From Poynter Online
By Kenneth Irby (More articles by this author)
Visual Journalism Group Leader/Diversity Director
The following vocabulary list is not intended to make you a world-class photographer. However, it will help you understand the lingo of photojournalism and aid you when communicating with photographers.
Unusual Balloon and Smoke Photography by Andrea Galvani
Italian photographer Andrea Galvani uses simple things like balloons and smoke to construct creative and complex images. I am absolutely fascinated by the second and fourth images. Even though they are just black balloons in a desert location, the way he arranges and captures them is inexplicably brilliant. Galvani stays between New York and Milan and teaches Photographic Language and History of Contemporary Photography at the Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti di Bergamo.
By Donald R. Winslow
© 2009 News Photographer magazine
WASHINGTON, DC (January 20, 2009) – In a new view of an American Presidential Inauguration that’s never been shot or seen before, photographer Chuck Kennedy from the McClatchy-Tribune Photo Service today made this image of President Barack Obama taking the oath of office as the 44th President of the United States. (More story beneath the photograph.)
McClatchy-Tribune Photo Service managing editor George Bridges said that Kennedy began lobbying for the remote camera position shortly after election day.
“He took photos from previous inaugurations showing that there is a lot of equipment there (speakers, mikes, teleprompters) so a camera there would not be a distraction,” Bridges told News Photographer magazine moments after the inauguration wrapped up.
“When the stand was being built Chuck went out and did test photos to show to the Joint Congressional Inaugural Committee and the Senate Press Photographers’ Gallery to show how dramatic the images could be.”
The camera was a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with wireless transmitter attached and mounted inside a Pelican case customized by Kennedy. It was mounted on a camera plate that was screwed into the platform and then mounted on a Bogen arm. The camera was wired via Ethernet for transmission through a DSL line at Kennedy’s position on the balustrade above and behind the platform. The camera was trigged via a hardwire to eliminate radio interference.
McClatchy senior photo editor Linda Epstein said that Kennedy’s remote shot with a wide-angle lens is closer than any camera has been before during the inaugural oath. “It’s a shot that’s never been gotten,” she said. The pool photo was sent to all McClatchy newspapers and the McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
From Huffington Post
Michal Moore is about to be sued by a celebrated war photographer over his online use of an image.
Independent correspondent Michael Yon took a photo, voted by Time readers the top photo of 2005, of a soldier cradling a bloody, injured Iraqi girl who died shortly thereafter. Moore used the photo without permission on his website michaelmoore.com.
The NY Post reports:
Yon has tried to contact Moore for seven months to discuss his unauthorized use of the poignant snap, but hasn’t heard a word back from the director of “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Now, the fed-up photojournalist has told his lawyer to ready a lawsuit against Moore for copyright infringement.
The misappropriated photo shows US Army Maj. Mark Bieger cradling an Iraqi girl wounded by car-bomb shrapnel. She died a short time later.
“The implication on Moore’s Web site was that our soldiers were somehow responsible for that kid being wounded,” Yon’s lawyer, John Mason, told Page Six. “That is absolutely not true. She was the victim of an insurgent’s car bomb.” Yon said: “I’ve never sued anyone in my life. It looks like Mr. Moore might be the first.” Page Six e-mailed Moore for his response, but he didn’t get back to us, either.
On his website Yon blogged about it and asked for help funding his fight:
If Mr. Moore and his counsel continue to ignore our correspondence, we will proceed with a lawsuit. This lawsuit, though, should not be a distraction from combat reporting; the proceedings should be easy and require almost zero hands-on work from me. But it will be potentially costly. I’ve never sued anyone in my life. Looks like Mr. Moore might be the first. I told one very important person recently about the possible upcoming lawsuit and he said something like, “Someone should drive a stake through that guy’s heart.” It won’t be that bad, but copyright cases are interesting and we have to deal with them often. If you want to help me as I both prepare to return overseas and take on this lawsuit with Mr. Michael Moore, please hit the PayPal button.
TURNERS, Mo. (AP) – Although legally blind, photographer Bob White does not let that stand in the way of his passion.
Using a 300-mm telephoto lens, he captures the beauty of rural life around him – plants, buildings, wildlife and people.
