Strobist guru David Hobby was recently featured in a USA Today article, where he was photographed by USA Today staffer H. Darr Beiser (using SB800’s with 2 of my HonlPhoto 5″ Speed Snoots). There are also 2 very informative videos to go along with it, so if you have any interest in small lighting on-the-fly, start by watching David in action in the following 2 USA Today videos.
Check it out here.
The job offer was tempting.
It was printed on a 16-foot-wide banner and strung above one of the busiest roads here, calling out to any “soldier or ex-soldier.”
“We’re offering you a good salary, food and medical care for your families,” it said in block letters.
But there was a catch: The employer was Los Zetas, a notorious Gulf cartel hit squad formed by elite Mexican army deserters. The group even included a phone number for job seekers that linked to a voice mailbox.
Check it out here.
Pascal Dangin is the premier retoucher of fashion photographs. Art directors and admen call him when they want someone who looks less than great to look great, someone who looks great to look amazing, or someone who looks amazing already—whether by dint of DNA or M·A·C—to look, as is the mode, superhuman. (Christy Turlington, for the record, needs the least help.) In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore.
Here are some images from the Burley series Disappearance of Darkness, which documents the final year of the Kodak Canada facility in Toronto. This facility, which was made up of 18 buildings on a 5 hectare site, had a one hundred year history of producing photographic films and papers. It was sold in 2006 and demolished in the summer of 2007.
Check it out here.
Social adoption of technological change takes place for one of two reason…
1 – A need is determined and someone then finds a way to fulfill it
2 – A new technology evolves and people then discover what can be done with it
Check it out here.
I was on my way to visit members of the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) at a jungle camp deep in the rain forests of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The FDLR is comprised of Hutu extremists who fled Rwanda after their involvement in the 1994 genocide, as well as Hutu members of the former Rwandan army and a mix of displaced Rwandan Hutus. The people number approximately 10,000; they have lived in the jungles of Congo for the past 14 years and have been one of the fundamental causes of the Congo conflict.
Check it out here.
Toronto artist Robert Burley is currently documenting the fate of chemical photography, recording the abandonment and demolition of various Kodak plants. The films, papers and processing chemicals these factories produced will soon be obsolete, although Burley himself is still physically printing images from negatives, albeit ones he edits digitally. The most notable of Burley’s large, highly detailed colour photographs shows the implosion of buildings 65 and 69 at Kodak Park in Rochester, N.Y., where a crowd that includes people who worked in the plant busily snap pictures of its demise on their digital cameras. Whatever sacrifices it may demand, technology is irresistible.
Airbrushing celebrity and model photos has become so common that it’s a popular pastime for magazine readers to spot the digital manipulations. But have photo editors gone too far?
It’s the biggest toy store in the world. But this one is for adults who won’t blink an eye at dropping a couple of million bucks on the latest satellite truck or news helicopter. PF Bentley and Dirck Halstead spent four days trudging the miles between the four huge halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center looking for the newest, the most impressive, and even the most bizarre items on display. Here is our report:
Check it out here.
10.65 GB.
That’s what I have to show after being laid off after five years at The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo.
While transferring files from the newspaper’s archive system to a 500 GB external hard drive it became painfully clear that only a fraction of the hard drive would be used to store my work that appeared in print.
Check it out here.
Mark Harmel reports that he was detained last Friday by the Beverly Hills Police Department after taking the above photo while standing on a public sidewalk
Check it out here.
Here are some new images the I recently shot in my family’s now closed business. Comments always welcome.
Images © Adam Marcinek
Check it out here.
Over the last ten years, the art of photography has undergone a sex change. The rather masculine act of capturing or “shooting” a moment (“the hunt”) with a sound subject and composition has evolved into one where the real art comes in the editing, not the capturing. The initial “kill” gets skinned, dressed and prepared for a meal by the wonderful witchy post production tool known as Photoshop. The photographer, like a woman putting on make up at her vanity before going out for the evening, edits reality: the best features and colors are enhanced and sharpened, and a new, hyper-realistic art form, with a nod to surrealism of last century, is born.
Check it out here.
so tonight is the Cute Hunter show at Secret Headquarters. you must come to it! or view it virtually..
Check it out here.
The photojournalism award, which honors John Stanmeyer’s photographs in the “Bedlam in the Blood: Malaria also names Senior Editor David Griffin, Deputy Director Susan A. Smith, Design Director David C. Whitmore and Senior Photo Editor Sarah Leen. The article ran in the July 2007 NGM.
Check it out here.
VII Photo hosted an intimate and emotional gathering in New York Thursday for friends and family of Alexandra Boulat, who died Oct. 5.
Boulat, a conflict photojournalist and a founding member of VII, suffered a brain aneurysm last June while working in Gaza and never recovered. She died in Paris, where she was with her family, and many attended her funeral last year in France. Today would have been her 46th birthday.
Check it out here.
To people who work in television, this development is known as “the viewer plunge.” Last spring at the upfronts, a chilling number was widely whispered: 2.5 million fewer people were watching NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox than had in spring 2006. TV executives repeatedly reassured ad buyers that everything was A-O.K., but they also took to kitchen-sinking to explain away the plunge. Daylight Savings Time had come too early. Everyone was using TiVo and the Internet. The rating system is unfair. The war. The economy. The toxins. The bees. But things were going to be great in ’08.
And then came the writers’ strike. Combined with the viewer plunge, it was like the Depression and the Dust Bowl — a double whammy for television and its audience. The strike “orphaned” viewers (as the jargon has it) without their favorite shows, which gave viewers a reason to leave network television entirely. And they did. Sayonara. According to The Hollywood Reporter, most returning shows lost between 10 and 30 percent of the viewers they had before the strike, when ratings for the networks were already low.
It’s not immediately clear what all this means for the upfronts. How do you celebrate your wedding anniversary the year that divorce is imminent? Do you drink alone? Toast to old times?
Check it out here.
The video ads on the Brawndo site, commissioned by Hottelet, feature members of Picnicface, a Canadian comedy troop, shouting hilariously over-the-top pitches: “It’s like a monster truck you pour into your face!” (The pitches actually owe quite a bit to videos Picnicface has made for a drink called Powerthirst — which doesn’t exist. I don’t think.)
Check it out here.
