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    Illinois lawmakers have joined in the fight over whether the Illinois High School Association can prevent newspaper photographers from covering public school academic and sporting championship events games, and whether they can regulate the secondary use of photographs and videos that come from the events.

    A new state law proposed this week comes in the aftermath of a dispute between the IHSA and the Illinois Press Association, a disagreement that reached a boiling point last November when several Illinois newspapers were prevented from photographing the state’s high school football finals and championship games.

    And now Illinois lawmakers have proposed legislation intended to resolve the current conflict and to keep it from happening again.

    Rep. Joseph M. Lyons (D-Chicago) has introduced House Bill 4582 which, if voted on and signed into law, will provide open access to all competitions, from elementary school to high school levels, including sports and academic activities.

    And Sen. James A. DeLeo (D-Chicago) has agreed to file an identical bill in the other chamber of the Illinois General Assembly.

    Check it out here.

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    When Leon Kaufman’s (Bradley Cooper) latest body of work – a collection of provocative, nighttime studies of the city and its inhabitants — earns the struggling photographer interest from prominent art gallerist Susan Hoff (Brooke Shields), she propels him to get grittier and show the darker side of humanity for his upcoming debut at her downtown art space. Believing he’s finally on track for success, Leon’s obsessive pursuit of dark subject matter leads him into the path of a serial killer, Mahogany (Vinnie Jones), the subway murderer who stalks late-night commuters — ultimately butchering them in the most gruesome ways imaginable.

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    His alleged offense was distributing to classmates a report, printed from a Web site, commenting on a Muslim woman’s right to multiple marriages. The article, written in Farsi, which is close to the Dari language spoken in Afghanistan, questioned why men are allowed to have four spouses in Islam while women are denied the same right.

    Without a lawyer to represent him, Kambakhsh was hustled Tuesday into a small hearing room where three judges and a prosecutor conducted a five-minute proceeding, according to his older brother.

    He was then handed a piece of paper saying he had acted against Islam and should be executed, said the brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, who visited him in prison Wednesday night.

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    Photography is a medium that feels natural to me. Once you place the camera in front of the eye, it constructs the world. The camera foregrounds the power of temporal and spatial affectivity as seen and thought. In fact, you could say that what I do is create frameworks. I frame the space within each image but also within the installation space. I devise a spatial montage that marks a rupture with the single moment in time and the one-point perspective.

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    The camera fiends at Vision Research have trotted out the Phantom V12, a crowd pleaser said to be capable of grabbing 1MM images per second (if you can live with 256×8 resolution; resolution goes up as frame rate goes down).  Their gear is “targeted at industrial applications ranging from biometric research to automotive crash testing,” they say. “Essentially,” opines Engadget, “this little bundle of joy is meant to be strapped into daredevil-type situations in order to grab as many photos as possible within a split second.”

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    Amy Stein | Photography | Blog: Chris Jordan…On the Rachael Ray Show?!?

    Photographic artist and gallery mate, Chris Jordan, has been making the TV circuit of late to promote his new Running the Numbers series. He has been seen on the Colbert Report, Bill Moyer’s Journal and now the Rachael Ray Show.

    Here.

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    Bernie Boston, 74; Took Iconic 1967 Photograph – washingtonpost.com

    Mr. Boston, who retired from the Los Angeles Times, was working for the Washington Star on Oct. 21, 1967, when he took the image he called “Flower Power.”

    The man with the flowers was later identified as teenage actor George Harris. He was making a nonviolent gesture against the soldiers, who were braced for trouble as they faced 250,000 demonstrators protesting the Vietnam War.

    “I knew I had a good picture,” Mr. Boston later said. “Flower Power” became one of the most reprinted pictures of the past 40 years, appearing in government textbooks and television specials about the era.

    At the time, Mr. Boston could not persuade his editors of the shot’s potential impact. They buried it inside the front section. Adding to his frustration, his car tires were slashed at the protest, and a bouquet of flowers was placed under his windshield wipers.

    Here.

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    Photo Attorney: Batch Processing of Your Photos for Copyright Registration and Adding Metadata

    During my interview with Photo Talk Radio last week, I mentioned Bert Krages’ Photoshop Action to batch process your photos (reduce their file size) for copyright registration with the U.S. Copyright Office. He also provides steps to add copyright notice metadata to your photo files

    Here.

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    NPPA’s Popular Monthly News Clip Contest (MNCC) Goes Digital

    The National Press Photographers Association’s long-standing and popular Monthly News Clip Contest is going digital beginning with the January 2008 entries, NPPA announced today.

    The MNCC’s new format should be easier and faster for entrants, judges, and contest chairs alike.

    “Going digital makes this a better contest, and that’s the goal,” NPPA executive director Jim Straight said today. “Digital will let us run this contest ‘on time’ and in today’s digital world that’s important. As an unexpected result, it will also create more space in News Photographer magazine for more stories, photographs, and original content. The magazine is consistently listed as one of the members’ top benefits, and the MNCC contest has been an important part of News Photographer over the years, and this advancement lets us make the best of both worlds for the contest and the magazine.”

    Here.

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    Editor Sues Newark Police Over Arrest

    A newspaper editor on Wednesday sued the Newark Police Department, charging that police had no right to arrest him and demand he not publish photographs from a crime scene.

    The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, came about two months after the state attorney general found that a Newark police chief violated her directive by questioning the editor and a photographer about their immigration status.

    The incident stems from an incident in September in which a freelance photographer for a weekly newspaper, the Brazilian Voice, discovered a dead body and, along with the newspaper’s editor, reported it to police.

    Here.