Orrick, near Forest Creek
I set off this afternoon for Orrick with my Minolta, my Holga, and (of course) my trusty camera phone. I had the Minolta loaded with cheap, commercial ISO 400 Fujifilm, and had brought along some E-100 color film for the Holga. I had two goals – the first was to find access to the beach on the north side of Forest Creek, and the second was to do some Freeman Patterson exercises.
Finding access to the beach was simple, but hair raising. The road was small and heavily rutted, and the various holes were full of water which made it difficult to judge their depth. I poked along in 3rd gear, hoping fervently that I would not discover a hole deep enough to crack an axle on the Saturn, but eventually reached a parking area on the north side of the creek. The beach itself turned out to be absolutely glorious. It was covered in driftwood near the bluffs, and the sand was for the most part hard packed and easy to walk on. There were few human tracks, and I spent the majority of my time there out of site of any other human beings, totally alone.
I hiked north all the way to the next headland, which was a fair strole through thin mist. The bluffs were heavily covered with brush, but occasionally I could hear the trickle of water down the rocks beneath – only if I had an ear pointing in that direction. If I turned my head to look for the water I would lose the sound in the wind.
The ocean was lovely and lively, rushing energetically up the beach, or forming broad shallow inlets that proved perfect for reflective photography.
I discovered that I had chosen poorly for my exercise for the day. The plan was to set the camera on a slow shutter speed and swing it with the timer on until the shutter tripped, but with 400 film it was impossible for me to get to a slow shutter speed even with the aperture cranked to f16. So instead I just concentrated on taking shots of the surf, of the sun, of the sea stacks, and of course of the metamorphic rock so common in this area.
Coming back near sunset I met a Yurok woman heading out to Mussel Rock (which, I discovered, is the name of the headland) to gather – mussels. That was my only human contact while I was there.
I shot a roll of the fujifilm, and a roll of color 120 film from the Holga. I also got a bunch of camera phone shots, which I have put up on my flickr site. You can find them here.
High as You Can by Benjamin (age 14) and Allen Clark will be part of the Frist Center’s exhibition “Seeing Ourselves: Photographs of Safe Haven,” opening Jan. 9.
An upcoming exhibit at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts will offer a look at the human side of homelessness.
“Seeing Ourselves: Photographs of Safe Haven” opens Friday, Jan. 9, and features 22 color and black-and-white photographs taken by members of homeless families while living at the Safe Haven Family Shelter. The photographs, organized by the Frist Center, are on view through May 3 in the Conte Community Arts Gallery, with no admission charge.
“The photographs selected for Seeing Ourselves represent life patterns and happenings that are experienced by people living in a variety of circumstances,” says Andee Rudloff, educator for outreach at the Frist and curator of the exhibition. “Instead of simply documenting the conditions of homelessness, the images remind us that we all share common hopes, dreams and goals.”
In April 2008, the Frist partnered with Safe Haven, which provides interim housing and job training to homeless families. Nashville-based photographer Allen Clark and the Frist’s outreach educators led a two-week photography workshop for participants, who ranged in age from 3 to 65, to learn about composition, visual storytelling and photographic technique. Writing exercises, including poems written to accompany their images, and preliminary drawings helped residents form ideas for pictures.
On the final day of the workshop, each resident was provided a Holga 120N camera, a toy-like camera that uses medium format film, and invited to create and capture the compositions they had planned.
The gallery guide features images and text, as well as a resource list that includes Web site addresses, for those in need of homeless services in the Nashville area.
“While the Frist Center brings art from all over the world to Nashville, the abiding commitment is to the community,” said Susan H. Edwards, the Frist’s executive director and chief executive officer.
“One of the founding tenets behind creating an art center was to serve the broadest possible constituency and to demonstrate through art the many ways we are connected.”
Contact Nancy DeVille at 615-259-8304 or ndeville@tennessean.com.
Twenty years ago today, a lasting bond took root between two men on opposite ends of a camera lens.
Holding the camera was Ron Olshwanger, a fire district director who took pictures of fires in his free time. Holding a soot-covered toddler was St. Louis firefighter Adam Long, who had just rescued the limp little girl from a burning building.
Olshwanger’s camera captured a jarring, moving image of Long trying to breathe life into 2-year-old Patricia Pettus moments after plucking her from her burning home in the Central West End.
