In 1999 I got hold of my first digital camera and never looked back. I currently shoot with a Canon 7D and an iPhone 4.

Any good photographer will tell you, your best camera is the one you have with you. And so it is with me, I always have my iPhone 4 in my pocket.

When I first purchased my iPhone I used the free and pre-installed Apple camera app. It does a fine job of capturing both still and video images. Its a bit slow and doesn’t give the photographer much control over the image.

My first camera app purchase was Camera+ by Tap, Tap, Tap. If you are going to download one paid camera app, it should be this one. Camera+ allows you to pick a focus point and a separate exposure point.

Camera+ also allows you to shoot in burst mode, firing image after image like a DSLR with a motor drive. The burst images are lower quality but allow you to capture action more effectively.

Basic picture editing and adjustments are included in the app. The cost of the app is $1.99.

I am also a fan of the Hipstamatic app, which makes your digital images look analog.

From the Apple Store, “The Hipstamatic brings back the look, feel, unpredictable beauty, and fun of plastic toy cameras of the past! The Hipstamatic keeps the the quirks of shooting old school but gives you the ability to swap lenses, film, and flash settings all with the swipe of a finger.”

Some of the lens and film choices remind me of my first camera, a plastic Kodak that produced square images. Beyond the look of Hipstamatic prints is the ability to share on Twitter and Facebook.

Damon Winter, a photojournalist at the New York Times recently won third place for feature picture story in the Pictures of the Year International. Winter used his iPhone 4 and the Hipstamatic app to capture images from the field in Afghanistan. The images are compelling but have also raised questions about the use of apps for photojournalism. Judge for yourself, you can see the images on the NYT Lens blog and read Winter’s account.

The third app I’ll recommend is an editing app, Filterstorm 2. Filterstorm gives you the ability to adjust the levels in your images and even has a history brush option much like Adobe Photoshop which sells for $600. You can adjust curves, color correct and even reduce noise in an image.

The single feature that sets Filterstorm apart from other editing apps is the ability to attach IPTC information to an image. IPTC information or International Press Telecommunications Council information is metadata that can be attached to text, images, audio and video files.

In other words, you can attach a caption to the image. This is a crucial feature for photojournalists who use the iPhone to shoot and edit images.

Filterstorm also allows users to send images directly from the app to an FTP site. Photojournalists like this because they can file pictures from their phone directly into their newsroom’s archive system which nearly always uses an FTP server. FTP or File Transfer Protocol is a network protocol that is used to copy files from a laptop or iPhone onto a host server.

Filterstorm is currently $3.99 in the Apple App store.

Initiative has never been a problem for Pulliam, an alum of several Freedom Forum Diversity Institute programs including the Chips Quinn Scholars (2008) and the American Indian Journalism Institute.

Pulliam left Nashville, headed for Joplin, MO armed with his Canon 40D digital camera, a Canon HV40 video camera and his iPhone 4. His only plan was to arrive in Joplin and begin documenting the devastation.

As luck and the Chips Quinn network would have it Pulliam met up with Chips alum Justin Hayworth (2000) who was covering the disaster for the Des Moines Register where he works as a photojournalist. The two Chipsters worked the scene together, Hayworth shooting photos and video for the Des Moines Register and Pulliam tweeting, posting photos and videos made on his iPhone.

Pulliam (@cspulliam on Twitter) gathered amazing moments with his iPhone and then edited and posted them on Twitter and Facebook. He captured moments like a reunion of a dog and its owner at the Humane Society in Joplin and a timelapse (using iTimelapse app) of storm clouds rolling into Joplin.

Pulliam then gathered all of his social media posts and organized the story on Storify

Storify allows users to collect social media and curate it to tell a story. Users can pull media from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Audio Boo, RSS feeds and YouTube. Storify is free to use.

Here is Pulliam’s story, organized and curated…click the link to see the active timeline.

