Smile for the PowerBook: Indianapolis Star photographer Jeff Atteberry shows some ferryboat passengers pictures of themselves taken with the the Kodak DCS 420 camera during a two-hour ride to Ocracoke Island, N.C.

Photo by

Jeff Tinsley.

Cigarette lighter illuminates sixth digital photo workshop

(In this, his fourth year of writing about Electronic Times, Neil Chase spent a week as an imaging coach on the project's faculty. As if the workshop wasn't enough of a test, he wrote this story in Quark CopyDesk -- so he could watch the running word count as he wrote.)

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- Evaluating the latest photojournalism technology took 200 people, $4 million worth of equipment and the beautiful fall week of Sept. 26-30.

The sixth annual Electronic Photojournalism Workshop yielded unanimous acclamation of one object as most useful to our trade. The winner:

The automobile cigarette lighter socket (with an assist from Radio Shack).

Blue-light special
One of the more than 30 teams covering events for the Electronic Times went to a tobacco auction. After having the film processed at a one-hour store, they set up shop in a Kmart parking lot in Reidsville, N.C.

Using a $100 power inverter from Radio Shack, the crew was able to scan, edit and transmit images using the car's lighter socket for power.

The equipment: A Polaroid SprintScan 35 film scanner, a Macintosh PowerBook, cellular modem and cellular phone.

Most of the work was done in the parking lot, with people and equipment all over the front seat and roof. But the last images were transmitted while the crew was driving back to Chapel Hill.

Another team transmitted from a shrimp boat off the Atlantic coast, and remote images also were transmitted by cellular phone from the sidelines at RFK Stadium in Washington during a Redskins football game.

Back on the ranch
While the road warriors worked from the front seat of a rental car outside a Kmart, most Electronic Times staffers were closer to their temporary home.

Going after stories that were suggested and arranged by editors from the host newspaper, the Herald-Sun in Durham, the teams covered everything from drug busts to lemur research to a mail-order condom house. In most cases, the teams returned to the newsroom to file stories, process film, scan and edit photos and design pages.

Did we say newsroom?

Well, it was actually a hotel ballroom, but in little more than a day this group was able to turn it into a complete newsroom with computers, scanners, a library, assignment desk, editors, writers, film processors, color labs and output devices.

Slightly less technical were the two basketball hoops fastened to the marble-floored lobby with duct tape.

From lens to newsprint
Because everything was crammed into one ballroom, this really was a museum of the future. It's safe to say every newspaper is using some of the technology that was on display, but nobody is using it all -- not yet, and maybe never.

Workflow, as always, was the key to success. Perhaps the best way to explain the workflow is to follow a picture as it works its way from input to output.

Incoming images began as film (developed in the newsroom on Noritsu processors, the same kind as in one-hour photo shops) or as digital pictures. They were reviewed by the photographers and their photo editors, who narrowed the choices to perhaps half a dozen images that became fodder for the full page being created for that assignment.

The input side
The first thing you saw upon entering the room (mostly because you had to walk around it) was Scannerland, a gaggle of suppliers immersed in their input equipment.

Through creative juggling by the photo editors, each photographer was sent to one of the manufacturers to have film scanned. The result: output from each of nine scanners went into the newspaper.

Best-known among them were the popular newsroom workhorses, Kodak's RFS 2035 Plus, AP's Leafscan 35 and Nikon's LS-3510AF. Other images were scanned with Nikon's Coolscan, Kodak's PhotoCD systems, AP's Leafax IIID and the Scitex Smart Scanner 340L.

But the two systems that gained the most attention were the least and most expensive offerings.

On the low end, Polaroid brought its much-vaunted SprintScan 35. It's reasonably portable at five pounds, and it costs about $2000.

This has been described as having the low weight and price of a Coolscan with the speed and quality of one of the $7000 models. On the price, weight and speed issues, it certainly lived up to its billing. Scanning was quick and easy.

On quality, the results were mixed. Many of the scans were excellent. With the Polaroid guy and the photographer working together on image quality before and during the scan, the scanned files were in great shape by the time they hit the photo desk.

Images shot under decent light and edited by the Polaroid guy along with the photographer worked well. But, like all technology, there seems to be at least a bit of a learning curve. When the scanner wasn't attended by the Polaroid guy, some of the scans were much worse. And a couple taken in bad light had to be scanned several times.

This doesn't seem to be as much of a scanner issue as simply a reminder that all new gadgets take some "getting used to." But it does appear that someone who learns the SprintScan can make really good scans, fast and cheap.

Big speed, big bucks
On the pricey side, the scanning system that everyone was talking about belonged to Applied Graphics Technologies.

First, its Digital Link system amazed photographers with its ability to scan entire rolls of film in one shot. It takes about seven minutes to do a 36-exposure roll, but each image is stored separately so you can work on one while the next one is scanning.

The scans were sharp and of high quality, and the system allowed tailored scanning on images that required more attention to shadow details or other tricky elements.

Aside from its speed and quality, Digital Link has wonderful photo editing capabilities, according to Eric Meskauskas of the New York Daily News. (The Daily News and AGT have the same owner, so the newspaper has been using the system extensively.)

Once they were through saying "wow, it can do a whole roll" and "that sure was fast," people at the workshop started talking about the high price of the system (some configurations are well into the six-figure range) and the issue everyone faces these days when considering a scanner purchase: What if in the future all my images are digital and I don't need a scanner anymore?

