September 25th, 2011 — Editorial, Photography
Over the past several decades there have been some great documentary films about photographers and photography, Original Fotografie has chosen a few for your benefit, a short list of my favorites.
1. The Presidents Photographer (2010)
National Geographic’s The President’s Photographer explores the perspective of the visual historians who capture both public and intimate moments in the lives of Presidents. Browse this gallery of the work of some of the photographers—and their subjects—featured in the program.
Here, President Obama and the First Lady share a private moment on a freight elevator in Washington’s convention center on the night of his inauguration in 2009. The photograph is considered by many to be one of photographer Pete Souza’s iconic images—so far.
2. The Genius of Photography [2007]
This documentary is the best filmed introduction to photography. This six episode BBC documentary includes interviews with some of the world’s greatest living photographers including William Eggleston, Nan Goldin, William Klein, Martin Parr, Sally Mann, Robert Adams, Juergen Teller, Andreas Gursky and Jeff Wall.
3. National Geographic’s The Photographers [1996]
The documentary feels a bit out dated now, but fascinating never the less, this classic documentary follows veteran photographers for National Geographic on assignment.
4. Annie Leibovitz – Life Through a Lens [2006]
A documentary about the life and work of the iconic American photographer Annie Leibovitz- directed by her sister, Barbara Leibovitz. Almost as famous as the people she photographs, Annie Leibovitz is one of America s most celebrated portrait photographers, capturing her subjects from Demi Moore and Nicole Kidman to the GeorgeWBush cabinet
Filmed by Jennifer Baichwal, the documentary is an extremely thought provoking and very cleverly work. It shows the shocking truth and reality to this apparently “wonderful world” we live in and the impact we have not only on the planet but to ourselves. The film follows Edward Burtynsky at work in China and Bangladesh and the USA.
6. Visual Acoustics: Modernism of Julius Shulman [2010]
If you are interested in architectural photography and modernism, this is thedocumentary you want to watch. This documentary gives in depth details of Shulman’s modernism in LA from Case study Houses onwards.
June 5th, 2011 — Photography
Little is known about early human habitation in the Bryce Canyon area. Archaeological surveys of Bryce Canyon National Park and the Paunsaugunt Plateau show that people have been in the area for at least 10,000 years. Basketmaker-period Anasazi artifacts several thousand years old have been found south of the park. Other artifacts from the Pueblo-period Anasazi and the Fremont culture (up to the mid-12th century) have also been found.The Paiute Indians moved into the surrounding valleys and plateaus in the area around the same time that the other cultures left.[8] These Native Americans hunted and gathered for most of their food, but also supplemented their diet with some cultivated products. The Paiute in the area developed a mythology surrounding the hoodoos (pinnacles) in Bryce Canyon. They believed that hoodoos were the Legend People whom the trickster Coyote turned to stone.[9] At least one older Paiute said his culture called the hoodoos Anka-ku-was-a-wits, which is Paiute for
June 5th, 2011 — Photography
Utah’s First National ParkMassive canyon walls ascend toward a brilliant blue sky. To experience Zion, you need to walk among the towering cliffs, or challenge your courage in a small narrow canyon. These unique sandstone cliffs range in color from cream, to pink, to red. They could be described as sand castles crowning desert canyons.
April 22nd, 2011 — Editorial
Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed while shooting the war in Libya. The Guardian head of photography explains the unique challenge of war photojournalism
In a closely controlled, PR-led media world, war remains the last frontier of raw reality. To the photojournalist, this has to be the ultimate attraction, even if it means facing the kind of dangers that normally only soldiers are exposed to. This grim game claimed two more victims this week, Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, when they were hit by fire from government forces in Misrata, Libya.
The escalating civil war is drawing in experienced and not-so experienced photographers from round the world. In some ways it’s the ideal war for photographers – colourful, anarchic rebels taking on a professional standing army. Compared with Afghanistan, the access to this conflict is easy. To cover the Afghanistan conflict in any meaningful way, photographers have to be embedded with the western armies, which means applying to and working with defence ministries and their press minders. In Libya, if you have the dollars and the guts, you just follow the road into Benghazi and from there to the ever-moving frontline. The inexperienced learn quickly in these situations, but they also know that, like bomb-disposal soldiers, they have to be near the action. Sometimes too near. As the most revered of all war photographers, Robert Capa, put it: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
But war is getting more and more difficult to cover. Battles are fought at longer distances, with long-range missiles, drone bombers and IEDs placed by fighters who melt into the landscape. Photographers are reduced to documenting the soldiers on one side or another. Many images of the Libyan conflict so far have been of extraordinarily dressed rebels posing with over-sized guns, which have lent a slightly misleading carnival aspect to the uprising. The news of Hetherington and Hondros’s deaths has refocused this war on the blood that has quietly been spilling into the desert sands.
