Toning

All images need to have a true black and a true white. If printing in a dark room, this is one of the first elements you will be searching for. All digital images require toning. A big reason for this is the digital photography does not have the tonal range of film. Until we have digital cameras with true 64mega pixels (Although, I’ve heard it said that megapixels are a lie. I don’t know. This is the quick guide.)

Basic toning then, is giving a true black and a true white. I start this process by increasing the brightness and the blacks in my Raw Processing stage, but when I look again, I never find what I have done sufficient. So I go into my curves. And increase the blacks and the whites. I tend to do far more with the blacks than the whites. The curves themselves tell you where to go.

See where the curve starts on the left hand side? That’s the beginning of the blacks. You have to move your tonal marker here. See where the curve ends. That’s where the whites end. Thus, to have a true black and a true white, you need to have the photo’s curve begin at the beginning of the whites, and end at the end of the whites. I do like to crush the blacks a bit – go a little further, to make the image even richer and counteract the washing out effect of the web. I also tend to pull down at the center point a little to give a bit more contrast as well.

Saturation

The web desaturates your images and videos. To counter this, it’s a good idea to boost the saturation of your images. Many of the best photographers do this regularly, and even to extreme. It’s a common contest related complaint that all the images are oversaturated. Those who win, however, tend to be oversaturated. I don’t know what to do with that. I’m noting it here but not worrying about it. Maybe it’s just the same as using Velvia. I say do what you think is right and don’t ever forget about your subject.

Regardless of the controversy, you, with your images and video on the web, will need saturation to even make things look right.

Images in Final Cut and the Web

Color profiles are incredibly important. You need to use the correct one for the color space in which you are going to be in, or you will lose all the beautiful adjustments you have made. When printing, nearly every paper type for each different printer has it’s own specific profile. That’s how important profiles are. There can be slight shifts in color and toning (very minor) when you make the transition, so if your image has only one destination, you should change the profile before making toning and saturation adjustments.

For Final Cut, you need to be in Apple RGB.

For the web, sRGB.

You can change the color profile by going to Edit > convert to Profile. Then you must select the appropriate profile.

You can also set the profile as you are Raw processing in Photoshop. The option is located at the bottom of the Raw dialogue box, where one is able to set the image size settings. Apple RGB is not an available choice here so you will have to convert later or investigate as to whether there is a way to add that to the options. (I’m guessing there is, but have never attempted).

Mac vs. PC

Mac’s have lighter screens than PC’s. This means your work will be lighter on a Mac than a PC. Thus, for a Mac, you’ll have to do more saturation and have more contrast (contrast is what you create with toning.) I would hazard to say the majority of people in this industry use Mac’s. The overwhelming majority of the users in the world, however, use PC’s. I’ve never seen anyone do cross platform testing with their videos or photos. I guess the question is, are you creating for the general public, or the multimedia/photographic community?

Another photo that I would like to share

The below was the first example I worked on. To be fair, the Canon 5d MKII, in good light, has incredible tone and saturation, especially coupled with a polarizing filter, which means this made a poor example to try to explain a fault of tone and saturation. I would still do all of the steps noted, but to a novice, it would be hard to understand why. This was taken on the now closed train route between Mendoza, Argentina and Los Andes, Chile. Nacho and I played a lot of pass the camera that day, so neither of us can say definitively who took it. It is undeniably beautiful.

Final Note – Expect More

There will be a part two to this post in the coming weeks. It will feature video color correcting screen shots from Final Cut, save for web and other instructional elements.

Here is a link to a very long discussion talking about tonal ranges with lots of graphs and charts comparing film to the now ancient 10D (my first camera.) It makes me feel guilty for crushing blacks, but Ansel Adams made huge prints for galleries and walls in homes, not the World Wide Web.

Compression is important. It’s how one gets video on the web without the use of intermediaries like Youtube or Vimeo. It tends to be a theme on which little time is spent in the classroom. Typically, in projects, someone who knows a lot gives you some settings that you plug into a given program. Or, even more likely, you hand off your full MOV to someone else, who compresses it for you.

This situation, however wonderful, becomes rarer and rarer in that real world. Here, I present you a simple series of steps to compress in the easiest (and least expensive) program I’ve used – QuicktimePro. This same thing can be done directly from Final Cut, but as it’s a good idea to always have a full res version of your finished projects for future exports, and because sometimes Final Cut gets screwy and takes eons to compress, I like to do it in Quicktime.

