely accurate analogy, it’s close. I can bet that many journalists who are carping about its death treated Google Reader the way I did – which is to say that I loaded up all of my favorite sites into it, then connected the account with my favorite RSS readers on my other devices (Feedler – which apparently already has a plan B - and Flipboard), never to look at Reader again until I needed to add things. No wonder the number of people actually logging into Reader was so low – it did its job so well you didn’t even remember it was doing it.

There’s now about to be a number of apps rendered useless by this move. And there are a number of apps that are rising up to take Google Reader’s place on the throne of RSS (which I think still means that RSS has a chance). I hope that the new caretakers of RSS (metaphorically speaking) figure out how to explain to the general public how important this technology is, so that the next time there’s a sea change in how we consume news, it won’t just be the journalists complaining.

Stay tuned for a look at some of the RSS alternatives. Looks like I’m in the market for a new RSS reader myself.

Under the category of “Better late than never”

Posted on March 21, 2013 by wasim.ahmad at 12:47 am

It’s been quite a while since the last post – and I wrestled with the idea of just posting and moving on as if nothing happened, but in the name of full disclosure, I’ll offer an explanation. It might be lame, but it’s an explanation.

I don’t normally veer into such personal territory on Journographica, but here goes …

First, we bought a house. For the first time. Had no idea what we were getting into. Or how much work it would be. So there’s that.

Second, I’ve been working on this, my new panorama/cellphone/whatever-ography site:

Phonescapes Blog

Not quite sure where I am going with it yet – I needed a space for the fun panoramas and cell phone photos (and other random shots) that I take, but that aren’t necessarily for the portfolio. I also needed a space to teach myself a few new code tricks. Go ahead and check it out, and please let me know if things aren’t working for you!

Some other housekeeping notes. I also worked on this piece for iMediaEthics:

iMediaEthics – AFP doesn’t care about names for captions.

It’s a follow up to a piece by NPR’s Coburn Dukehart, where she examines how a woman felt about not even being asked by journalists for her name.

And then there’s this piece. Where iMediaEthics held a photographer’s feet to the fire about calling my student an Occupy Wall Street protestor, when she was nothing of the sort. She was there covering the event as a journalist for my class:

iMediaEthics – Getty calls student journalist an OWS protestor.

So – I guess we’re all caught up then? Good.

Back to business then.

2012: The year in photos

Posted on December 31, 2012 by wasim.ahmad at 3:26 pm

While this year ended up (for the shooting I did, anyway) being mostly about both Hurricane Sandy and Occupy Wall Street, there were a few quieter moments in the year.

The Freedom Tower in the city saw a ton of progress this year, but in January it was still a tiny thing (comparatively speaking, of course):

A composite photo made form six images of the under-construction Freedom Tower on January 16, 2012. Photo by Wasim Ahmad.

Then Occupy Wall Street marked 6 months. I offered extra credit to my students to cover it and so they did, turning the city into their newsroom – this was the start of more experiential journalism workshops later in the year.

Police arrest Occupy Wall Street demonstrators during a protest at Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park on Saturday, March 17, 2012. The Occupy Wall Street Movement marked six months with a march on Wall Street followed by a gathering at Zuccotti Park, where protestors gathered for the first time for the movement on Sept. 17, 2011. Photo by Wasim Ahmad.

Occupy Wall Street Protestors gather at Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park on the evening of Saturday, March 17, 2012. The Occupy Wall Street Movement marked six months with a march on Wall Street followed by a gathering at Zuccotti Park, where protestors gathered for the first time for the movement on Sept. 17, 2011. Photo by Wasim Ahmad.

And after the protestors got removed from Zuccotti Park, they made Union Square their new home. They weren’t kidding with their chants of “This is what a police state looks like.” – there was a wall of police closing off the park each night for a while:

Occupy Wall Street protestors made Union Square in Manhattan their new base of operations after being removed from Zuccotti Park on the six-month anniversary of the protests. For weeks, police would close off the park at midnight to keep the protestors from staying overnight. This particular night was moments after midnight on March 24. Photo by Wasim Ahmad.

More photos from the six-month anniversary can be found here.
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The Daily bites the dust

Posted on December 20, 2012 by wasim.ahmad at 5:02 pm

So my favorite punching bag from the early days of Journographica, The Daily, has finally bit the dust.

The final issue featured an animated pile of iPads with The Daily covers.

