Every assignment/subject/event I have ever photographed in my life has taken less than one minute to capture. It takes a lot of frames at 1/250th of a second to add up to a minute, but it’s all the things we do between this time and that, which make all the difference in the world. Sometimes I wish the people in upper level management would spend more than 1/250th of a second deciding which stories we run centerpiece photos with and which ones we ignore all together. Photography at The Spectrum is an afterthought in most cases, used to fill space between the words on the page. I always ask myself ‘how can I best serve the story, how can I best serve the reader’ with my photos, and when I cover a city council meeting like I did tonight I wonder if my time would be better spent covering an assignment that would be enhanced with visual story telling.
Delkin has announced several new digital photography products, including a four-slot USB 2.0 card reader called ImageRouter, a Dual Universal Battery Charger capable of charging two digital camera batteries simultaneously, a line of ExpressCard SSDs in 4GB, 8GB and 16GB capacities, a 16GB Class 6 SDHC card and more.
yesterday a brief discussion came up under “student work/workshops” that i thought might be interesting to bring up right here….herve brought it up, after seeing my India student essays, with regard to what he described as a “trend” by workshop students in particular and many photographers in general to photograph what he described as “incomplete” or “not quite” photographs….photographs which could possibly require just too too much imagination on the viewers part…not enough “explanation” perhaps….
A seven-year period may seem short compared to a full-span professional career, but in the case of the independent photojournalist Dimitris Soulas (born 1938) this hardly matters.
Soulas worked as a photographer in Germany between 1967 and 1974, a period that coincided with the junta regime in Greece. It was a short but highly creative period that earned him success and recognition. “Dimitris Soulas, Snapshots, Photographs 1967-1974,” an exhibition currently being held at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, reveals the strength and richness in the work of this artist whose commitment to photography, although brief, was substantial. The first large presentation held on the work of Soulas worldwide, it is a touring exhibition that begins from Greece (at the artist’s request). It has been organized by the Museum of Photography in the City of Munich to which Soulas donated his archive, to mark the photographer’s 70th birthday. It is being held in collaboration with the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography and is jointly curated by Ulrich Pohlmann (director of the German museum) and Heracles Papaioannou, curator at the Thessaloniki museum. An album with researched essays that place the work of Soulas in its time has been published by both museums on the occasion.
The image adjustment technology, which first appeared in Nikon Capture NX and is that program’s standout feature because of how much simpler it makes the process of applying selective corrections to a photo, will soon be available for both Mac and Windows versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements in the form of a plug-in called Viveza.
Last week at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the surprise hit was a music documentary called ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL, the story of which can be summed up as “Spinal Tap in Real Life” (Stonehenge even makes an appearance). Anvil, who die-hard late-80s metal fans (and possibly no one else) will recall as precursors to Megadeth and Slayer (and contemporaries of the Scorpions and Whitesnake), never “made it” like many of their peers and acolytes- yet they have soldiered on, playing the rawk for 35 years.
The Internet, it seems, doesn’t take advantage of how humans best process information. Evolution granted Homo Sapiens a high degree of visual acuity … Scrolling and linking are inferior modes of taking in information. “Humans are incredibly good at spatial navigation and incredibly bad at navigating through a list of generic icons or generic text.” … These limitations are not lost on the technology giants and forward-thinking entrepreneurs working to commercialize a new way to take in information visually: the zoom interface. In its simplest form, it displays information all at once – all the photos in an album, say, or all the files on a PC, or all the entries in a database, or all the items retrieved in a search – and when you spot something of interest, you zoom down into it. In this way, zooming represents an upgrade from the second- and third-best methods for accessing information (scrolling and linking) to the best option: displaying information like a landscape, and giving people the chance to zoom down to the details … Only recently have engineers had the advances in display technology, broadband connections and video processors capable of coping with a zoom interface. As a result, prototype zoom interfaces are now up and running in labs around the world.
As I survive my sixth layoff in five years, I question the future of photojournalism and am worried about the path we are headed down. Almost every newspaper in the county has laid off, bought out or done away with positions in the last few years. Everyone is trying to cut back on expenses, trim the fat, and keep profit margins up as the economy starts to take a dive. “This is necessary, these are hard times, it has to be done,” we’re told. Newspapers cannot afford to have investigative reporters, or fat staffs, or experienced journalists with higher salaries.
We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what’s fair and what isn’t at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.
