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|| SportsShooter.com: News Item: Posted 2010-04-07
'How I learned to eat my words.'
Danny Gawlowski is dumping preconceptions and adapting quickly to embrace opportunities at The Seattle Times.
By Danny Gawlowski, The Seattle Times
Photo by Kevin Martin
Over time and through attending The Kalish visual editing workshop, Danny Gawlowski came to really value the role of good editors and the great journalism work they do.
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When I was a photojournalism student, I was pretty certain of a couple things: I was never going to shoot video and I was never going to work in an office. "Journalism doesn't happen behind a desk," I was all too fond of saying. Well, few things are certain and I’ve definitely had to eat those words. I'm now the Video Editor at The Seattle Times and I couldn’t be happier.
The difference in my life, the inspiration for me to see storytelling from a broader perspective, was The Kalish visual editing workshop. I helped out one year not long after I graduated and learned my first lesson quickly – journalism does happen behind a desk. Seeing the work of passionate picture editors, I began to understand that good editors craft a story through picture selection and placement in a way not all that different from the way photographers in the field choose which images to make. It’s pretty obvious that good photojournalists work hard. A picture editor’s work is less obvious but not less important. Especially in this age, getting photojournalists the time and resources necessary to do their work and the resources necessary to get that work seen may very well be more difficult than the photography itself. Photojournalism depends on good picture editors as much as it depends on good photographers.
I continued helping with the Kalish workshop for the next few years and learned another lesson I wasn’t expecting – that a time would come for me to tell my stories not just through still images and audio slideshows, but with video as well. If I had any lingering doubts about the story-telling potential of video, they were completely vanquished by the time Geri Migielicz, the Director of Photography at the San Jose Mercury News, left the newspaper to start STORY4, a video and multimedia production company serving non-profits. I knew that a lot of newspaper photojournalists were turning to video, but it took two of my mentors, Geri and Dan Habib, making the switch for me to really understand that video was going to affect all of us.
Once I finally accepted that fact, I sought the means to educate myself. If I was going to do video, I wanted to have a good base to start from. Working as a staff photographer for The Bellingham Herald in Washington, I sought opportunities to shoot video in addition to my regular assignments. I studied at the Seattle Film Institute, shot a short documentary, and supplemented my picture stories with video. The bulk of my time was spent shooting stills, but I was really starting to enjoy using video to tell stories as well. Then, as our photo staff shrank due to layoffs, time allotted for video work kept getting scaled back. And you know what? I started to really regret that. I was actually missing video. So when I heard of a job opening for a video editor – a posting I would have ignored just one year previous – I went for it.
Since starting my job in October, I’ve learned much. The learning curve has been pretty steep and I’ve spent long hours teaching myself things I never expected I would need to know, but I’m loving it. More than anything else, I’ve learned how much you can really craft a story in FinalCut. Every day, I’m handed the work of amazing photojournalists and asked to shape it into something new. I do my work on storyboards and timelines instead of cameras, but I’m still telling stories. And I couldn’t be happier.
I’m not sure what any of us will be doing next, but I’ve definitely learned to be flexible and to question my preconceptions. Times are tough. But I really think that the best chance we have for making it through this downturn is to be flexible, adaptable and willing to learn.
The 2010 Kalish visual editing workshop will be held June 4-8. You can apply online: http://www.kalishworkshop.org/apply.html. If you’re interested in visual story telling across various media, I’d encourage you to go. I’ll be there, teaching video editing with FinalCut Pro – teaching how journalism can be done from behind a desk.
(Danny Gawlowski is on staff at The Seattle Times where he works as an editor of video and multimedia. You can see his member page here: http://www.sportsshooter.com/gawlowski and more samples of his work on his personal website: http://www.dannygawlowski.com)
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