Early on I posted a piece in which I explained why I decided to get into nightlife photography. With a cynical attitude towards being a part of the photographic industry following University, nightlife photography has shed some optimism on my photographic future as it helped me develop a plan. I’ll be candid and profess up until a few weeks ago I wasn’t impressed with my third year at University. For some reason I have always been a person who doesn’t really worry about their future too much, which is why I have always studied subjects which interest me. If I had a genuine concern I imagine I would be studying some humdrum crap like management or banking which actually has potential for future employment. But because I have no intention of spending the next forty or fifty years of my life waking up at seven or eight in the morning, five days a week with a feeling of enmity towards my life because I have to go to work, I don’t. Many find my approach immature, I receive the ‘hopefully you’ll find a rich husband’ joke all the time, utterly hilarious. Yet I don’t care. I’m happy to fill my head with interesting knowledge and work as a bar tender for the rest of my life if need be, just like in the movies, that middle aged guy with Socratic wisdom working behind the bar, they always seem happy, except I’m less of an advice giver and more of a conversationalist. So the reason I wasn’t too enthusiastic about my third and final year was because I wasn’t actually learning anything new and interesting. Instead I felt like I was constantly being asked where my future was headed, to which I would give an idealistic response and listened to practitioners talk about how they broke into the industry. And because week by week I considered the idea of me becoming ‘a photographer’ less and less feasible, I kind of didn’t care. On a more cheerful note though I’ve changed my mind and I think I get the point now. Third year is about building some structure in your life and taking some serious consideration. I felt completely mystified three or four weeks ago but now I feel slightly enlightened and it actually is because of the third year program. The idea is that I try get into nightlife photography when I leave University, it’s fun, reasonably achievable and a short term plan. In the further future I will hopefully be involved in journalism, but I still need to do a lot of work before that happens. Additionally I have come to the acceptance that I’m not much of a technology person. I don’t particularly like computers and I don’t care about the latest cameras and equipment. I tried to care in my first year, tried to learn about what cameras were being released and stuff about them but I found it distinctly boring. Throughout my first and second year I thought this was a bit of an issue, but I don’t anymore. My interest lies within the content of imagery and the story it is telling, regardless of whether it was taken with a Canon 5D Mark II or a disposable camera. So in a weird way, although I thought I wasn’t really learning anything this year, I was wrong. Over the last couple of months I have learnt about what I want, what I like and have considered this with plausible means of being a part of something that interests me in the future rather than worrying about producing work for the sheer fact that it’s listed on an assignment sheet. So I have produced a project on nightlife photography and it was fun. Hardly a reputable line to get into with a degree in photography I suppose, but I am hoping it will lead to bigger things and fund my survival until I get to do what I want to do.

Where Have All the Photojournalists Gone?

In the middle of last month, Jack Womack, CNN's senior vice president of domestic news operations, sent around a memo to staffers. It was not the kind of memo people like to get right before the holidays. "We... spent a great deal of time analyzing how we utilize and deploy photojournalists across all of our locations in the U.S.," wrote Womack. "We looked at production demands, down time, and international deployments. We looked at the impact of user-generated content and social media, CNN iReporters and of course our affiliate contributions in breaking news. Consumer and pro-sumer technologies are simpler and more accessible. Small cameras are now high broadcast quality. More of this technology is in the hands of more people. After completing this analysis, CNN determined that some photojournalists will be departing the company."

In short, because it was receiving so many photo submissions via its user-generated iReport platform, CNN decided that it could afford to do away with 12 of its full-time photographers. The message at the root of the layoffs was big: In an age when anyone with an iPhone can tweet breaking news pictures, the photojournalist is going the way of the pterodactyl.

"If the game is to be in the right place at the right time, I can't win at that game, because there's only one of me," says Rob Bennett, a Wall Street Journal contract photographer. "I'm resigned to that." Millions of people with smartphones are now in constant possession of cameras. Nobody plans for a 9/11 attack or a Japanese tsunami, and when those things happen, it's not photojournalists who are there first, it's iPhone users. "The iPhone people are going to be there when the bomb goes off, when the house burns down, when the assassination goes down," says Bennett. "They’re going to crush that market, and there's nothing I can do about it."

Indeed, usage of the iPhone 4's camera is surging, according to data from picture-sharing site Flickr. The iPhone 4 is now the second most popular image maker on the site, second only to Nikon's D90 and ahead of every single Canon point-and-shoot. The smartphone camera is so popular, in fact, that even some photojournalists are using it. Michael Christopher Brown, a photographer who flew to Libya to cover the uprising in February, shot an entire series using his iPhone's Hipstamatic app after dropping and breaking his SLR camera. He was still shooting on his phone in April when an explosion sent shrapnel into his chest and killed two of his nearby colleagues, Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington. "At this point I hesitate using a 'real' camera," Brown told Time magazine a few weeks after his injury. "Using a phone has brought my attention less to the craft and more to what I am photographing and why. So, the question becomes not where I see the phone taking my work, but where the work will take me."

The modern media consumer seems to demand that less attention be paid to the craft. A great photograph is still a great photograph, but a good photograph immediately dispersed through Twitter wins the day. Consider Stefanie Gordon, the woman from Hoboken who in May took what is probably the most famous photo of the Space Shuttle Endeavour's final mission. Gordon wasn't at the Kennedy Space Center with hundreds of other professional photographers, she was on a Delta flight to Palm Beach, where she snapped a few photos with her iPhone and then tweeted them. Within hours her pictures were on dozens of news sites; the Associated Press gave her $500 per, and the next day some of her Twitpics had made it to the front pages of newspapers. "It’s definitely a different experience and something I never expected," Gordon later told Newark’s Star-Ledger. "It was just the right place at the right time."