[View the story "My time in Joplin" on Storify]

Kenon, a multimedia photojournalist at The Indianapolis Star, produced “Hoosier Veterans: Faces of War“; Wagner, a staff photographer at the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, S.D., produced the multimedia and photographs for “Growing Up Indian“; and Welliver, a multimedia journalist at The Island Packet in Hilton Head, S.C., produced a video for “Greatest Generation of Our Time.”

Kenon spent the better part of six months working on “Hoosier Veterans: Faces of War,” a 28-minute documentary about the service of men and women from Indianapolis. In addition to the documentary are video chapters recounting the war experiences of each man and woman featured.

The project sought to honor Hoosier veterans, but it also brings front and center stories of being at war.

The documentary is being aired on WFYI Public Broadcasting and can be seen at Indystar.com.

The project was a collaboration among Kenon, a photo librarian and various editors and multimedia photojournalists. Kenon was the video editor, weaving together the stories.

She is a frequent speaker and coach during Chips Quinn orientation and multimedia training.

Devin Wagner spent nearly six months traveling South Dakota’s Indian reservations in his dusty Subaru for the project “Growing Up Indian.”

The 10-minute video project looks at the lives of three young people on the Lower Brule, Oglala and Rosebud reservations. Wagner, a Crow descendant, conducted the interviews and shot and edited the footage. Accompanying the project online are photo galleries he also shot and edited.

Wagner was in the first class of Chips Quinn Scholars to receive five days of multimedia training in the spring of 2008. As a graduate of the American Indian Journalism Institute (AIJI), he has experience producing audio and video.

Accompanying Wagner’s work on “Growing Up Indian,” are videos from three American Indian students who attended the Crazy Horse Journalism Workshop in April 2010. The three students were trained to tell their stories through video during a session with the staff of the Argus Leader and the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute at Crazy Horse Memorial in June. In the videos, the students reflect on growing up on and off the reservation and the future they see for themselves.

Sarah Welliver, also a graduate of AIJI, is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. She produced a Veteran’s Day project, “Greatest Generation of Our Time” for The Island Packet. She worked on the project on and off for two months, traveling to Washington, D.C., to record the veterans during their Honor Flight visit to the World War II memorial.

The project gives voice to four World War II veterans from Beaufort County, S.C. The vets tell their stories of being at war and of their experience with the Honor Flight program.

“It was an amazing project to put together,” Welliver says. “The military has always been a part of my life and it’s something I’m passionate about covering as a journalist. Listening to these four vets’ stories was an experience I was proud to share with their community.” One thing that impressed her was “the modesty that these men have — people don’t realize the sacrifices they made, most before they were even 20-years-old.”

Welliver received multimedia training while participating in AIJI in 2008 and has since produced several multimedia projects for her paper.

I am one proud mentor today. The multimedia work produced by these three journalists is what we should all aim for — compelling, well shot and well edited.

Nice work gang.

Earthquake In Chile on Dipity.

Dipity.com is a free site that allows you to create and share time lines. You can add text, photos and video to the time line. The Seattle Times, Chicago Sun-Times and others are using Dipity time lines.

Another super cool thing about Dipity is that it can make a time line from your Tweets. By connecting my Twitter account to Dipity it will time line my last 100 Tweets.

You can also connect Facebook, Digg, Tumblr, Wordpress, Last.fm and more to a Dipity time line.

Dipity is all the things I like, free, easy and pretty darn cool.

Update to this post…The Seattle Times used Dipity in its Pulitzer Prize winning breaking news reporting.

Here is the the link to time Times Lakewood police shooting reporting.

At Work

The Big Picture Blog at Boston.com is still one of my favorite photo blogs. Alan Taylor is a developer at Boston.com and posts entries Monday, Wednesday and Friday each week.

The Polygamists

National Geographic now posts photo galleries on their website from each print edition. The Polygamists is one of many well edited galleries on the National Geographic site.

Advice From A Grandma Beauty Queen

This New York Times video is a great piece of personal journalism. The filmmakers happen to be the beauty queen’s grandsons. The photography is mediocre but the storytelling is excellent.

