Friday, January 29, 2010

After doing the reading for Picture Story, I loved reading the Photojournalism and Today's News by Loup Langton. I found myself so interested in everything he was explaining about photojournalism in today's world and the reality of it. Although we think we are getting the one picture that "tells the whole story," we are really just editing the situation and showing a certain view of it. I feel like everything he talks about in this introduction is so valid in how the media works. Even after taking Staff Photography, I never really realized the process until Langton explained it in such a blunt way. As photographers, we are sent out to get a photo that is based on our editors views of what they want for the story. We are guided as to what they want to see. And then if we come back with something that wasn't what they thought, we are usually told how we could have gone about doing the photo taking a different way to get that certain view. We still come in with preconceived notions ourselves, which affect our picture taking also. Although we are taught objectivity in school, it is still our edit of the situation. We choose certain angles, certain light, etc. I feel after reading this part of the book, I know what I experienced in the newsroom and how media works around different newsrooms.