Seamus Conlan: Lost and Found
For Conlan, initiated into digital photography in Afghanistan during the bombing campaign, shooting digitally in the remotest parts of southern Africa was second nature, in part because he brought a camera that favors his shooting style. “If I see something, I need to shoot it and keep on shooting it until I’ve got the right image. I prefer to use a Canon D30, which lets me shoot off 320 frames on one card,” he says.
“I travel with a PowerBook G4, which is absolutely beautiful — 30 gig drive, burns CDs, perfect.”
Conlan believes his quick-draw action is complemented and even enabled by another standard feature of digital cameras, real-time feedback. “With any digital camera, the monitor on the back is like a Polaroid,” says Conlan. “So you can go into a pretty dodgy situation, snap off a quick frame, check it on the back, change the ASA, change your settings, shoot off again, you’re happy, and bang, you’re rolling. You continue to shoot a few hundred frames.”
Working it Through
After capture, Conlan’s workflow runs through a Mac. “I travel with a PowerBook G4, which is absolutely beautiful — 30 gig drive, burns CDs, perfect.”
Conlan uses the Mac to track and edit in the field, even as a kind of video hotplate. “Generally with digital — as with film negs — there is a color balance problem. But really all that I do is alter the color balance in Photoshop using a small program I developed around the automatic actions. I basically select the folder and allow Photoshop to put one touch of yellow on every image, just to warm them up slightly, because they are generally a little cold when they come out of my Canon camera.”
On the Digital Front
With long experience managing the logistical problems associated with shooting and processing film in remote areas of conflict, Conlan was an easy and eager convert to digital technology when it became available and viable. “The quality is absolutely superb, you don’t have processing problems, you don’t have any dust on your negatives and you don’t have a problem shipping chemicals or trying to find water,” says Conlan. “If you don’t bring your own kit, you also have the problem of trying to find a photo processing place.”
Conlan once found such a place in Kukes, Albania, a town of 400 people just outside Kosovo. “I paid a man at a photo lab $100 and told him to change his chemicals and clean his machine down. And I sat there until he cleaned it. When 3,000 journalists arrived, this photo lab turned into a 24-hour lab. Now he wouldn’t increase his business at all, because everything’s digital,” he says.
New Transmission
Conlan witnessed a complete analog-to-digital switchout between conflicts. “When the Kosovo war kicked off in 1999, about 20% of the photographers were running around with digital cameras. Fast forward to Afghanistan during the bombing campaign and 100% of the photographers had digital cameras. Every single one of them,” he says.
He believes the rocketing rate of adoption has as much to do with sending as getting critical images in difficult conditions. “What journalists use now are ICN satellite phones that plug into any Mac and let you transmit a full-size 9MB file in 20 seconds. I used to have to process 20 rolls of film until 3 or 4 in the morning, select 2 or 3 images, digitize them, put them into a Mac and send them on an old satellite phone at a rate of one picture per hour. By then it was time for breakfast, and I’d be off again working. Now I can turn a hundred pictures in half an hour. The editor’s getting a better choice and I can get to bed at night.”
Wired Shop
Conlan founded a new international picture service, World Picture News, built to leverage the shoot-and-send workflow made possible by digital technology.
“We don’t have any filing cabinets because it’s all digital,” says Conlan. “When people come round to see us, all they see are half a dozen Macs. Everything is FTPd into the server, just hanging up there somewhere between Mars and Pluto. If we upload a picture into the site, our 2,500 clients see it instantly and they can download and use it within three minutes. It has revolutionized our industry completely. And there’s no going back.”
