The mandate for Documerica was intriguingly broad -- "photographically document subjects of environmental concern" -- and photographers responded with striking images covering everything from pot-smoking form to toxic smog.
So you want to create stirring nature documentaries. You could go the National Geographic way and risk trench-foot, snakebite and more in pursuit of the scenic wild. Or you could take the Boris Godfroid route: Schlep a few hundred pounds of bricks into a spare room, cover it with moss and other forgiving plant life, and let nature run wild in miniature.
Finnish lawmakers could soon rewrite the nation's copyright laws, as a citizen-originated initiative aimed at easing piracy penalties and protecting consumer rights makes it way to Parliament.
You're looking for an image to illustrate your ad promoting child-care services and find a portrait of an adorable tot, obviously free for the taking because it's on the Internet. What could wrong?
More than you could dream up in your worst nightmares, as promoters of the Montreux Jazz Festival have learned after misappropriating an image of a child who turned out to be the victim in one France's most notorious murder cases of recent times.
Were you smiling a lot Friday afternoon? Hope so, because that's when you and your 7 billion planetary neighbors got a rare portrait session from the Cassini spacecraft. Orbiting above Saturn almost a billion miles away, the craft turned its camera towards to Earth to capture some spectacular images of our planet foregrounded by Saturn's rings.
It was the first time in nine years that Cassini has been in orbit and taking scheduled photos of our planet, prompting NASA and friends to promote a "The Day That the Earth Smiled" event via social media.
Spanish visual artist Sergio Albiac is offering the world a chance to meld with the universe in an innovative project that combines portraiture with images from the Hubble space telescope.
Albiac calls his "Stardust" project "an experiment in generative portraiture."
Singer Kanye West is being investigated by Los Angeles police for allegedly assaulting a photographer. Again.
The latest incident happened Friday at Los Angeles International Airport, when videographer Daniel Ramos approached the star, already well-established as no fan of celebrity journalism.
An Australian photographer has succeeded in having her work reinstated to a prominent exhibit, after authorities initially pulled the graphic image of a baby seconds after birth for being "too confronting."
Attention photojournalists: As if times weren't tough enough already, a new startup wants to replace your work with Twitter-based crowdsourcing.
News photographers have a potentially valuable new tool with Covertimes, a new website that congregates images of front pages from newspapers around the world.
Hundreds of thousands of protesters angry over the verdict in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin trial swarmed San Francisco streets this weekend in numbers huge enough to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge.
At least that's what happened in the world of social media, where a photo (above) of a pedestrian-filled 1987 celebration of the iconic bridge's 50th anniversary circulated on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and their ilk posing as evidence of mass San Francisco reaction to Zimmerman's acquittal.
Detroit police are investigating an incident last week in which a photographer for the Detroit Free Press was arrested and had her camera seized while covering a police action.
Can you trust camera reviews submitted by customers of online retailers? Not entirely, suggests a new academic study, and not for the reasons you might think.
It's official -- the point-and-shoot market is dying, while DSLRs and other interchangeable lens systems champion the cause for standalone cameras.
A new report from retail researchers NPD tallies U.S. sales of $2.1 billion worth of interchangeable lens cameras between June 2012 and May 2013, an increase of 5 percent over the same period a year ago. U.S. sales of compact cameras, meanwhile, plunged 26 percent, to $1.9 billion. This is the first time interchangeable lens cameras have surpassed the sleek-and-shiny segment.
Formula One car racing authority FIA instituted new rules this week banning photographers from track pits, after several spectacular injuries or near-misses this season. But photographers are saying such restrictions will do little more than reduce the quality of their work.
A trove of 3,700 unpublished photos of iconic movie star Marilyn Monroe, each with full copyright included, will go up for sale at a Los Angeles auction late this month.
A federal court judge has ordered celebrity/fashion photographer Terry Richardson to surrender 142,000 shots of Lady Gaga as evidence in a lawsuit against the pop star.
If you've ever questioned the wisdom of insuring your camera gear, witness the methodical fury of basketball star and Kardashian spouse Lamar Odom wrecking a photographer's equipment.
How not to run a wedding photography business: Take deposits from clients, don't show up for the weddings and skip town before the law catches on. That was the strategy employed by Ramon Rodriguez, a Louisville, Kentucky photographer who remains in jail after bilking prospective clients out of $27,000.
A photographer for an Egyptian newspaper, shot while covering political protests Monday, appears to have captured his own death on camera.
Zooey Deschanel is the latest performer to weigh in on concert etiquette, with signs posted at concerts by the actress/singer's indie pop act She & Him asking fans to ditch their cameraphones and refrain from snapping photos.
Sad news from the Whistler ski resort in Canada, where a weekend search for a missing GoPro camera with priceless images for a newly widowed skier turned up nothing.
Australian couple Matt Lorraway and Rebecca Ware had a great vacation at Whistler last February, with Ware trying out skiing, snowboarding, snowmobiling and ziplining, all captured on Lorraway's helmet-mounted GoPro. Sadly, the camera fell off and got lost in the snow on one of their last ski runs.
Photographers still irked about about Adobe's decision to make Photoshop rental-only have a new alternative with the re-release of the pioneering LightZone application as a free, open-source program for Windows, Linux and (eventually) Mac OS.
Take away the visual element from photography and what have you got?
Quite a lot, according to Partho Bhowmick, founder of the Blind With Camera project in Mumbai, India, which to date has taught more than 500 blind people how to express themselves through photography (you can find a gallery here).
Photojournalists in the Philippines are accusing a National Geographic photographer of pushing and kicking a newspaper photographer at a recent press event.