Note, there are other programs that do this. Squeeze, to my knowledge, is the best. It’s also roughly $5000 $799 (thanks for the correction @phildaquila). It is using the same set of variables, but has somewhat better programming which produce more refined results. We used Squeeze in Andaman Rising and Powering a Nation. The results are a little less shiny and nice in quicktime, but entirely reasonable.

What you are doing is making an flv – a Flash video, which is how most of the video in the web is encoded. This is likely to change in the coming years to mp4 with the adoption across browsers to HTML5, as Apple is refusing to allow the Flash plugin necessary on either the ipad or iphone. For now, as only Safari is ready for HTML5, we’ve got some time to go with Flash video.

What you’re doing is trying to create a balance between a refined, beautiful video and file size. The bigger the file, the more difficult it is for people to see it due to the slowness of their internet connection. When in doubt, err on the side of smaller file size. I’ve been hovering around 8mb per minute, for my La Tercera work, it seems to work well. People leave sites whose videos don’t play. (81% of web users will leave a web page if the video starts buffering midstream.)

Open your video in Quicktime. In quicktime, select file>export.

In the export dialog, choose movie to Flash Video (flv).

Go into your options. Go to video settings.

Video codec should be On2 VP6. Make sure deinterlace is checked if you used a camera with interlacing (1080i60, for example – the i is for interlace.) Data rate, frame rate and key frame intervals are the ones you can play with. You can see from our screen shot what we’ve been using. Data rate will be the first one you’ll want to raise for better quality.

Go to audio settings. Put audio – 80kbps

Crop and Resize – whatever size you need. Make sure to have maintain aspect ration checked.

That’s it. Hit ok. Hit export. Depending on the length of your original video and your computer’s processor, in 20 minutes to an hour, you will have a flash video. A little box will tell you how much time remains.

What’s nice is that quicktime does remember your most recent settings. You can return and return, and keep using the same export settings. I am happy to discuss further what some of the options in the video dialog mean, but, I’ve found that for most, it’s not relevant to most people. Results, not explanations.

The above photos are from a project I did about the beginning of school in Santiago – how both children and parents are coping. It has nothing to do with the rest of the post, but is fulfilling our always visuals rule. The post itself talks about an unpublished piece, which will not appear in the blog until the publishing. The only hint on the visuals of that piece is the thumbnail.

So the other night, it was getting late and I was needing some music for a piece. I was working on a story about the damage to the Chile’s cultural heritage by the earthquake that occurred Feb. 27.

Music creates an internal conflict for me. I have been trying to steer away from music, as I tend to collect an abundance of ambient audio, and it makes me feel like less of a journalist to use music. I have heard that its use is forbidden in serious papers like the Washington Post and maybe even the New York Times. On the other hand, music can be wonderful. It’s nice to watch things with music. We’re accustomed to seeing it in television and movies. On the other, other hand, in Chile, they even play it in their broadcast news. I heard Sarah McLachlan playing during the reporting of the death and funeral of a young boy who had rejected a heart transplant. As well, the early entries to this year’s Project Report nearly all had heavy, narrative drowning emotional music. Blah. I don’t want to be a music user like that.

But, this piece needed it. I was using a combination of images from my own shooting, the work of other staff photographers at La Tercera and the Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales. I was the only one who recorded any ambient. Plus, the piece was long. These days, I don’t like to go over 2, 2 and a half minutes. I feel like it’s discourteous to the viewer. I dislike being bored. I don’t want to do the same to others. Additionally, the piece was full of buildings. It’s hard to connect with a building, even if it is pretty and old.

As I said, it was late. Or maybe early. I’ve been trading in my late nights for early mornings. It’s arguably more productive. My interview track was set. Nearly all of the images were in place. I went to the free soundtrackpro first but I couldn’t commit to it as I feel that as a source, it’s kind of tapped. I moved to Jamendo. I like the site because although the search isn’t super, it’s inexpensive, you don’t have to deal with a customer rep, and you can download and try all of their music free in the normal (as opposed to pro) section.

The story was for the Bicentenario (200th anniversary of Chile’s independence or declaration of independence more accurately). I felt like I should use something traditional, but I don’t know very much about traditional Chilean music. There is the cueca, a large, kind of complex, percussion heavy music. There were a number of reasons not to use the cueca. Firstly, it would have dominated my piece. Secondly, I was looking for something with the precise mixture of sadness and hopefulness – building were destroyed, but Chile’s strength is in her people. I doubted I would be able to find such a cueca. Finally, even if I did find the cueca that could convey these things, it was not going to be on Jamendo. Licensing some obscure cueca band would provide a whole new series of challenges.

