This was how Time Magazine covered Hurricane Sandy on its cover on its Nov. 1 issue.The photo, which is pretty impressive, came from Instagram.
For more details on this, see a very good piece on why this was done, and how was done in Forbes by Jeff Bercovici.
I am more interested in the fact that it was done at all, and what it says, not only about the future of professional photography, but of professional videography as well, which follows suit by about a decade.
When I founded Video News International in 1988, one of my first investors was a man named Nick Nicholas.
He was then the Chairman and CEO of Time/Life, the largest and most widely respected media company in the world.
(Latterly, they could become Time/Warner, and briefly, AOL Time Warner  – but that is another story).
Nicholas liked my idea of equipping working traditional journalists with small, (then), easy-to-use video cameras and creating a global corps of professional video journalists. Â He was well ahead of his time.
Once he became an investor, Nick took me down the hall to meet a few of the Life and Time Magazine photographers. Â Could I, he asked, teach them to make video?
It was a great opportunity. Â What would a professional photojournalist do with a video camera if he could use it the way he or she already used a Leica?
We would find out.
So it was that I began to train some of the world’ best photographers – people like Dirck Halstead, David Kennerly, PF Bentley, Bill Gentile and Susan Meiseles, among others.
And it worked.
But as with every step forward, borne by new technologies, there comes an unexpected consequence.
A few years into the project, PF Bentley, who was then the White House photographer for Time Magazine invited me to go on a shoot.
PF has an incredible eye.
Here’s an example of his work:
We went to some massive political rally, and due to his credentials and reputation, were able to get up front.
PF said he wanted to show me something really neat. Â He then proceeded to pull out of his camerabag one of the very first Canon digital cameras.
Today, this is the norm, but then, it was the very first one I (or anyone else for that matter) had ever seen.
He held the camera over his head, pointed it in the general direction of the event he was covering and held down the button.
The camera probably rattled off 30 or 50 exposures. Â Then he pointed it in another direction and did the same. Â 50 more.
Of course, we were all used to film so this was pretty astonishing. Even with a motor drive you couldn’t do stuff like that.
And with auto-focus, also unheard of, he didn’t even have to look through the lens.
Then, he scrolled through the exposures for me. Â (that was novel as well). Â They were sharp and some quite good.
“Pretty impressive” he said.
And it was.
But he was also carrying in his hands the very seeds of the destruction of his career. Because if he could do that, so could anyone else.
They might not have his eye – but maybe Time Magazine would not care.
As it turned out, they didn’t.
The use of an Instagram exposure on the cover of Time tells us volumes about not only where the photography business is going, but where the video business is sure to follow.
What is Instagram today for photos (and they have now achieved the ‘pinnacle’ of the professional what was once the professional world of photography, how long will it be before iPhone videos replace the work of video professionals at TV’s highest levels?
I would guess 5 years.
Maybe fewer.
Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2013
