The FJP

For Syria’s war is characterised most strongly by absence and collective abandonment. Other than the protagonists and victims the arena is almost empty. There is no foreign military intervention. There are no NGOs or aid workers distributing food and blankets. The media is similarly self-exiled: very few broadcasters or newspapers commit journalists regularly, if at all. A handful of freelance photographers work inside the country, but none of the big names. The middle-aged bravehearts of Bosnia and Afghanistan have grown old and too soft for the hardships of Syria, while the economics of journalism have not allowed their replacement generation to prosper. That McCullin, still a prizefighter despite his years, had hauled himself out to that lonely war zone was inspiring in itself, legitimising the work of the few freelancers already there and challenging the absentees.

Anthony Loyd, The Australian. Parting shots.

That’s right: a 77 year old photographer named Don McCullin recently went to Aleppo to take his last set of photos, 15 years after his last war assignment. See the above article for an account of his trip as told by the much younger journalist in charge of his safety.

There’s no telling which photos from Syria’s revolutionary war will become famous and come to represent the conflict, if any do at all. For a great collection of pictures by other photojournalists in the country, see these. For more of McCullin, who is something of a legend in his line of work, see this bio and a portion of his photography from Vietnam and Lebanon.

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Apple Pulls 500px’s Mobile Apps From The App Store, Claiming It’s Too Easy To Search For Nude Photos

Via TechCrunch:

Toronto photo-sharing startup 500px is reporting today that both of its applications, 500px for iOS and its recent acquisition ISO500, have been pulled from the Apple App Store due to concerns about nude photos. Combined, the apps have over 1 million downloads, 500px COO Evgeny Tchebotarev tells us…

The apps were pulled from the App Store this morning around 1 AM Eastern, and had completely disappeared by noon today. The move came shortly after last night’s discussions with Apple related to an updated version of 500px for iOS, which was in the hands of an App Store reviewer.

The Apple reviewer told the company that the update couldn’t be approved because it allowed users to search for nude photos in the app. This is correct to some extent, but 500px had actually made it tough to do so, explains Tchebotarev. New users couldn’t just launch the app and locate the nude images, he says, the way you can today on other social photo sharing services like Instagram or Tumblr, for instance. Instead, the app defaulted to a “safe search” mode where these type of photos were hidden. To shut off safe search, 500px actually required its users to visit their desktop website and make an explicit change.

Tchebotarev said the company did this because they don’t want kids or others to come across these nude photos unwittingly. “Some people are mature enough to see these photos,” he says, “but by default it’s safe.”

FJP: A few things to note:

Noted, Part One: as one commenter on the story writes, “Do they plan on removing Safari from iOS as well? And every other mobile web browser?”

Noted, Part Deux: God forbid they take a close look at what you can find with the Tumblr app.

Noted, the third: Here’s where you come across the very serious issue of a gatekeeping ecosystem where app developers and publishers are essentially at the whims of Apple. For example, last summer Apple refused to carry an app that mapped publicly reported drone strikes.

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Old-Timey Inaugurations

Top: Suffragists march at Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 inauguration.

Left: Franklin Roosevelt with wife Eleanor and son James at the first of his four inaugurations.

Right: Outgoing president Grover Cleveland watches watches incoming president William McKinley’s 1897 inauguration speech. McKinley was assassinated in 1901.

Images via Talking Points Memo. Read through for more.

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Disaster Chic?

Vogue pays tribute (we think) to New York’s “other finest” with an Annie Leibovitz photo spread. A bit tacky, no?

Recreating Banksy

Photographer Nick Stern re-enacts iconic Banksy images.

See Slate for more photos.

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Agence France-Presse and The Washington Post infringed on the copyrights of photographer Daniel Morel in using pictures he took in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in January 2010, District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan ruled.

From Reuters earlier today.

Background:

The photographer put the Haiti images on Twitter, and they were then disseminated widely after an AFP editor discovered them through another Twitter user’s account, according to the ruling.

AFP distributed several of the pictures to Getty Images, the ruling said. The Washington Post, a Getty client, published four of the images on its website, according to the ruling.

So Morel approached AFP, which then sued Morel on grounds that it legally used his photos. Morel sued back, and sued the Washington Post and Getty as well, though at the time of this writing Getty is not in the same boat as the publishers.

The judge ruled against the AFP and WaPo based largely upon what she found in Twitter’s terms of use.

From Mashable:

While the AFP argued Morel’s work was free to use once posted to Twitter, Nathan instead found that Twitter’s Terms of Service required that news outlets first get permission before running tweeted photos.

Nathan, however, did rule that the retweeting of such photos is allowed.

Twitter has long held that photographers own their tweeted content. The company’s Terms of Service section on copyright maintains that “Twitter respects the intellectual property rights of others and expects users of the Services to do the same.”

