A new book by Joachim Ladefoged, featuring 62 colour portraits and 16 black-and-white action shots from bodybuilding competitions in Scandinavia
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Dith Pran, who survived torture under the genocidal Khmer Rouge after helping The New York Times’s Cambodia correspondent for three years, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January. He was hospitalized for three weeks starting in mid-February, and was released to the Roosevelt Care Center in Edison, NJ, on Friday.
After escaping his country in 1979, Dith, 65, became a photographer for The New York Times in 1980, where he remains on staff. [His given name is Pran; Dith is his family name.] He was made famous by the 1984 film “The Killing Fields,” which depicts him in his role as a translator and journalist assisting Sydney Schanberg, then a foreign correspondent for The Times.
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My story on Ben finally ran yesterday, on my last day of work. I felt like I went out with a good note. It was nice to see my vision for the story play out through fruition. All the photos ran in black and white over three pages starting on the A1.
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When you close your eyes and think of Iraq, what do you see in your mind’s eye?
Is it a picture of charred bodies hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates River in Fallujah? Is it a picture of a Marine climbing a massive statue of Saddam Hussein to place an American flag on its face, hours after the fall of Baghdad?
Or is it a picture of an Iraqi prisoner standing on a box, arms outstretched with wires attached, a fabric bag covering his headCheck it out here.
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Hearing damage is the No. 1 disability in the war on terrorism, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and some experts say the true toll could take decades to become clear. Nearly 70,000 of the more than 1.3 million troops who have served in the two war zones are collecting disability for tinnitus, a potentially debilitating ringing in the ears, and more than 58,000 are on disability for hearing loss, the VA said.
“The numbers are staggering,” said Theresa Schulz, a former audiologist with the Air Force, past president of the National Hearing Conservation Association and author of a 2004 report titled “Troops Return With Alarming Rates of Hearing Loss.”
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in War
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in Sports
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When the news emerged this week that Margaret Seltzer had fabricated her gang memoir, “Love and Consequences,” under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones, many in the publishing industry and beyond thought: Here we go again.
The most immediate examples that came to mind were, of course, James Frey, the author of the best-selling “Million Little Pieces,” in which he embellished details of his experiences as a drug addict, and J T LeRoy, the novelist thought to be a young West Virginia male prostitute who was actually the fictive alter ego of Laura Albert, a woman now living in San Francisco.Check it out here.
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In this month’s Amateur Photographer Informer magazine supplement we reported how Kodak consumer print film has been saved from digital demolition thanks, in part, to a burgeoning market in India, according to Kodak.
Initial predictions of the death of film have been somewhat premature, according to Joel Proegler, general manager of Film Capture at Eastman Kodak who told us: ‘Kodak has focused on the digital message for the past four years. As we come out of that transition, one thing is very clear: film is a very profitable part of the business’.
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in Equipment
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In the video game that Wafaa Bilal created, his avatar is steely-eyed and hooded, with an automatic rifle at his side, an ammunition belt around his waist, a fuse in his hand and the mien of a knightly suicide-bomber. He is the “Virtual Jihadi.”
The Iraqi-born, Chicago-based artist said he adapted his game from an earlier version made by al-Qaeda’s media branch to raise questions about Americans’ conceptions of the enemy in Iraq.
His work was briefly exhibited Thursday night at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. The game was projected on a giant screen so that one viewer at a time could play — until administrators shut down the show Friday morning. The institute needed time to review the show’s “origin, content and intent,” said William N. Walker, a vice presidentCheck it out here.
in Gaming
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Born in Kabul, the 23-year-old is one of the few female photojournalists in Afghanistan. And even six years after she picked up her first camera, Farzana Wahidy says she still hears the grunts of disapproval or feels the sticks that are thrown at her, the sentiment that comes with being a female photojournalist in a male-dominated profession, and in a country where women are not seen as equals.
“Every picture that came out of Afghanistan, they were mostly taken by men and foreign photojournalists.” And most were pictures of bloodshed, she says. “So I thought that could be something for me to do, show a picture of what Afghanistan is. I like pictures that show the difficulty of the lives of women, their daily lives.”Check it out here.
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© Raymond Depardon / Magnum PhotosThis weekend in 1989, the Soviet Union withdrew its last troops from Afghanistan after having occupied the country since 1979 with much resistance from the mujahideen. Civil war, refugee crises, and Taliban rule followed, then the United States struck the Taliban in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. Magnum presents a short history of Afghanistan in pictures.
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March 9 marks three months since a judge in Baghdad placed a gag order on the hearing of Bilal Hussein, the Associated Press photojournalist accused of being a security threat.
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The day after Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama in the Ohio and Texas primaries, the New York Times ran this image, by Win McNamee for Getty Images, showing Obama talking to reporters on his campaign plane. The Times unfortunately cropped out the best part, which is the reporter at right holding a bunch of cell phones or tape recorders or something. Gawker happily showed the entire image. What in the world is she doing?
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One of the challenges that comes with maintaining a graphic-intensive website like Shifting Pixel is finding a way to get high quality images throughout the site with as little effort as possible. To tackle this, I developed the Smart Image Resizer and have been using it around the site for the past few months. I couldn’t be happier.
The major advantage of this script is that it allows me to resize and crop any image on my website without touching the actual image or writing any code. I upload each image once at a high enough resolution and can then reuse it at any size I want, anywhere I want. It doesn’t matter if the images are in a post, on a page, or in a template file–it just works. All of the magic is done through the query string part of the URL in the src attribute of the img tag.
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The Photoshop Action Pack provides 87 Actions (86 in the CS2 version, and 85 for CS) that allow you to control a tremendous number of Photoshop’s functions. In addition, the Action Pack includes special filter operations that let you sort images based on various criteria including EXIF and IPTC tags, color mode, size, orientation and aspect ratio. With the Photoshop Action Pack, you can execute complex batch operations that are impossible with Photoshop’s own internal Actions. In addition to filtering by file properties, you can create branching logic for more complex functionality. While Adobe Bridge provides a simple interface for launching batch processes, it limits you to only operating on the files within a single folder. Automator has no such limitations, and provides are more ways to launch a batch process.
Because Automator can control much more than just Photoshop, you can automate entire photography and graphics production pipelines. For example, you can use Automator and the Photoshop Action Pack to batch process the manipulation of your images and then automatically upload the results to a server, or archive them to a CD or DVD.
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Wang Lili, a 52-year old photojournalist, received his pink slip from Tongzhou Newsletter where he had been working more than 3 years and the only reason for the dismissal was an incomprehensible “political incident” that in one of his picture reports for the local People’s Congress, the warden of Beijing Tongzhou District “bowed the head with closed eyes, presenting an off-colored image”, Southern Metropolis Weekly Reported last Friday. The problem photo taken by Wang was concluded as a picture report which biased its readers against the government, exerting extremely bad political influence.
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Esko Männikkö (b. 1959, Finland) documents the lives of those who inhabit the periphery. Initially a hunter, his passion developed from this to shooting photographs in the early 1980s.
Männikkö became widely known for The Female Pike, which featured bachelors living isolated lives in the Finnish countryside. In this series, as well as his work Mexas (1999), produced on the border between Mexico and Texas, each photograph is instilled with the peculiarities and unique characteristics of the individuals.
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in Contests
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PHOTOJOURNALISM
Matt McClain of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver receives $10,000 and a trophy for his portfolio of complex and memorable images, which chronicled the story of a town devastated by a tornado and helped make Colorado’s energy rush real to readers.Finalists: Sam Dean, The Roanoke (Va.) Times, and John Moore, Getty Images
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