This is mostly fun, now … but sixty years ago, if I had the same ethical standards I do now, I’d be pretty frightened by this book on how to retouch photos that Michael Zhang has written about at PetaPixel.
I will grant that most of the photos in the book are commercial or corporate images and not what we would consider pure journalism. But still … to “glamorize” an image by adding more smoke from a factory stack seems … well … odd.
This may be the best ad campaign I’ve ever seen for a news organization … Nail has created a campaign for the Providence Journal and it is brilliant.
(For mobile viewers, the video is in Flash, sorry about that.)
(Thanks to Seth Siditsky for the lead.)
Maybe, maybe, this time we’ll get this to happen – The New York Times is reporting the Obama administration has caked Sen. Charles Schumer to revive a federal shield law bill.
A democracy must have a free and open press, one that does not work under fear of the government.
Over at the National Press Photographers Association’s web site, Jim Colton has put together a series of posts on building the perfect portfolio.
In the third part of the series, he quotes MaryAnne Golon of the Washington Post:
You need to care deeply about every image in your portfolio. If you don’t care about your pictures, why would anyone else?
Damn straight …
The opening pages of Sports Illustrated have featured some of the best sports photojournalism of the week for years. The new director of photography at the magazine, Brad Smith, is moving towards changing that format for one that tells stories with a lot more depth.
“We have reviewed the RAW image, as supplied by World Press Photo, and the resulting published JPEG image. It is clear that the published photo was retouched with respect to both global and local color and tone. Beyond this, however, we find no evidence of significant photo manipulation or compositing. Furthermore, the analysis purporting photo manipulation is deeply flawed, as described briefly below.”
So … was there someone on a grassy knoll with a reflector?
Sebastian Anthony over at ExtremeTech (a site I'd never heard of until moments ago) has a post up claiming the already-questionable World Press Photo winner may have been faked. Several questions have already been raised about Paul Hansen's winning image from Gaza, but most have been about the amount of toning involved.
Just … what the hell?
In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.
Really?
Every accountant will tell you to save, file and organize your receipts. The George Eastman House takes the cake, though – they have a receipt for a camera purchased in 1840 on file.
One Samuel A. Bemis spent a total of $76 for a “daguerreotype apparatus” and 12 glass plates. Including shipping. That’s about $2,128 in today’s money, if you’re curious.
I had better not ever hear a student say there’s nothing worth photographing … The Denver Post’s Plog looks at a year’s worth of images by Mark Hirsch of the same tree.
Yep, 365 photos of one tree, all shot on his phone.