I was in Washington a few weeks ago at the annual awards dinner of the White House News Photographers Association. It’s an annual chance to see old friends and catch up on news. It’s also a time to meet new people and see how they’re doing in the great, wide, wonderful world of photojournalism.
This year’s word?
Depression.
Check it out here.
Tony Overman, a photographer for The Olympian in Olympia, Wash., and past president of the National Press Photographers Association, was arrested and injured Friday while working to cover a fire. He was charged with suspicion of simple assault of a police detective and will be arraigned June 19, his paper reports.
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A 61-year-old woman elbows her 5-foot-2-inch frame to the front of the crowd mobbing Bill Clinton after a campaign event in South Dakota. As Mr. Clinton shakes her hand and holds it tight, she deftly draws him into a response to an article on the Vanity Fair Web site that examines his post-presidential life. “Sleazy” and “slimy” are among the words that issue from the former president’s mouth. Within hours, audio of the three-minute exchange — including the woman’s description of the article as a “hatchet job,” and Mr. Clinton’s description of Todd Purdum, the author and a former reporter for The New York Times, as “dishonest” — is available for the world to hear on the Huffington Post Web site.
The woman, Mayhill Fowler, who calls herself a citizen journalist, wore no credential around her neck and did not identify herself, her intentions or her affiliation as an unpaid contributor to Off the Bus, a section of The Huffington Post. While her digital audio recorder was visible in her left hand during that encounter last Monday, she says, she did not believe Mr. Clinton saw it. “I think we can safely say he thought I was a member of the audience,” she said in a telephone interview on Friday.
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A bitter personal struggle between two powerful figures in the world of terrorism has broken out, forcing their followers to choose sides. This battle is not being fought in the rugged no man’s land on the Pakistan-Afghan border. It is a contest reverberating inside the Beltway between two of America’s leading theorists on terrorism and how to fight it, two men who hold opposing views on the very nature of the threat.
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Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is going to change just about everything for the dice-rolling set.
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i always implore the photographers i mentor, to please please minimize the “who can i get to know” list and maximize the “here is what i will do” list….one thing i do know for sure, if you have the work, really HAVE THE WORK, your Medici will materialize….it would have done me no good whatsoever to have made a “good impression” on Garrett, had i not had the work….
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On April 26, Mary Ellen Mark and her entourage of assistants set up a makeshift photo studio in a small room next to the school’s gymnasium. Mark is working on a three-year project called “Prom.” Charlottesville High was the seventh of 12 schools she is photographing.
Next weekend, Mark will speak at the Look3 Festival of the Photograph here, where her Charlottesville photos will be on display.
“Prom is a slice of Americana for me,” Mark said. “You learn about a culture and how different racial groups bring their own style to prom.”
Check it out here.
The Boston Globe just launched a fantastic website called The Big Picture and it’s making noise outside of photography circles.
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The first time my father told me about Sean Flynn’s disappearance, I felt as if a spider had walked down my spine. “Just gone?” I said, looking down at a picture that was taken of Sean hours before he vanished into the Cambodian countryside in April 1970 — a heart-stoppingly handsome young man on a motorcycle with thick sideburns and a battered Nikon around his neck. “Yeah,” my father said in a papery voice that made him suddenly sound much older. “Just gone.”
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21 year-old WKU Junior Carl Kiilsgaard is working on a rather intensive project documenting the life of an impoverished family in rural Kentucky.
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Archiving photos is a tedious, time-consuming experience and the transition from storing negatives to digital files on CD, DVD, or hard drives hasn’t really improved matters all that much. On the other hand, losing images because they weren’t archived properly is even worse and the potential for losing large numbers of images is arguably even greater with digital.
Many friends and colleagues ask me how I archive my photos and what I recommend as a backup solution, so I wrote this post to illustrate the strategy I use:
Check it out here.
What is it with photographers these days? Are they really all terrorists, or does everyone just think they are?
Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.
Except that it’s nonsense.
Check it out here.
It took an unlawful arrest and an embarrasing $8,000 settlement, but the Seattle Police Department has issued a new policy clarifying that citizens are within their rights to document police activity, as long as they are not interfering with the investigation.
Check it out here.
In the video I told Fred that I shoot between 100 and 500 photographs on an average day. I’m a big believer in shooting every day. One of my goals is to shoot every single day for the rest of my life. On days where I don’t feel like shooting I will still force myself to shoot, even if it’s only for five minutes on that particular day. I think the discipline is good.
Check it out here.
Mona Reeder, a photographer with the Dallas Morning News, has won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for domestic photography for her photo essay “The Bottom Line.” Through pictures, Reeder explored Texas’ poor rankings in a number of categories ranging from the poorest counties in the U.S. to environmental protection.
Earlier this year, the project won the Community Service Photojournalism Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. It also was a Pulitzer finalist.
Kenny Irby interviewed Reeder about the project for “Best Newspaper Writing 2008-2009.” In this excerpt, Reeder discusses the value of in-depth photo essays and how she developed this one.
Check it out here.
A Reuters photographer working in Zimbabwe has been fined 20 billion Zimbabwe dollars for contravening the country’s broadcasting act reports Zimbabwejournalists.com.
Howard Burditt was also sentenced to two months in prison, suspended for five years on the condition he did not repeat the offence.
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Time director of photography MaryAnne Golon, one of the most influential editors in photography, is leaving her position. Alice Gabriner has been promoted to the new position of chief picture editor.
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I’ve been getting quite a few inquiries about problems saving files from Photoshop directly to network drives when using the recently released Mac OS 10.5.3. (I’m told the issue can affect InDesign and maybe other apps as well.)
The short story is that we’ve been working closely with Apple to troubleshoot the issue and have identified the cause. Apple is working on a fix, and we expect they’ll release it in the next System Update.
Check it out here.
A city official in Mexico took this amazing picture of a deadly traffic accident Sunday in Matamoros, Mexico. The accident, which left one cyclist dead and at least 10 others hurt, is getting international attention mainly because of this photograph. The photo, credited to José Fidelino Vera Hernández, ran in the Mexican newspaper Hoy Tamaulipas and on the AP wire this week.
Check it out here.
