KHARTOUM, Sudan — Sometimes, the things reporters do here in Africa can seem harrowing from afar. But up close, the experiences tend to be more Seinfeld than 24, more surreally mundane than high adventure. My recent eight-hour non-detention detention by Sudanese intelligence agents in Khartoum was a long, sleepy day of waiting and more waiting with no definitive beginning or end.
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Tomorrow is the big day. I fly off to Beijing (w/ an overnight layover for some kimchee in Korea) and am very much looking forward to setting foot in China for the second time. I went to Shanghai and Beijing in early 2001 with one of my best friends Harry How (who will also be covering the games for Getty Images.) A lot has changed since then – 9/11 happened a few months after our return and clearly the world has changed quite a bit since then. But mostly – I’m looking to see how China has evolved since my first visit.
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With the Olympics just around the corner I thought I’d check in with Simon Barnett of Newsweek, because he’s hired his very own dream team of photographers (Laforet, Miralle and Powell) to provide coverage of the event.
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Solzhenitsyn’s unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union’s slave labor camps riveted his countrymen, whose secret history he exposed. They earned him 20 years of bitter exile, but international renown.
And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person’s courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.
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“It took me a while to get over being ‘the baby guy’, now I’m known as ‘the gorilla guy’.” Brent Stirton, senior staff photographer at Getty Images and four times a World Press Photo winner, talks to CPN’s Mike Stanton about celebrity portraiture, dancing with his camera – and how he gained access to one of the most remote and volatile regions on earth armed only with an EOS-1Ds Mark III.
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Late last year a video started to circulate the internet showing the Mercedes-McLaren SLR in an internet film. Not surprising, but the amazing aspect of this 10-minute movie was that a large part of it was shot using still cameras – EOS-1D Mark II N and EOS-1D Mark III bodies. David Newton met up with Roman Kuhn, the man behind the idea, to find out where it came from and what was involved in the shoot.
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Three of Heller’s dictators considered themselves artists and eagerly participated in marketing their brands. Mao fancied himself a poet and master calligrapher; Mussolini wrote a pulp novel and portrayed himself as a hypermasculine sex symbol. Hitler was an aspiring architect and avid watercolorist before adopting what Heller calls his “sociopolitical art project.” The Führer sought to control all aspects of the Nazi brand, from the swastika “logo” to his own image, with mustache but without glasses. Heller argues that Mao with his “Mona Lisa smile” and Lenin with his proletarian cap functioned in much the same way as “trade characters” like Joe Camel or the Geico gecko, putting “a friendly face on an otherwise inanimate (or sometimes inhumane) product.” Like modern corporate competitors, these leaders borrowed freely from one another, with Hitler taking the straight-armed Roman salute from Mussolini and Mao adopting Socialist Realism from the Soviets.
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And then, there’s that husband.
The blue-eyed, blond Muhannad, played by Kivanc Tatlitu, a 24-year-old Turkish actor and model, is tall, handsome, romantic, respectful and treats his wife, Noor — the title character — as both a love object and an equal.
“Saudi women fantasize about what they’re lacking,” said Amira Kashgari, an assistant linguistics professor at King Abdul Aziz University who writes about social issues for al-Watan newspaper. “They are almost obsessed with this show because of the way he interacts with and treats his wife.”
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Behind the scenes, their bosses on the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games are busy preparing daily news conferences and field trips to showcase all that China has to offer. There are lectures on how to protect the giant panda, briefings on the safety of Olympic Village food and opportunities to witness the gleaming urban development of Beijing.
But much to the dismay of organizers, the thousands of credentialed journalists who have begun pouring into the capital are not impressed.
Instead of writing about pandas or Olympic food, Western journalists are mostly covering stories that the Chinese government would rather they not — the city’s chronic pollution, for instance — and complaining about a lack of access to Internet sites and the famed Tiananmen Square.
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“One World, One Dream,” is the official motto of the Beijing Olympics that open Friday, but the world has become considerably more complicated since the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2008 Summer Games to China seven years ago.
That was long before China’s crackdown on Tibet this spring, before its support for the government of Sudan became an international issue and before air pollution became so threatening that the Ethiopian world-record holder in the marathon thought it better to run a shorter distance to protect his lungs.
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I have seen Lyndon Wade’s (nsfw) photography before in big magazines and print ads
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shows the faces of the cruellest and most infamous dictators of our time, from Mao to Hitler to Mugabe. Hans Weishäupl took photographs of over 350 people in each dictator’s country and pieced particular parts of them together to create a new and alarmingly lively look for each of them. All seem familiar and yet somehow impenetrable due to the many faces that hide behind each portrait – just as in reality.
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Leaf has taken the wraps off its new AFi 10 which uses a 56x36mm, 56MP imaging sensor. Leaf was apparently set to make this announcement this coming Tuesday but word got out in the blogs yesterday and they’ve now posted info on their website and issued a press release (see it after the jump).
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Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page to a lost iPod. Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself over a lost iPod. The “an hero” meme was born. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell’s death in absurdity.
Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.
In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities.
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Newsweek’s “Countdown to Beijing” blog has this amazing piece of reporting about the tense business of editing photos at Chinese newspapers.
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British photographer Martin Parr, whose work straddles documentary and fine art photography, argues that photojournalism “has to get modern” to regain the attention and support of mainstream magazines. In this month’s “State of the Art Report: Photojournalism Survival” (PDN August), Parr asserts, “You have to disguise things as entertainment, but still leave a message and some poignancy.” In a recent interview, we asked him to elaborate on his theory.
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Two men were booked into the Salt Lake County jail Tuesday on suspicion of aggravated assault after they allegedly attacked a teen with a knife and a four-edged medieval battle ax.
The pair attacked the victim at his Kearns home around 4:30 a.m. after a text-messaging squabble over a woman, according to probable cause statement filed with the jail.
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Nikon has announced a service modification for the D3 that more than doubles the number of frames that can be shot in a single burst. The number of FX Format 14-bit Lossless Compressed NEFs, for example, jumps from 16 to 36, and most other file format options see a similar increase.
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