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    Colorado Lawmaker May Be Censured For Kicking Photographer

    Colorado lawmakers introduced the first-ever censure against a fellow lawmaker on Wednesday, accusing Republican Rep. Douglas Bruce of bringing disrepute to fellow lawmakers for kicking a newspaper photographer on the House floor while he was waiting to be sworn in.

    The full House of Representatives could vote on the action against Bruce as early as Thursday. The resolution requires a simple majority from the 65 House members.

    The resolution by Reps. Paul Weissmann, D-Louisville, and Rep. Steve King, D-Grand Junction, says that Bruce deserves to be censured because his conduct “failed to uphold the honor and dignity of the House of Representatives and reflects poorly on the state.” It also criticized Bruce for his failure to apologize for the incident that took place during the House prayer.

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    Steve McCurry: An Interview with PDN

    Long before he became a contributor to National Geographic, published dozens of books on Asia or took his famous portrait of “Afghan Girl,” Steve McCurry found his voice as a photographer during the during years he spent touring India and the subcontinent in the late Seventies.

    McCurry, who we profile in this month’s Legends issue, had been working for a small-town newspaper, shooting “Lions Club meetings, high school wrestling, football games” in black-and-white. His portfolio wasn’t good enough to land a job at a bigger newspaper, he recalls. “I realized what I really wanted to do was travel, so I said, ok, I’m just going to quit.” At the time, he says, “I hadn’t shot color, but I knew the magazine world wanted color, “ so he packed 200 rolls of Kodachrome that he would send back to the States for processing, and went to India. Along the way, he supported himself with small travel assignments and some sales to Scholastic.

    When asked what those two years of travel taught him, McCurry says simply, “Just because someone’s wearing a turban, doesn’t mean it’s an interesting photo.”

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    The Wild Weird World of Sports: Past & Present

    Photography, as in art, is totally subjective.

    I’ve spent much of 2007 trying to figure out what I want to tell visually, what interests me. That doesn’t always translate into contest wins. Whatever.

    I had many people I truly respect look over my work from this past year. Some parts of an edit, I loved. Others, less certain.

    Not sure if this is a winning edit, but it’s what I submitted for 2007 Sports Portfolio. For whatever it’s worth, it feels right to me.

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    redlights and redeyes: desaturate

    Sarasota is a circus town. Ever since John Ringling moved the winter headquarters for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to Sarasota in 1927, evidence of his influence is sprinkled across the town – street names, museums, art schools, public statues, and a long list of local circuses and traveling shows that always seem to find their way across the assignment desk.

    It was hard for me to rob these photos from the of their obvious, saturated color…alas, I wanted to mix up the moments a bit by shooting a lot tighter and concentrating more on form and texture.

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    It’s Time To Register For The Kalish

    “We’ve retained the best of the print instruction including team exercises for the front page and picture pages, as well as, a full day of management sessions for those trying to move up and be better advocates for visuals in their organizations. We’ve integrated cross-platform considerations into every session and we’ve added a full day of multimedia exercises including SoundSlides, storyboarding and basic video production.

    “And, we’ve added a full day to the workshop and cut the price.”

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    New Tools to Bolster Mac’s World – New York Times

    The other Mac software news this month is more exciting.

    For years, the industry’s most amazing speech-recognition program has been Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows. In its latest version, I got 98.9 percent accuracy right out of the box, without even reading the training scripts.

    On the Mac, though, the only speech-recognition option was a program called iListen, which was built on far less sophisticated speech technology from Philips. Seven years ago, I asked iListen’s creator, a former Dragon engineer named Andrew Taylor, why on earth he’d based his Mac program on the Philips software instead of Dragon’s.

    The answer, it turns out, was that the Dragon technology would cost too much, and the conditions for using it were too onerous, in Mr. Taylor’s view. He went with the Philips software, but never gave up his dream of bringing Dragon technology to the Mac.

    Eventually, the Mac’s popularity rose, new bosses took over at Nuance (the current owner of the Dragon technology) and Mr. Taylor finally landed a deal.

    The new program, MacSpeech Dictate ($200 with headset), is a big deal, especially for the thousands of Mac lovers who have been running Windows all these years just so they could use Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

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    Rob Galbraith DPI: Canon announces price, release dates for new supertelephotos

    Canon USA this evening has announced that the EF 200mm f/2L IS USM is scheduled for release in April 2008 at an estimated street price of US$5999, while the EF 800mm f/5.6L IS USM is slated for delivery in May 2008 at an estimated street price of US$11,999.

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    the image is found . photo blog

    today we had a few free minutes so jaclyn and i headed out to do a mini maternity session before she pops 🙂 we drove over to an industrial park, stopped on the side of a road and shot all of these in about a 100 square foot area in a half an hour before it started pouring rain. i may be biased, but jaclyn is hands down the most prettyest pregnant woman i’ve ever seen…in fact, that probably has something to do with why she is prego in the first place…enjoy 🙂

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    Canon Powershot G9 Review

    But seriously, who takes their M8 to Japan and ends up leaving it in the bag (or the hotel room) most of the time? The answer, it turns out, is me.

    With only eleven days in which to savour a first-taste of Japan, I chose to travel as light as possible. In my old universe, this meant the Leica M8 with a 28/35/50 Tri-Elmar. At the last minute, Michael suggested that I also take the new Canon G9 and put it through its paces as a travel camera. No harm, I thought, as it’ll be nice to have a point-and-shoot for ‘happy snaps’ along the way.

    As the story unfolded, however, this solid, dependable little blob of consumer electronics became my constant companion, and the Leica a lonely bag-warmer. This is the tale of how my paradigm on ‘serious’ travel cameras changed.

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