The document he’d given me provided no explanation for my expulsion, but I immediately felt that there was some connection to the travels and reporting I had done for a story published two days earlier in the New York Times Magazine, about a dangerous new generation of Taliban in Pakistan. I had spent several months traveling throughout the troubled areas along the border with Afghanistan, including Quetta (in Baluchistan province) and Dera Ismail Khan, Peshawar and Swat (all in the North-West Frontier Province). My visa listed no travel restrictions, and less than a week earlier, President Pervez Musharraf had sat before a roomful of foreign journalists in Islamabad and told them that they could go anywhere they wanted in Pakistan.
The truth, however, is that foreign journalists are barred from almost half the country; in most cases, their visas are restricted to three cities — Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. In Baluchistan province, which covers 44 percent of Pakistan and where ethnic nationalists are fighting a low-level insurgency, the government requires prior notification and approval if you want to travel anywhere outside the capital of Quetta. Such permission is rarely given. And the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where the pro-Taliban militants are strong, are completely off-limits. Musharraf’s government says that journalists are kept out for their own security. But meanwhile, two conflicts go unreported in one of the world’s most vital — and misunderstood — countries.
Tucked away in the back of Fuji’s booth at PMA 2008 was an interesting prototype for a 6×7 film camera. With over four times the resolution of 35mm film, 70mm 120/220 roll films have long been the favored film for pros, but it’s been decades since reasonably priced consumer models have been manufactured outside the toy-camera world.
Based on a classic design, this as-yet-unnamed camera isn’t amazingly innovative, but it seems to be perfectly refined with everything fans of old Ansco/Agfa cameras would expect. Add in the convenience of an electronic shutter and this becomes a pretty interesting concept, considering the rest of it is basically 1950s tech. This was the only new film camera model we ran into at PMA.
The German-born British photographer, E.O. Hoppe, was a different sort of a case. It’s true, he was probably the most famous photographer alive in the 1920s, and it’s true that after his death he fell into obscurity.
But here’s the marvel: Hoppe’s photographs look as brilliant now as they did to his contemporaries. Looking at his pictures, you see it immediately; it doesn’t take a specialist’s eye or any kind of rarefied knowledge.
A special report looking at the provision of education in an area of Mali has won the inaugural Journalism.co.uk multimedia reporting competition.
Judges praised the combined use of voiceover, stills and video footage within a series of slideshows, that made up the Learning Lessons in Africa report, calling it a ‘compelling story’ and a ‘seamless piece of journalism’ that set it apart from other more technically adventurous projects.
Photographer Ami Vitale and videographer Dan Chung complied footage in Mali for the report (pictured above), which was then produced by Elliot Smith with interactive design by Paddy Allen and published online by the Guardian.
Burckhardt, who emigrated from Switzerland in 1935, is difficult to classify within the tradition of New York street photography. He was an impatient photographer, taking few exposures even when shooting stationary subjects, and a careless printer who allowed his negatives to become scratched. Photography was not his only medium; he also painted and made short, lyrical 16-millimeter films of the city. His early work has been compared to that of Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott, though without the social or historical conscience. His playful late photographs, from the ’70s and ’80s, suggest a less aggressive Garry Winogrand.
His photographs also register as the work of an outsider. Burckhardt’s most famous pictures, views of Astor Place and the Flatiron Building taken from rooftops, focus on the few places in the city where the street grid is broken. New York landmarks become European boulevards. Another well-known photograph shows the Midtown skyline from the vantage point of a rail yard in Astoria, Queens.
Leica fanatics are different than regular people, so it’s no surprise Leica’s taking an entirely different—but brilliant—approach with its M8: It’s everlasting. Instead of dropping an M9 or M10, Leica is offering substantial upgrades to the M8 itself—mechanical and digital components, so it’ll slowly evolve into a new camera. The first package is a sapphire LCD screen, which can only be scratched by a diamond, plus a new, quieter, less shaky shutter, at a cost of around $1,800.
Compared to the monkey, everything else was a cinch, says Guy Neveling, when asked about the production of our featured image, an advertisement for Volkswagen. “The monkey was all over the studio.” That is, until the time came for something rarely heard of in stateside shoots—his afternoon nap.
A skilled photographer working in a small market like South Africa has to be versatile enough to let the monkey sleep, says Nevelling. “They’ll give you an animal shot one week and then next week, I’ll be shooting a car,” he says. His range serves him well in a region where work is plentiful and photographers are in short supply. “It’s like the Wild West,” Neveling says. “There is violence [in Johannesburg] but people are open to new things and new people.”
