The Final Edit

Is the job easier now that we shoot digital?

Bryan Eaton — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:41:02 +0000

Getting the right photo that tells the story still takes the same skills. Digital has made lots of things easier — it’s faster and easier to edit your photos and you have a better idea if you have a strong image before you leave the scene. Like any tool, it’s just that. A tool. So Photoshop is just another step in getting the image that we see and capture transferred to the newspaper, or Web, so that our readers can then see it. I don’t think we tried harder with film, but digital has made us more sure of the mechanical part of the news gathering.

Covering my first blizzard

Bryan Eaton — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:52:29 +0000

I had just started at the Eagle-Tribune in the final days of 1977 and just over a month later covered the Blizzard of ‘78, which was a big deal for a rookie. I couldn’t leave my house in Salisbury because the road wasn’t plowed, so I couldn’t get to work. But my cousin plowed for the town and had a good-sized truck with four-wheel drive. He offered to take me around the area. Bridge Road was flooded in parts, and it looked like a bomb went off at Salisbury Beach with much of the 5 O’clock Club blown into the ocean or onto the street in front, called Ocean Front South.

In Hampton Beach, sections of Route 1A were covered with rocks the size of grapefruit and nearby several cars were piled on top of each other. The tops of the old metal seawalls were curved like pretzels, some blown off completely. Since I couldn’t drive to the Eagle-Tribune the company sent a newspaper delivery truck with three guys to nearby Route 110, which was plowed, to pick up my film and take it back to the photo chief for processing. Bryan Eaton chief photographer/Newburyport Daily News.

Click here for more photos from the Blizzard of ‘78.

Remembering the Blizzard of ‘78

Ken Yuszkus — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:49:58 +0000

I got up and looked out and could not believe the amount of snow.
It was three feet deep with drifts covering the cars in the large parking lot of my apartment complex. There was no way I was going to get out of the parking lot. I phoned in to the newspaper to tell the chief photographer that I was snowed in and had no idea when I would be able to get to work.
A short time later I was told reporter Sally Gilman, who drove a Jeep, would come by to pick me up so I could start taking photos in New Hampshire. It was still snowing as I swam through the three feet of snow to get to the street where I was picked up and driven around. We drove mostly in Salem, N.H.
We searched and photographed whoever we could find. Not many people were out because a state of emergency was in effect and people were told not to go out and definitely not to drive. Eventually, after a couple of days, I did get my car out of the parking lot.

One of the stranger sights we witnessed was snowmobilers driving down the streets of Salem. We saw them go down Route 28 and found some at the state liquor store, which was open. Just about everything was closed everywhere, so this was a surprise, seeing the liquor store open and selling liquor to customers during a blizzard. Ken Yuszkus/chief photographer Eagle-Tribune/New Hampshire.

Click here to check out the slideshow.