This is becoming a trend … Getty Images photojournalist Mark Wilson walks through his image of the president’s notes.
Pay attention to his thinking behind the gear he was carrying – being prepared is key.
“Take as many pictures as you want. We need this to be known.”
Nov 11, ’19
8:01 AM
How we deal with families after they have been through a traumatic event is a constant conversation for us. Finding the balance between the needs of individuals and the needs of a community can be brutally hard.
We never want to intrude, we never want to add to the grief a family is experiencing but, at the same time, their story can have a powerful impact on a community. That story can both explain what has happened and help a community move forward, through healing or actions of change.
Cesar Rodriguez walks us through his coverage of the slain family in Mexico over at Time.
They were telling me that we want people to know what happened because if they don’t know, if things don’t change, their deaths will have been for nothing. So something good has to come out of this. Something powerful.
Worth a read.
Photographer Caricatures
Oct 28, ’19
4:27 PM
Something a little lighter … PetaPixel has the story of Pixelcrush’s caricatures of photographers and they’re worth a little time.
And, yes, I’ve met most of these folks.
What You Photograph Is a Reflection of Who You Are
Oct 25, ’19
10:14 AM
A sarcastic Tweet reply set off Dan Ginn at The Phoblographer this week.
As it should have.
I’m forever thankful I work with students who care about their communities and want to use photographic tools to explore and explain issues within those communities. As a general rule, the see photography as a means, not an end – our classes, workshops, discussions and goals are not based on making a photo, they’re based on making a difference.
Because I am a camera geek (I know, you’re shocked), I do spend some time on sites focused on photography. There is a significant level of, “I love how this lens made this woman beautiful” types of posts and, well, every one of those gets me a little closer to leaving that group.
I’ll grant that my reason for carrying a camera is not the same reason as everyone else’s. I use photography to record, process and comprehend my world – and, once I’ve made some sense of it, to share that information with others. It is a documentary tool, an investigative tool, an exploratory tool. If I’m going to freeze a moment in time, there needs to be some societal value to that moment that adds to our understanding without minimizing or objectifying others.
If your photos don’t educate and illuminate, I’m just not that interested.
But, hey, that’s just me and sometimes I like to photograph my dogs, too. I don’t think they feel objectified by this.
One Step Closer to a Small Claims Copyright Court
Oct 23, ’19
7:52 AM
Why do we care? This bill has been ten-years in the making, supported by the U.S. Copyright Office and trade organizations (including the National Press Photographers Association) and is designed to make sub-$30,000 copyright infringement claims much easier to pursue.
The Senate now needs to take this up.
Start Your Holiday Shopping with Photojournalist Barbie
Oct 22, ’19
8:22 AM
On the one hand, I think the partnership between the Barbie brand and National Geographic is great – giving kids, especially girls, more role models and career views is fantastic. The growth of the Barbie line in my lifetime has been fun to watch (even if our own kid never played with one).
That said, the video released as part of the promo is … well … not what photojournalists actually do. The first half is what we call “spray and pray” – point the camera everywhere without any thought.
After that doesn’t work, NatGeo Barbie sulks off with Forest Conservationist Barbie until – Oh LOOK HOW LUCKY WE ARE – the mythical monkey appears and plays happily in front of them.
As the commercial says, that’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this works.
I suppose a video with NatGeo Barbie reading academic journals that explain the movements of monkeys through the forest is not going to be as exciting, but this is setting kids up with the (overly common) mistaken belief that great photos come from luck.
They don’t. They come from preparation.
The Pelosi-Trump Photo
Oct 21, ’19
5:43 PM
Good discussion over at the Chatting the Picture podcast about the Nancy Pelosi – Donald Trump image that the White House released last week.
A lot of analysis in the first six minutes, but they didn’t go into the sourcing issue which raises all sorts of other ethical questions – do you treat this differently because it’s a hand out photo? Does that factor into the discussion?
Visualizing Change
Oct 19, ’19
1:01 PM
A good behind the scenes look into how The Guardian is changing the way they use images in stories about climate change.
I think this is an incredibly important discussion to have for many of the reasons they denote – we all feel bad about the polar bear, but it doesn’t impact most of our daily lives and so, after a few moments of sadness, we move on. The emotional connection may be there but it doesn’t persist, we aren’t reminded of it as we go about our daily lives.
Images need to educate us about what is happening and resonate with us – that persistence idea is so critical. And the same applies to images in other stories – wars, man made disasters, natural disasters and even images of poverty. If the images don’t look like the things we deal with on a daily basis, then we are, effectively, othering the story which disconnects us from it.
This may be why I’m attracted to images of the vernacular, images of the everyday things in our lives. The work of photographers like Walker Evans and Fred Herzog intrigues me because it shows me the common things in life, the things I feel I may have or might still experience. It connects me, it shows something that is not other than what I am used to.
But this is incredibly hard to do. The impacts of climate change are both enormous and subtle. Massive storms are easy to visualize yet difficult to contextualize. The smaller, daily impacts can be easier to explain but harder to show. What does a 1.5 degree shift in average temperature look like? It is far too easy to get drawn into the extremist traps, leaving us with polar bears alone. We must do better.
Land is cleared in Athens, Georgia, to build a new gas station. Even as fuel economy increases, fueling locations are becoming more common. (Photo/Mark E. Johnson)
NPPF Scholarships
Oct 7, ’19
11:12 AM
The National Press Photographers Foundation has opened applications for their annual scholarship programs. Deadline is on December 2, but why wait that long?
The Importance of Design in Cameras
Oct 2, ’19
9:00 AM
The designed Luigi Colani died recently. While that New York Times obit deals with many things, it doesn’t do justice to the work he did with Canon in the 1980s – he is credited with the design of the T90, the first truly modern SLR camera.
Look at that camera – introduced in 1986, almost every DSLR of today owes a debt to its purposeful, organic and humanist design. That was the camera that truly moved manufacturers away from the dedicated dials and knobs and started to take full advantage of microprocessors.
In the mid-1980s, that was one of the cameras we all lusted after. A beautiful piece of kit that was truly revolutionary.
Over at The Online Photographer, Adam Richardson has a nice tribute to Colani.