Wildlife researchers now have a much clearer idea of how bats fly, thanks to the wicked-looking X-Ray video above that shows the animal's skeleton at work.
First Lytro tried to make focusing irrelevant, and now an MIT project wants to make choosing a camera angle a thing of the past.
Aydin Arpa, a reserarcher at MIT's Media Lab, recently presented a paper on CrowdCam, an app in development that would combine images taken from multiple perspectives into a seamless visual field where you could change the perspective just by swiping your finger on the screen.
The photographer who captured images of the Chicago Bears doing the "Super Bowl Shuffle" is suing the Chicago Tribune and Fox Sports for allegedly misappropriating the images.
A Miami man has been arrested after allegedly posing as a photographer on Craigslist to lure two women to a remote spot and then assault them.
Anthony Molina-Iglesias, 30, faces charges of sexual battery, armed sexual battery, kidnapping and carjacking.
A group representing Irish photofinishers and related businesses says the country's new driver's license policies could kill as many as 500 photography jobs.
Elaborately staged tableaus have become a staple of fine-art photography and something of their own medium -- the artistry of a Gary Salter or Annabel Mehran image is as much in the building of the scene as the actual photography.
"Can you help me with my camera?" I get that a lot, as I'm sure do most camera weenies whose geek credentials are a little too obvious.
And most of the time I'm happy to co-operate. Ideally, I get the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing somebody is going to have legible images of a key moment in their lives. At worst, at least there'll be one less uncontrolled on-board flash to blind me.
Hey, professional and aspiring photographers! Are you tired of responding to attractive assignment offers only to find later that compensation for the work consists only of "valuable exposure" for your work? And then you have to explain that you can't feed your family on exposure?
Well fret no more. with the new Exposure Helper™, you can feed your family on exposure, allowing you to accept all the free assignments you want!
VICE Magazine has withdrawn from it Web site a photo series depicting famous female authors committing suicide, after the piece drew widespread criticism for being "breathtakingly tasteless."
Turns out that driver's license photos are useful for more than acute embarrassment. States, realizing they have a de-facto visual database of most of their residents, are increasingly plugging those photos into facial-recognition software and Facebook to solve crimes -- and worrying privacy advocates in the process.
Search giant Google has revealed that it's working on a global database it expects to help rid the Internet of child porn.
A handful of groups representing professional photographers are calling for a boycott of a Conde Nast photo contest whose terms they consider exploitative.
It was a day of typically brutal summer heat in Phoenix, and I had the air conditioner blasting as I raced down the freeway en route to some event I was obliged to cover in my role as a general-assignment newspaper reporter.
The scene came to me in pieces as I glanced to the other side of the roadway. A car on the shoulder, broken down and steam billowing from under the raised hood. Somebody, presumably the driver, sitting on the grass embankment nearby, head in his hands. Wearing a full-on clown outfit -- wild hair, floppy shoes, pancake makeup, red nose, the whole package. And looking about as morose and defeated as a clown can get.
A state-funded museum in Paris is drawing widespread criticism for a new exhibit of photos that show sympathetic portrayals of Palestinian suicide bombers.
Here's yet another reason why it's a bad idea to think reporters outfitted with cameras can replace actual photojournalists -- the reporters apparently are dumb enough to wander into an abandoned insane asylum full of zombies.
(The first thing a real photojournalist would do, of course is ask "Do I get paid mileage?" before refusing to take the gig.)
Mystery solved: Beyonce is so riled up about restricting photographer access because she's hell-bent on projecting an image somewhere between "Photoshopped" and "impossible."
That's the impression from the the pop star's latest ad campaign, in which she sports body proportions that make her look like she stepped straight from a U.N. refugee camp into a Paris couture salon.
Prosecutors in Reno, Nevada, have dropped charges against a newspaper photographer arrested and injured while trying to cover a house fire last year.
Tim Dunn, photo director at the Reno Gazette-Journal was taking photos and video at a four-alarm fire on June 18. 2012, when Washoe Count Sheriff's deputies told him to clear out. Dunn says the deputies then shoved him to ground and pushed his face into the gravel. He later showed facial injuries he said were caused by the rough treatment.
A pair of British artists has won the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize for a work that combines war images with text. It is the first time the prestigious photography prize -- described as the "biggest" and "most prestigious" photo prize in Europe -- has been awarded to a pair of artists.
You've had a rough day, you're bone tired and ready for bed. What would feel better than cuddling up with an image of some anonymous dude in a Superman outfit?
Yeah, I can think of a couple million things, too. But apparently there's a market for body pillows emblazoned with images of comics fans dressing as their favorite characters. The legal and ethical framework for selling them, however, is a different matter.
Living in a tourist town like San Francisco, I have frequent opportunities to observe how people use their cameras. Inevitably, these lead to "Why, oh why?" moments in which advanced technology collides with general cluelessness.
We're getting more and more accustomed to authorities telling us if and how we can photograph something, so the camera ban enacted for the recent Reno Rodeo isn't all that surprising.
What's different with this one is the intended target of the ban, which animal-rights activists claim is intended to prevent them from exposing abuses.
You may never take local birds and weeds for granted again after spending some time with Meet Your Neighbors, a photo project aimed at documenting the huge variety of the biosphere one species at a time.
Chicago Sun-Times photographers, who lost their jobs in a mass layoff last week, are not going quietly into oblivion.
I was cleaning out my gear drawer recently when I came across a couple of holders for Cokin filters. The filters had long since been sent to an eBay afterlife, but tossing the cases started me thinking, mainly about how I hadn't missed the things a bit.
This one is a little hard to interpret, but a recently published patent application from Nikon seems to pave the way for a new lens mount.