That Sony is willing to tackle the difficult economics of the full-frame SLR market with its new Alpha provides further evidence that Sony is serious with its SLR push.
“This year, Alpha will proceed to its main stage,” Katsumoto said. “We will address the whole spectrum of digital SLR segments this year ranging from entry-level to flagship.”
Full-frame cameras can offer greater sensitivity for a given megapixel count because individual pixels are larger and gather more light. Sony’s flagship Alpha, with 24.8 megapixels, puts pixel count in the driver’s seat. In contrast, Nikon’s 12-megapixel D3 emphasizes bigger pixels with good low-light performance.
From his first job at a small south Chicago paper to his current position as a staff photographer for the Chicago Tribune, Scott Strazzante has carried with him a personal project about a family farm near Lockport, Illinois. Now presented as a slide show for the Chicago Tribune Magazine titled Another Country, Strazzante’s diptychs pair images of the Cagwin farm with subsequent shots from the subdivision that was built on their land. After American Photo senior editor Miki Johnson wrote about the project on the magazine’s State of the Art blog, Strazzante got in touch and the two struck up a conversation about the ongoing project.
At a wedding, Denis Reggie rarely asks the couple to pose for pictures. In fact, they often do not even know that he is shooting photographs which will make it to their wedding album. Then why are clients willing to pay upwards of $25,000 for their wedding pictures? Ritu Raizada finds out.
Already a manufacturer of CMOS imaging sensors for professional digital SLRs, Sony announced this morning at PMA 2008 in Las Vegas that it too would introduce a pro digital SLR this year. The new digital SLR — which is simply being called “Flagship” at this point — will use a new 24.6-megapixel full-frame “Exmor” CMOS sensor and employ Sony’s in-camera Super SteadyShot image stabilizer, Sony said at a press conference at PMA.
Curiously, the resolution of the CMOS sensor in the new “Flagship” Sony camera is a notch lower than a new 24.8-megapixel full-frame sensor Sony announced it was developing yesterday. If it is released as planned, Sony’s new camera would have bragging rights for most megapixels in a current professional full-frame DSLR
The White House News Photographers Association Student Contest Committee announces a new contest open to students from around the world to compete for the honor of WHNPA 2008 Student Photographer of the Year. WHNPA sponsor, Digital Railroad, will host the competition website and the award for the winning student photographer.
The contest submission page will open on February 1, 2008 and entries will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. on March 1, 2008.
It is with great pleasure that I announce the immediate availability of MarsEdit 2.1, a significant update to Red Sweater’s Eddy-Award winning desktop blog editing application.
I think we’re all aware that the portfolio website is a very important tool for photographers and I’ll go so far as to predict that it will soon replace printed portfolios (bold, I know), so I wanted to create a quick reference guide for photographers looking for templates or designers or examples of portfolios that I like.
Sigma has announced the imminent availability of the greatly anticipated DP1 digital camera. The DP1 has a sensor around the size of those found in most DLSRs – although it is greatly different in terms of design – and aims to offer equivalent image-quality and specification in a compact format. In common with Sigma’s DSLR offerings it utilizes Foveon’s direct-image-sensor technology which detects three colors at each of its 4.6 million pixels (collecting the same amount of color data as a conventional 14 megapixel sensor). Our contacts at Sigma say it will be available in “spring.”
For those of you that are familiar with our recent blog project “Revisit and Retouch” you’ll recognize this image. I provided CameraPorn readers with a set of three bracketed exposures to have a go at creating their own unique version by any means necessary. The image above is not only my entry to the project, but also an exercise in retouching that focuses on the common practice of compositing multiple, bracketed exposures to create a final image that better represents the scene as viewed by the human eye… In more ‘technical’ terms, an image with a higher dynamic range.
Before getting into the nitty-gritty of how I came to this final image, it’s important to understand what I mean by “higher dynamic range.” Many of you are probably thinking, oh yeah, he means ‘HDR’ imagery like what you create with a program such as Photomatix and see plastered all over flickr, but you’re wrong. As neato as those images can look, they are rarely executed in a way that brings the final image to appear as the scene actually looked to the human eye, which in my opinion, is where the true value lies in creating higher dynamic range images. Creating a tone-mapped HDR image in an HDR program usually leads to oversaturated, dream-like images which look pretty cool but can be created by almost anybody with Photomatix and some bracketed images with little to no skill involved in most cases. Now don’t get me wrong there are some incredibly talented HDR ‘artists’ out there whose work amazes me, but the general image you see on flickr looks too fake for my tastes, and besides today we’re talking about using good old Photoshop and Lightroom. To see how I did it and learn a bit more about dynamic range, read on…
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