Jimmy A. Domingo

A second take on the skills needed by photojournalists in future is provided by Jimmy A. Domingo, a freelance photographer and photojournalism program coordinator of the Asian Center for Journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines.

Says Jimmy: “If your pictures are not good enough, you are not close enough.” This is attributed to the legendary photographer Robert Capa and it is a quote I have been using lately to start discussions on what makes a skillful or a complete photojournalist in this age of internet communication technologies.

Capa may not just have been referring to the physical closeness between a photographer and his subjects. And this may hold truer in these times where a photojournalist has more platforms to show (and sell) his works and the competition is becoming stiffer.

What are the skills needed to get close in the various dimensions of a photography project and, in effect, be an effective photojournalist?

All things being equal in terms of technical skills - understanding light, capturing good quality images, achieving effective composition with a variety of lenses and array of angles and knowing when to press the shutter - as ever the most important skill is newsgathering.

And this involves a great deal of research to understand the subject being photographed and how a particular subject matter has been approached visually before.

We learn from the masters, from the role models of cutting-edge photojournalism. However, there is an information overload on the web, much of which I call digital garbage, and Internet research skill is a must. This is on top of good communication on the Internet for getting assignments, being in touch with editors and swift delivery of images.

With digital photography now being the norm - where one can only read generic camera-generated alphanumeric filenames and the physical photograph is seen only when it is opened - a proficiency in applying industry-standard metadata is essential. Extend this skill to batch processing in software.

This will help give sufficient information about a particular image and provide some copyright protection. I know a lot of photographers who have the required images but take time to retrieve them from a hard disk due to lack of an archiving system.

With the shrinking of print pages and more online platforms - where the huge challenge now is how to hold the interest of viewers - skill in creating multimedia presentations is vital.

Apart from still pictures, the inclusion of interviews in audio – making the subjects “speak” and/or self-recorded material – gives context to a story. Software like Soundslides can easily be learned for such presentations.

To get feedback on portfolios and ongoing projects, creating photojournalistic blogs is an option. A domain name is not that expensive and there are hundreds of free host sites with responsive content management systems.

On top of all this, an appreciation of the ethical issues in photojournalism is fundamental. Especially now, when software can be used with so much ease to modify images to the point of fakery and manipulation. The only safeguard is for photojournalists to say No to the “everybody-is-doing-it-why-shouldn’t-I” behavior.

Finally, whatever skills a photojournalist has must be shared with aspiring visual story tellers. And acquiring teaching skills is another challenge but it should come naturally to those who are willing to take on such a daunting task."