This week my classmates and I are in Washington DC to meet and talk to a number of editors, photographers, and other members of the industry. Due to technical difficulties recently I'll have to delay photos from the trip until I have fixed my computer, but until then I will be posting about our daily meetings. We started today by going to Bloomberg and meeting with their photo editor, Andrew Harrer. After meeting with Andrew, we went to US News and World Report to meet with Director of Photography, Avi Gupta.
We started the morning at Bloomberg where we met in the training room. Bloomberg is a company that covers business, economic, and political news. The headquarters is in NYC with a branch also in DC. In DC we met with Andrew Harrer who acts as photo editor and photographer in the DC branch. Andrew discussed with us how Bloomberg's photo department works, hiring mostly freelancers with a staff of just four photographers located in various cities around the world. Andrew went on to discuss how Bloomberg is starting to work with more and more video. He explained his role in the video, taking 10 to 15 second clips and captioning them all before giving them off to a video editor who will edit them and put them up on the wire. As the meeting came to a close Andrew gave us some tips that will be useful as we enter the field of photography. He told us to make sure to be very good at captioning, always keep networking, and have a diverse base of knowledge so that you have some background on the subjects that you will end up covering.
After Bloomberg we went over to US News and World Report where we met with the director of photography, Avi Gupta. US News and World Report is a company that puts out an online weekly publication, several specialty publications throughout the year (for example they did a publication on the civil war this past year), and some consumer reports rating the best colleges and hospitals in the country. Avi discussed how the photo department there worked. Like Bloomberg, US News and World Report also depended heavily on freelance photographers. Their consumer report publications this past year were roughly 95 percent original photography. All of this was shot with one staff photographer and a lot of freelancers. Avi then explained what a basic contract for a freelance photographer would include, the important features being copyright, reuse, embargos, and finances. He then showed us the editing room, where all of the editors pin up print outs of each page to the wall to mess around with different layouts and see how it looks. While their Avi introduced us to the one US News and World Report staff photographer/photo editor, Brett Ziegler. Brett gave us some words of wisdom, mostly involving personal work and the need to continue producing it all the time.
Overall the day was a good one with lots of wisdom from several great minds in the business.
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