If any lucky person with a smartphone can now take pictures for newspapers, what makes a photojournalist a photojournalist in 2011?

"Photographers need to figure out what exactly separates them from pedestrians with nice cameras," says Channing Johnson, a photojournalist who spent time at Michigan's Midland Daily News and Vermont's Valley News before deciding to become a full-time wedding photographer. "If what makes a photographer better isn't clear, then I don't think photographer jobs should be preserved just because they have up until this point. People thought the profession of photography was threatened when autofocus was introduced, but photographers who lasted proved that knowing the technical elements of a camera was the least important part of their value."

Johnson says one thing professionals can offer that amateurs can't is ethics. Not changing the context of an event with a manipulative image, for instance, or not adding or removing anything with Photoshop. "A news organization is only as good as it's credibility," he says. "It's hard to control that when you are getting key content from strangers."

Darrow Montgomery, a staff photographer for D.C.'s alt weekly, the Washington City Paper, says that although photojournalism's decline is "inevitable," professional photographers should never be obsolete. "If the metric for successful image making is being at the right place at the right time, the professional is doomed based on the sheer number of warm bodies with image making whatnots," he says. "But if the metric is to get the best, most telling, evocative picture of a given situation, and to be able to do that repeatedly, then the professional will win almost every time."

Bennett, who is also an adjunct professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, was hired to replace a professor who gave up teaching photojournalism because "he said it felt like sending lambs to the slaughter." Bennett, 35, says that though the horizon seems dim for photojournalists, the students he sees aren't dispirited. "They want to learn everything they can," he says. "They're so hungry and excited. And they should be; CNN can do whatever they want. I’m not pissed at them firing photographers. They’re making their best business decision, and nobody is going to change that market force. I just continue to have faith that what I do and what my very skilled colleagues and students do is of value."

Overall, Bennett is "bullish" about the future of photojournalism. But toward the end of our conversation he opens up a bit. "Something you might find interesting is that as bullish as I am, I'm not sure how much longer I can go on being a photographer myself," he says. "I'm tired. It's hard out there right now, because my editors want to save money by not hiring that extra photographer each day, so they've got me doing the work of two people. I could have maybe done it 10 years ago, but now I'm just exhausted."

http://www.good.is/post/where-have-all-the-photojournalists-gone/?utm_content=image&utm_medium=hp_carousel&utm_source=slide_1

Joined Demotix

My Final Six

In choosing the final six for my portfolio I couldn’t choose between the more ‘clubbish’ looking images where the light beams run through or the images I took in bars, which have darker lighting. I decided I liked both styles and they reflected the two sides of night life which I was photographing. So that it wouldn’t look out of balance I decided to place three images of each style. The intentions of the images I have selected are to display images of people and friends out enjoying themselves. The only image which isn’t very joyful is the image posted second before last above. However it’s one of my favourite images because I love how the lighting came and the individual in the image seems to be in his own world. Ideally I would have liked to have included more images, perhaps six more would have created a more interesting set, because these images I feel work better as a series as they create more of an atmosphere as you go along. The photographs are not meant to have any profound meaning, there is no story behind them, the subject matter is quite simple, it’s just people on a night out coming together and enjoying themselves, which is hopefully expressed adequately in these photographs.  

Some of My Favourites and Why

I actually laughed out loud after taking this picture, which is the reason why I like it, it’s funny. I showed it to the guy who was messing around with someone else the second I took it and he too burst out laughing. I suppose it’s not the best picture of the guy, but only in respect to boring posed photos.

I was at a Halloween party when I took the image of the girl wearing the mask (above left). She burst into the room suddenly burst into the room wearing this mask, it was quite funny and I immediately took her picture. I like the picture because it has a bit of a comical element to it. The reason why I like the image on the right is because it was taken just a couple of moments later and this guy looked at me and kind of posed for a picture while the girl wearing the mask is in the background still goofing around. You’re not sure what to look at or what’s going on when you see the picture.

Website

When it came to designing my website I knew I wanted something basic, because the best websites always are. Initially I was going to go with a white website, with the images placed onto the white background. However I went for black because many of my images are dark and I think black engages better with the practise of nightlife photography by association. Furthermore I was going to write a mini ‘about me’ section on the home page revealing who I am and that I am taking nightlife photography etcetera. However, when it came to actually writing this diminutive passage it felt mundane, insufficient and effectively to no purpose, so I decided to leave it out. The website should speak for itself, there is my name on the home page, all necessary information has been put forth on the info page and the images on the portfolio page should be enough to give away what the website is representing anyway. So instead of having boring text no one is interested in, I decided to have none.

When it came to choosing the picture for the home page I really wanted to use a fun picture, because this type of photography is meant to be fun. The picture with the girl and the big green mask is one of my favourite images and I really wanted to use it for the home page. Unfortunately after I set up the website it become evident that this image didn’t match the rest. I took the photograph of the girl at a Halloween house party and even though it’s a party photo, it just doesn’t look like the rest aesthetically, it’s not dark and it’s blatant that it was taken in a house. I sent the link to a friend of mine who studies web design down south, I didn’t mention the image on the home page, just to see if she would and what she generally thought of the website. To not much of a surprise I suppose, she made a comment on the image of the girl with the mask being too different from the rest. I knew then that it had to go, Cheryl suggested photoshopping it to make it look like the rest, but I’ve never been keen on photo editing, so it just had to go.

I replaced it with the picture of the guy caught in a funny moment. I decided to use this picture because I think it looks fun and it’s the first thing you see when you go on to my website.

http://www.wix.com/kayfenech/nightlifephotography

Dance Deluxe Nightlife Photography