Free-lancers learn need to join the digital photo revolution

For free-lance travel writer Robert Bone, sending his first color photograph from his home office in Hawaii to the Miami Herald was deja vu all over again.

Back in the early 1980s, Bone was the first journalist in the Hawaiian islands to transmit free-lance news and travel stories electronically from his Xerox 820 (remember when 64 kilobytes of RAM was the standard?) to mainland publications.

Like all pioneers, Bone faced enormous difficulties at first. Often, editors -- to whom he had repeatedly shipped copy from the RCA Telex office in Honolulu -- hadn't a clue as to how to receive a free-lance story electronically.

The usual drill was to find a key person at the newspaper who understood modems, transmission parameters and story headers. Then Bone and he (never a she, at first) would painstakingly figure out how to get a story to pop up on the target editor's VDT.

"It was an educational challenge for everyone at first," Bone recalled. "Eventually we worked through the problems."

Today, Bone is a master self-syndicator. He routinely transmits travel stories via modem to as many as 40 U.S. and Canadian newspapers. Many travel editors have come to rely on Bone for quick turnarounds on Hawaiian topics.

If only his picture turnarounds could be as quick.

Now Bone is tackling the same kinds of challenges he faced in 1984 as he again blazes a trail by sending his first color images electronically from his personal computer in Oahu.

"It seems like history is repeating itself," said the 61-year-old author, former newspaper reporter and magazine editor who turned to full-time free-lancing more than a decade ago. "When I call up editors today and offer to send a picture into their system, they'll sometimes say, `You can do that?'"

Bone has mastered the technology with little help.

"You can't find anything on this (digital photo transmission) in the photo magazines or in the computer magazines. It's very frustrating," he said. "Some people have suggested I go on-line on CompuServe to find people who've done this and compare notes. It's a good idea, but so far I haven't had the time."

Bone's first hurdle was to set up a workable hardware/software photo transmission package on his office DOS computer. It represented a relatively modest investment -- about $2000. Based on his expected increase in business, the system should pay for itself in a year or so, he said.

To be sure, Bone isn't the first individual to transmit pictures over phone lines from a computer. John Van Beekum, graphics systems editor of the Miami Herald, said staff photographers have successfully delivered images into the newspaper's system using a Nikon slide scanner hooked to a Macintosh portable computer.

Van Beekum said he encourages free-lance photographers to use the Herald's electronic mailbox at PressLink, a photo database operation that offers distribution services to hundreds of U.S. newspapers.

PressLink, based in Reston, Va., is a unit of Knight-Ridder, which also owns the Herald. "PressLink is very nice," Van Beekum said, "not just because it's owned by Knight-Ridder, but because it's specific to our business."

Bone's approach of sending photo files directly to the newspaper is unusual, Van Beekum said. As the number of free-lancers who wish to transmit images increases, newspapers will probably need to establish electronic bulletin boards to capture the files and then download them into their publishing systems. "The volume is low, so it's not backbreaking," he said.

A key to making the process run smoothly is educating the free-lancer, Van Beekum said.

Experience has taught him, for example, that image transmission works best using the Z-modem protocol because it sends data in bigger chunks than the widely used X-modem and Y-modem protocols.

It also can save time: "With Z-modem, if you lose the telephone line, as long as you don't change the name of the file, it automatically picks up where it left off when the line is reestablished."

Van Beekum agrees with Bone that the era of electronic photo transmission is only dawning. As more independent photographers, graphic artists, political cartoonists and writers acquire the gear and master this new technology, newspaper editors will be faced with the growing challenge of how to cope with a flood of digitized images pouring across their electronic transoms, he said.

"If you're a writer/photographer who free-lances, it's a good way to sell your stuff, and it'll be more common as time passes," Van Beekum said. "Obviously, if you're a free-lance writer who can shoot pictures, it's easier than hiring a photographer to take them for you."

"The main purpose of the whole thing has been to support my writing," said Bone, author of four guidebooks (on Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and Alaska). "The idea is to sell my travel stories, and pictures help sell a story. That can only increase my income potential."

The day will come, too, when his library of thousands of photos taken in Hawaii, across the Pacific and in Asia is digitized and available on-line. Such an electronic stock photo operation "has the potential to really help my business," he said.

Like it or not, changes in photo transmission technology -- and the ways images are acquired -- are overtaking publications the world over.

For those newspapers that plan ahead, the transition will be less rocky than for those who ignore what's occurring now, said Chris Gulker, development director at the San Francisco Examiner. Like the Miami Herald, the Examiner is a leader in developing in-house capabilities to use color electronic images daily on deadline.

Most publications have yet to train their technical personnel on how to deal with non-staffers who wish to send photos into their electronic photo systems. Indeed, many small and mid-sized newspapers have yet to install the hardware and software -- usually Macintosh-based -- to receive such transmissions.

Publications that have so-called electronic darkrooms usually use equipment supplied by the Associated Press or Reuters. Unfortunately, Bone discovered, this equipment can be extremely user unfriendly.

So far, Bone has transmitted one photo successfully to the Miami Herald. It illustrated a story which developed from a Mediterranean cruise he and his daughter Christina took last year. (An attempt to transmit to the Chicago Tribune was unsuccessful.)