It came to four songs. I found a song with something of a folk sounding theme, done by a Chilean group, although to my ear, it sounded more Caribbean than Chilean (Catalina Parra). Other searches gave me: one very bold, march sounding tune by a Spanish group (Quisiera ser Sol para iluminar) one simple, quasi classical piano tune, and finally (Hope), one electronic song, that captured the emotion but I was doubtful it would fit with the theme of bicentenario that my editors sought (Exponential Tears).

The Spanish, with their big, 18th century military march type song, was ruled out quickly, as it was the Spanish the Chileans were fighting. Although I might be the only one who would know, it still seemed inappropriate.

With the last three I struggled. Hope was what you expect to hear in a multimedia piece – simple piano playing. Catalina Parra hinted at the folk past of Chile. Exponential Tears, I just liked. It was edgier, more modern. It did not hint at the past, but emotionally, it conveyed what I was looking for without being heavy handed.

So, struggling, and struggling, I listened to the songs over and over again. Each time I heard a particular song, I thought, “this one, definitely this one.” Then I’d return to listen to another, with a repeat of “this one, definitely this one.”

And then, inspiration. It began with Papyrus. I thought, if the folksy song were to be any font, it would be Papyrus – very obvious, and not necessarily speaking to the actual moment. Then, bam, if Catalina Parra is the Papyrus choice for this project, Hope would be Times New Roman. Just blah. Functional and not in your face, but nothing that will spark anything up. OK, so then, Exponential Tears would have to be Interstate – modern and sleek, but no so much so that it is irritating. A font elegant for it’s simplicity, but beyond the basic Helvetica. A font, were this video to be a website, I’d be proud to use. And so, I chose Interstate, ie Exponential Tears.

Some links, for exploration…

On fonts – Nacho found this really fun chart the other day. Each time I look at it, I find something new to make me chuckle.

On music – MediaStorm has written a guide to choosing and working with music.

This is the video that makes me curse the 24-hour news cycle. I understand the cycle. I understand the attention span. We want to know now what is happening, and once we’ve gathered sufficient information, we move onto another theme. I do it. I am incredibly and shamefully decisive with my attention span. I couldn’t tell you how much time I spent on the Haiti earthquake, which in terms of loss of life and, likely, destruction, was far graver. I don’t remember reading more then one story about the earthquake last year in China.

That said, that this video’s viewership will be appallingly low as here and on Nacho’s website are the only places it is published, this breaks my heart. The reason for this is that by the time the video was done and seen, nearly a week had passed since the earthquake. We shot it on Tuesday and Wednesday after the quake. It was an incredible turnaround. Nevertheless, the public’s appetite had been sated by the instant broadcast world.

Photojournalism, documentary photojournalism, visual journalism, is an incredibly invasive form of journalism. It requires absolute entrance into another’s life. If I don’t have something on tape or compact flash, it doesn’t exist. In general, I am surpassingly respectful of other people’s privacy. For me, the reason I am able and willing to intrude upon another’s life, so to speak, is that the topic matter is that important. Their story needs to be seen. People are willing to let us journalists into their lives, because the idea is that telling their story will help change the situation. In a situation like this, it may help bring aid. These people very much need aid. In not getting their story told, I feel I am betraying my part of the bargain.

But you are seeing it. That is a start. You will know that among the large cities that the earthquake brought low, too, there was a tiny seaside hamlet by the name of Perales that the ocean came and washed away. You will witness one man’s grief as he sees his destroyed house for the very first time. You will see the woman who fled from the waves without shoes. And you will meet the old man who calls his survival the greatest miracle of his life.

About the video, it was shot and edited by both Nacho and I, Eileen.

After this, we went to various places in Talca to try to understand what the residents were experiencing. We began at a large empty plot near central Talca where people afraid to return to their homes founded a campamento. We went to the center of the city, where the destruction was the worst. We found vast lines of people for every open service – gas, water, pharmacy. Piñera, then the president elect, passed by in his motorcade. For the residents of Talca, the hardest part may have been having no communication with the outside world. They knew they had survived, but had no knowledge of their relatives. Following this concern, there was a great neat for everything for which people formed lines – water, pharmacies, and gas.

When communications fail it’s really hard to deliver your material to your contractors. Yes, digital media helps in capturing and editing material far faster than traditional media, but also consumes an enormous amount of power (laptop and camera batteries) and requires a steady data connection in order to transmit, which was non-existent at the time.

(Photos at the end of the post)

When communications fail it’s really hard to deliver your material to your contractors. Yes, digital media helps in capturing and editing material far faster than traditional media, but also consumes an enormous amount of power (laptop and camera batteries) and requires a steady data connection in order to transmit, which was non-existent at the time.

