1. Logistically, freelancers have advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages are obvious, basically you make of logistician, agent, psychologist, is a bit of everything … Besides all that, you have to have an economic support as to fund these trips and manage the work. The advantage is that you have the freedom to decide where to go and choose your stories, unlike the staff journalists who have economic freedom and logistics, because they are covered by the mainstream media, but lack some, not all, of agency .
2. What I do now is, above all, is working harder, because at the moment the photographic assignments to levels have fallen sharply. With 3, 4 or 5 assignments you may have a year do not cover the economic capacity to survive.
3. Right now they are looking duality between photographer and videographer. The orchestra man. Within the context of the image I understand that a person who makes video is a photographer or someone who is a photographer can also make video. What is already beyond me is when they ask radio, make pen and all that kind of stuff, you really take time away what is your own work or your mother work, which is photography or video.
4. Digital photography equipment was obviously a huge change. Before you had to go with an impressive amount of rolls and now you two cards and an album with that and strips. But it is also true that it has the disadvantage that globalized photography and now it seems that everyone who has a camera and is a photographer, unlike before, you had to have some technical knowledge to know at least expose and positive these images, which is no longer needed.
5. The emergence of smartphones has not changed the way I work. I continue as usual. I’m not against using any tool you can use to photograph, such as smartphones, but I prefer to follow other paths such as cameras. Smartphones still have many limitations.
6. The impact of social networks in photojournalism is diffusion, obviously, but for me they have the disadvantage of having such widely, no such offer and such supply capacity level news we do not know exactly who or what media have no loyalty within the fabric of a social network. Many times you come across news that are absolutely false. Is ignoring some big media, in favor of information in social networks.
7. Han born alia, due mainly social networks, also have won, but I think in that sense it still maintains that it is essential to belong to one of the big agencies to be renowned photojournalist.
8. I is unacceptable losing the copyright of the images by uploading them to social networking. It’s like a writer, painter or sculptor take away the rights of his work. As photography has been globalized, today we have fallen into that trap that everyone is a photographer and photography has ceased to have the value it had once.
9. Agence France Presse and its US partner Getty Images had to pay the sum of 1.22 million dollars to the Haitian photographer Daniel Morel for deliberately violating your copyright in 2010. This is good because it will set precedents. Otherwise, at the end we risk losing those rights in the near future.
10. I am not against citizen photojournalism. I always give the example that if you are driving and you suddenly find yourself with an accident and need medical knowledge obviously is fine if you help that person, but when the doctor arrives, you have to give way to the doctor. In the case of photojournalism it should happen the same. It is great that you use that knowledge or that first push, but when the professionals arrive you have to let them pass, either locally or whether accidental, it has absolutely nothing to do. Not talking about a distinction of nationality, but simply of professionals in the sector.
Ricardo Garcia Vilanova
