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| © David Lesson/Dallas Morning News |
| A frame grab taken days after Katrina. |
David Leeson
Director of Video, Dallas Morning News
On List Because: He's helping photojournalists shoot still photography and Web-based video work at the same time
Secret of His Success: Evolving with the times in both product and process
Quote: "If you don't approach video from the standpoint of a still photographer, and you go looking for good frame grabs, you are going to be sorely disappointed -- they're not going to be there."
David Leeson is a seasoned photojournalist who has won numerous awards for his still photos, including the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for his images of the U.S. invasion of Iraq for the Dallas Morning News. But in recent years he has embraced video photography as the wave of the future.
"Some photojournalists probably see me as the right hand of Satan -- trying to destroy everything they love," Leeson says with a laugh. "But I'm trying to preserve what we love. Because I know many pressures on newspapers today are to provide a rich content for a digital medium -- the Internet. I want to adapt to these cultural and technological shifts in a way that preserves the legacies of still photojournalism."
Since taking over the News digital-video group in 2005, Leeson has spearheaded a movement to have staff photographers shoot high-definition video for use on the paper's Website (dallasmorningnews.com) -- and to submit frame grabs from those videos as still photos to run in the paper's broadsheet pages. "Right now we're shooting with the Sony HVR-Z1U HDV, a reasonably small, 1,080-pixel high-range camcorder," he says. "We hope manufacturers will come up with a camera more perfect for our needs, preferably recording to a true digital transfer and storage medium for fast export into Final Cut Pro. It's on the horizon."
 In postproduction -- to generate files big enough for a frame grab to run at, say, a five-column width in the newspaper -- Leeson relies on a computer algorithm devised by his son, David Leeson II, who also works for the News. "He came up with an approach that not only speeds up the process of editing frame grabs but also gives us a 67.8-megabyte JPEG at 203dpi resolution, whereas the standard frame grab is 5.93 megabytes," Leeson says. "He tried to explain it to me once, and I didn't quite understand it -- my response was that it's voodoo. So he's been calling it the voodoo tool," he adds with a chuckle. "But it works, allowing us to create amazingly high-res stills directly from video."
Technology aside, Leeson says still photography requires the same attention to detail as ever, regardless of what camera is used. "Shooting video, we try to approach it exactly as we would as still photographers: We frame images the same way, we're careful with shutter speeds and apertures, we're thinking about light and use of lenses in the same way," he says. "A still photo does something different from video; it does not try to provide a beginning, middle, and end. It only provides a moment. As processes, techniques, and technology evolve, one thing remains the same -- the moment itself."
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