The next day, as she clung to life at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, the photo ran on the front page of the Post-Dispatch. Before long, it was published in newspapers worldwide.
The photo chronicled a moment that would change them all.
Six days after the fire, Patricia died. The following spring, Olshwanger was presented the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography.
As for Long, the incident branded him a hero — he received a Medal of Honor — though he didn’t feel very heroic. “For about a year, I second-guessed myself: ‘Did you really do all that you could have done?’” Long said.
The day the photo was published, Olshwanger went to meet Long at Engine House No. 17, where the firefighter was stationed. Though Olshwanger had stood just a few feet from the firefighter when he took the photo, Long had no idea it had been taken until he saw it in the newspaper. While Olshwanger had focused on him, Long’s focus was on saving the toddler.
They both went to the hospital to see Patricia. She was unable to take visitors when Olshwanger came by, but when Long did, nurses let him see her. As the little girl lay quietly in her bed, he held her hand.
“She just looked like she was resting,” he recalled, “but she was on life support.”
The two men grieved when she died. They attended her funeral together.
And as difficult as it was to accept her loss, each found meaning in her death.
“The little girl did not die in vain,” said Olshwanger, who said he still receives requests for copies of the photo. “To me, she is a hero because people are going out and buying smoke detectors because of what they see in that photo.”
Long agreed. “God has a funny way of doing things to get people’s attention, and that’s what it was: to get people’s attention, because in the city we were having lots of fire deaths,” he said.
The fire also sparked a friendship that has remained strong for 20 years.
Long and his wife accompanied Olshwanger and his wife to the Pulitzer ceremony in New York. They appeared on the Charlie Rose show and in media interviews together. And both men have received hundreds, if not thousands, of letters about the photo, which is prominently displayed in numerous St. Louis-area firehouses and beyond.
When Olshwanger’s wife, Sally, died of cancer in 1991, both men took it hard, Olshwanger said. “At the funeral, he was right there,” Olshwanger said. “I made a great friend.”
The two men have continued to talk regularly and have lunch about once a month.
Olshwanger, 71, who is still a director for the Creve Coeur Fire Protection District, is quick to boast of Long’s accomplishments, including his promotion to battalion chief at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. “If that picture never would have been taken, Adam would still be where he is today,” Olshwanger said. “He’s a role model for how to be a good firefighter and a good person, someone people can look up to.”
And while Long, 58, says any firefighter would have done what he did to find and retrieve Patricia’s body from the burning, smoke-filled home two decades ago, he is quick to assign deeper meaning to Olshwanger’s role at the fire.
“That was supposed to be,” Long said. “You were put there for a reason.
“And I have a good friend now.”
MODESTO, California (CNN) — The photograph became an icon of the Great Depression: a migrant mother with her children burying their faces in her shoulder. Katherine McIntosh was 4 years old when the photo was snapped. She said it brought shame — and determination — to her family.
(From Times Online)
Shakespeare hits the nail on the head on the subject of war when he has the jealous Othello bid his emotional farewell to “big wars that make ambition virtue!”. It is not ambition alone that gets turned into something else by war. Viewpoints become causes. Murderousness becomes strength of purpose. A pointless death becomes a national sacrifice. The most terrible thing about wars is not that they happen, but that in starting them, we alter the DNA of our values.
I kept having dark thoughts like these as I poked my way around the Barbican’s compelling yet dismaying investigation of war photography in general and Robert Capa’s in particular. Downstairs at the Barbican, contemporary artists from Israel, Vietnam and Holland are seen tackling the current wars in the Middle East, with intriguing results. Upstairs, Capa spends 1936 rampaging through the Spanish civil war and still has enough fight hormones coursing through his upstanding veins to rampage through the D-day landings in 1944. In Spain, he is joined by his notable girlfriend and fellow war photographer Gerda Taro, who has also been given a show to herself here. Taro was killed in 1937 at the Battle of Brunete. So Capa spends the rest of his action-packed career partnered flimsily by adrenaline and glory. In 1954, he stepped on a roadside mine at a small turn-off in the first Indochina war, and died the death he seemed always to have been angling for. Oh, and in between he founded Magnum Photos, that alpha-male photographers’ club that still calls so many of the photographic shots in modern media.
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