-Rhyme and Reason to editing. Like people mistakenly believe you need an eye for photography when what you really need is an intellect and knowledge, same is true for editing, it isn’t an instinctive eye, it’s a logical set of conditions. 1) editing for readability, how clearly an image is emphasize and guides the viewer to a conclusion (or is the image an indiscriminate mess), 2) edit for pace: dynamic images vs static images, a party should be dynamic, a funeral should be static, 3) editing for consistent voice, can’t have commercial constructs, ideological constructs, and organizational constructs in same essay.  Show taxonomy of voices. This is just an extension of the gradient we looked at the other week. Journalism has to be intimate active and informative. Can use FL and composition to your hearts content, but only mild uses of dof and motion blur.  Has to be just for emphasis. No archetypes are allowed and certainly no conspicuous use of light. The moment you have any conspicuous use of light, it disqualifies the image from being journalism, but not necessarily documentary or editorial. The atmospheric look. The stoic look. The sentimental look. The gritty look. All well defined, and all allowed in documentary but not journalism.

-Consider the constraints put on the photojournalist voice because it’s issued as an impossible task. This leads to hypocrisies. Not allowed to pose or stage the image, EXCEPT for the portrait, that one has to be staged. If you stage the other three, you look like a crazy person. None of the images can be archetypal, EXCEPT for the scene-setter. The scene setter has no single reference point to emphasize against something else, because the entire scene is the reference point, so in order to reference anything with that shot you have to reference an idea (with an archetype). So busy, creepy, playful, grand, claustrophobic, etc. All of this hypocrisy is a consequence of society saying “we need this image to be clear and emphatic narration, but it also has to appear very neutral and unauthored.” These conflicting demands have pushed photojournalists into this particular formula, which tries its best to accommodate those conflicting demands. Blame the public, not the journalist. But knowing this makes much better sense of the journalistic style.

-NatGeo discussion: 1916 to 2016. What happened? The answer is definitely not that the technology changed, if I or Sebastiao Salgado got in a time machine, with out knowledge, we could make our images back in 1916. There was still focal length back then, and focus, and depth of field, and film had exposure latitude that allowed for silhouettes, etc. So tech isn’t what changed. We changed. Is it that we were once deliberately very dry and as neutral as possible (ours is not to comment, ours is merely to report and present) and then very gradually we allowed bit by bit slightly more injection of authorship, each decade it wasn’t noticeable, but after 10 decades we’d gone full authorship. Or is it that photographers in 1916 didn’t understand the medium yet, those images were the monosyllabic ramblings of cavemen, and as photographers have learned and developed this language, learned how to create emphasis or exploit archetype, and created more sophisticated, more multifaceted images, while the public was simultaneously become more literate?

-Color vs B&W: which is harder, which do you prefer, and why does it matter? Color is harder because it objectively has more components to manage. B&W is harder because you have to work harder to manufacture separation or emphasis, you may need to know more about the physics and mechanics of photography. People prefer B&W citing it being more “dramatic, romantic, sentimental, etc.” which has to do with the fact that of LST we associate Light with sentimental archetypes more than space or time, and in B&W light differentials are far more noticeable to the viewer because it isn’t competing with color (lizard example). Also cite “timeless.” Color dates an image in 2 ways, the color in the photo (Stephen Shore’s cars) and the color process (Kodachrome).  B&W removes both of those time stamps.  People prefer color citing that it allows more to be communicated, both in terms of information and in terms of viewer’s associations...it’s another differential. But color and B&W are fundamentally different. You have to approach them differently, compose them differently (different compositional gravity to consider) and deal with them differently from a technical standpoint.

-main color theory photographers need to understand, first color value (HSV), another tricky culprit that leads to discussion of NatGeo photographer in Guanajuato. RGB additive and subtractive color because it has applications everywhere from white balance to post-processing to printing to old school darkroom.