A bold experiment launched February 2011 by News Corp., The Daily was supposed to be an iPad-exclusive news “magazine.”

Despite my criticism, I really was hoping it worked – techno-luddites like me were waiting for a magazine we could take on our iPads, and the touches of interactive graphics and variety gave me some hope that it might actually succeed.

But while the platform and look finally got there after an update in July 2011, the content never did. Never felt like I was reading anything exclusive. Everything I read in The Daily I could have read elsewhere, for free. Often, the stories were even chopped down wire service pieces that gave me less than I could elsewhere. And I paid 99 cents for it per week.

Stories like this one often populated the news section – and I’m perplexed as to why. Am I missing something? This one is from Dec. 4, 2012.

Oh, and even towards the very end, they were still doing the dog stories I lamented at launch. Click on the image of the article on the right and tell me that’s something befitting a news magazine seeking a national audience.

The Daily also existed in its own black hole on the Internet – articles lived in the app until you updated, and then they disappeared forever unless I had thought to clip them. Would it be terrible to provide an online archive? Or even use the Web at all, as more than a link to the Apple App Store?

Ultimately, while I paid for both, the New York Times got the lion’s share of my attention – because it didn’t merely repeat the news I could read elsewhere – it expanded on it with its own brilliant original coverage – a little less interactive on my iPad, but that doesn’t matter when the words and images are so good.

So the lesson here is this: content is still king.

The platform and app built by The Daily team seems like a winner – now, finally at the end – I just hope someone picks up the bones and invests in some good reporters to use them.

Freelancer who shot death photos in NY Post should release his RAW files

Posted on December 5, 2012 by wasim.ahmad at 12:15 am

The New York Post wrote this headline over a photo of a man about to be hit by a train – on their front page.

The New York Post’s Dec. 4 cover photo showed a man seconds from his death at the wheels of an NYC Subway train. Throughout the day, there was near-universal condemnation from the social mediaverse (and, well, the universe) of the actions of the photographer, and the decision-makers at the Post who chose to run the photo with the headline “DOOMED: Pushed on the subway track, this man is about to die.”

Let’s get this one out: this is a poor choice to run as a cover photo, and an even more insensitive choice of headline. This cover should have never made it past a copy desk – or even the headline-writer’s brain.

But the jury is still out on the photographer.

Some background: ~~Ki Suk Han~~ Ki-Suck Han (The initial reports in the Post had his name wrong), of Queens, was thrown onto the tracks on Monday afternoon by a man who had been threatening people on the subway platform. According to the The New York Post, the freelance photographer, R. Umar Abbasi, happened to be on the scene (along with many others), but was unable to help the man. He says that he would not have been able to lift the man off the tracks, so he instead “… ran toward the train, repeatedly firing off his flash to warn the operator.”

It didn’t work, and the train hit and killed Han. Abbasi was left with images that will haunt him for life in his head – and, apparently, in his camera.

I won’t judge the photographer’s actions – the common storyline is that there’s no telling how much time he had to save the man.

Except that there is.

The video accompanying the story on The Post’s website shows several photos from Abbasi. Whenever a camera takes a photo, it embeds a ton of information into the file – shooting settings, camera serial numbers and – most importantly – a timestamp. These attributes cannot be changed easily. Even if the time setting is wrong, examining the files would reveal the amount of time he actually had.

A message for the photographer

A Twitter search for #NYPOST Tuesday night reveals the amount of venom spewing toward the NY Post and Abbasi – similar conversations dotted Facebook.

So, Mr. Abbasi – stop letting the internet turn you into a villain. Release the RAW files from your camera to the internet, and let the world see where you were standing. Show us the entire string of photos. Let us into your head and see what you shot leading up to Han’s death.

Let the photos, their timestamps and – I hope – the truth, clear your name.

Rockaway ripped apart by Sandy: The news in your backyard

Posted on November 13, 2012 by wasim.ahmad at 10:45 am

John Morris, of Astoria, rests Sunday, Nov. 11, 2012 on what’s left of the Rockaway Beach Boardwalk after helping clean out the homes of other Rockaway residents, including his cousin’s down the block. Superstorm Sandy, coupled with high tide, brought seawater racing through the whole town from the Atlantic Ocean to Jamaica Bay, and almost two weeks later, residents were still cleaning up the mess left behind. “Send us a Tide truck,” Morris said, describing the struggles for people to keep clean in the area. He said it was easier to get donated new clothes than to clean the ones he was wearing, with power and most services out for the entire area. Photo by Wasim Ahmad.

