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.
The International Center of Photography has announced their Infinity Awards recognizing outstanding achievements in photography. Eight awards were given and MediaStorm produced films on each of the winners.
David Guttenfelder’s is a great look into how his work out of North Korea has come about. If you mouse over the right side, you can see the play list and watch his. (Of course, the Jeff Bridges one is worth watching, too.)
That quote at the end, about building connections, is why we do this work.
Some of the big awards have been announced …
RJ Sangosti of The Denver Post was today named the National Press Photographers Association’s Best Of Photojournalism 2013 Photojournalist of the Year (Larger Markets), and David Weatherwax of The Herald, in Jasper, IN, was selected as the Photojournalist of the Year (Smaller Markets).
Mark Edelson of The Palm Beach Post was today named the National Press Photographers Association’s Best Of Photojournalism 2013 Newspaper Picture Editor of the Year, and Jamie Wellford of Newsweek was selected as the Magazine Picture Editor of the Year.
Congrats to all the winners, and thank you for telling stories that matter.
Pull up a chair and dig in – the video is narrated by Chris Dean, who grew up in Memphis in some pretty difficult situations, but rose up to be able to introduce President Obama during a visit to the city.
Powerful stuff.
Info is now up on the 2013 LUCEO Student Project Award competition. The winner gets $1,000 and a year’s worth of mentoring from the group.
And that last part is probably worth more than the first part …
Word filtered out yesterday that two alums from my program here at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication sort of, well, won all of the things in the Georgia Press Association’s January clip contest.
Sara Caldwell, a 2011 grad, and Jon-Michael Sullivan, a 2010 grad, are both on staff at the Augusta Chronicle and about to get knee-deep in the Masters. But here’s what they did:
So, by my count, of the 15 photo awards for the month, the two of them won 10. In a state wide contest.
And as if that wasn’t enough, they also each had a photo in the Zuma Press Photo of the Day this past weekend.
What a great way to end the week, eh?
This is a really nice bit of public service – Jasmine DeFoore has collected together, on one page, all of the major photo contests, grouped by the month their deadlines fall in, with links to their sites.
All it needs is a downloadable calendar you can import …
Continuing on my catching up … over at PhotoShelter, Allen Murabayashi takes on the question of over toning images, to the point they look like movie posters.
I fully support Murabayashi except for the first part of this excerpt:
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that there has been any manipulation that falls outside of the rules of the contest, but when images cease to look real and to be overly retouched, we have a veracity problem. And if we subscribe to the common ethos of photojournalism (i.e. that we are trying not to deceive the viewer), then we have an increasingly enigmatic issue. This movie poster look reminds me of this article about Hollywood’s obsession with teal and orange. We have somehow come to believe that the images look better with copious amounts of Photoshop vs what is straight out of the camera.
I think it has fallen outside of the rules of the World Press Photo competition. The inclusion of the word “press” implies journalism, and none of the images he questions are journalism anymore – they are illustrations.
So what do we do? His suggestion that contests require submission of untouched original files is right on the money. What message do we send when we give awards to images that no longer reflect reality? That are impossibilities? That have become, at their core, visual lies?
My students occasionally complain that I spend too little time teaching them Photoshop, that other programs spend more time on it. They are absolutely right, I spend comically little time teaching it because it is a tool that scares me. I grew up on Kodachromes (yeah, I went there) – get it right in the camera and life is much easier.
Because no one will ever save democracy by sitting in a dark room pushing pixels around.
A winning entry in the Pictures of the Year International competition have been raised by many people. Good summations available by David Gonzalez and James Estrin at the New York Times’ Lens blog as well as by Donald Winslow on the National Press Photographers Association’s site.
There are warnings to be heeded in here, particularly about captions and making sure the story is verified. Language barrier or not, journalism is journalism – staging photos and writing misleading captions is not okay.