Local News | Weyerhaeuser, environmentalists argue logging’s effect on floods | Seattle Times Newspaper: “The Seattle Times photograph, by Steve Ringman, was taken with a 20-mm wide-angle lens a few days after the storm hit. At the hearing, Weyerhaeuser’s Godbout said the slope looked less steep when seen from a different perspective, and — on a screen — he showed a corporate photograph with a different view of the slides and slope.”
(Via Conscientious.)
The four best online and multimedia professional journalism groups | Will Sullivan’s Journerdism: “Now, on to The Four:
* The Online News Association
* The National Press Photographer Association
* The Society for News Design
* Sports Shooter”
There are profiles of six photographers on Canon Europe’s professional website. Most interesting to me was the profile of Swedish photojournalist Per-Anders Pettersson, who has been doing fascinating work from the Congo (that’s his photograph above), where millions of people have died in conflict since 1997 with almost no international attention. You can read Pettersson’s profile and see his photos (and a video) at this link.
The other photographers profiled are: Kai Pfaffenbach, Martin Eisenhawer, Bill Frakes, and Alessandra Meniconzi.
SF Gate:
Rotting corpses, starving babies, burned-out villages. Those aren’t the kinds of images kids at San Anselmo’s Sir Francis Drake High School usually see when they crowd into the gym for an assembly.
But they got an eyeful one recent morning when Mark Brecke, a resourceful San Francisco photographer who’s spent a decade documenting mass murder and ethnic cleansing, served up a sobering tutorial on genocide. He showed slides from the decimated Darfur region of Sudan, where he lived for five weeks with roving rebels of the Sudanese Liberation Army, and from the camps in neighboring Chad, where survivors find refuge from the slaughter and forced starvation that has killed more than 400,000 people since 2003.
“These images are not easy to take, that’s for sure,” said Brecke, a soft-spoken, fair-haired man in his late 30s, showing a picture of a partially decomposed body lying in the dirt. “But they’re necessary. Because you are witnessing a mass crime scene, if you want to call it that.”
Here.
Journal of a Photographer:
I was assigned to create the Magnum Blog… The first step back home was to do a layout and design for it. Once the design was ready I started the technical implementation. That proved to be a bigger challenge then I expected. I mean this was not the first blog I set up but I implemented many new features and techniques that I did not use before or that I did not use in the same way.
The new Magnum Blog is ready, approved and online now which means that my part in creating a blog for Magnum is over. By declining the job Magnum offered me a few months back, I gave away the chance to administrate the blog. To find topics, talk to photographers about ideas for stories, motivate them to write their own articles from the field, invite authors to join, make sure that the blog evolves.
Here.
Digital Journalist:
Contact Press Images celebrated 30 years of remarkable photography in 2006. Founded by Robert Pledge and David Burnett in 1976, the agency has maintained its involvement with humanitarian and human-rights issues. This involves the responsibility to understand an issue and see that it could have consequences beyond the borders of one’s own town, region or country. Doing long-term stories on regime change, civil wars and genocide when they first appear on the horizon often means that a Contact photographer is aware and knowledgeable when the event evolves into a world news event. The vivid images of apartheid in South Africa, the civil war in El Salvador, the fall of the Shah of Iran, and 9/11 are visual markers of the 20th–21st centuries. Contact is one of the agencies that changed the landscape of photojournalism in Europe and America during the 1970s–1980s.
Here.
Ramin Rahimian, Digital Journalist:
Being a citizen and a journalist from the U.S. worked in my favor and against me. In a busy deli in downtown Caracas, close to the capitol – a heavily Chavista area – I was approached by a middle-aged man wearing the party’s traditional red T-shirt. He was belligerent and seemed drunk. He got in my face in this crowded deli and pulled at his shirt, telling me that I’m the devil and that this was his country. He was unrelenting. All I could do was agree with him, “Yes, I know, I’m the devil. I know.” Anything so that he would not knock me out.
Photographing, or should I say street shooting, in that neighborhood was very difficult for me. It is a Chávez stronghold. I had heard countless horror stories from other shooters of theft, knife attacks, and general harassment and distaste for foreign journalists. It was tough not to shoot; I felt like I missed out on showing the downtown environment in my own way.
Here.
NYT:
Enrique Metinides photographed his first dead body before he was 12. It was as if he had caught a fever, because after that he couldn’t stop. For years while he slept he kept his radio in Mexico City tuned to emergency stations so that he could be awakened by the latest news of disaster. He would often throw on his clothes and rush into the night to see yet another car wreck or fire or murder.
He found a cornucopia of gore: suicides, jumpers, accidental electrocutions and exploding gas tanks. (In that case petty thieves drove off from the pumps with the hose still inside their car.) We feel somehow we shouldn’t gawk. But how can we not?
So we do. We stare at the mangled corpses and at the crowds who stare back into Mr. Metinides’s camera, which means they stare at us. The cycle of voyeurism is complete.
Here.
Yana Poskova on SportsShooter:
On my last day, I printed each doctor and patient a photograph. Many had never before possessed one. As I watched patients tape the pictures above their beds, I leaned against the peeling wall in solitude with my thoughts. I had slowly realized that while this experience taught me much about photography (using an environment with little activity and light,) and about interacting with my subjects (listening to what they wanted you to tell, and respecting what they didn’t,) my greatest lesson was one in motivation-in my personal and professional life, both of which I would try to take for granted less than before. When the patients and doctors asked me to return in 2007, I wanted to tell them all this, but I again lacked words; so I just promised I would. Instead, as gratitude, I hoped my images would shed light on the worth of each of their lives.