The setting for James Cameron’s short-lived Dark Angel television series is a United States circa 2019 that’s been rocked by an electromagnetic pulse. Anything electronic is fried as a result. Dead cars and debris line the streets. Seattle, the main setting for the show, looks like a shadow of its former self.

Add in a generous helping of sand – everywhere – and much the same can be said for Rockaway, N.Y., after Superstorm Sandy roared through almost two weeks ago.

Frank Gombos, a 32-year Rockaway resident sits Sunday, Nov. 11, 2012 outside his apartment building on what’s left of the Rockaway Beach Boardwalk. Gombos decided to ride out Superstorm Sandy by watching the beach from the lobby of his building, and he said that two waves caused the damage to the boardwalk – the first one loosening it from its cement moorings, and the second one tossing it against the side of his building. Photo by Wasim Ahmad.

Rockaway’s famous boardwalk looks as if it had been lifted from its cement foundation, rolled up like a newspaper and tossed against the buildings lining the beach.

Resident Frank Gombos, a 32-year resident of the Rockaways said he saw the whole thing happen from the lobby of his building over looking the water. He watched, he said, as the first major wave brought on by high tide and fierce winds shook the boardwalk from its supports, and then again as the next wave pushed it into his building. He stayed when most others evacuated.

Rockaway is on a peninsula just south of Brooklyn, bordered on the north by Jamaica Bay and on the south by the Atlantic Ocean. Were it not for the large sand piles and sanitation trucks blocking the way, you can drive the entire north-south portion of the area in about 5 minutes.

Rockaway residents Claire Conti and Meaghan McHugh sit Sunday, Nov. 11, 2012 on what’s left of the Rockaway Beach Boardwalk. Photo by Wasim Ahmad.

Aside from Rockaway, the= peninsula includes Breezy Point, which lost more than 100 homes to a fire during the height of Sandy’s wrath, and Roxbury, where I was earlier in the month. The area is amongst the hardest hit by the storm.

The area is still without power. Relief workers pour in to deliver food, clothes and supplies to Rockaway residents. St. Francis de Sales Parish in the neighboring Belle Harbor community has become a makeshift relief center, offering food, clothing and a warming tent where people can get recovery information.
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Lindenhurts: The news in your backyard

Posted on November 4, 2012 by wasim.ahmad at 9:27 pm

A boat sits in front of a house Lindenhurst, N.Y. on Saturday, Nov. 3, 2012. The boat belonged to one of the neighbors. The area was one of the hardest-hit on Long Island after Hurricane Sandy rolled through the area on Monday. Many homes in the area flooded and some were declared unsafe to live in. Residents spent Saturday removing their belongings before dusk, as the area was still without power.

That headline isn’t a typo.

With Hurricane Sandy hitting so close to home, the entirety of Long Island is now, unfortunately, our news backyard. On Saturday, myself and Newsday shooter (and School of Journalism adjunct professor) Jessica Rotkiewicz traveled to our literal backyard – Lindenhurst.

We started in North Lindenhurst, scoping out the gas situation – lines a half-mile long, waits of up to three hours in some cases, and peoples’ patience tested as they waited to see if they were one of the lucky ones to get gas. The scene across the Island was grim – people would shut down their cars after gas ran out and just wait for the next shipment. Usually a police officer or state trooper was hovering near many stations.
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Hurricane Sandy destroys Roxbury: The news in your backyard

Posted on November 1, 2012 by wasim.ahmad at 11:59 pm

Homes lie in a tangled pile of rubble in Roxbury, N.Y. on Thursday, Nov. 1, 2012. Hurricane Sandy blew through through the area on Monday, bringing with it high winds and flooding for residents in the Roxbury neighborhood of Queens. By Thursday, there was still no power to the area and residents were busy cleaning up the mess the storm left behind.

The eyes of the world are on Breezy Point, N.Y., after the community lost 111 homes in a devastating fire at the height of Hurricane Sandy.

And so it was with that in mind I went out to Breezy Point from Stony Brook – I wanted to see the firsthand what Sandy’s wrath was, and tell the story in pictures.
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Visuals, Journalism and Visual Journalism