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    After Heath Ledger was found dead in his SoHo apartment on Jan. 22, David Granger, the editor in chief of Esquire magazine, dispatched a writer named Lisa Taddeo to report on the actor’s final days.
    Her article, published in the April issue, which will be on newstands next week, finds Mr. Ledger eating Moroccan food with Jack Nicholson in London, returning to New York and partying at the downtown nightspot Beatrice Inn, eating steak and eggs at a cafe in Little Italy and wolfing down a banana-nut muffin as his last morsel of food.

    None of this is exactly true. “The Last Days of Heath Ledger,” written in the first person as if it were Mr. Ledger’s own diary, is a fictionalized account of his last days in London and New York and ponders the indignities of celebrity.

    Check it out here.

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  • A public beta of Microsoft Expression Media 2, the application formerly known as iView MediaPro, is now available. New in Expression Media 2 is hierarchical keywording, faster catalog creation and updating, basic catalog sharing across a network, better use of multiple monitors, support for new, mostly non-image file formats and more.

    Check it out here.

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  • As an aspiring photojournalist, Christopher Scott Frost wouldn’t stop until he got that one shot that would bring a story to life, his father said Wednesday.
    And as a member of the U.S. Air Force serving in Iraq, he got to employ his relentless pursuit of stories as an editor of a military publication, Gary Frost said.

    “He was ecstatic when one of his stories got picked up by a Spokane, Washington, newspaper,” Gary Frost said in a telephone interview Wednesday night, after learning that his son had been killed in Iraq. “He is esteemed by the people who worked around him for his willingness to tackle any assignment or any mission.”

    According to the U.S. Department of Defense, Staff Sgt. Christopher S. Frost, 24, died Monday near Bayji, Iraq, in a crash of an Iraqi Army Mi-17 helicopter. The circumstances surrounding the crash are under investigation. He was assigned to the 377th Air Base Wing, Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M.

    Check it out here.

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    Jason P Howe:

    Sitting naked on the edge of the bed in a cheap, sweltering hotel room in the heart of a war-torn, drug-producing region of Colombia, I lit a cigarette and listened as the girl I had just made love with told me a secret dark enough to shake anyone from their postcoital bliss.

    I had been in Colombia for a few months to learn how to become a photojournalist. Not by attending some theoretical university course, or taking portraits in a cosy studio, but by pitching myself in at the deep end.

    Check it out here.

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  • Camera Bits has recently released Photo Mechanic 4.5.3.1, a maintenance update to its pro photo browsing and transmission application for Windows and Mac

    Check it out here.

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    In this charming and captivating volume, National Geographic photographer Annie Griffiths Belt discloses the secrets of a peripatetic life, revealing in often hilarious detail how she managed to juggle two children, bulky cases of camera equipment, and everything needed for a nurturing family life as she traveled to far-flung destinations around the world.
    Belt was one of the first female photographers hired at the National Geographic Society. When her children were born, she kept right on going—and this book is a loving compendium of the wisdom she gained. It chronicles three decades of international travel, a moveable family, and the art she created along the way.

    Check it out here. Via Rob Galbraith.

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    A mid-career retrospective, this exhibition explores the issues of land and landlessness in two parts. The first section reveals Larry Towell’s family and their relationship to their land in Ontario. Most of the photographs in this section were taken within 100 yards of his front porch. The second section reviews Towell’s work over the past twenty years documenting the crisis of human landlessness throughout the world, from Central America to the Middle East. Writes Towell, “We must address these crises in order to achieve a more stable and peaceful world.”

    Check it out here.

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    Here’s the plan: I’ll be releasing one desktop wallpaper every Wednesday morning (California time) until I run out of wallpapers. They’ll be free to download, and come in a multitude of monitor sizes, as well as iPhone and PSP versions just for the fun of it. As of writing this, there are 60 artists involved with the project, some of them providing multiple wallpapers. Who are these 60 artists that are participating? Well I’m not telling because I really like secrets and surprises, and I want you all to be surprised and excited come Wednesday.

    To get things started though, I’m releasing three wallpapers by three amazing artists, Tim Biskup, Mcbess, and IMAKETHINGS.

    Check it out here.

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    Responding to the London Metropolitan Police’s new anti-photographer snitch campaign, wherein posters urge Londoners to turn in people who might be taking pictures of CCTV cameras, many people have taken a crack at redesigning the posters to point out the absurdity of them.

    Check it out here.

