Visual Journalism – Page 223 – Notes from aside the camera

July 25, 2010

JPEGs, Adobe Lightroom and Quality Settings

I am not an Adobe Lightroom user (though one colleague and one former student may sway me from my Photo Mechanic/Aperture combo), so I don’t have a lot of experience here to back this up … but Jeffrey Friendl has posted an excellent tutorial on JPEG compression quality as it relates to Lightroom exports. It has some fantastic interactive sliders...

Tech Talk

July 23, 2010

Again, On the End of Kodachrome

As with so many others, I cut my photographic teeth on Kodachrome. It was what my dad shot when I was a kid in the 1970s, so when he started to teach me, it was what I learned on. Little yellow and red boxes of Kodachrome 25 and 64, usually in 36 exposure lengths but occasionally in the shorter 20...

Business & Industry/Craft

July 23, 2010

What the Duck on Photoshop Insider

Student Emily Karol passes this along … a column by What the Duck creator Aaron Johnston over on Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Insider blog … complete with a new comic. Man, I love that guy …

Business & Industry/Craft

July 20, 2010

$12,000 Grant Opportunity

The ShootQ Grant is a $12,000 grant given to a photographer to fund a project that raises public awareness about an important social, environmental or economic issue. (Thanks to NPPA President Bob Carey for the link, via Twitter.)

Business & Industry/Competitions

July 20, 2010

“Sometimes you make a mistake and it’s fatal. I made a fatal mistake.”

Guy Reynolds, the photo editor at the Dallas Morning News who found the altered golf image of Matt Bettencourt has talked with the (now) former Getty Images freelance photographer who made, altered and transmitted the image. (Reynolds’ original post is still online which explains how he found the image and what he did.) In the update, Marc Feldman claims Bettencourt’s...

Ethics & Legal/Thoughts & Theory

July 20, 2010

Getty Images Drops Freelancer Over Altered Image

According to a story in Photo District News, Getty Images has terminated its contract with a freelance photographer after it was found he had removed a person from the background of a golf image. They issued a kill order and removed the image from their archive immediately after the image was found by a photo editor at the Dallas Morning...

Ethics & Legal

July 15, 2010

Your Neighbor is not Your Competition

In going through the comments to John Harrington’s most recent post on Black Star Rising (noted here), I came across a link to this piece on the ASMP site by Rosh Sillars dealing with … well … dealing with amateurs. (Thanks, Dominick, but why no link to your own site?) Loved this line: The mystery of the photographers’ black box has...

Advice & Learning/Business & Industry

July 15, 2010

Free is Bad, It Just Is. Mostly.

Over on the Black Star Rising blog, John Harrington takes a look at 12 ideas about why shooting for free is a good idea and concludes – not surprisingly – that they are all myths. If I worked pretty hard at it, I might come up with a few situations where I wouldn’t charge a client (pro bono work for...

Business & Industry

July 13, 2010

One For the Kids

I know there’s a fairly large number of college students reading this (meaning, all of mine), so here’s a deal for you … Amazon.com, which has everything you really need to be happy, has a free shipping service called Prime. (You want a three pack of Spiderman toothbrushes? They have it. How about an external battery for your 2001-era Handspring...

Tech Talk

July 12, 2010

Watch Where You Walk. Always.

Being aware of your surroundings is critical in photojournalism. We work in dangerous locations where emotions run high, so knowing your place in space is important. Turns out, the same is true for other photographic realms …

At Work/Business & Industry