As the ceremony got under way with a dramatic, drummed countdown, viewers watching at home and on giant screens inside the Bird’s Nest National Stadium watched as a series of giant footprints outlined in fireworks processed gloriously above the city from Tiananmen Square.
What they did not realise was that what they were watching was in fact computer graphics, meticulously created over a period of months and inserted into the coverage electronically at exactly the right moment.
As the disruption to the mass media business models of traditional media becomes more acute, more and more veteran journalists are beginning to ask how the business of news will be funded. Of course, this question comes from a belief that professional news — that which is funded by advertising — is a permanent institutional structure, and this is problematic at best. Now that advertisers are voting with their money, journalists are crying “foul” and desperately seeking another model to sustain what increasingly comes off as a sense of entitlement.
How sad, for you Thomas. And, everyone rallying around your opinion here. Is there any justice at all to a one-sided rant? This to me is where blogging loses it’s credibility, by the second. I see that you tried to make some grand statement about the rights of photographers, but your method for doing so is selfish, immature, and actually rather cruel. Do you know Simon Blint? Do you have any idea of what it means to be able to safely and securely bring art to the masses? I do, on both accounts. I have worked at SFMOMA. You have used this incident to construct a rather flimsy soap box.
Every so often, I need to dump all this crap out of my head. I’ve spent so much time learning and assimilating so much into the way I shoot that I just need to forget. To let go of everything and just shoot the way I want. To not have to worry about deadlines and expectations. Standards and content. The pictures might be worthless, but at least it instills some new sense of freedom and rekindles that passion that I sometimes lose when photography starts to become work.
The pastor, who spoke to Daily Sun had this to say, “I am the shepherd of the church. I do repair handsets, so one of my members gave me a handset. I told him to return it or face the consequences. The boy dared me and could not return the handset. So, I got angry and decided to deal with him.”
He continued: “Actually, when I was beating him, he was unruffled, which made me to resort to a higher punishment. I only tied his two hands to the back and locked him up in a room without food and water so that he could learn his lessons. Unfortunately, I did not know that the hands would be destroyed. I am not happy but I believe in miracles. I know God will intervene and heal him.”
The latest moves come amid concern over the civilian death toll on both sides, which appeared to have reached 2,000 yesterday. The first horrific images began emerging from the Georgian town of Gori, bombed yesterday by Russian jets, where up to 60 civilians died when bombs landed on two apartment blocks in a town that Georgia has been using as a military staging post for its assault on South Ossetia.
When former presidential candidate John Edwards finally admitted to having an extramarital affair this weekend he faced an outpouring of recrimination. But a lot of ire has now been aimed at the mainstream media in America, which did not report on the story even as it became a national talking point on the internet and late-night television.
The fact that many of the prisoners Khan describes appear to have been innocent of the vague accusations against them, were imprisoned for years without formal charges or fair hearings and were eventually released by the United States without apology or compensation makes the abuse they suffered during years of imprisonment all the more outrageous. By giving us the perspective of the detainees, “My Guantánamo Diary” provides a valuable account of what we can now recognize as one of the most shameful episodes in the war on terror. It is hard to read this book without a growing sense of embarrassment and indignation.
Writer and photographer Beth Lesser travelled in Jamaica throughout the Eighties with her husband, interviewing musicians for her magazine. Along the way she captured the scene at the time, exploring the period between the death of Marley and ragga’s conquest of America
In California’s Mojave Desert, the US Army has built a “virtual Iraq” – a billion dollar urban warfare simulation – and populated it with hundreds of Iraqi role-players. FULL BATTLE RATTLE, a feature documentary, follows an Army Battalion through the simulation, as they attempt to quell an insurgency and prevent Medina Wasl, a mock Iraqi village, from slipping into civil war. Comic, surreal and poignant, the film provides a revelatory look at the soul of the American war machine
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, this astonishingly powerful documentary is at once horrifying and exhilarating. Directed and produced by Fahrenheit 9/11and Bowling for Columbineproducers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, Trouble the Watertakes you inside Hurricane Katrina in a way never before seen on screen.
Then the show started, Amazing, fantastic. All my adjectives fall short, as do my pictures. The creative minds which cobbled it together must have been extraordinary. The one thing I can tell you for sure: this operation was NOT put together by a bunch of consultants using their Blackberrys. In the last few minutes, when the medalist carry the torch started to ascend from the edge of the playing field, you could hear 80000 people say “Ahhh!” all at once. That is a sound you should hear at least once in your life. Then, tilting to the side, he became a slow motion runner, legs taking in ten, twenty feet at a stride. He lacked only a flickering light to make you think you were watching a film clip of the 1920 Olympic Games. As he started into the first turn, headed towards me (and my 200mm lens) I couldn’t see the image in the viewfinder, for the tears which were crawling down my face.
To bring you the stunning choreography of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, Reuters photographers and photo editors do a complex dance of their own — and then a brutal Darwinian whittling down to select just the best and most iconic images to send to subscribers.The team shot a staggering 18,000 frames during the four hours of the ceremony. Only about 850 shots made it to the “wire” — our file of photos to customers. That’s just five percent. Less than a 10th of those were selected for our web slideshow and a typical newspaper subscriber might only print one two or three shots from the selection.
Hey, everyone. So this is what’s happening: I AM 8BIT opens on AUG 14 at World of Wonder in LA. There are 4 different flyers for this show. All of these flyers have a different video game on them that you can cut-out and construct yourself and make your own little arcade.
What doesn’t thrill us, particularly, is the camera’s RAW capability, which uses a new Nikon format called NRW — not the familiar NEF format used by Nikon’s DSLRs — which can only be processed in-camera at this point. You will be able to open NRW files in Nikon’s ViewNX Software but that won’t be released until October as a Windows-only application. Bummer.
Members of the popular 1990s grunge band Soundgarden shocked critics and fans alike Tuesday, appearing together publicly for the first time in more than a decade after accidentally running into one another at the Northgate Mall Cinnabon.
The last monster comes to life in the wee hours of the morning. Stefan Bucher squirts a dab of black ink onto paper. He hits it with a blast of compressed air. Twists the paper here and there. Soon, he sees it. A jawbone. He starts to draw. The splotch of ink grows wings, a ruffly tail. A beak like a toucan’s protrudes — yellow, gargantuan, perverse. Then a reptile eye. Within seconds, all the monster trademarks are in place.
For the past year, Bucher has videotaped himself drawing monsters. The videos, 199 of them, are archived on his Web site, dailymonster.com. This new toucan-beaked critter, Monster 200, is the last of the “daily” monsters for a while. They’ll be going on hiatus while Bucher develops their cousins into an animated TV segment for 2009’s rebooted Electric Company on PBS. His work is also collected in the book 100 Days of Monsters.
