Author: Mark E. Johnson

July 6, 2011

For Summer Interns: Your Personal Matrix

We are going to step far afield of our usual sources this morning … Jodi Glickman at the, ahem Harvard Business Review writes about evaluating your summer internship as you hit the midway point. It’s an excellent read, something that I’m tucking away to talk with my students about before the next batch is heading off into internship-land. (Which, by...

Categories Advice & Learning/Business & Industry/Journalism/Photojournalism

July 6, 2011

Scared or Democratized – What Kind of Photographer Are You?

Over at Nuwomb, Scott Webb wrote about the battle between “scared” photographers – those who think everything new is a gimmick – and “democratized” photographers – who think everything new is an opportunity. Where do you fall? Me? I fall on the side of storytelling, because that’s how I use this medium. I’m not an artist and, while I appreciate...

Categories Advice & Learning/Craft/Tech Talk

July 5, 2011

A Lunch-time Laugh

Take with a grain of salt … but a photographer claims a bunch of black macaque monkeys started doing self-portraits with his camera gear. (Thanks to CNN’s Victor Hernandez for the lede.)

Categories Photojournalism

July 5, 2011

When “New” Replaces “Good”

Over at Black Star Rising, David Saxe wrote about how curators are now evaluating some work – and the only criteria seems to be whether it is “new.” So what we’ve seen is photographers making their photographs larger, changing the format from rectangular to square, and authoring more loquacious artist statements. This is the new “new.” The subject is as...

Categories Craft

July 5, 2011

National Geographic iPad App

Not new, but still pretty cool … National Geographic has an app that talks about how their 50 greatest photos were made. It’s $4.99 and reportedly also has ads in it (would rather one or the other), but if someone gives you a gift card, why not?

Categories Advice & Learning/Good Work/Photojournalism

July 4, 2011

Best Camera Review Line Ever?

Not journalism, but Zack Arias bought himself a Fuji X100 and has decided it’s the perfect camera. In his … well, it’s not a review … witnessing? I don’t know what to call it … he has this graf: No review of a camera is complete with out all of us having a thorough discussion of pixel density while looking...

Categories Tech Talk

July 4, 2011

Over at the Gear Geek …

I’m live over at The Gear Geek for the National Press Photographers Association today with a look at one of our favorites, the Kodak Zi8 pocket video camera.

Categories Tech Talk

July 3, 2011

Why a Journalism Degree Doesn’t Matter in Journalism

Back in 2003, after asking me to stick around and do a masters degree at Syracuse University, the college lost a program and, with it, the funding for my assistantship. Which lead to a very weird series of phone calls where my advisor/mentor/friend told me to call the University of Florida and ask about their assistantship. I did, had a...

Categories Advice & Learning

July 3, 2011

The Hard Part of Photojournalism

I have always said the hardest part of what we do is deciding where to point the camera and when to push the button …

Categories Photojournalism/Tech Talk

July 1, 2011

Ricoh Buys Pentax

Hoya, which bought the Pentax brand in 2008, has announced they are selling the camera brand to Ricoh for $128 million. While neither are major players in the photojournalism realm, this could have a cascading effect as other manufacturers decide to merge or buy out smaller, innovative companies. (Thanks to Jeff Snyder at Adorama for the link on Twitter.)

Categories Business & Industry/Tech Talk