We are pretty pleased on the picture desk today. One of our staff photographers, Sean Smith, won the best international news film award at last night's Royal Television Society journalism awards bash. Sean is the first Guardian journalist to win a UK television award.
There were some bemused faces among the television crowd as Sean, a newspaper journalist, collected his gong for his film Iraq: Apache Company along with the likes of Paxo et al.
So is video the future for stills photographers?
Well, probably not the whole future, but I'm sure it will be part of it. Some photographers are embracing it more than others, in the same sort of way that some took to digital cameras, whilst others clung on to film.
The thing that all of them seem pretty clear about is that they don't want to be a reporter's cameraman. This struck a chord quite firmly last night, when one TV reporter after another stood up, collected their award, and said something nice about "their" cameraman.
Photojournalists are used to working on their own -- on their own material -- and most are not team players. The idea of being told what to shoot by a director or reporter will be very difficult for most of them. Some will go down the team cameraman route, but I think most established
photographers will choose to work alone and produce the whole package themselves (with help with final picture editing and voiceover production).
This will probably mean more training in non-visual journalistic stills, like interviewing and story-telling techniques. And of course we will have visually aware writers approaching the same goal from the other direction, putting down their pens and taking up cameras.
