I found the article about the representation of photojournalist characters in film to be a very stimulating read that alerted me to the wider issue of representation within all film. While I understood the points and connections made in the article I was continuously conscious of how much influence film has over an audience. Learning about how the representation changed over the course of decades was interesting because I had never thought about representation as being a film variable, this made me wonder about how our chosen topic is being portrayed in the media currently and whether we should choose to oppose this. I had one issue with the article, after the introduction and when I had an idea of what the piece was about I expected to see a mention of Full Metal Jacket. The film is a timeless classic which has been viewed by a huge audience and as two of the main characters are war correspondents I was disappointed to find it had not been covered. Although it may not have been a groundbreaking film in terms of photojournalist representation I feel that it should have been mentioned simply for its popularity as this would press home the point being made about the heroic 80's portrayal of photojournalism.

In the article about responsibility and photography Susan Sontag raised a point which I have often thought about. Since my first semester at university where I researched into propaganda I have often looked at photojournalists work and detected a elements of propaganda, connections between the narrative of the image and the definition of the term. Although this connection exists through the goal of trying to promote a cause I believe there is a difference with photojournalism that distances it from propaganda. Photojournalism tries to capture a reality, as close to true life as possible, this means that personal agenda on the photographers part is not as influential in the final outcome and that any effect on the audience comes directly from a personal perspective thus photojournalism is allowing the viewer freedom of interpretation where as propaganda has a dictatorial agenda and definitive goal.

I found this article highlighted a issue which can be found running throughout visual mediums across the globe and that is de-sensitization. I believe that when audiences are exposed to shocking material for a length of time it soon begins to loose its shock factor and therefore looses its purpose creating a need for new material with greater strength. This comes from personal experience and is much like watching a film, once the viewer has seen it a few times it becomes tiresome and less intriguing. For me the development of news to a larger negative aspect is a logical move stemmed from common sense, positive news doesn't necessarily dictate change as it implies progression, naturally this means people are less interested in it. Negative news on the other hand suggests imperfection which effects a wide range of people, this automatically means more people relate to the story increasing the viewing figures. 

This article was extremely useful in helping my understanding of why we were pushed to using the RAW format. Since reading the article I know that RAW captures extra metadata compared to JPEG, this extra material is used to convert the RAW capture into an RGB image. Because RAW captures using greyscale white balance is a variable which can be adjusted at will in RAW editing, pixel colour is another variable which is adjustable.

The journey article taught me valuable information that would be extremely beneficial to our documentary. After reading it I knew that documentary, like drama, must have a beginning middle and end, although I knew this already I hadn't questioned why that was? In the reading it explores human nature to reach an achievement or goal, to get to this point one must first travel a journey. Naturally people are interested in media that depicts a journey, be it drama, novel or documentary this is simply due to our curiosity of seeing how other people reach their goals. With our documentary in mind it isn't about what the goal is, its about the journey taken. The journey in whatever form dictates how well an audience member can relate and engage with the film.

This article raised several very important questions regarding our documentary and also some points of consideration from my own personal perspective.

Over recent decades I believe film has damaged the relationship between documentaries and their audiences. Trying to make a film a mimic of reality has become a trend recently and films such as Paranormal Activity, The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield  have used devices to increase their realism factors. Although mocumentaries have been around before this I found that they drew the audiences attention to the fact that it was a mimic, often due to the use of comedy. These new films however with new editing and post-production techniques are damaging the trust between image and viewer for documentary. Audiences are know more educated about how editing can distort the truth so documentary filmmakers have a thin rope to walk when editing their footage. The temptation to tweak an image to give it more contrast or desaturizing it surely breaks reality and therefore isn't true documenting? This article has made me evaluate how much damage we can do to the depiction of reality in terms of editing. We must be carful in our film to find a balance between aesthetic editing and honest material.