In his softly lit bedroom, former SJSU photojournalism professor Joe Swan looked down at the nonexistent bump in the bed sheet where his legs should be.
“I’m pretty well bedridden,” Swan said in his slow Texas twang. “If I keep getting healthier – if you can use that term for somebody fatally ill – I might try to convert to a wheelchair.”
Within the last year, Swan, 78, has had both legs amputated and has been on dialysis, a process of filtration used when the kidneys stop working, because of complications from diabetes.
He stopped dialysis almost one month ago.
According to the Kidney End-of-Life Coalition, most patients who stop dialysis die within eight to 12 days, although some do live weeks or months.
“‘Brave’ just comes to mind when you’re doing something that will probably actually take your life,” said Debbie Gorman, Swan’s daughter.
A leading team of CGI experts hand-selected by blockbuster producer and director Michael Bay has pushed the limits of what can be accomplished with special effects and digital imaging by creating a computer- generated best-director Oscar for the 43-year-old filmmaker.
The $125 million project, funded entirely by Bay, has been called one of the most ambitious CGI undertakings to date, dwarfing even Bay’s most ambitious efforts in his 2007 robot-action film, Transformers. A crew of nearly 200 technicians working for nine months on a 15,000-square-foot soundstage was required to realize the director’s wildly imaginative fantasy world.
Nancy Aldrich-Ruenzel, publisher of Peachpit, speaks with National Geographic photographer Joe McNally about his new best-selling book, The Moment It Clicks–the first book with one foot on the coffee table, and one foot in the classroom.
Being a graphic designer has made me fall in love with all things creative, including photography. In a previous article I mentioned the importance of building a strong foundation in one career first, such as graphic design and then branching out into other skills sets. One important area I have started to branch out into is photography. I spend a lot of time looking at photography portfolios and below you will find some of my favorite photos.
The SportsShooter.com community is a large and dedicated bunch, and our sponsors have long appreciated their loyal support. As a continued thank-you from them, we’ve prepared this special page that lists the current special offers in effect for the SportsShooter.com community.
Lawhead and fellow journalism professors Brian Poulter and Peter Voelz spoke about the background behind many infamous and Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs.
Lawhead said he started to choke up because he could relate to the scene in the child’s photo.
“I’ve sat next to a one-year-old and watched him die,” Lawhead said.
He said he tells his students being a photojournalist is a fun job but parts of it are “not so cool.”
When photographer Tod Marks first entered into the steeplechase arena most of the veteran media wanted to know, “Who’s the new guy?” They soon found that he was hardly new to the world of horse racing. In fact, he had covered some of the greatest flat races in the last several decades and that hands-on photography experience translated nicely into jump racing.
Marks uses his expertise as a photojournalist to get intense action images combined with great emotion at the various steeplechase venues. He travels to almost all the major National Steeplechase Association meets and his work is well-represented in the NSA yearbook and in the industry publication, the Steeplechase Times, where he has been working ever since first helping with the Sean Clancy’s book “Saratoga Days” and the Saratoga Special newspaper back in 2000.
For the last few weeks, there has been brewing speculation about a big announcement soon. And Apple Insider has intercepted a message from Mike Shinoda, a member of the band Linkin Park, to its fans.
In addition to a show at Madison Square Garden, he wrote, “look forward to a special show that we’re doing in NYC in conjunction with Apple…shh…it’s a secret…”
under no circumstances may Bearer display any more
than seven still pictures or photographs of any Game at any time regardless of whether Bearer obtained such pictures or photographs at the Game; (ii) unless such still pictures or photographs of any Game are displayed in connection with an article about or summary of such Game, such still pictures or photographs cannot be displayed for more than seventy-two hours following the conclusion of the respective Game
In a move that legal experts said could present a major test of First Amendment rights in the Internet era, a federal judge in San Francisco on Friday ordered the disabling of a Web site devoted to disclosing confidential information.
The site, Wikileaks.org, invites people to post leaked materials with the goal of discouraging “unethical behavior” by corporations and governments. It has posted documents concerning the rules of engagement for American troops in Iraq, a military manual concerning the operation of prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and other evidence of what it has called corporate waste and wrongdoing.
Japanese photographer Masao Yamamoto has intrigued me since I first held several of his tiny energy-charged photos in my hands at a photography festival in California in 2003, and I could not leave without taking three of these precious objects home with me (at a price I could barely afford at the time). Six years later, those same photos float on the wall in my home where I can see them every day, in all kinds of light, and they still exert that same emotional pull on me every time I stop to look at them.
Over the past thirty years, Michael Eastman has produced a body of fine-art photography on subjects ranging from European architecture to Midwestern storefronts.
Without a doubt, the new official Apple Aperture 2.0 website is a truly excellent primary resource.
My favorite section in the newly revamped site is the Tutorials. In this section, Apple presents more than 50 excellent compact video tutorials, that is somewhat similar to a lot of the fantastic iPhone tutorial videos. There are also about 10 text tutorials in the same page.
Philip Jones – Griffiths, a great friend of Viet Nam, who is suffering from cancer, is struggling his last battle in London to grasp the very last breath of his life.
Cai Guo-Qiang says his favorite artistic moment is the pregnant pause between the lighting of the fuse and the detonation of the gunpowder. “There is a pressure in it to be preserved, and then it explodes,” he says. “This moment belongs just to the artist and the work.” On a breezy afternoon last September, in a large A-frame shed at the Grucci fireworks plant on Long Island, he was setting the stage. With the help of his wife, Hong Hong Wu, he cut a long green fuse into segments, then laid the pieces carefully on eight contiguous panels of handmade Japanese rice paper.
After three young female assistants placed stencils in the shape of an eagle’s wings, head and beak onto the panels, Cai, a onetime serious student of martial arts, moved gracefully as he sprinkled different grades of gunpowder, some custom-made for him. “I don’t know what the result will be, even though I preplan,” he told me, speaking through an interpreter in Chinese. “It is like making medicine — a little of this, a little of that, watch it and taste it a little and see how it is working. My work is like a dialogue between me and unseen powers, like alchemy.” (In Chinese, the word for gunpowder is literally “fire medicine,” an allusion to the eighth-century Chinese alchemists who accidentally invented it while searching for a magic elixir.) The assistants lifted the stencils, and Cai scattered and rubbed gunpowder in the white space that had been covered. Then the women put the stencils back on the panels, and he tossed on more gunpowder. The entire process was repeated for another image, this one of a pine-tree branch below the eagle’s claws.