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    Nearly ten years ago, towards the end of 1998, we here at Photo District News embarked on an endeavor we called PDN’s “30 Under 30.” Sitting in a small room in our then Times Square offices, Holly Stuart Hughes, Darren Ching, former photo editor Mackenzie Green and myself gathered together a large pile of promising portfolios and an even larger pile of slides (yes, slides) and began the process of choosing a list of 30 gifted photographers we felt would make an impact on the photographic industry. I can still remember the excitement we all felt at the start of this enterprise. With some assistance and advice from peers in the photo community, we were very pleased to present among that first congregation such future luminaries as Taryn Simon, Jason Fulford, Jonathan Kantor, Guy Aroch, and Norman Jean Roy. We were off to an excellent beginning

    This year’s 30: Ian Baguskas, Aya Brackett, Michael Christopher Brown, Michal Chelbin, J. Bennett Fitts, Taj Forer, Emiliano Granada, Katie Kingma, Andreas Laszlo Konrath, Adam Krause, Eamon Mac Mahon, Tiffany Walling McGarity & John McGarity, Mike McGregor, Domingo Milella, Graeme Mitchell, Morgan & Owens, Ed Du, Christina Paige, Birthe Piantek, Espen Rasmussen, David Rochkind, Jennifer Racholl, Dustin Snipes, Brian Sokol, Mikhael Subotzky, Daniel Traub, Munem Wasif, Donald Weber, Shen Wei.

    Check it out here.

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    At exactly three forty-five on September 19, 1957, unemployed organ grinder Bob Hannon entered RCA Studio 4 and made monkey history with this two-sided tribute to Today Show Animal Editor Kokomo, Jr. the Talking Chimpanzee.

    Check it out here.

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    Check it out here. Via Rob Galbraith.

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    liveBooks, Inc. (www.livebooks.com), a leading provider of customized portfolio websites and marketing software for professional photographers, today announced the Spring 2008 release of liveBooks Professional. Research has shown that more than 80 percent of Internet users first find websites through organic search. To address this need, this latest release adds new features to enhance the search marketing functionality integrated into every visually rich, custom Flash website built by liveBooks.

    Check it out here.

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  • Newsweek has announced that photographers Vincent Laforet, Donald Miralle and Mike Powell will be on exclusive assignment for the magazine to cover the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

    Check it out here.

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    Geoffrey Kloske, publisher of Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that released the book, by Margaret Seltzer, under a pseudonym, Margaret B. Jones, said on Tuesday that there was nothing else that he or Sarah McGrath, the book’s editor, could have done to prevent the author from lying.

    “In hindsight we can second-guess all day things we could have looked for or found,” Mr. Kloske said. “The fact is that the author went to extraordinary lengths: she provided people who acted as her foster siblings. There was a professor who vouched for her work, and a writer who had written about her that seemed to corroborate her story.” He added that Ms. Seltzer had signed a contract in which she had legally promised to tell the truth. “The one thing we wish,” Mr. Kloske said, “is that the author had told us the truth.”

    Check it out here.

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  • According to a post on Troll Lord Games, the company that had published his most recent work, Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has passed away

    Check it out here.

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    Police deny that their latest anti-terror campaign will encourage harassment of photographers taking pictures in public places.

    Last week police chiefs issued fresh warnings over the potential dangers posed by people carrying cameras for surveillance purposes.

    The news comes amid growing reports of clashes between police officers and photographers taking pictures in public places in the UK.

    Check it out here. Via Conscientious.

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    “It’s the archive that’s at stake,” Angelo Grima, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for the National Geographic Society, said during a panel on digital rights at the Magazine Publishers of America’s Magazines 24/7 conference at the Hearst Tower Thursday. “We’ll go to the Supreme Court if we have to, because our archive is that important to us.”

    The litigation, now entering its 11th year, has seen more twists than a John Grisham novel. The 11th Circuit first ruled in 2001 in favor of Jerry Greenberg, a freelance photographer whose work had appeared in National Geographic (in 1962, 1968 and 1971) and then on CD. Subsequent cases in the 2nd Circuit ruled in favor of National Geographic. In 2004, a Florida judge awarded Greenburg $400,000 in damages; National Geographic appealed. Last year, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit overruled the 2001 decision in favor of National Geographic, but Greenburg asked for—and was granted—a full court review.

    Check it out here.

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  • Join Al Tompkins to learn what impressed the judges, what ethical issues arose in this year’s entries, and how the backpack journalist trend is affecting photojournalism.

    Check it out here.

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    “I think it goes without saying that a major international photo festival in New York is long overdue,” said Frank Evers, managing director of the VII Photo Agency and one of the founders of the New York Photo Festival. Evers and other show organizers spoke at the Dumbo headquarters of powerHouse books; publisher Daniel Power is the other founder of the festival. Two Trees Management, which owns most of the real estate in Dumbo, is another supporter. (PDN is one of the festival’s media partners.)

    Four main curators will each oversee a pavilion: British photographer Martin Parr; Kathy Ryan, picture editor of The New York Times Magazine; Lesley A. Martin, book publisher at the Aperture Foundation; and Tim Barber, former photo editor for Vice magazine and editor of tinyvices.com.

    Check it out here.

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