Cheryl Diaz Meyer: Photography Without Borders
When photojournalist Cheryl Diaz Meyer was sent to cover the initial days of the war in Iraq, she realized there’s more to capturing great images than simply being a great photographer. For Diaz Meyer, it also meant setting up a Mac-based workflow that allowed her to shoot, process, and transmit digital photos from one of the most hostile environments on earth.
Diaz Meyer was embedded with a U.S. Marine Corps unit in 2003 as a senior staff photographer for The Dallas Morning News. Despite sweltering heat, blinding dust storms, and rudimentary resources, she did more than just capture a moment in time: The urgent, gritty photos she took on the mission earned her a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography. She credits her Mac laptop with helping her get the job done.
Kurdish refugee children play at the Kirkuk Stadium in Iraq
“When I’m in the field, my Mac is my darkroom, a portable organizing and editing station, and my communications system with the world,” she says. “I rely on the fact that Macs are so sturdy. I’ve taken my Mac through the worst of circumstances — through sand, grit, and moisture — and it’s always survived.”
Over the past decade Diaz Meyer has traveled to Afghanistan to document the effects of the Taliban regime and the war on terror, journeyed to the Philippines and Indonesia to cover Christian and Muslim extremism, and covered world events from China to Guatemala. Now an independent photographer, Diaz Meyer does both editorial and commercial photography for a variety of organizations and clients — and her MacBook Pro still accompanies her whenever she’s in the field.
“My Mac is a visually friendly, intuitive tool, and an integral part of my photography workflow,” Diaz Meyer says. “I use a Mac because I need something that is absolutely reliable. If a Mac can’t do it, then I know that no computer can.”
Final Resolution
Diaz Meyer shoots with a Canon EOS 1D Mark III, and transfers the photos from her camera’s memory card to her MacBook Pro via USB. She uses Photo Mechanic, a professional imaging workflow application for the Mac, to sort, discard, highlight, and add metadata to all her images at once.
“The data input includes my byline, copyright information, the date and place the image was taken, and the journalist’s all-important ‘who, where, when, what, why’ information,” says Diaz Meyer. “I also include an assignment number, so all the images I’ve downloaded into a newspaper’s archive can be easily retrievable by an editor.”
Unlike many professional photographers working in other fields, Diaz Meyer almost never shoots in the RAW format. “Because I’m shooting primarily for print newspapers, magazines, and the web, high-quality JPEG images give me appropriate quality at a smaller file size,” she says. “And I need just a few minutes per shot to transmit them from my Mac via a satellite phone.” She also saves her selected images in the larger TIFF format for her archives or possible inclusion in her own photographic website.
Prior to sending an image, Diaz Meyer reduces the file’s resolution to 1000 x 667 pixels, which can then be transmitted more easily to an FTP site. In Iraq and on other remote assignments for The Dallas Morning News, she connected to the newspaper’s FTP server using a satellite phone link and uploaded about twenty 300 KB to 600 KB files per transmission, each image taking about a minute to transmit.
Telling the Truth
To process her shots, Diaz Meyer opens each image in Adobe Photoshop, using the application to color-correct, crop, and lighten or darken each picture that she plans to transmit. But unlike professional art and product photographers, photojournalists don’t manipulate their photographs using filters and other advanced processing tools.
“As a journalist, my job is to bring an image back the way it was in reality, not as I might have liked it to look,” says Diaz Meyer. “Photojournalism is about documenting and revealing the truth in a visual format.”
Diaz Meyer does use several Photoshop tools to process her photos within these constraints. “I use the Curves menu to make contrast and color corrections,” she says. “And to dodge or burn an image, I use the History tool. First I make the adjustments I need for the specified area of an image next, I take a snapshot in the History menu, then return to my original image. I select the snapshot and use the History brush to dodge or burn the shot. Finally I save my images into a ‘final edit’ folder. These are the images that will be considered by an editor.”
