The Washington Post raised some eyebrows last Friday after running an uber-saturated front page photo with the caption stating that it was “a composite created by taking several photos and combining them with computer software to transcend the visual limitations of standard photography.” After emailing the photo editor, Poynter learned that the image was simply an HDR photograph. While it’s a pretty common technique these days, some believe that it has no place in photojournalism,
Sean Elliot, president of the National Press Photographers Association, said, “HDR is not appropriate for documentary photojournalism.” The organization’s code of ethics say photographers should respect the integrity of the digital moment, “and in that light an HDR photo is no different from any other digital manipulation.”
“By using HDR,” he told me by email, “The Washington Post has combined different moments, and thereby created an image that does not exist. The aircraft visible in the final product was not there for all the other moments combined into the final, and that alone simply raises too many questions about the factual validity of the actual published image.” [#]
What complicates matters is that many new cameras (e.g. Nikon D4, Apple iPhone 4S) offer HDR features that create single images from multiple exposures in the camera. The Washington Post published a response to the controversy yesterday. Do you think HDR is an appropriate technique for photojournalists to use?
For his project Vanishing Cultures, photographer Dennis Manarchy is traveling around the country documenting various cultures with a one-of-a-kind, 35-foot-long camera called “Eye of America”. Styled like an old fashioned large format camera, it’s so large that a person can work comfortably inside it. The negatives measure 6×4.5 feet, and are so large that windows must be used as lightboxes to examine them. The detail in a portrait subjects’ eyeball alone is a thousand times greater than what you get with the average negative. Resulting portraits will be featured on prints 2 stories tall. Read more…
Back in May 2011, Canadian camera shop The Camera Store released a humorous advertisement that quickly went viral, amassing millions of views. Here’s the sequel to that video, showing another violent engagement between two groups of well trained photographers.
There are plenty of presets out there that attempt to make your digital images look like they were shot with film, but VSCO Film by Visual Supply Co is different: it’s a Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW add-on that uses film profiles to change how the RAW files are interpreted rather than simply perform standard adjustments on the images. The video introduction above shows some examples of what the various options can do. This patent-pending method of film emulation doesn’t come cheap — it costs $120 each for Canon or Nikon profiles, and $200 for both.
B&H is one of the most popular retailers in the photo world, but most customers haven’t set foot inside the physical superstore in New York City, one of the largest photo stores in the world. If you’ve been wondering what it looks like on the inside, you can take a virtual tour through Google Street View (click the arrow pointing into the building). Starting late last year, Street View started including imagery of the inside of some buildings in addition to its street-level views.
For his project Lightscapes by photographer James Reeve photographed cities at night, and then stripped away everything but the lights and windows. The technique turns both buildings and cityscapes into “anonymous patterns of light”. Read more…
Swedish artist Sanna Dullaway recently started a business in which she restores and colorizes old black and white photographs. To show off her skills, she decided to colorize some famous B&W photographs captured throughout history. Read more…
YouTube member MJRecession came up with the idea of placing a digital camera onto the conveyor belt a sushi restaurant in Japan to record candid portraits of the other patrons in the restaurant. It’d be interesting to see this same thing done at sushi bars around the world to see how different cultures would react.
Some spec rumors for the Olympus OM-D camera that we wrote about yesterday are starting to emerge. The retro-styled, weather-sealed magnesium body will reportedly resemble classic OM series film SLR cameras, and will be available in both black and silver. Rather than have a pentaprism like an actual SLR, the 16MP camera will feature a 1.44M dot electronic viewfinder. It’ll be 121mm wide, and will weigh 425g. The release date is rumored to be sometime in late March 2012.
A young woman living in Los Angeles named Madeline did a 365 day project that’s a bit different than most: instead of taking a picture a day, she decided to document each day with roughly one second of footage. At the conclusion of 2011, she combined all 365 video clips into this beautiful 7-minute-long video that offers a glimpse into what her year was like.