The Herald sale developed through a classic situation faced by free-lancers every day: Travel Editor Jay Clarke needed a photo within hours to illustrate the story Bone had submitted two weeks earlier. Without an illustration, Clarke told Bone, the story could not be published.

Before the advent of digital photo transmission technology, Bone would have been unable to meet Clarke's needs. Hawaii is simply too far from most mainland cities to ship pictures by air express for next-day delivery. The fastest service to East Coast cities takes 48 hours.

Aside from being slow, the conventional method also often required one or two days' lead time to have the selected slides duped at a local lab. Sometimes the dupes suffered from unexpected color shifts, or other exposure problems.

In short, the whole process was cumbersome -- and far from fail-safe.

Late last year Bone decided to start experimenting with digital photography, largely out of frustration with the way he was forced to deal with the photo side of his business. His first purchase was a multimedia package for DOS machines that included a NEC double-speed CD-ROM drive, a sound card, software and some sample CDs. Cost: about $1000.

Next he purchased the Kodak Photo Edge software-CD package for about $100. This came with one Photo CD containing sample images with which he was able to master the skills to move pictures from the CD to his hard disk, where he could manipulate and transmit them.

The Photo Edge software is sort of a pauper's Adobe Photoshop program, he said, allowing a user to manipulate, crop and adjust image files to some extent.

He also upgraded his color monitor to a 15-inch, 28 dot pitch, NEC color model to handle the higher resolution images he was dealing with. Cost: $700.

Bone's basic computer setup currently includes a relatively slow 25 MHz '386SX motherboard, a Maxtel 350 megabyte hard disk running under Microsoft Windows and Dos 6.2. (Windows is required to open Kodak Photo CD images on DOS machines, Bone said.)

Lacking a slide scanner, Bone found a Kodak Photo CD service in nearby Kaneohe that would scan his slides, for about $1.50 per image, onto a CD that can be read by his NEC drive. Turnaround time is 24 hours. Each blank $7 CD can hold up to 100 images.

Coincidentally, he had converted some of his slides of the Mediterranean trip to CD files before the Herald called in January. But when he tried his first transmission to Miami using the tagged image format (TIFF) at low resolution, it was a failure.

No one at either end of the 6000-mile phone link between Hawaii and Florida could figure out what was wrong. After several more failures, Bone gave up in disgust.

Later that day, Bone visited a local bookstore in a desperate hunt for anything that might help him unravel the mysteries of the process. There he stumbled across a book, The Magic of Image Processing, by Mike Morrison. It contained a disk with a shareware program called Graphics Workshop.

Included was a format conversion system that converts TIFF files under the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) image compression standard. JPEG is the de facto standard for picture compression used by newspapers across the country.

The book provided enough detailed information for Bone to convert his TIFF images to the JPEG standard. Firing up his ProComm Plus communications software and his Hayes Optima 9600 modem, he tried sending the photo again.

"It came across perfectly the first time," recalled Bone. "It was then that I realized I had mastered the process. I was very happy."

Transmission time with the 9600-bps modem for a 1.5 megabyte photo file -- compressed to about 400 kilobytes -- was about five minutes, he said. Modems that operate at 19,600 bps, the most common speed used by newspapers, can send the same file in less than half that time.

It was no surprise to Bone that many newspaper photo desk staffers are reluctant to work with free-lancers, who often use equipment with which they are unfamiliar.

"We can't expect everybody to be a tech guru," he said. "That's always been a problem."

When he made his initial attempt to duplicate his Miami feat with the Chicago Tribune, Bone discovered another roadblock: Telebit Worldblazer modems, common in many newspaper offices that use AP's Leaf Picture Desk system. Worldblazer modems, because they use a proprietary error-correction system, will normally talk only to other Worldblazers, and will not accept a signal from modems set to industry-standard Hayes protocols.

After several long-distance conversations with support personnel at Telebit and Hayes, Bone was able to pinpoint the problem. The fix is relatively simple: Someone at the target newspaper has to reset the modem to accept a file from a non-Worldblazer modem.

After a file is successfully received, the Worldblazer automatically reverts to its default settings, so no permanent change is made to the publication's electronic photo system, Bone said. It is a straightforward software change. But few newspapers have someone on staff able to accomplish the task.

After the success at the Miami Herald and the failure at the Chicago Tribune, Bone successfully sent three photos to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Although the Texas paper's AP Leaf Picture Desk uses Worldblazer modems, the photo editor also had a photo line connected to a garden-variety Supra fax modem, and Bone's high-resolution JPEG transmission was received perfectly on that.

Despite the setbacks, Bone is eager to expand his own system, first with a '486DX motherboard, and later with a Nikon Coolscan slide scanner.

The scanner, which costs about $1700 from mail-order dealers, will eliminate the need to take his slides to his local Kodak photo-CD dealer for conversion. It also will do away with having to archive stock photos in digital form.

As he tries to expand his digital photo business in the months ahead, Bone expects to spend considerable time with systems people at each of his newspaper clients, solving the kinds of niggling problems he's experienced already at the Herald and Tribune.

Bone knows newspapers. He knows just when this ad hoc training will occur:

"Each session will probably come when they're desperate for a photo. That's the way it usually happens."

Eastman Kodak Co., (800) 242-2424;
Presslink, (703) 758-1740.

-- Robert Hollis

From THE COLE PAPERS, April 1994, Copyright (c) 1994, All Rights Reserved.