“Let’s go.” These words sum up Patrick Chauvel’s life. For him, journalism is a way of life. It’s not some a Taliban of information. Photography? The obligation to be the first in line, where it’s really happening. “I’m not a great photographer,” he says to those who will listen. “But now and then I do take great photos.”

“This is where John White preached,” he said. “This is where Alfred Eisenstaedt and Joe Rosenthal stood. This is where Gordon Parks would walk down the halls of the Days Inn with a girl on either side when he was in his 80s. This is where photographers like Bill Frakes would get kids up at 3 in the morning to go out and make pictures so theirs would be better than everyone else’s. This is the place where passion pulses through everyone’s veins 24 hours a day — where sleep is not important.”

because Gannett’s US Presswire team will be shooting there

My first thought was, “I hope he means John H. White.”
Several weeks later, he confirmed, that indeed, he was looking for me to hang out with John a bit for a cover story honoring John on the 30th anniversary of his Pulitzer Prize.

Link: LightBox

Reed noticed that, while his fellow photographers often spoke of that urge to give back, they lacked a platform to do so in an organized and sustained fashion. In 2008, he and some art- and business-minded friends founded Nuru Project—“Nuru” meaning “light” in Swahili—to fill that void. The business now has relationships with well-known photojournalists, including TIME contract photographer Yuri Kozyrev, and the group is looking to grow with an upcoming Kickstarter drive aimed at funding a marketing campaign. Reed says that response to the project has been positive, but he’s aware of the deeper questions of journalistic integrity that are raised by his brainchild.

This is a business of bounces, sharp turns, unexpected events, lean times, occasional joyous celebrations, and bouts of euphoria measured in slices of seconds. No matter what, be it an excellent day in the field, or a humdrum day filing pictures or doing billing, it is punctuated almost incessantly with the intrusive reality of just how difficult this is to do, over the long haul. Wonderful, but tough at the same time.

And so a day that began at a stable ended in a top-secret meeting. Mr. Mills and a group of journalists were told they were about to embark upon a secret mission, to Afghanistan.

The problem here is that using a Hipstamatic/Instagram app is not at all “a different aesthetic than people are used to seeing” – everybody and their grandmother are now using those apps or filters. On top of that, these apps mimic old film cameras. So it’s not a different aesthetic at all – it’s a trendy aesthetic. In fact it’s so trendy and popular that Facebook just paid $1b to buy Instagram – a site centering on those kinds of images!

It’s the emphasis on style that makes me hesitate, as if it were all about finding some visual quirk that lends distinction to the photograph

Tim Rasmussen expects your best work. And he’ll push you until he gets it.

“Some people just come at you hard, and Rasmussen is definitely a guy who comes at you hard,” says Andrew Innerarity, a former staff photographer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel where Rasmussen used to be the director of photography. “If you are a weak person he is going to eat you up.”

In this live webinar on Tuesday, May 1st, Jamie will discuss:

What separates an average photo from a compelling one in the news industry, and examples of photo stories that have made it into the magazine.
How changes in the editorial industry have affected photographers and the business side of photojournalism.
How photographers can gain the confidence of photo editors and score assignments.
Plus, the best way to pitch your photos and story ideas to major news publications like Newsweek.

Back in the car, MacMillan is already iPhone-editing video he shot of pulling up to the scene. In a few days, he’ll post the video to GunCrisis.org, an “open-source journalism experiment” he launched last month that aims to explore the city’s homicide-by-gun epidemic and possible solutions while carefully, purposefully, avoiding slipping down the rabbit holes of the gun-policy debate.

Photographs have enormous visual power, but on their own they have absolutely no meaning. The meaning of a photograph is a construct that involves a group of people operating against a specific background (news, art, …), subject to the group’s personal, cultural and political biases

Link: Sports Shooter Venue Guide – Lazy Elk High School

To avoid any unpleasantries make sure you check in with one of the assistant vice principals before you start shooting. In exchange for your drivers license they will give you a sideline pass. This pass must be worn around your neck and must remain visible at all times.

Next, the school police deputy will point out any players on the team that can’t be photographed, either because their parents haven’t signed a media release or because they’re facing felony charges.

When we made the decision to publish, the Pentagon asked us to wait 24 additional hours to protect troops depicted in the photographs. We agreed to push back our publication date until the Pentagon told us they had taken the necessary precautions. In fact, we waited more than 72 hours after their request.

Link: Poynter

Times Editor Davan Maharaj said, “After careful consideration, we decided that publishing a small but representative selection of the photos would fulfill our obligation to readers to report vigorously and impartially on all aspects of the American mission in Afghanistan, including the allegation that the images reflect a breakdown in unit discipline that was endangering U.S. troops.”

We all like to think that the photographer’s intention inform the image and that when we look at a photograph we can see those intention. But if we ignore the simple fact that we have no way of knowing what the photographer’s intentions were (How would we know? All we have is a photograph), especially in a news context, we don’t just look at photographs, we look at them with our own sets of expectations (as Colin notes) and biases.

The idea is that one should look a certain way in the face of tragedy, part of the simplistic narrative that is expected of people when they are part of a photograph – a simplistic narrative that does not have an equivalence in writing. Here it is easy to explain the contrast between the glorious sky and the casual dress, the trappings of the picnic and the relaxed poses. These are all allowed to happen, but when it comes to a photograph, God forbid if anybody is caught doing anything that lies outside a very narrow band of expected responses

TIME of course paid more. They always had more budget than Newsweek. As my friend Jimmy Colton, then an editor at NW and now at SI, was fond of saying, “TIME is a hospital. Newsweek’s a MASH unit.” Below is the first cover I shot for TIME, and if I recall, they paid about 3 grand. Other shooters, the real premier cover guys, got more dough, for sure. I was definitely not in that group. If I got a cover, it was either an accident or a last ditch phone call by a desperate editor.