A week ago, the World Press Photo of the year award went to a digitally enhanced photo taken by Paul Hansen. It’s a really compelling photo, one that SpeigelOnline writers Matthias Krug and Stefan Niggemeier write “conveys a beauty that seems almost innappropriate.”

The fact, though, is that every digital photographer enhances their pictures. Even just adjusting the colors to make it pop on screen is changing the story, altering reality. Of course, in a newsroom, any blatant manipulation of a picture — even one of the protagonisst of Krug and Niggenmeier’s article, Claudio Palmisano of 10b Photography in Rome, notes that they never ‘alter pixels’ — is a violation of journalistic ethics akin to making up quotes or sources. 

But in a digital landscape, where catchy headlines and niche journalism seem to be key components of profitability, it’s hard to distinguish between what’s bias and what’s best practice. 

Is adding a dramatic light just an attention grabber or an opinion? I’m not so sure. The nature of storytelling through words or images is such that just by picking a subject, it becomes interesting or ‘newsworthy.’ The only underlined sentence in my undergrad copy of Susan Sontag’s On Photography is this:  Read more

Alex Goh and the team at Imgembed are onto something. They launched this year at SXSW and already have one million images loaded into their platform for sharing, using, and, most importantly, monetizing photos online.

It goes something like this: if you are a professional or amateur photographer, you can upload your photos via Instagram, Flickr, or any other social photo sharing platform. If you’re a journalist, you can search images for free for your blog posts. You copy the embed link, and the photographer’s name comes embedded with the photo.

If the footer bar with the creator’s name doesn’t work for your layout, you go premium. Each photo comes with a price, set by the creator, for each impression. The image is always free for up to 10,000 impressions, and after that, you pay the price. And if you’re article with a picture gets more than 10,000 you should know how to monetize that anyway.

Every time a photo is embedded, the platform generates a unique jpeg with the creator’s name attached, so the photos are easier to track. You can ‘steal’ an Imgembed photo, but it has the artist’s name on it. Win – win.

It gets to the heart of digital copyright and Creative Commons licensing. Goh believes that people want to use creative works ethically, but aren’t very good at it. He says:

There’s a big misunderstanding about Creative Commons licensing. CC licenses mean that you can use the image, but you have to attribute the work to the creator. People often don’t do that or they forget to link back…So they’re stealing because it’s free and it’s easy. We’ve made it so easy, that there’s no excuse to do it the wrong way.

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Instagram has become an unlikely, yet important, online tool for journalists, bloggers and citizens. Not only is it a great way to shoot stylized photos and on-the-go location shots, but it’s also a smart outlet to turn to when looking for eyewitness accounts of major news — people often turn to Instagram thanks to its quick sharing with social media networks like Twitter and Facebook.

However, these past few weeks have changed the service in a radical way, and now is the time to determine whether it’s the right tool for your photos and your personal use.

1. You Won’t See it On Twitter

This season has been a rocky one for Instagram and one of its biggest propagators, Twitter. Two weeks ago, the companies had effectively “broken up,” with Instagram no longer hosting images through Twitter’s API. Twitter snapped back, effectively distributing its own Instagram clone (with filters to boot) right in its native TwitPic system. Read more

We’ve given ThingLink a lot of love here at 10,000 Words, but the easy-to-use interactive image-maker merits another post because of its new functionality: working on the Twitters.

Users can now share an image on Twitter complete with any created ThingLink meta-data, and it’s all accessible in the tweet itself. That means that, for better or worse, a new level of engagement and storytelling is possible right in the platform of Twitter. A user doesn’t have click to a new page to see  a ThingLink’d image. And a tweet can now contain a short bit of text, an image and several, several links.

Here’s an example of a popular White House photo making its way around the net this weekend. You’re probably already seen it. If not, I explain using ThingLink’s own features.

Here’s that image ThingLink’d and working directly in a tweet: Read more

Recognizing a new tool at The Boston Globe is a gateway to worthwhile discussion on social media strategy: not everyone likes, has access to or uses the same digital thing. And that’s great for journalism.

Journalism.co.uk has a nice read on the wall-o-local-Instagram pics that the Globe is test-driving in its newsroom. Appropriately named “Snap,” the project is a result of a partnership with the MIT Media Lab, and it displays every local Instagram image on a big map of the area. Neat on its own (i.e., worthy of an Instagrammed pic of its own), and notably, it’s also being used for helping find sources for local stories.

There’s definite newsroom utility to display social media data like this on a map. You naturally are exposed to events, with pictorial evidence, that you may not have otherwise paid attention towards. And you can can pinpoint where that action is happening. That’s practical on a day-to-day basis, and particularly helpful during event like Hurricane Sandy, where much is going on and you’re looking to move your reporting fast. It’s clearly a useful tool (and if it isn’t yet clear, I’d certainty love to play with it.)

What I think is worth noting beyond the obvious ingenuity, however, was the main story that according to the article Chris Marstall, creative technologist at the Boston Globe, actually produced during Hurricane Sandy. After spending “about eight hours staring at Snap” during the storm, this piece says that Marstall didn’t know what story to pick up and write. “Eventually I figured out that the interesting story to tell was that everybody was staying home and getting drunk in their apartments, doing a lot of day drinking,” he said.

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