From The New York Times:
A reflection in a puddle on an airport tarmac or in a mirrorlike teleprompter. Silhouetted shadows on a chain-link fence. A cascade of empty metal bleachers. Not the stuff of ordinary political coverage. But Damon Winter, 34, had never before covered a presidential campaign. So maybe he didn’t know how many rules he was breaking as he followed Senator Barack Obama. But that approach worked, and he received the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography.
From State of the Art:
The 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced today. In the Feature Photography category, Damon Winter of the New York Times won for his “memorable array of pictures deftly capturing multiple facets of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.”
In the Breaking News category, the award went to Patrick Farrell of the Miami Herald for coverage of Haiti in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. The jury called Farrell’s work “impeccably composed images of despair.” The photo below shows four-year old Veronica Lonis, malnourished and weighing 16 pounds.
From Visura Magazine:
It came to me in a dream… I was laying in bed one morning and three images from a story in Brazil flowed through my mind’s eye like a cinematic strip. This idea of three images… seeing in threes… became a focal point for combing through my more than twenty years of images, looking for the visual connections, visual language and visual poetry of three.
via DuckRabbit.
From dvafoto:
Brian Ulrich can’t believe he’s alive because he’s just been named a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Other photographers awarded the fellowship this year, most previously unknown to me: Thomas Joshua Cooper (examples), Osamu James Nakagawa, Suzanne Opton (you may have seen her Soldier Billboard Project), Anna Shteynshleyger, Cheryle St. Onge, and Byron Glen Wolfe (can’t find anything online for Wolfe…).
From lenscratch:
Mark recently shot the images featured below for the book cover repackaging of the Little House on the Prarie series for Harper-Collins
washingtonpost.com:
Name a major political story broken by a White House correspondent. A thorough debunking of the Bush case for Iraqi WMD? McClatchy Newspapers’ State Department and national security correspondents. Bush’s abuse of signing statements? The Boston Globe’s legal affairs correspondent. Even Watergate came off The Washington Post’s Metro desk.
Here are some stories that reporters working the White House beat have produced in the past few months: Pocket squares are back! The president is popular in Europe. Vegetable garden! Joe Biden occasionally says things he probably regrets. Puppy!
From NYTimes.com:
He worked in what would now be labeled as virtual anonymity, unknown beyond his tight-knit circle of family, friends and clients. His lack of fame and fortune did not seem to inhibit him; he was a big and unusual fish in this small pond. He thrived. It was enough.
From Smashing Magazine:
“Lomography” is a term quite unknown to most of us, but many practice it. The name was inspired and derived from the Russian “LOMO” cameras. Lomography not only refers to photographs taken with the LOMO camera, but can also apply to casual photography taken with any ordinary camera.
The characteristics of Lomo photographs are oversaturated colors, extreme optical distortions, rainbow-colored subjects, off-kilter exposure, blurring and alternative film processing, all things usually considered bad in photography. In short, Lomography is the act of taking photographs without thinking, and ignoring the established rules of “good” photography.
From Gadget Lab from Wired.com:
But will we see a D700-level camera with video? To compete with Canon, the answer would have to be “yes”. But as the D700 currently shares the exact same image chain as the flagship D3, the whole lineup would have to change. This would make the camera more expensive (Nikon likes to share electronics and even body-shells between different models to bring down costs). This makes it seem like the answer is “no”.
More likely is a D400 with 1080p video, which is exactly the guess that Digital Rev is making. It would also get a 16-18 MP sensor, although in smaller DX-dimensions. To us this seems plausible.
From St. Petersburg Times:
They were screwed-up kids, sent to the reform school in Marianna for smoking, fighting, stealing cars or worse. The Florida School for Boys — that’d straighten them out.
Fifty years later they are, by their own account, screwed-up men — afraid of the dark, unable to love or be loved, twisted by anger, scarred by the whippings they endured in a cinder block hell called the White House.
via Chip.
CLICK NOTE: So if I have this right, we could pay $1.9 million to buy the band Rednex and never hear Cotton Eye Joe again. Sounds reasonable to me.
From Pop Band For Sale!:
Buying a pop band opens up opportunities to make a hayload of money and peek behind the scenes of an exclusive branch. Rednex is touring around the world, making dozens of TV & Radio performances yearly, doing shows at galas, sport arenas and festivals, from city celebrations in front of 1 million people to orphanages, and even for royalty at their private palaces in front of 30 people.
And if you see anyone claiming to be the real Rednex, make sure to report them.
From Zack Arias:
For my bag I use the ThinkTank Airport Security roller bag. This is THE best camera bag I have ever owned and it has more miles on it than I can count and every stitch is still in place. I love that I can lock the main compartments as well as lock the tethered cable to something so someone can’t simply roll off with it. They have to show up with bolt cutters to take off with this thing.
From Smashing Magazine:
As an introduction to the wonderful world of online photography magazines, we put together a list of the biggest and best that we could find. You won’t find these magazines in your local bookstore, they’re only available online. From photojournalism to portraiture, from landscapes to lomography (and everything in between), you’ll find the most amazing photography and discover the work of some of the world’s best photographers, both famous and unknown. Dive in and enjoy their work.
From Perfesser Kev:
A letter written to my students of the time, a couple weeks after the Columbine shootings:
May 4, 1999
Dear students,
Two weeks ago a horde descended upon Clement Park to cover the massacre at Columbine High School. There bereaved families and students found themselves face-to-face with more camera operators than I have seen anywhere, and that collision created a perfect laboratory for us to look at ourselves, the job we do and how the public reacts to our work.
From Wonderful Machine:
Bill Cramer would probably have an MBA if he wasn’t a photographer.
