Visual Journalism

We’ve talked before about Steve McCurry’s being given the last roll of Kodachrome ever made, now there are some more details about what he did with it. Can’t wait for the National Geographic special …

You’ve all seen the series of YouTube videos from Blendtec, where they blend up everything from iPhones to marbles. Now, they seem to have partnered with Olympus …

My desire for an Olympus Pen just keeps growing …

(Thanks to my old friend Alexander Koromilas for the link.)

No, really – use a cell phone to shoot a full-size magazine cover. Pixel-peepers the world over are cringing right now, but Peter Belanger shot the current Macworld cover with his new iPhone 4. And didn’t retouch it, either.

See, it isn’t the camera, is it? As Ansel Adams said, “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.”

Do past thoughts on video still apply for mobile platforms? It would seem so … and a lot of those still apply to desktop- or laptop-watched video, too.

(Picked up from Richard Koci Hernandez’s Twitter stream.)

Kodak has taken the massive backlit displays it used to feature in New York City’s Grand Central Station and sent them to the Eastman House Museum. If you’re in e Rochester area, I would highly recommend taking a look.

I am not an Adobe Lightroom user (though one colleague and one former student may sway me from my Photo Mechanic/Aperture combo), so I don’t have a lot of experience here to back this up … but Jeffrey Friendl has posted an excellent tutorial on JPEG compression quality as it relates to Lightroom exports. It has some fantastic interactive sliders that show you how various quality settings will affect your final image.

Even if you don’t use Lightroom, it’s a clean way of learning how JPEGs work. Worth the time.

(Picked up from Daring Fireball.)

Today, I like Scott Bourne a little more. Which is hard to do, because I liked him quite a bit before.

Is it buyer’s remorse? Is it fear of the troll? Whatever causes it, camera/lens hypochondria is a really big issue. Thecure? Avoid the Internet, no one wants to see photos of your computer screen, anyway.

(For the record, I’ve had one soft lens in almost 30 years of buying gear. And it was a very old, very used lens.)

There used to be these little logos you would find on web sites that said, “Made on a Mac.” I admit to being geeky enough to having one on my site … for years …

But this is even better … a short film shot and edited on the new iPhone 4. “Apple of My Eye” was directed by Michael Koerbel, produced by Eric Edmonds and Rebekah Koerbel, written by Anna Elizabeth James and Michael Koerbel and edited by Anna Elizabeth James. All in a two day span …

The film is about 90 seconds long, but the version below has the behind-the-scenes footage tacked on.

I am inspired.

Ahhh … someone who is as paranoid as me about workflow and archiving … Chase Jarvis and Co. have put together a 10 minute video on how their photo and video workflow … er … flows. Yeah, that’s it.

Watch and learn.

(Thanks to Autumn McBride for sending along the link.)

Years ago, when I realized I was heading towards the world of photojournalism, I bought a serious camera bag – the legendary Domke F2. In the 1980s, it was the bag to have – durable, flexible, adaptable and, well, you looked cool carrying it – especially once it started to wear-in. (I still have my original one, it is beyond broken-in – it’s threadbare, but I refuse to toss it. I also refuse to carry it around as I’m afraid it may disintegrate at any moment.)

Since then, I think I’ve bought about a dozen more Domke bags of various styles and sizes. Every single one of them has served me amazingly well. (I’ve also bought nearly 60 for the college for various camera kits – go with what you know, right?)

But then my back started to hurt a little bit more and I needed to transition to something aside from shoulder bags. On the recommendation of several people, I picked up a Think Tank system and have really come to admire them. Designed by working photojournalists (as the Domke bags are), they’ve really started to change the way multimedia journalists carry their gear – and are doing an excellent job of showing us not just how to use the gear, but how to manage it. They’ve posted a good sized section on their web site on what’s available out there for multimedia gear – audio recorders, microphones, DSLR cameras that can do video – as well as how to fit it into their system.

Sure, that last part is the self-promotion, but, overall, it’s a nice roundup of what’s out there now.