Author: Mark E. Johnson

May 21, 2010

Painting, with Moving Pictures

This piece, funded by Stella Artois and produced by Malcolm Murray, hits me in a couple of ways … I am fascinated by the subject matter, painted signs to me are just really cool. (And I have a desire to do a project about them … someday … myself.) And I think this is really well shot and well told....

Categories Craft/Good Work/Video

May 20, 2010

Emerging Vision Incentive from POYi

The Pictures of the Year International program has announced a $10,000 grant for an emerging documentary photographer. Rick Shaw, director of POYi, said: If someone is a security guard, and their whole hope was to become a documentary photographer, but they’re not able to get a foothold because of the current publishing climate and economic realities, this incentive would do...

Categories Competitions

May 20, 2010

Make or Take?

If you haven’t spent some time looking at the videos from the various TED conferences, you really should. Alum Jake Daniels pointed me to this one of Jonathan Klein from Getty Images and it brought up a debate I’ve been having in my head for the last few years about making or taking photographs. I argued for years that the...

Categories Advice & Learning/Craft/Good Work/Journalism

May 19, 2010

This, This is INSANE

This has popped up about seven times in my Twitter feed this morning … the Morgantown (West Virginia) Dominion Post removed three politicians from a photo because they were running for office. The photo had nothing to so with the campaign, it had to do with a legislative bill they had co-sponsored and the governor was signing into law. The...

Categories Business & Industry/Ethics & Legal

May 17, 2010

California is a Place

This has popped up in my Twitter feed several times over the last few days, so I figured I’d better go check it out. California is a Place is, at the moment, a collection of videos shot by Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari and they are pretty stunning pieces. Go check them all out, but here’s my favorite – it...

Categories Good Work/Journalism/Video

May 17, 2010

The Jazz Loft

In the late 1950s, W. Eugene Smith moved into a New York City apartment building known as the Jazz Loft. He made more than 40,000 images of musicians playing for the fun of it, along with hours and hours of audio recordings. Now, the show is on the road. (Thanks to Abriana Welch for the inadvertent tipoff to the video.)

Categories Good Work/Journalism/Photojournalism/Video

May 17, 2010

200 Moments in the 2000s that Transformed Journalism

This is pretty cool and I’m going to have to spend more time with it. David Shedden, director of Poynter’s Eugene Patterson Library, has assembled a list of the 200 moments that transformed journalism in the first decade of this century. Some quick highlights: 2000: 12 billion e-mails are sent per day during 2000. In 2008, 247 billion e-mails are...

Categories Business & Industry

May 14, 2010

Vietnam, 35 Years Ago

The end of April marked the 35th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and Boston.com’s The Big Picture has an excellent set of images from the war. Most of these I’d seen before, some of them are iconic, but there are a few sequences in here you generally don’t see (like Nick Ut’s images of the bombing that lead to...

Categories Good Work

May 14, 2010

The 10 Traits of a Winning Photojournalist

Alex Garcia, over at the Chicago Tribune, as a list of what he thinks are the 10 things that separate the good from the great in our craft. I think he’s missing one, though: A love of people and community. If you don’t care about your subjects and your audience, then you’re only shooting for your own ego and that...

Categories Business & Industry/Craft

May 13, 2010

Going Mobile in California

California is the land of sun, stars and cars – and it’s also becoming a cutting edge mobile journalism area. Damon Kiesow has a story up on the Poynter Institute site about Ray Meese’s work at the Ventura County Star where he’s doing the full mobile journalist deal with an iPhone and a few accessories.

Categories Multimedia/Tech Talk