This essay has focussed primarily on a dark future: While the technology has gotten better, the average photography quality on exhibit in the press is deteriorating. The essay has shown why giving journalists cameras is not a substitution for specialised photographers, but the question remains: What can be done?
Check it out here.
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.”
Check it out here.
The red glow of a traffic signal illuminates a droplet of frozen rain clinging to a tree branch early on Sunday, Feb. 17, 2008. Freezing rain fell across much of southeast Wisconsin, causing isolated flooding and slick road conditions. Bryon S. Houlgrave ©/The Waukesha Freeman
Check it out here.
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.
Check it out here.
Przemysław Pokrycki’s “Rites of Passage” is a wonderful series showing family gatherings for baptisms, first communions, weddings, and funerals – kind of like a social typology.
Check it out here.
Recently, this point was brought home on the Magnum photo site when Christopher Anderson’s bare-bulb approach to photographing presidential candidate Mitt Romney came under fire from some viewers. Anderson’s approach was the “anti-photo op.” Tired of making the same stale and banal images that most of the press pack gets of the candidates, Anderson blasted Romney through what appears to be a rain-splattered lens.
Check it out here.
The Chicago Tribune, chicagotribune.com and ChicagoSports.com will not publish news photographs of this weekend’s girls gymnastics and wrestling state finals because of a legal challenge the Tribune, the Illinois Press Association and other state newspapers have filed against the Illinois High School Association.
Check it out here.
In or out? With 45,000 images to get through, there’s barely enough time to capture a frame in the dimly lit room before judges decide whether an image stays or goes. It’s raining outside at the University of Missouri, but in Tucker Forum it’s sunny, cloudy, hot and cold as each image has its moment to shine on the big screen.
With fewer than a dozen spectators in the audience, the rain kept most from attending the first day of public judging during the 65th annual Pictures of the Year International competition. But that will change over the next three weeks, as students and professionals from across the country will join a group of 12 judges from around the world as they select winning images in each of this year’s 48 categories.
Check it out here.
I remember covering a fire once and the home owner came over to me and a TV journalist and demanded that we leave and stop taking advantage of him. You will run into that. This man was very mad at us for just being there. We tried to explain our job but his emotion made him unreasonable. I had a friend who was attacked at the scene of a fatal accident when a family member literally assaulted him. Thankfully a deputy was nearby and came to his aide. I was shoved by a drunk and enraged family member while covering a house fire. I have been at other scenes when the family members were very accepting of my presence and understood what I was doing. There is just no way to predict how people will react under pressure.
Check it out here.
“This is a photograph that everybody is familiar with. When I first saw it, my eyes lit up: the Tibetan antelopes and the train on the Qinghai-Tibet railroad appeared simultaneously in the eye of the camera. This was such a precise and decisive moment! Thus, this photograph was selected as one of the top 10 most memorable photographs of 2006 and its author received innumerable honors … but on the day before yesterday, I suddenly discovered that there was a very obvious line at the bottom of the photograph.” On February 12, an essay titled Liu Weiqiang’s award winning photograph of the Tibetan antelopes is suspected of being fake was posted to the world’s largest Chinese-language photography forum Unlimited sights and colors. This post quickly drew more than 10,000 page views. As of 7pm last evening, there were 120,478 page views and 1,524 comments. Some netizens even compared Liu with “Tiger Zhou.” Could it be that this photograph was the result of PhotoShop manipulation?
Check it out here.
“Stories are in search of tellers. And when a story grabs onto you, that’s the one you should be telling.” – Storyteller Alton Takiyama-Chung recites one of his favorite quotes.
Check it out here.
Basically I start by making sure there is at least ONE usable picture. No risk taking… Autofocus, straight flash, no fancy composition, the accused smack in the middle of the frame, 5 or six shots. That’s it… Switch to the M8, ambient light (the last firmware update finally delivers acceptable white balance results), 320 ISO (too much noise higher up), 2.8, 30th/ second and MOVE, change position, go to the back of the pack, slide to the right, push back into the pack again, move back and go to the left where the judges are, go straight back towards the accused, frame, focus and… finished. It’s over. The 5 minutes are gone. We’re politely asked by the security guards to leave the room… Hoping we didn’t screw up and that there is something a little different to show. There are about 60 frames on my cards, 40 of which are really useless.
Check it out here.
I spent two hours on a tour of the Sacramento County Jail today. They are beginning to open the facility up to public tours.
I’ve been in the booking areas before and I have had quick visits to different prisons. But here I had this intense feeling of solitude as I walked from floor to floor taking pictures.
Check it out here.
:
And everytime Madonna’s car stopped it would send photographers and cameramen into a frenzy – abandoning their vehicles on the roads and rushing towards her car with cameras hanging from their shoulders. It was surprising that no photographer got injured, either as a result of the crush or the baton-wielding policemen.
This time too, most of us had no choice. Either we follow her and get her pictures or not get pictures at all. And irrespective of the organisation we belonged to, considering this news-worthy ,we all followed her, though with varying degrees of intensity. It made by stomach churn, to see some enthusiastic bikers almost come in the way of Madonna’s speeding carcade.
Check it out here.
British photographer Tim Hetherington talks about his photograph of a US soldier in Afghanistan which has won the 2007 World Press Photo Award.
The picture shows an American soldier in a bunker in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley during fierce fighting with the Taleban.
Check it out here.
i am sure that all of you know that the photography licensing business as we know it, is going through dramatic changes…Getty Images, heretofore the largest photo licensing agency in the world, is up for sale..so far, no takers….even though they grossed around 800 million dollars last year, they “lost” 31 million….Corbis is losing money in licensing….so is Magnum (a very small “player” in the mega image sales arena)..so are all photographic agencies…the traditional licensing agencies are now subject to getting slammed by the the biggest “storm” to come out of the skies ….EVER!!
Check it out here.
Those who followed the story of the 23 Koreans kidnapped in Afghanistan in July last year may remember the name Kim Joo-seon, a Korean freelance reporter who went where no other Korean reporters were allowed to go. Kim scored an exclusive interview with Taliban commanders in the Ghazni region, the base of the Taliban militants, and filed story after story and photo after photo for the Chosun Ilbo, though few people knew who she was.
Now “Kim” has finally revealed her true identity: Jean Chung. “I hid my real name because of my parents,” she said. “I’m the only daughter in my family. My parents would have a heart attack if they knew I was in Afghanistan. They still think that I was in India.”Chung has built a successful career as a photojournalist. After graduating from the department of Oriental Painting at Seoul National University’s College of Arts, she traveled to the U.S. and studied photojournalism at New York University and the University of Missouri.
Check it out here.