Power, if you need it, beg for it.
There’s always someone who’s been cautious enough to have a generator.

Just look for the only light on in town, head that way and explain them. Here’s why they will let you, probably no one has been able to send info or material to their editors, because no one in the rest of the country knows how that area is doing, and so getting that info ASAP could mean faster help to that town.

Power, saving battery life while editing
I love my Macbook Pro. It’s not the latest model, but the battery is supposed to last for 3 hours.  You probably know that’s not true, especially when editing video.

So, a few tips:
- Turn off your Wi-fi (if on, it looks for connection, wasting a lot of battery), dim the screen light, remove any peripherals you don’t need, turn off keyboard lights and make your fans go off when your computer really needs them (using Fan Control)

- When editing your interviews, turn off the video layer, just listen to it, since your shot is on a tripod, you don’t need that. When editing B-roll, don’t play it, just scroll through your material or hit on different spots of the timeline, you’ll get enough info to do the cuts.

- Rendering. It’s a bitch. Avoid any effects or multilayering to avoid it. If you have to render, turn off your screen to save some juice, same as when exporting. Just listen to your computer, you’ll hear your fans slow down when done exporting or rendering.

Photos (I love my Iphone, Part 1)
As I said before, having no cellphone coverage sucks. But here’s the thing. When coverage fails, sometimes data still works. Don’t know the reason, but sometimes it does. Also, looking for high spots, might give you a bit of coverage, enough to do the following:

- Ingest your photos in your computer, process them and save them in your pictures folder. Plug in your Iphone, open Itunes and turn off all syncing options BUT the picture folder. Sync it and you’ll have the photos in your phone, Itunes optimizes them and makes them 640X480. I know, small, but you know what? Files are really small and your editors will have those photos before anyone else.

Once done, select them all and email them. The minute you get some sort of reception, your files will be sent.  I spent almost 3 hours in Talca and surroundings looking for coverage until I got EDGE network at around 4am.

Remember that cellphones use radio waves so, a clear night and no interference can help those waves get further. I went to the same spot later that day and got nothing.

Be sure to have your Iphone configured to send BCC to your email, that way you’ll know if it arrived to its destination

Audio (I love my Iphone, Part 2)

I’m fully surprised. The iphone mic rules. Quality is superb even for getting ambient audio. Conduct your interviews, spell the subject names and that’s it. Just be sure to look at the timer, because the phone has a 2 minutes maximum per clip to be sent over cellphone. When done, email it or ingest to your computer, edit the material and follow the instructions for the photos and voilá. The minute you get coverage, your email will go on its way.

NOTE: Be sure to keep your phone in airplane mode when doing this, just turn it on when looking for coverage or in a point where you know there’s coverage.

Data

Graphics people need it. So gather as much as you can, streets, exact addresses, area affected, length of , for example, the earthquake, how far did the wave reached, how tall it was, etc. This would be enough for them in order to create a map. Google maps can be used to look for the addresses and find exact places.

Again, write an email with all of it, when you get coverage, it’ll be sent.

Free Wi-Fi

One night I was lucky enough someone had set up a free antenna. Ask the Police, Fire Station or Radios, even people in the street.

But remember, what once worked, doesn’t mean it will be there again.

Ethics

Please, please, please, follow the rules. Respect people above all. Believe me, they will cooperate, they want their story told. The faster and better it reaches the media, the more help they’ll receive because eyes will be on that community.

Toning Images: I got disgusted when coming back home and seeing over-toned photos, for example, bringing earth tones up and removing shadows and adding light. Really, your job is to report and submit ASAP in order to inform about the situation. Be fair with the people. It’s already dramatic to lose your belongings and sometimes lives of people you love, believe me, you don’t need to add “drama” to your photos.

Report accurately: You owe it to the people. Don’t over dramatize. Just heard in a video a reporter say that “the smell of death” was starting to be felt underneath the rubble in Talca downtown. I was there, in the exact same street where he did his report and no one died. In fact, no one died in several streets around. I’m not completely certain, but I’m almost sure no one did in Talca’s downtown.

So please, don’t exaggerate and report properly. Can you imagine having your family living in the area and watching a video that mentions that “you can smell decomposing flesh in the air”?

What the difficulties were and what the difficulties weren’t in this assignment surprised me. Shooting was easy. People saw us with cameras and they wanted to talk – they wanted what they were experiencing to be seen. Visuals were everywhere. The greatest challenge, and something I never thought of before were the logistics. The earthquake had knocked out all of the power. Gas stations weren’t operating or full of people trying to get fuel for vehicles and generators. How would we able to get back and forth? By Nacho’s calculations, we had exactly enough gas to get there and back in ideal conditions – but, what about traffic, detours, any extra driving? How would we be able to edit on a shared Macbook with at most an hour and a half of battery power? How would we be able to get our images back to the home offices? 100km north of Talca, not even our phones were working. We couldn’t even speak with the offices, let alone send huge video files.