Royalty Free Music That IS FREE

I ran across this list of free music sites on Vimeo recently. I have used several of these sites including incomptech.com, audiofarm.org and freesound.org.

Why The Designer Holds The Key To The Future of Journalism

Journalism 2.0 is run by Mark Briggs. He recently posted this guest column from Adam Westbrook, a multimedia journalist based in London. Westbrook talks about web design and how it can help sell online news. He also mentions Flyp Media which is a highly designed online news magazine.

Visual Complexity

Continuing on the design theme…visual complexity is a site devoted to graphic design. There are excellent examples of both low-fi and high-fi web graphics.

Effect Generator

Journalists want to learn Flash. Flash is complicated and it requires you to learn action scripting.  Effect Generator is a free Flash-like website where you can create video effects, slideshows and animations. Effect Generator also has great video tutorials to guide you through your first project.

Eric Bressi On Being Elvis

AARP’s website, AARP Bulletin Today, has recently begun featuring documentary videos. Eric Bressi On Being Elvis was created during last year’s Eddie Adams Workshop. This mini-doc mixes still images and sound.

New York Times Haiti photo/graphic

Satellite images help tell the story of destruction in Haiti. The New York Times staff found images from before and after the 7.0 earthquake that illustrate the extent of the damage. This is flat out one of the coolest photo/graphic pieces from the Port-au- Prince coverage.

Charlie Brooker - How to Report The News

For a little fun here is a YouTube video that pokes fun at broadcast news.

Beautiful black and white surf images from Chris Bickford and the New York Times Travel section.

Americanpoverty.org

Excellent photo essays from photojournalists around the country.

From the website, “In Our Own Backyard is an organization of photojournalists committed to the cause of social justice in the United States. Our inaugural project, AmericanPoverty.org is a multimedia examination of the daily struggles of impoverished Americans: a comprehensive and innovative campaign that will affect the way the general public and policymakers think about poverty in America.”

Big Picture Blog: Glacier National Park

Beautiful photo gallery from one of our most beautiful National Parks.

How Do You Correct Errors in Video Stories (from Ken Kobre’s blog)

Kobre’s discussion is a good one so jump in.

An Alaskan Village in Crisis

I don’t like voice overs but the story and visuals in this piece from The New York Times is extremely compelling.

Beginners Guide to Digital Cameras and Video

This blog post from dpreview.com may come in handy during the holiday season. Because you are a multimedia journalist your relatives and friends think you are an expert on all digital cameras. Take a minute and read this post, then pass it on.

Save Our Sounds

This is a cool idea. The BBC is using reader submitted audio to create this “sound map”.

Ten Tips for Working With Music in Multimedia, from the Media Storm Blog

Media Storm is generously sharing the secrets of their success.

Times of Crisis, Reuters

I don’t think of the financial crisis as a particularly visual story but Reuters and the Media Storm team have produced a very rich visual multimedia story. It is worth the 11 minutes, 42 seconds.

Let me know what you are watching by leaving a comment or emailing me at vhoeppner@freedomforum.org.

Audio slide show: Frozen Land, Forgotten People

In 1966, Bureau of Indian Affairs Commissioner Robert L. Bennett outlawed development on 1.6 million acres of desert in northeastern Arizona that was claimed by both the Navajo nation and the Hopi tribe.
Photography and audio by Barbara Davidson Produced by Albert Lee, Los Angeles Times

Ian Fisher: American Soldier

Denver Post photojournalist Craig F. Walker tracks Ian Fisher from High School to basic training and finally through a year deployment in Iraq. Spend time with this piece, it offers excellent storytelling, good visuals and great design.

Scene In

The Washington Post describes this feature in the Style section by saying, “The Washington Post’s Alexandra Garcia hits the streets to find out what’s hip around Washington D.C.”

One of the amazing things about this piece is that all the footage and images are shot on the Canon 5D Mark II. The lighting, visuals and audio are vibrant. Go back and watch the episode on Dupont Circle, it shows the strength of the 5D Mark II video capabilities.

