News / Clark County News

From the Newsroom: Photo editor hones her skills

By Craig Brown, Columbian Editor

Published: July 27, 2024, 6:10am

3 Photos

Sue Morrow, center in black sweater, looks over photos that were edited and sequenced by participants in The Kalish Visual Storytelling Workshop last June in Rochester, N.Y. (Amanda Cowan/The Columbian) Photo Gallery

One of the best things about my job is getting to work with journalists whom I admire. We have a talented and devoted team in The Columbian’s newsroom, and we really enjoy bringing local news and information to Clark County.

Some of us are relatively new to the trade, while others, like me, have been in the workforce for quite a while. Our photo editor, Amanda Cowan, is one of the experienced folks I admire. She is a life-long learner, working hard to hone her craft. Last year, for example, she was one of 40 photojournalists invited to attend The Missouri Photo Workshop, an intensive week where photojournalists document life in a small town, with the guidance and coaching of some of the world’s best photographers. Amanda reported the story, “Still Home,” about the struggles of a Sedalia, Mo., family struggling to care for their elderly parents. (See the story at https://bit.ly/3A0syUU.)

Last month, she attended the Kalish Workshop in Rochester, N.Y., which focuses on the craft of photo editing. As it says on its site: “Through a series of engaging exercises, participants will examine provided content and decide how to best edit and present each story for online, mobile, print and social platforms. Participants discuss and problem-solve tough ethical issues, examine nonlinear editing techniques, practice selecting and effectively sequencing the best photographs for each platform and re-imagine content presentation methods for each platform. The end goal: the workshop engages participants to develop an exceptional eye for excellence in visual editing, its value, the process and its purpose in their workplaces.”

She’s brought a lot back to share from each of these workshops. Some of it is pretty specialized, but a lot of it is applicable to everyone in the newsroom, and some of it may even be useful to amateur photographers. I’m taking some of the material from Amanda’s presentations to our staff, along with information prepared by Sue Morrow, a professor and former multimedia editor at the Sacramento Bee who was one of the Kalish instructors.

Photographers and reporters work together as equal partners to tell the story, but that doesn’t mean they always want to be in the same place at the same time. Reporters ask the subject to stop and answer questions and talk about themselves, while photographers are keen to document what the person does when they’re not being interviewed.

For both goals to be achieved, it takes good planning. A reporter might talk to subjects of a story by phone or email, go out and interview them, then return to the office and put in a photo request. Good photo requests include details like what the story is about, what makes it interesting, what the people being profiled do, where and when they do it, and other concerns such as what the lighting at the scene is like.

Sometimes it’s impossible for the reporter and photographer to go at different times. And at a press conference, for example, or a visit by a politician, talking to reporters is the action. But it’s easy to get in each other’s way, as I learned back in my rookie days when I had a bad habit of getting either me or my car in photos.

One of the most important things is to schedule a photojournalist to visit when the activity is taking place. Journalists want to honestly document what is happening; to have a set-up “photo op” is anathema to us, even if the subject means well. If a photojournalist is sent to an assignment where this is happening, they will generally decline to photograph the staged event and instead make a portrait of the subject.

Photojournalists have a hard job. We’re lucky to employ professionals like Amanda Cowan and Taylor Balkom who can use their excellent skills to tell our community’s visual stories.

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