bladerunner912

Tony Sleep: I have huge respect for Dan, but don't understand his logic. Stills photojournalism has lost its economic base as agencies and crowdsourcing have whittled away the need to pay for professional material. It seems probable that video will follow the same curve, just a bit later. As he says, there are already many amateurs exploring video with impressive competence. They will eventually seek publication for a byline, as with stills.

As for professionals being slow to transition from stills to video, it's a different medium. Those who are most committed to stills are least likely to change simply because they don't have the same fascination with the moving image. Dan is an excepton.

attomole: I am not a professional photographer. but i am an avid consumer of news particularly on the internet, one of the biggest news site's out there is the Mail, and they feature some excellent photographs, and very little video. aside my dislike over politics and celeb tittle tattle, it still an good site which features constantly high quality images and occasionally great photography.

DaveMarx: First, it's all "electronic photography." One imaging sensor, one CPU. Motion, stills, audio, text, time and position data in a small, hand-held device. One investment in lenses, a common memory storage device. Stills darkroom plus audio/video post in another compact and portable device. We can document the world with one little bag of gear.

Ignore this convergence if you will, but if you do, you're restricting your creativity, and the ability to use the right tool for the job - motion when it's called for, stills when that's called for, and often both, because there are several ways to tell the same story.

I started shooting stills over 40 years ago. Within a few years I was working in radio, television, and film, eventually online and web, print publishing... It's not hard, it's all about communicating. Each medium has its strengths and weaknesses. If you can be eloquent in one, you can be eloquent in several. It's not one vs. the other, it's all for one and one for all.

marike6: You don't have to look any farther than all the citizen journalists, vloggers, the role that people with video cameras played in the popular uprisings like the Arab Spring, or keeping law enforcement honest at OWS protests, YouTube, Vimeo and the tons of amazingly creative work on display there to know that multimedia is here to stay and it's role cannot and should not be minimized. I'm not sure how the contrary can even be seriously argued. This fact doesn't lessen the impact the still images will continue to have. Anyway, I seen Dan Chung's work on Vimeo prior to this piece but didn't realize all the cool things he has done.

Desifinado: Stills are still the backbone of journalism. But photojournalism as a profession is shrinking for a reason Chung doesn't touch on (I saw this in the my last couple of years before I retired): news outlets are accepting more and more images from citizen journalists as digital technology has advanced.

Unlike a reporter, who can put a story together though online research, phone interviews, etc., the PJ must obviously be there, to get the shot. With the ubiquitousness of digital cameras, cell phone cameras, etc., - there are millions of high-quality digital eyes present on every scene, and the internet makes transmission of those impressions quick and easy.

Some venues like sports, concerts, editorial concepts, etc., that require a high level of expertise, or press conferences and venues that require credentials, or familiarity with journalistic protocol, are still shot by pros. But it's a shrinking field, as the democratization of high-quality image production grows ubiquitous.

ecm: Interesting article. And yet I didn't bother to click on any of the videos - after all, who cares? It's just video; there's millions of videos on the net. The last photo in the article, however, tells a whole story.....