The Guardian’s picture desk received a strong image last week of two rebel fighters posing with a gun. One had a lemon-coloured jumper on and big hair blowing in the wind, when body-armour and a helmet would have been so much more appropriate. This glamorisation of the combatants has always been a part of the documentation of war. Roger Fenton, sometimes thought to be the first British war photographer, went to the Crimea in the 1850s to take location portraits of the officers for their families back home. He soon realised that there was more that he could do with his camera and took some stark pictures of the aftermath of the battles. The glamour inevitably rubs off on the war photographers themselves and leads to the stereotype of a hard-drinking self-obsessive in a keffiyeh scarf. But the painful pictures, shot by their colleagues, of medics fighting to save Hetherington and Hondros strip away that sheen and reminds us of the high price some pay.
It’s sometimes said that war photographers are driven by the need for the adrenaline fix of the ultimate gamble, but the best and the most successful seem pretty stable people. They recognise that the conflict they want to cover is probably the only current event that might yield truly memorable hard news images. They also know that they need to shoot pictures that have an urgency to get them published by war-weary editors back home, who are desperate to cheer up rather than depress their readers. In a recent BBC interview, Goran Tomasevic, a Reuters veteran, said: “I don’t have any problem stepping back into my normal life; not at all. I just go out, eat a couple of steaks and drink a lot of beer. I check out the football and I’m happy.” Tomasevic’s attitude is typical of the leading news photographers – he knows he is taking risks, but he also takes precautions like any professional. Capa again: “The war correspondent has his stake – his life – in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute.” The world (and not just its media) needs these people: we need to see and have conflicts recorded. The rest of us are lucky that we can tap into their enthusiasm and bravery however misplaced it sometimes may be. In the end, motives are not important, it’s the image on the page or screen telling the unadorned truth that counts.
Hetherington and Hondros were working very differently. Hetherington had left a successful stills career behind to follow up his Oscar-nominated film documentary about the American Marines in Afghanistan and was shooting more video. Hondros was filing a daily stream of pictures to his agency, Getty Images. Indeed, the Guardian received more of his photographs just hours before he was killed. War photographers are increasingly expected to shoot video – and without the back-up that a TV crew might expect. But this is leading to a new sort of moving visual journalism that is more immediate and personal, without the reporter between the viewer and the action. It feeds off the strengths of the photographer, the need to get in close, the need to create a relationship with the fighters he’s working alongside. All of the skills that are traditionally that of a war photographer; all those skills that Hetherington and Hondros had.
April 22nd, 2011 — Apps
Image via Wikipedia
Get back to nature just in time for Earth Day with National Geographic’s National Park Maps HD. You can probably guess what the app does: it covers 15 different parks, but National Park Maps is more than just a park atlases. A photographers‘ dream come true!
Nat Geo’s app also keeps track of your location when you’re in the parks using your device’s GPS technology, helping you navigate even when you’re away from the beaten path. It’s also filled with information about the parks, like landmarks and points of interest, so you can plan a trip without having to do a lot of research.
APS FOR 15 GREAT NATIONAL PARKS
Acadia – Bryce Canyon – Canyonlands – Glacier/Waterton – Grand Canyon – Grand Teton – Great Smoky Mountains – Mount Rainier – Olympic – Rocky Mountain – Sequoia/Kings Canyon – Shenandoah – Yellowstone – Yosemite – Zion
April 2nd, 2011 — Photography, Products
WEDNESDAY MARCH 9, 2011
AVAILABLE NOW!
Go Get it Now!
“I love 100 Cameras!” – iPad Today, Sarah Lane
“Trey Ratcliff Releases One Of The Sexiest Photo Editing Apps For iPad” – Robert Scoble
“100 Cameras in 1 for iPad is a quantum leap above the others” – Doug Kaye
100 CAMERAS IN 1 FOR THE IPAD!
The Top 10 App for the iPhone (iPhone Version) comes to the iPad. Bigger and bolder!
Benefits:
➤ Fast, simple, and light. Designed for speed and ease-of-use
➤ Use your existing library to give existing photos 100 new magical looks
➤ or… take new photos (iPad 2+ only)
➤ 100 different effects that use mixes of hardlight, overlay, and more with beautiful textures from around the world.
➤ iPad version has many many additional features, including hi-res effects at 2000×2000 pixels.
➤ A “new” kind of app that takes the editing process in a whole new, beautiful durections
➤ Share your photos on email, Twitter, Facebook, SmugMug and Flickr!
