New Zealand-based travel photographer Amos Chapple visited Iran on three personal trips between December 2011 and January 2013. While he was there, he photographed the country and its people as he saw them on the ground.
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A couple of months ago, we spent some time telling you about CrowdOptic, a company that has been pioneering a way to sift through the millions of photos taken every second of every day and separate the “noise” from the “signal” when it comes to finding newsworthy content.
The company’s technology takes advantage of the fact that smartphone photographs today come with both GPS and heading data attached, allowing algorithms to determine not only where a photo was taken, but also what it was taken of. And in the video above, former football player Jim Kovach explains the tech in detail at TEDxSiliconAlley in New York City. Read more…
Apparently robbers in Northern California are starting to learn that photojournalists typically shoot with pretty expensive gear. The New York Times reports that robbers have been targeting news photographers in recent months, sometimes at gunpoint:
Last August, Laura Oda, chief photographer for The Oakland Tribune, was photographing people painting the mural when she spotted someone in her peripheral vision. “Within seconds they were on me,” she said, “one in front and one in back.” Armed, they pulled cameras off her neck and grabbed her bag of cameras and a laptop from her car.
Three months later, Ms. Oda was photographing cars at a busy intersection when she was again robbed of her camera, at gunpoint once more. For a while, she avoided the streets of Oakland. She has since returned but has established a new rule: she does not stay in one place for more than five minutes.
One veteran photojournalist has already lost five cameras to robbery. Each successful theft nets the robbers between $3,000 to $50,000 in gear — gear that hasn’t been turning up on the secondary market (e.g. craigslist).
In Oakland, Photojournalists Covering Crimes Become the Victims [NYTimes]
Image credit: Oakland Tribune by James Cridland
Ohio University graduate student Sara Lewkowicz recently published a disturbing and extremely controversial photo essay on domestic violence as part of Time Magazine’s LightBox series. The essay, which began as an assignment to document the stigmas associated with being an ex-convict, turned physical when the couple she had been photographing for months got into a violent fight right before her eyes.
The photo essay that resulted has caused no small amount of controversy on the internet, receiving over 1,500 comments from readers, many of which voiced their anger at the fact that Lewkowicz took pictures instead of intervening. Several of the photos show 31-year-old Shane physically assaulting his 19-year-old girlfriend Maggie while her 2-year-old daughter watched — many commenters expressed the belief that, in that situation, her camera could have been better used as a weapon. Read more…
This striking photo, taken by Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin, has been making the award rounds recently, sweeping up first and second place trophies for the photog’s mantle. According to the description, the photo portrays a “former Marine Corps sniper,” and is part of a series of photos taken in a rough part of Rochester, NY called “The Crescent.”
Pellegrin’s ethics, however, are now being called into question by a BagNewsNotes article, which points out that the man in the photo, Shane Keller, was neither a sniper nor does he live in The Crescent — he was headed to a shooting range at Pellegrin’s request, as part of a portrait shoot. Read more…
On April 8, 2011, Senator Jon Kyl was quoted on the Senate floor as saying, “If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.”
This is not a post about abortion or Planned Parenthood. This is a discussion about veracity and why it matters in photojournalism. In fact, about 3% of Planned Parenthood’s services are abortion-related. When Sen. Kyl was confronted with the facts, his office responded with “his remark was not intended to be a factual statement.”
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David Burnett is a traditional photojournalist whose style and work has remained relevant in an increasingly digital world. You may remember his stunning shots from the London 2012 Olympic Games that were captured, not with a 1DX, but a 4×5 Speed Graphic camera and Aerial reconnaissance lens, both from the 1940s.
But Burnett’s incredible photography has graced newspapers and magazine covers for decades. And in this B&H Event Space presentation, he regales us with some stories from the journey that took him from shooting local basketball games in high school with a Yashica Mat and a one-off Highland Strobe, to shooting for the cover of Time magazine with his Speed Graphic.
(via ISO 1200)
The photograph above by Swedish Dagens Nyheter photographer Paul Hansen has been selected as the World Press Photo of the Year 2012. It’s a powerful image that shows a funeral procession in Gaza City, with men carrying the bodies of two children while the body of their father trails behind on a stretcher.
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Two days ago marked the 10th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, in which 7 astronauts lost their lives during reentry as the rest of us watched horror-struck from the ground. The following day, newspapers the world over were announcing the tragic news, all of them using the same photo taken, not by a prolific AP photographer, but a cardiologist and his 6.3MP Canon D60. Read more…
NPR sparked a debate regarding photojournalism, ethics, and privacy this past Monday after publishing a story titled, “What It Feels Like To Be Photographed In A Moment Of Grief” on its photography blog.
The discussion revolved around the photograph above, which AFP photographer Emmanuel Dunand captured in the evening after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
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