The proper answer, of course, is "Uh, well, gee, that's true, I guess, maybe."

Digital cameras mature
Speaking of digital imaging, not every photograph came in through a scanner. AP and Kodak were helping photographers capture images from AP's NC2000 and Kodak's DCS 420.

What a difference a year makes. The digital images captured mostly with DCS 100 and DCS 200 cameras at last year's workshop ranged in quality from excellent to just plain lousy. But this year, with newer cameras and perhaps more savvy photographers, the images were consistently strong.

There were some problems in low-light situations, but they were minor.

Yellow brick road
Once a photo was scanned from film, transmitted from the field or acquired from a digital camera, it went into "the system."

Each image was supposed to enter the system as a JPEG-compressed TIF file carrying a standard Iptc caption. Images from most sources were scanned or acquired in Photoshop, with captions added using a plug-in from Iron Mike Software.

But of course with so many input paths, there were deviations. Some systems, like AGT's Digital Link, could add captions but would produce only uncompressed TIFFs. A handful of manufacturers learned that this industry, or at least the segment represented at the workshop, expects them to be able to produce captioned JPEG files.

Once they were in the computers, pictures went into a fileserver. Here they entered an Oz-like land of AppleScripts crafted by Dan Neville of Newsday.

These scripts carried the photos first to a station running Iron Mike's Photo Factory, a processing program that compressed those photos that came in as regular TIFFs and made sure that every photo passing that point had certain caption information properly completed.

Next stop on the road to Oz was Archiveland, where several different archiving systems were given copies of the photos.

Then the script read the name of each photo, if it had been properly slugged. The first letter of the slug name told which of the three editing teams (named Cyan, Magenta and Yellow) was responsible for the assignment.

The photo was put into that team's volume on the fileserver. If it was the first item for that story, a new folder was created. Subsequent items carrying the same story name went into the same folder.

Making 'em look good
Because this was a workshop, participants did the bulk of the work. It's the best way to learn. But throughout the process they were assisted by coaches, faculty members who did a little teaching, a little coaching, a little coercing and a little bit of moving everyone along so no story gets too far behind.

So once a photo was in the system (with help from a photo coach and often from a representative of the scanner manufacturer), it moved to the imaging area. Here, a team of highly skilled, extremely efficient, remarkably talented and -- of course -- thoroughly humble imaging coaches took over.

Some participants were new to the Macintosh, while others were experienced electronic photo editors. Each was offered a chance to do as much as he or she could on each image with whatever help was needed from coaches.

New tricks from Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop Version 3.0 was new to everyone, and most everyone was eager to try it.

Most popular were two new functions: the ability to select a color throughout the image, and the ability to selectively edit one color in the image at a time.

Karl Kuntz of the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch provided a wealth of tips on using the new program, and one of the favorites was the snapshot function.

Take a snapshot of the picture before you start, then make whatever changes you wish to make. Now the picture's perfect, except for that one area that was blown out to start with and now looks way too bright.

In addition to Photoshop, some of the images were edited in HSC's new Live Picture program. Live Picture makes a small, mathematical representation of the image and lets you work on that. Then, when you're done, it applies those changes to the real photo.

That means editing a 200MB file should be as fast as editing a 10MB file. Of course, our photos for newsprint were closer to 10MB than 200MB. But it gave us a chance to try Live Picture, and it let the product manager learn more about which parts of the program will be useful to newspapers.

And now, for a layout
Once the photos were corrected and ready for publication, it was layout time.

Here, as in all parts of the workshop, the organizers were not content with simply picking one tool. No, they had to try everything.

So pages were laid out in Quark XPress on Macintoshes. XPress on PCs. Adobe's Aldus PageMaker on Macs. PageMaker on PCs. The Quark Publishing System. And the pagination system from Digital Technology International of Orem, Utah.

The results were pretty much as expected. Pages made in XPress and PageMaker on Macs went pretty smoothly. Pages made on the PCs worked reasonably well, but there were some output problems and, in a couple of cases, there was trouble linking Mac-created images to PC pages.

As in previous years, this workshop featured a bunch of Mac fans trying to make PCs work. So it's not exactly a fair fight. But they did work reasonably well.

On paper and on-line
Final pages were output to film in the newsroom with Scitex and Autologic equipment, using Open Pre-press Interface systems so that layout files had only low-resolution versions of the high-res photos.

The page negatives were then sent to the pressroom at the Herald-Sun by a more traditional method: Cars.

But traditional printing was only part of the equation. While the final page had been posted through on-line services at last year's event, this was the first time that the Electronic Times had a virtual newsroom worldwide.

Photos taken during the workshop were posted on an Internet World-Wide Web page and on various services. Coverage of the workshop and the several concurrent seminars was also published instantly in words and pictures.

Editors outside the newsroom were also involved. Students and professionals around the world participated in a virtual photo editing assignment.

About two dozen images from one team's story were posted for the assignment along with page templates and text. Participants on several continents downloaded the content and created their own pages, selecting images and doing the layouts, then returned those completed pages to the North Carolina newsroom.

In the end, this workshop generated words and photos that were published worldwide on the Internet before our presses even started rolling.

We scooped ourselves. Good thing the publisher didn't mind.

-- Neil Chase

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