1.1 Welcome to the World of News and Editorial Photography

Editorial Assignment Photography can be a lot of different things. Portraits of personalities to illustrate a story, sports and news coverage, food and architecture photography for restaurant reviews or, my personal favorite, photo stories. All assignments require a unique skill-set and approach. For news and sports photography, we need to work quickly under time deadlines, often in less than ideal situations. We are often sending our photos from the basement of the stadium, or from our car parked in a parking garage somewhere. For news and sports photography, we're using very fast cameras and lenses. You'll often see news photographers with two cameras, so they don't have to switch lenses back and forth. Standard equipment for this types of photography is a fast camera with a high frame per second rate and a 7200 2.8 zoom lens and a 16-35 wide angle zoom lens. My preferred computer program for this type of work is Photo Mechanic. It allows me to quickly ingest, sort, caption, and FTP my photos directly to my client. But I'm doing my photo manipulation in Photoshop and sometimes Light Year. We'll be getting deeper into these programs in following videos. For food and architecture photography assignments, we have a little bit more time to pay attention to details like lighting and composition. We're a little bit more refined. These details are sometimes overlooked in the middle of a pressroom. And back to my favorite photo stories, taking multiple photos of a certain subject, idea or theme. Done right, these photos could stand on their own without text. They can cover multiple pages in a news paper or magazine. They can also be used in a book or even a gallery show. But next, editorial clients, who are they, and how can you get your first assignment?