Firstly, gas. The morning after the quake, every gas station in Santiago had lines of at least 10 cars. Luckily, Nacho had filled his car the day before. Nevertheless, the whole way to Talca, Nacho was calculating how many more miles we had on the current tank of gas and when we would absolutely have to stop to insure that we could get home. Any open gas station had long lines, but we could never be sure that there would be another open further down the road.

As well, traffic was very, very heavy. There were points where the bulk of the traffic was turning around and returning home. Each time, we had to ask ourselves whether we thought it would be possible to continue through or whether this barricade would prevent us completely from continuing. We continued.

As we neared Talca, there was a major rerouting through a small town named San Rafael. The Carabineros’ office had suffered major damage.  (Carabineros are essentially the police.) While the building still stood, much had fallen from it and the non-structural walls had collapsed. Outside, a group of men were talking. At Nacho’s urging, we stopped. We took video and photos of the place.

Nacho began to speak to the men. As it turned out, many of them were Carabineros, but their uniforms were buried beneath the rubble. We explained what we were doing, and they volunteered another individual in the group, a teacher at a local school, to accompany us with our work. It was 9pm at this time and the light was fading. We warned him that we would likely not sleep, but he was unfazed. “I didn’t sleep last night either,” he said, and he became an invaluable companion and friend for the rest of the time in Talca.

The first place he took us was a campamento of people from San Rafael. They’d moved their kitchen table into a field, and set up tents and a tarp. By this time, it was dark. I could shoot nothing with my video camera nor with the 7D. The only thing visible was the camp fire.

The second place he took us was the hospital. Here, there was light. We asked the doctor whether we could shoot in the patient area. His response was that under normal circumstances, there would be no chance. This, however, was a disaster, and people needed to see it. Thus, we were allowed in.

Finally, we went throughout the city, looking for damage. Again, I lacked sufficient light. The power was out throughout the town. The moon was full, and the eye was able to the see; the video sensors, alas, cannot. I shot some, using car lights or a small flash light, but still, it was frustrating. The jail had a working generator, and the lights were on there. Part of a major wall had fallen, and armed men were guarding it, trying to prevent the detainees from escaping as they did in Conception. (Roughly 216 are still missing from Conception’s jail.) It was there I got my most usable outside footage.

After this, Enrique mentioned that his friend had a generator. We were invited there to charge our batteries. It happened his friend also had a butcher shop, and a huge asado going. We were fed large pieces of meat until we could not eat a bit more, and then spent the evening in this courtyard, editing on their terrace, under a grape arbor as the aftershocks came every hour to half hour. (Aftershocks, another thing this Michigan girl knew nothing about. And, the only food we’d brought with us was a pack of cookies. If these people had not fed us, we would not have eaten.)

Nacho left with Enrique and his friend, and I was left to edit my hospital story at 3 am. They drove for a good hour and a half searching for a wireless signal. By chance, they found one, and Nacho managed to upload his photos from his iphone. They also filled up the gas tank. There are no lines at 3 am. I finished editing at 6.30 – two stories – the fastest I’ve ever done in my life.

At 7, we went with Enrique to refind the wireless signal but it had vanished. We went to the radio station. The director had a thumb internet drive. He agreed to let us use it for five minutes. It was the station’s only link to outside news. It took me 30 minutes to send an 8mb file and Nacho another 15 to resend 8 photos, as the iphone had compressed the images at 3 am, and the Times needed them bigger. Thus ends day 1. Day 2 is daylight shooting and finding out that the file I’d thought I’d sent had not gone.

My primary focus has been documentary storytelling.

I LOVE spending time with people I don’t know anything about and telling their stories.
It’s a great satisfaction to be able to get immersed in an unknown world and be accepted as one more in their lives while taking photos and video of their daily activities.

But sometimes, I find refreshing taking pictures of nature. I enjoy those times when you don’t have to be putting people on every frame you take.

While on vacations in the South of Chile (one of my favorite places in the world) I just grabbed my camera and starting pointing at things.

It’s just incredible how nature amazes me sometimes. We are slaves to light situations when shooting and try constantly to find the perfect light and sometimes, we don’t succeed.  But sometimes, light finds us and there’s nothing much to do than just grab your camera, point up and shoot.