A review of some of the preliminary awards, which often foretell Pulitzer success, as well as interviews with editors and current and former jurors, indicates some frontrunners have emerged.
Check it out here.
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A growing number of researchers and companies are looking for such signs of tampering in hopes of restoring credibility to photographs at a time when the name of a popular program for manipulating digital images has become a verb, Photoshopping.
Adobe Systems Inc., the developer of Photoshop, said it may incorporate their techniques into future releases.
“There’s much more awareness and much more skepticism when (people) are looking at images,” said Kevin Connor, a senior director of product management at Adobe. “That’s why we think that’s something we need to get involved in. It’s not healthy to have people be too skeptical about what they saw.”Check it out here.
in Ethics
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According to the U.K.-based magazine Amateur Photographer, an interview the publication conducted with Lee during PMA 2008 could have been the cause of his firing. In an editor’s note written by Damien Demolder of Amateur Photographer, Demolder claims that Lee “hinted strongly” to his magazine that Leica was planning a full-frame version of the M8 digital rangefinder, a slip-up that, if true, could have led to Lee’s eventual ouster.
Check it out here.
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“I have enough experience to know that a tight nit group governs any field within the photography industry, and that these experienced elders are the gatekeepers for access to the industry,” said Octavian Cantilli. “As such it makes perfect sense that they only endorse those that they both like and feel have talent. However, it has been my experience that some of these elders don’t deserve respect! At least not from young photographers.”
Check it out here.
in Photography
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As the pictures processor in the team covering the Australian Open tennis tournament, it is my job to help picture editor Petar Kujundzic and our team of photographers – Tim Wimborne, Darren Whiteside, Mick Tsikas, Steve Holland and Stuart Milligan, get their pictures to the Singapore desk quickly with accurate captions. That sounds easy on paper – right?
Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that the job is either easy or for that matter glamorous.
Check it out here.
in Sports
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When Gus Mueller released Acorn, his fundamentally rethought bitmap image editing app, I was excited. Partly because it filled a void in my tool belt, but more because I knew it was the start of something big.
For this lovely little app, good things are starting to come. Congratulations to Gus on today’s release of Acorn 1.1! I’m already looking forward to the next episode.
Check it out here.
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In anticipation of his visit to UCSB on March 3rd, where he’ll show his latest work and discuss the role of journalists in the modern world, Marcus Bleasdale spent some time chatting over the phone from his home in Norway. He’d just returned from Kenya, where he said the politicians and international community should be “ashamed” for standing by “toothless” while another round of ethnic cleansing occurred.
Check it out here.
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The world’s biggest photo agency announced Monday that it intends to go private, with a $2.4 billion sale to private equity firm Hellman & Friedman. (Related story.) Shortly after the announcement, PDN spoke to Getty Images CEO Jonathan Klein to learn more about the deal. Excerpts:
Check it out here.
in Interviews
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Superficial Snapshots, Zine 2, An Issue with Lomos is going FAST. Tell your friends! Order one today before it’s too late
Check it out here.
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A representative of the Illinois Press Association today told IPA members that the Illinois High School Association will allow photographers with valid press credentials to have access to the floor at the girls state basketball finals in Bloomington this weekend without being required to sign IHSA’s waivers or releases.
Check it out here.
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After a decade of acquiring nearly every stock photography collection and agency with promise, Getty Images has itself been acquired. The buyer? Private equity firm Hellman & Friedman LLC, in a transaction valued at approximately $2.4 billion.
Check it out here.
in Photography
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London-based photojournalist Marc Vallée originally brought a private civil action for up to £15,000 against both the police force and its commissioner Sir Ian Blair alleging assault and breaches of the Human Rights Act. Under the terms of the settlement the Metropolitan Police have not accepted any liability.
Vallée, 39, was hospitalised and left unable to work for a month with back injuries which he alleges resulted from being manhandled by a police officer while covering the Sack Parliament protest in London’s Parliament Square on 9 October 2006.
Check it out here.
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Alexia Tsairis was a photojournalism major at Syracuse University who used her camera as a means to draw cultures together. But in the winter of 1988, life took a turn for the worse when 35 Syracuse students were killed in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103-Tsairis included.
