Posts tagged photography

Yes, You Can Win This Cinetics miniSkates Tripod

And now for something new: The first ever FJP Photo Contest.

Back in March Peter went to SXSW and met Justin Jensen, founder of Cinetics, a company he started from the MIT Media Lab to create portable cinematic systems. Peter loved what they’re doing and Justin and Co were kind enough to donate the miniSkates tripod as the prize for our first photo contest. (You can see the tripod in action in Justin’s original 2011 Kickstarter video.)

The Contest

The theme for this contest is “Daily Commute”.

You are welcome to interpret the theme however you like but here are some ideas to help get you started:

• the essence of your commute;
• something you notice that you think others pass by;
• motion;
• the places you commute to, from or through;
• the idea of what a commute is;
• something not mentioned above cause we didn’t think of it.

How to Enter

1. Take a great photo based on our “Daily Commute” theme;
2. Submit your photo on our Facebook contest page;
3. Win the coolest tripod on wheels!

Deadline: May 31, 2013

Other things you can do: Share this with your friends.

If this contest is successful we think we can get other companies to come together and offer contest prizes for The FJP community.

Many thanks. Start taking your photos and submit them to us over on Facebook. We look forward to seeing them!

Final Embrace

Every time I look back to this photo, I feel uncomfortable — it haunts me. It’s as if they are saying to me, we are not a number — not only cheap labor and cheap lives. We are human beings like you. Our life is precious like yours, and our dreams are precious too. — Taslima Akhter.

Image: Two victims of a garment factory building collapse in Savar, Bangladesh by Taslima Akhter via Time Lightbox. Select to embiggen.

UPDATE: Via the New York Times, Clothing Is New Front in Movement for Fair Trade.

With fair-trade coffee and organic fruit now standard on grocery shelves, consumers concerned with working conditions, environmental issues and outsourcing are now demanding similar accountability for their T-shirts. And some retailers are doing what was once unthinkable, handing over information about exactly how, and where, their products were made.

The death toll from the Bangladesh factory collapse is now over 800.

The Big List of Photography Cheatsheets

Check Hongkiat for their cheat sheets that help photographers with everything from depth of field to aperture settings, shutter speeds, focal length, lighting and more.

Hongkiat, 20+ Cheatsheets & Infographics For Photographers.

Image: The 10 Rules of Photography, via Hongkiat.

Image Management

Beyonce Knowles has banned press photographers from her ‘Mrs. Carter’ concert tour in an attempt to prevent unbecoming photos of herself from being used by the media. This appears to be a response to unflattering photos published by Gawker and Buzzfeed from the singer’s Superbowl performance.

Now, Beyonce’s personal photographer, Frank Micelotta, is the only one officially allowed to capture images of Beyonce during her concerts. The press is then given a link to an “official” website where they must register to download “approved” images.

In an article in Slate, Alyssa Rosenberg points out the quandary of celebrities censoring — or otherwise trying to completely control — their pictures:

“[Beyonce is] turning the media into a distribution machine for whatever message she wants to send, rather than accepting that others have the right to judge the tour, as a product she’s offering up.”

FJP: Pop stars aren’t the only ones practicing the dark arts of image control.

Earlier this winter Politico published an article about the Washington press corps’ frustration with their access to the White House. Part of that criticism was the Obama administration’s use of social media to bypass them with images and information posted directly to the public.

For example, the White House Flickr gallery is made up of photographs by Pete Souza, the official Obama administration photographer. Souza captures and even stages pictures of the president — like Obama’s moment of silence photo op held in honor of the Boston bombings — and many of those images have been used by the news media.

Is it acceptable that politicians can craft their own image, but not celebrities? And how authentic can journalism be if everyone gets their images from one, tightly controlled source?

Sort of related: Attorney, Carolyn E. Wright, points out in Slate’s Manners For The Digital Age podcast: if you’re in a publicly-accessible area, and you don’t have an expectation of privacy, you’re fair game to be photographed.

Famous people, beware: as long as the media have their will, they’ll get you on camera their way — be you Obama, or be you Beyonce. — Krissy

Image: Beyonce from the Super Bowl, via Pocket-Lint.

How We Read our Newspapers

fotojournalismus:

A man reads a newspaper inside a dilapidated baby’s crib along a street in downtown Manila, Philippines on April 10, 2013.

[Credit : Aaron Favila/AP]

FJP: I personally spread it out over the kitchen table but this works. — Michael

Remembering Rwanda

Via Pieter Hugo:

In 2004, most of the photojournalists I knew were heading to South Africa to cover that country’s decade of democracy celebrations. Following a succession of terrible events – widespread famine, Somalia’s endless civil war, the scourge of Aids and finally the genocide in Rwanda, which led to the war in former Zaire – people were desperate to tell positive stories from Africa. Publications and academics demanded it, claiming that it was irresponsible to continue depicting Africa as a continent tethered to war, famine and disaster. Yet, not engaging with the complexities of Rwanda seemed thoughtless to me.

As I still worked primarily as a photojournalist at the time, I tried petitioning every foreign publication I knew to send me to Rwanda. None obliged, so I decided to go on my own and stayed there for a few months photographing and contemplating these sites.

Rwanda did eventually rebury its dead ceremoniously in 2004. After President Paul Kagame stated that France ‘knowingly trained and armed the government soldiers and militias who were going to commit genocide and they knew they were going to commit genocide’, the French junior foreign minister, Renaud Muselier, cut his trip short.

These photographs offer a glimpse of what I saw there before the reburials took place, and a very limited forensic view of a few of the genocide sites. At many of the places there is nothing happening and historical knowledge is needed to support the images; through the stillness the atrocity continues to resonate. At some of the sites human remains and the personal effects of the dead are still present. I hope these images in some small way bear testament to the personal anguish of these individuals.

April 7 was the United Nations’ Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Rwanda Genocide. Human rights organizations estimate that 800,000 people were killed within a one hundred day period.

Image: Bodies Covered in Lime, Murambi, by Pieter Hugo.

Google Street View Captures Fukushima Ghost Town

Via The New York Times:

The eerily empty streets of Namie, a town deep in the evacuation zone around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, are featured in the latest images captured by Google for its Street View mapping project.

The scene is wrenching: houses flattened by the earthquake and now abandoned for fear of radiation; rows of empty shutters on a boulevard that once hosted Namie’s annual autumn festival; ships and debris that still dot a landscape laid bare by the 50-foot waves that destroyed its coastline more than two years ago.

Namie’s 21,000 residents are still in government-mandated exile, scattered throughout Fukushima and across Japan. They are allowed brief visits no more than once a month to check on their homes.

Over at Lat Long, the Google Maps blog, Tamotsu Baba, the town’s mayor, writes:

Ever since the March disaster, the rest of the world has been moving forward, and many places in Japan have started recovering. But in Namie-machi time stands still. With the lingering nuclear hazard, we have only been able to do cursory work for two whole years. We would greatly appreciate it if you viewed this Street View imagery to understand the current state of Namie-machi and the tremendous gravity of the situation.

Those of us in the older generation feel that we received this town from our forebearers, and we feel great pain that we cannot pass it down to our children. It has become our generation’s duty to make sure future generations understand the city’s history and culture—maybe even those who will not remember the Fukushima nuclear accident. We want this Street View imagery to become a permanent record of what happened to Namie-machi in the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster.

Image: Screenshot, Google Street View from Namie-machi, Fukushima, Japan.