Here.
PDN:
Todd Heisler, a Rocky Mountain News photographer who won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for his “Final Salute” photo essay, will join the photo staff of The New York Times.
Heisler, who starts in December, fills one of two staff photography openings at the Times. Recently, Ting Li Wang left to work in China and Paul Hosefros retired, according to New York Times assistant managing editor for photography Michele McNally.
Here.
Alec Soth:
But Modica wasn’t the only one assigned to the story. The much more prominent full-page intro has the following photo illustration:
This use of photography brings the medium down to the lowest common denominator. What is the point? If anything it pushes me away from reading the story. I understand that weekly news magazines are under huge deadlines and need to fill the pages. But do we need so much photo-filler? The photographs in another weekly, The New Yorker, are exceptionally powerful because of their restraint. What if Modica’s image was the only one used in the story? Wouldn’t it be so much better?
Here.
Ken Irby, Poynter:
The Times has very clear guidelines in place that prohibit image manipulation without clear cause and disclosure:
Photography and Images.
Images in our pages that purport to depict reality must be genuine in every way. No people or objects may be added, rearranged, reversed, distorted or removed from a scene (except for the recognized practice of cropping to omit extraneous outer portions). Adjustments of color or gray scale should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction, analogous to the “burning” and “dodging” that formerly took place in darkroom processing of images. Pictures of news situations must not be posed. In the cases of collages, montages, portraits, fashion or home design illustrations, fanciful contrived situations and demonstrations of how a device is used, our intervention should be unmistakable to the reader, and unmistakably free of intent to deceive. Captions and credits should further acknowledge our intervention if the slightest doubt is possible. The design director, a masthead editor or the news desk should be consulted on doubtful cases or proposals for exceptions.
Here.
PDN:
Photojournalist Paolo Pellegrin of Magnum Photos was one of several people injured in an Aug. 6 missile attack in southern Lebanon.
Pellegrin and reporter Scott Anderson were traveling together in Tyre on assignment for The New York Times Magazine. They were treated for their injuries and now are back at work in Lebanon.
“They’re in Beirut. They’re fine,” says Kathy Ryan, director of photography for Times magazine.
Here.
From the Eddie Adams Workshop:
Congratulations to the following 100 students and professionals who will attend Barnstorm XIX this year. Click a name to see images from their portfolios.
Here.
From the Tall J blog:
This is an older photo but I wanted to put this up here. I love this one. I shot it on tri-x with an old FM2 that I bought from Ravell Call at the Deseret Morning News. That camera was beat up pretty bad. The rewind knob was broken off of it so it took a lot longer than normal to change rolls of film.
I broke the camera a few minutes after I shot this frame. The shutter completely blew out on it.
Here.
From the New York Times:
“Whadda you kidding? It’s a zoo out there. Two deli stickups at 12 on the dot; one of the perps getting plugged. I got the picture. Roulette joint bust on East 68th. Society types. You shoulda seen the penguins run. Three a.m.: Brooklyn. Car crash. Kids. Bad.”
“Four a.m., bars close. Guys asleep in Bowery doorways. But just before dawn is the worst: despair city. The jumpers start, out the windows, off the roof. I can’t even look. So that’s the night, New York. Ain’t it grand? What a life.”
Here.
Mario Ruiz, from the Digital Journalist:
I was told I would have five days in Iridimi. We would arrive by plane via a United Nations cargo jet on Monday and leave Friday morning, giving me only four days to shoot at the camps. I had no idea whether that would be enough time to get what I needed. With the amount of pressure I placed myself under it would prove to be enough time.
Here.
Christoph Bangert, from the Digital Journalist:
There are maybe eight or nine foreign photographers still trying to cover this conflict from the civilian side. I am by far not the bravest, most committed, talented nor longest-serving of these photographers; I am just one of them. The majority of the pictures that are coming out of this country are taken by Iraqi photographers working for wire services or foreigners who are exclusively embedded with the military. Of course, I am one of them and am sometimes embedded with either the American, British or Iraqi military and so are most of my colleagues.
I used to be the only blond guy in Baghdad. Well, at least that’s what I felt like. Now I am the only blond guy in Baghdad that dyed his hair black. I look like a fool and maybe I am one. Maybe it’s foolish to be here and tell oneself that it is important to do so. Maybe it actually makes sense.
Here.
From PDN:
With the guidance of photographer Gary Knight of the VII agency, the six women have formed a new group called EVE Photographers to create and promote social documentary photojournalism. They will collaborate on projects and post their best work on a group web site.
The photographers are Marizilda Cruppe (in Brazil), Agnès Dherbeys (Thailand), Bénédicte Kurzen (South Africa), Justyna Mielnikiewicz (Georgia), Lourdes Segade (Spain) and Newsha Tavakolian (Iran).
Here.
From The Digital Journalist (link to gallery at bottom of page):
Rick Loomis says that survival skills he learned as a boy in Loxahatchee help him at the front. Zucchino observed that, “Raised in rural south Florida, Loomis is comfortable around guns, knives, fast cars and motorcycles. In other words, he’s part redneck. On a grueling three-week mission with a U.S. Special Forces team last winter, Loomis not only showed the Green Berets how to ford a river in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, he also beat them hands-down in an improvised distance-jumping contest with the soldiers’ own dirt bike.”
Here.