After she passed away, her parents were determined to support students with the same passion.
“After the crash, they came to the university looking for a way to memorialize Alexia,” said David Sutherland, an associate professor of journalism. “We came up with this concept that is getting better every year.”
The Alexia Foundation for World Peace supports budding student and professional photographers as they capture and share stories of the world.
Check it out here.
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John Moore is a finalist for Nicest Guy On the Planet competition. O.K., there is no such thing but seriously, what a super guy. Mike worked with John at the Albuquerque Tribune (The Trib’s last day of publication was Saturday, February 23, 2008) close to 20 years ago and saw then that he was one talented, sincere, considerate person who made pictures that reflected these and other endearing aspects of his personality. And so it has been as John has trotted the globe since then.
We catch up with him in Pakistan, days after World Press recognized his photographs of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. And he just won First Place: News Picture Story and an Award of Excellence in the Pictures of the Year International competitionCheck it out here.
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Scholz & Volkmer has launched an interesting website for Leica, the legendary compact camera brand that is currently trying to reposition itself and earn back the success of the past.
Check it out here.
in Leica
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Paul D’Amato has the above photograph in the Presumed Innonece exhibition that I just mentioned. It’s from his beatiful series entitled Barrio, photographs made between 1988 and 2002 in Pilsen, Chicago’s largest Mexican neighborhood, and the neighboring Little Village.
The photographs that D’Amato made in those fourteen years became increasingly intimate; he eventually grew to know residents of the neighborhood and could then make photographs of people at work, children at play, families at weddings or parties, and even portraits of gang members.
Check it out here.
in Photography
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The Tribune’s philosophy on visuals demanded reporting and encouraged storytelling. It wasn’t enough to merely break up the type. Today, members of our photo staff, past and present, bid farewell to Tribune readers in their own way.
Check it out here. Via Rob Finch’s Pictures
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UPDATE: Rich-Joseph Facun won first place in general news reporting for this image of 5-year-old Evan Burgoon watching for his father at Oceana Naval Air Station.
Stephen M. Katz of The Virginian-Pilot was named the newspaper photographer of the year Friday night, taking the top honor in the 65th Annual Pictures of the Year International Competition.
“We’re extremely proud of the collection of images that Stephen put together,” said Randall Greenwell, director of photography for The Pilot, which is published by Landmark Communications Inc. “We knew that he had an excellent year and this honor certainly confirms it.”
Check it out here.
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My dear friend JeongMee Yoon just got a lovely write-up in the New York Times. In addition to the article they also gave her work the full multimedia slide show treatment. Really impressive. You can see JeongMee’s work in person beginning March 3 when her solo show opens at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in New York.
Check it out here.
in Photography
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Photo by Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
As I went to get some hot chocolate in the dining tent, the peaceful night was shattered by mortars, rockets and machine-gun fire banging and bursting around us. It was a coordinated attack on all the fire bases. It didn’t take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants. The soldiers were on a 15-month tour that included just 18 days off. Many of them were “stop-lossed,” meaning their contracts were extended because the army is stretched so thin. You are not allowed to refuse these extensions. And they felt eclipsed by Iraq. As Sgt. Erick Gallardo put it: “We don’t get supplies, assets. We scrounge for everything and live a lot more rugged. But we know the war is here. We got unfinished business.”
For sanity, all they had was the medics’ tent, video games and movies — “Gladiator,” “Conan the Barbarian,” “Dogma,” Monty Python. Down the road in the Pech Valley, soldiers played cricket with Afghan kids and had organized boxing and soccer matches. Lt. Kareem Hernandez, a New Yorker running a base on the Pech River, regularly bantered over dinner with the Afghan police. Neighbors would come by with tips. But here in the Korengal, the soldiers were completely alienated from the local culture. One night while watching a scene from HBO’s “Rome” in which a Roman soldier tells a slave he wants to marry her, a soldier asked which century the story was set in. “First B.C. or A.D.,” said another soldier. The first shook his head: “And they’re still living like this 800 meters outside the wire.”
Check it out here.