➤ Gamecenter support. Unlock fun achievements!
Other features:
➤ 100 unique effects, many mixed together with exotic textures from all over the world
➤ Poetic names so that you get a general feel of the effect to put you in a creative mood
➤ A new “Explore” area with helpful hints, good links, and even more
➤ Uses a predictive algorithm to guess which way you will “swipe” the image next so that the upcoming effects load instantly
March 28th, 2011 — Photography
by Dave Cryer
For many many years I have been accused of being an Apple fanboy. Maybe these accusations are correct, as in almost all of my videos and for all of my working day I use a
MacBook or MacBook Pro.
Image via CrunchBase
The main use of a computer for me, be it a laptop or a more powerful desktop, is for both video processing and photo editing. Ever since I made the move to a digital camera I have been amazed at how tools like Photoshop have evolved, allowing for exposure to be corrected or that annoying kid who ran into the frame to be removed. Airbrushing out a bright red spot on a persons face and making them look beautiful at the click of a button seems like magic, but is accessible at a very reasonable cost nowadays. Then there is the likes of Adobe Lightroom or my preferred application, Apple’s very own Aperture. These offer up many correction tools, plus superb organizing features too.
I suppose for many, when they stumble into enjoying photography they often overlook what they are going to do with their photos. It is very important to have some way of sharing them for starters and once the bug has bitten, many start tinkering with changing brightness and editing their photos. What seems to be the norm is that this will be on a Windows based PC and so the story (often of the horror variety) ensues… let me explain.
To be fair, a Windows based computer will work fine and will certainly get the job done, but the majority of emails I receive do reveal a rather frustrating story. They normally go something like this… ”Dear David, I have spent the last two hours trying to install xx application. After doing this and applying the updates, a Windows update became available. This is so so frustrating, after spending all this time and restarting my laptop, it now says I have a missing DLL file of something. How can I fix it?” or ”I turned it off last night and it worked fine, yet this morning it simply refuses to start and puts me in some safe mode. I tried turning it off and back on again, but still nothing”. You can see a trend in these emails, revealing so many users being frustrated with the tools they are trying to use either on a hobbyist basis or a more professional way to produce something for a client. It must be very discouraging for the average user and certainly does not encourage any degree of enthusiasm.
Image via Wikipedia
Drawing from my own personal experience. I started in computers with an IBM contractor background, something I should refer to as a frustrating, rather than enjoyable job. When I moved into graphic design, there was a creative side, all Apple Macs. Then there was the business side, referred to as the ”Grey Side” which consisted of three Windows based PC’s. My role was that of the designer, yet I spent the majority of my time sorting out problems with the three PC’s. The main issues that seem to be a stumbling block for many is dealing with installing software, updating Windows itself and those nasty viruses.
So, back to the Mac and without meaning to sound so predictable. The reason why I love Steve Jobs and what he has done for computers, is that he took control of Apple’s destiny by being ruthless. As a leader, he insisted in stringent quality controls. As a company they took control of both the hardware and the software, ensuring they work in harmony with the minimum of fuss. It is this aspect of technology that they excel in, with both their desktop and laptop computers, all the way through to their software and iDevices. If you buy a Mac, in my experience 99% of the time it will just work. Install a piece of software and it will work elegantly. Even the task of updating (which all manufacturers have us do) is completed with the minimum of effort. This leaves the average user with more time, well actually almost all of their time, to enjoy their computer. For the power user, like myself, my creative time is so much more productive than you could imagine. As the saying goes ”Once you try a Mac, you’ll never go back,” couldn’t be more accurate.
In closing, it certainly does make me laugh when people say I am the love child of Steve Jobs. However, the last laugh is always mine. Whilst my PC counterparts are still applying their latest virus definition update, I have finished all of my work and am sitting enjoying a nice frothy cappuccino.
March 25th, 2011 — Photography
I joined over a dozen photographers Saturday evening at Federal Hill Park in Baltimore, MD to shoot the super full moon rising over the harbor. The moon rose well to the west of the buildings which was not ideal for framing a classic Baltimore moonrise shot, but the weather conditions were perfect for viewing the moon rising through the sky.
The moon appeared slightly larger and brighter than usual (I guess) on the horizon, but when it rose into the sky it looked like a rather typical full moon. According to NASA, Saturday’s full moon was the biggest full moon since 1993, reaching its “perigee”, the closest approach to earth in its orbit. Perigee moons are 14% bigger and 30% brighter than moons on the “apogee” side of the moon’s orbit, when it is farthest away from earth.
March 24th, 2011 — Photography
March 24th, 2011 — Photography