Russian avant-gardist Alexander Rodchenko claimed that photography could ‘leave Rubens behind’. Through patterns and unusual viewpoints, his compositions make the viewer see familiar scenes in a different light, observes Craig Raine
All of this got me instantly thinking (and worrying): What kind of Mexican suitcase will we leave to our future generations to find? A SyQuest cartridge from the early 1990’s? A floppy disk? A Zip drive? I’ve always laughed at the prospect of one of the great ironies of the digital era: In the end, only paper will survive. Our grandchildren might venture into an attic sixty years from now and find a stack of gorgeous prints–made from digital cameras and film cameras alike–and then again, they might find the original files to those prints on a CD with faded Sharpie writing. The prints, of course, will be treasured while the CD will get thrown into the trash faster than one can say, “what’s a SCSI drive?”
(To be fair, there are plenty of atrocities on both sides of the fence. Back in the late eighties, someone at a major Washington newspaper, looking to clear some space, threw away negatives from a 16 year period, including many of those belonging to a minor political dust-up called Watergate.)
Not so very long ago, we winced every time we saw someone with facial hair or a backpack. Average people were terrified of opening their mail for fear of getting a face full of anthrax. Those were perhaps our country’s greatest days. Yet that once-phobic spirit that defined our times is drastically changing.
Today, people are making eye contact with strangers on the street. They are whistling on subway platforms, strolling down sidewalks, and generally behaving as if they do not feel they could be killed at any moment. Children can be seen running playfully in public parks, their parents smiling and watching idly from afar when they should be obsessing over an unseen child abductor who will snatch and rape their babies first chance they get. It breaks my heart to see the land I love fall into such a state of non-panic.
Of course trade sources have been saying that Nikon will have a 24MP camera this year to follow up on their recently released D3 camera. Since Sony is almost certainly their fabricator (if not co-designer) this is all starting to make perfect sense.
“When I woke up after several hours, I felt a pain in my right side,” Saleem recalled, sitting on a metal cot in a city hospital ward. “The men said, ‘We have removed your kidney, and you better not breathe a word about it.’ My life broke into pieces when I heard that.”
Saleem was the latest in a long list of poor laborers who had come to Gurgaon to work and lost their kidneys as a result. Police say they were victims of a major organ-trafficking racket based in this city for nearly a decade.
The scam was discovered last week after police, acting on a tip from a middleman, raided the bungalow where Saleem had been held. They said they found a labyrinthine kidney bazaar run by a group of men posing as doctors. Five suspects were arrested.
I officially approved zine two today! The zine has 34 photos all shot with my lomo LC+A. Printed on 80-lb cover stock paper which really gives it a flip book feel. The photos I consider to be my travel snapshots. My dad said it well as he looked through the mocked up zine last week, “this isn’t your best work.” I explained that they are throw away photos. I haven’t sleeved or archived any of the film, I see them as sketches. I’ll put up a paypal button next week when the zines are here. They’ll be 22.50 this time. I can’t wait for you to see it!
Something is fishy over at Reuters. The news wire has been caught distributing what appear to be staged photographs of Gaza power outages. Check out the two photographs above, taken by Gaza-based Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem.
The captions for the pictures read “Palestinian lawmakers attend a parliament session in candlelight during a power cut in Gaza January 22, 2008.”
Except… look closely at the pictures. Is that sunlight steaming in through the windows? Yes. Yes it is. They’re holding a parliamentary session by candlelight during the daytime.
When does photographer/blogger John Harrington sleep? We are not sure. Sometime between last night (when he covered the State of the Union address) and this afternoon, he produced an extremely informative 12-minute video about how photographers cover the president’s annual applause-fest. (Take note of Dennis Brack’s spot-on prediction that the Obama-Clinton cold shoulder would be the most important photo of the night.)
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris
29 January – 13 April 2008
Photography project on world power inspired by the history of classical painting. Each part refers to painting by its subject and format and tries to explore in a conceptual way the mechanisms of power and history.
Most things come in three. A trinity structure has occurred during many reigns, empires and organized religion. 1. The leaders or gods, 2. the army or avenging creatures and 3. the people or representatives.
Figurative painting or drawing was for a long time the source for historical reflection and reporting. Format, color, glorification, imposing frames, mise en scene were elements of persuasion to create an overwhelming feeling of history and testimony.
Now, television and printed media have taken over this concept. 30 images per second and millions of pictures per day determine and influence in a direct or indirect way the global opinion and give a thin notion of reality and opinion. World leaders like CNN are the perfect example.
By going back to the idea of one large image representing a situation I try to reintroduce the element of time in dealing with images of reality. The viewer, in the museum, is forced by the sheer size of the image to look at it in a way some people do with paintings. Standing still, sitting or even kneeling in front of an image is encouraged like in less abundant media times.
The world ‘order’ changed after the atomic ‘Trinity’ project of the US.
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