Photojournalists compare their photos during a political rally before sending them out across the wire.

The Internet has made it possible for photojournalists like these to spend less time in the office and more time in the field reporting. One photographer told me that he goes into their newsroom only two or three times a month now. When he first started about 15 years ago, he had to rush back to the office after every job in order to develop his photos in the darkroom. Now they rush to the nearest location with wireless Internet access, which is quite often any one of the coffee shops dotted around the city. You’ll often times see them hunched over a table, impatiently stabbing the keys of a laptop while a pricey Canon or Nikon camera sits nearby.

In talking to photojournalists in Hong Kong, most recognize that the Internet has created a larger market for the use of digital photos, which ensures a certain degree of job security. The Internet has also had some negative affects as well - most notably in making it easier to violate copyrights.

The newswire agencies do a good job of maintaining the security of the photographs they sell. They usually have long-term relationships with their customers and make sure those customers abide by the industry’s practices and standards. However, no system is foolproof. The moment a photo has been sent to a customer, they have to trust that customer to ensure it doesn’t get transmitted elsewhere.

The Internet has made sharing photos easier than ever; which can be good or bad depending on your perspective. The capacity to share photos with a wider audience has enabled some people to become professional photographers less than a year after picking up a new camera. They did this by posting their stuff on Flickr and then getting feedback from a virtual community of experts and pros that regularly browse the site. I don’t know if anybody has used Flickr to make the jump into press photography yet but it certainly seems likely.

Getting into press photography requires a body of work to demonstrate your photography skills are at the appropriate standard, a good reputation within the photojournalist fraternity, and most important of all - luck. The Internet has taken away the need to lug around a portfolio of 8×10 prints. Instead photographers have to maintain a professionally designed Web site to showcase their work. If a photographer doesn’t have a Web site listed on their business card then that photographer will have no credibility.

Another way to lose credibility is to ‘Photoshop’ your photos. The best example of this was a series of photos taken by Adnan Hajj, a freelance photographer. It was a blogger, named Charles Johnson, who highlighted the dishonesty, which eventually led to Reuters firing Mr Hajj and purging his photos from their archives. Blogs on the Internet have become the watchdog’s watchdog. If photojournalists become complacent, sloppy or even try to deceive the public they are supposed to serve then bloggers like Mr Johnson will take them to task and rightly so.

Press photography is and always will be a very competitive field and the pay is minimal compared to just about all other professions. But the buzz that comes from observing and reporting the news more than makes up for that. Photojournalism has been dramatically changed by the Internet and for the most part that change has been positive. As the Internet continues to evolve we can only hope that trend continues.