The Picture Show Blog

The Picture Show is David Gilkey’s NPR blog. Gilkey is video producer at NPR.The Picture Show has many photo galleries from Gilkey’s travels, video and audio slideshows.

Living Galapagos

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication announces the release of http://LivingGalapagos.org, a collection of student-produced multimedia stories about life in the Galapagos Islands.

Texas Tribune

From the Tribune website….What is The Texas Tribune?

A non-profit, nonpartisan public media organization. Our mission is to promote civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide concern, and we do this in two principal ways.

I spent 45 minutes sifting through the Trib’s site (they refer to themselves as “The Trib” ).  I found the website to be clean, visual, full of good political journalism and well designed for the online reader.

4/Docs

Finally, a cool website all about short documentary films. 4docs.org.uk has some helpful information in their blogs and wiki sections about producing short docs. The site, of course, has a watch section that is full of short documentaries.

When I needed to learn to edit video in Final Cut Pro I turned to lynda.com. Lynda isn’t new but they continue to upgrade the hundreds of tutorials they offer for $25 per month for an individual user.

Amy Webb of Knowledgewebb was one of the highlights of the Associated Press Managing Editors and Photo Mangers conference. Webb, a former journalist, has 150 tutorials and learning opportunities available on Knowledgewebb with a yearly cost of about $129. If you attended APME you can receive a discounted rate by using the coupon code APME09.

NewsU.org is a Poynter website offering free tutorials on everything from video storytelling to management strategy. All you need to do is become a registered user and start learning.

Knight New Media offers dozens of free tutorials on audio and video storytelling, setting up a blog, CSS and a variety of multimedia gear.

Gotoandlearn provides free video tutorials on Flash and related products by Lee Brimelow. If you want to learn about Adobe Flash this is a great resource.

The University of Westminster offers Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Flash and various other multimedia software tutorials. They have a YouTube channel with dozens of how-to videos.

Everyone should be using an RSS reader and following blogs relating to tech and journalism. I use Google Reader and follow more than 30 blogs. Google Reader makes it easy for me to sort my blogs by topic and to skim through the hundreds of daily posts. Here are some of the blogs that I follow:

Video WTF? is a forum on all things video. Post a question and let the community help yu solve your problems. This is a give and take site, play nice and contribute when you can.

Mindy McAdams, Teaching Online Journalism is not just for teachers. Mindy writes on timely multimedia and online journalism issues. She also offers many how-to lessons on her site. The conversation is lively and she is quick to respond to your questions.

Channel your inner geek by reading Mashable and TechCrunch Both blogs offer reviews of gear, new software and news that effects the online journalism industry.

Another great resource for learning Final Cut Pro techniques is Larry Jordan’s Monthly Newsletter. Larry is in the training business and on the production side of the video business but he offers excellent tips and techniques for high level video editing. Sign up for the email newsletter, its free!

We all need to be more efficient. The next few sites will help you be your best.

Dropbox is a free large file transfer station. You can upgrade to a paid account and create your own intranet that is accessible online. Dropbox allows you to store and move files.

Google Docs is a free and efficient way to share budgets, project planning, databases and more with anyone you invite to collaborate. I used Google Docs to share the multimedia planning budget with editors and multimedia journalists when I was multimedia director at The Indianapolis Star. I still use Docs today to create, share and track multimedia assignments during training sessions at the Diversity Institute.

MindMeister is a mind mapping website that allows you to think visually as you do project planning and brainstorming. MindMeister also allows you to share the mind map and collaborate in real time.

Gist is a site that allows you to track people. It is a great way to keep track of sources already in your email contacts list. You get real time updates on your contacts Facebook, Twitter, blog posts or media mentions. This is a great resource for reporters.

Finally, if your photographers and multimedia journalists are using smart phones like the iPhone, HTC, Blackberry Storm, etc. you can use Qik to broadcast live video to your website via a video enabled phone. Need video of a press conference or breaking news event? Instead of carrying bulky equipment into the field for raw video use a smart phone and Qik.

PART ONE (4:58)

PART TWO (5:31)