FJP: Should be interesting to see how this plays out.

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Innocence Assassinated: Living in Mexico’s Drug War

fjp-latinamerica:

REPORTAGE, the photojournalism branch of Getty Images, is featuring an astounding slideshow on Mexican violence through the lens of New York-based Katie Orlinsky, one of its most talented photographers.

For Innocence Assassinated, in order to depict how locals deal with the rampaging narco-fueled bloodshed that overwhelms their communities day after day, Katie went on a breath-taking journey through the some of the most violent regions of Mexico, such as Ciudad Juárez, the Tamaulipas borderlands, the shores of Guerrero (including Acapulco), and the P’urhépecha plateau in central Michoacán. The resulting product is pretty impressive.

So, go ahead and make sure you turn on the captions.

Image: A destroyed sign at the entrance of Ciudad Mier in Tamaulipas, México. Cover of Innocence Assassinated [PDF], via Reportage by GettyImages.

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Fireworks, In Reverse

From Melbourne by Julian Tay.

H/T: @sree

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Roadtrip USA: 5000 photos in 3 minutes

Pictures taken by Facebook employees Mike Matas and Sharon Hwang, between San Francisco and New York City.

They used a Canon 5d Mark II and three lenses: a 50mm f/1.2, a 16-35mm f/2.8L II, and a 70-200 f/2.8 L.

H/T: PetaPixel.

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From Print to Digital, Quite Literally

Cabel Sasser, Co-founder of the software maker Panic, visited a “very old” building in Portland recently. In the basement of that very old building he found something remarkable: Where once was a newspaper print shop with favorite pages still pasted to the wall is now an Internet hub for every major carrier in the Pacific Northwest:

The roar of the presses that ruled these rooms has been replaced, just as we all suspected, with the calculated silence of the conduit that carries our data. This data, in fact. These very photos.

100 years from now, when another one of you goes spelunking around this basement, that data, those bits, today’s moments, will likely be long, long gone.

Poynter thinks the newspaper that once printed there might have been The Evening Telegram.

Read through for the rest of Cabel’s photos.

Images: Pages of old-timey newspapers pasted to the walls of what is now an Internet hub in the Pittock Block in Portland. Via Cabel Sasser. Select to embiggen.

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Dear Users:

You are not our customers, you are the cattle we drive to market and auction off to the highest bidder. Enjoy your feed and keep producing the milk.

Reginald Braithwaite, Translation from legalese and PR-speak to English of selected portions of another overfunded startup’s communications as they “monetize” their service.

The News, via CNET:

Instagram said today that it has the perpetual right to sell users’ photographs without payment or notification, a dramatic policy shift that quickly sparked a public outcry.

The new intellectual property policy, which takes effect on January 16, comes three months after Facebook completed its acquisition of the popular photo-sharing site. Unless Instagram users delete their accounts before the January deadline, they cannot opt out.

Under the new policy, Facebook claims the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which would effectively transform the Web site into the world’s largest stock photo agency. One irked Twitter user quipped that “Instagram is now the new iStockPhoto, except they won’t have to pay you anything to use your images.”

Read On: CNET, Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos.

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Earth at Night

Blake posted a video earlier showing NASA’s new Earth photos created with infrared imaging technology. I can’t stop looking at them though.

Here’s the basic set (including a 54000x27000 GeoTIFF version of the top image — let’s make posters), and here’s a fascinating look at the Nile. And over here is an interactive map where you can explore the entire globe.

Image background from the Earth Observatory:

A handful of scientists have observed earthly night lights over the past four decades with military satellites and astronaut photography. But in 2012, the view became significantly clearer. The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite — launched in October 2011 by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Department of Defense — carries a low-light sensor that can distinguish night lights with six times better spatial resolution and 250 times better resolution of lighting levels (dynamic range) than before. Also, because Suomi NPP is a civilian science satellite, data is available to scientists within minutes to hours of acquisition.

The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on Suomi NPP can observe dim light down to the scale of an isolated highway lamp or fishing boat. It can even detect faint, nocturnal atmospheric light — known as airglow — and observe clouds lit by it. Through the use of its “day-night band,” VIIRS can make the first quantitative measurements of light emissions and reflections, distinguishing the intensity and the sources of night light. The sum of these measurements gives us a global view of the human footprint on the Earth.

Stunning — Michael.

Images: City Lights, via Nasa Earth Observatory. Select to embiggen.

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Goodnight: Evening on Planet Earth

Above, satellite Suomi NPP’s view of lights on our planet. Compiled from imagery taken over the course of 22 days.

Here’s Slate:

I’ll note Suomi NPP orbits about 800 kilometers (500 miles) above the Earth and sees only a small part of the planet at any one time. This animation comprises 2.5 terabytes of data—2500 gigabytes!—that were stitched together to show the entire Earth’s face over a single rotation.