Author: Mark E. Johnson

April 26, 2011

Covering Holi and Protecting Gear

I’ve seen photos from the Holi festival in India several times before, but had no idea they celebrate it in … Utah? Yeah, Utah. Retuers’ Jim Urguhart covered the event earlier this month and posted on the company’s blog about his experiences there. Buried in there is a graf or two about prepping his gear and made mention of something...

Categories Good Work/Photojournalism/Tech Talk

April 26, 2011

Disaster Diptychs

It’s a phrase Scott Strazzante has used for a while in his on-going Common Ground project, but it popped into my head while looking at a collection of images shot by Retuers’ Carlos Barria in Japan and Haiti.

Categories Good Work/Photojournalism

April 26, 2011

Scenes from China

Boston.com’s The Big Picture posted a roundup of daily scenes from China. Everyday, ordinary things – what does your world look like today?

Categories Good Work

April 25, 2011

Rich Clarkson on His Own Sports Photography

Catching up on my photo blogs … another from the Denver Post with images and commentary from Rich Clarkson, arguably one of the two deans of sports photography over the last 50 years. Clarkson has probably trained more great sports shooters then everyone else combined.

Categories Photojournalism

April 25, 2011

Vietnam Revisited

The deaths of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros last week have a lot of people revisiting the idea of war photography. Michael Johnston at The Online Photographer pointed back to a photo gallery from a year ago by the Denver Post’s Captured blog. The collection of images looks at the war in Vietnam on the 35th anniversary of the fall...

Categories Photojournalism

April 23, 2011

Naming Conventions

My students think it’s a silly thing, naming conventions. Does it really matter? Yes, yes it does. Search will only get you so far in finding images (and they’re not great on meta data at the start of a semester). Plus, if I can’t find their assignment I can’t critique it. Which just made this a little funnier for me.

Categories Tech Talk

April 23, 2011

Collaborations Between Writers and Photographers

Dan Zak at the Washington Post has a piece up on the value of writers working with photojournalists on local stories. There are some reporters who, no matter the time of day, if they called and said, “I got something here …” I just went. And, of course, there were others that could offer me large amounts of cash and...

Categories At Work/Business & Industry/Journalism

April 22, 2011

Flash in Class

I usually reserve the big flash talks for the fall Advanced Photojournalism class, but we had questions in all of the classes over the last few weeks, so we decided to play a bit during class. Part of this was initiated by conversations about the Flash Bus stop in Atlanta a few weeks ago, part of it came out of...

Categories Tech Talk

April 22, 2011

Jobs I Want

Not that I don’t love this job, but if my world were to collapse, I think I’d throw my name at this job opening at KING-TV in Seattle. Why? Read the language … evangelize … inspire … encourage … empower … affect change. Who wouldn’t want to have that on their business card? (Thanks to … um … everyone who...

Categories At Work/Business & Industry

April 22, 2011

It’s Not About an Addiction to Danger

Over at The Guardian, Sean Smith talks about why photojournalists have to put themselves in danger. War photographers don’t do this because they’re addicted to danger. They’re just like any journalist who wants to do their job well, and they see no romance in it. You certainly think about the risks – last year, Sunday Mirror photographer Phil Coburn lost...

Categories Business & Industry/Journalism