PSSST - We've Moved

In an effort to consolidate my life, I'm moving the UGA Photojournalism blog to another platform - it's now over at ugapj.wordpress.com. 

A little more control, a little more flexibility. Please update your feeds. 

Space Shuttle Silhouette

I've been a space junkie since I was a kid. I don't know why, but the space shuttles have always been something really cool. (And I really, really want to be in Florida for a launch ...)

So I've read some and looked at stuff and think I've seen a lot of photos - but the third image here just blew me away. It is, in two words, stunningly cool. 

Nice work, Thierry Legault. Very nice work.

And This is Why Photo Editors are Important

The Washington Times ... well ... read for yourself. 

Good grief.

MediaStorm Workshop - Tuition Free

Passed along from Frannie Fabian ... 

Given the tough economic climate and the critical need for multimedia training, MediaStorm will be holding a one-time, tuition-free Advanced Multimedia Reporting Workshop, in Brooklyn, NY from June 20-26, 2009.

The MediaStorm Advanced Multimedia Workshops are designed for multimedia storytellers who want to get to the next level. It is not an introductory course. Students are responsible for their own travel, room and board. Reporters are expected to have a high level of competency with still photography, and be familiar with audio and video techniques. Editors are expected to be comfortable in Final Cut Pro.

We only have spots for 8 participants as Multimedia Reporters, Editors or Observers so we are expecting a competitive process. Applications are due no later than Friday, May 15, 2009. Participants will be selected based on the content of their applications. (click here for application form)

For more information, and to see work produced in previous workshops, see the Workshop site. If you have any questions, please email us at workshops@mediastorm.org.

Photojournalism Workshop in Prague

FYI ...

I’m writing from Transitions (TOL), a non-profit journalism and media training organisation based in Prague. We thought that some of your students might be interested in our summer photojournalism course.

Each summer TOL brings together international groups of students and young journalists for practical training courses in international reporting, investigative journalism, photojournalism and new media.

An important aspect of the courses is the emphasis on practical training. We only work with trainers who have a strong track record with respected media.

The photojournalism course will be held in Prague over four days from August 4-7. Dean Cox, who will lead the course, is an international photojournalist whose portfolio includes work for The Associated Press, The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, EurasiaNet and Bloomberg News.

The course will feature morning classroom training sessions and in the afternoons students will go out into the city to shoot. By the end of the course, each participant will have a complete, edited photo essay. And they’ll have learned to use many of the essential tools and techniques in the process.

Dean has trained on several TOL foreign correspondent courses and we’re looking forward to a successful photojournalism courses this August.

More information can be found on our website:
http://journalism-courses.tol.org.

I’d naturally be happy to answer any questions that you or your students might have about the course. Thank you in advance for your interest in TOL’s courses; any help in disseminating the information is much appreciated.

NY Times Audio Slide Show on Layoffs

Nicole Bengiveno of the New York Times takes a look at the person who has to make the layoff decisions and notifications. While the shooting is clean, it's the interview that gets to you. It has no natural sounds, but it works - solemn, serious. 

Kent State, 38 Years Later

John Filo, who shot the iconic photo from Kent State 39 years ago, talks about the photo and meeting Mary Vecchio years later. 

Women Photojournalists of Washington Workshop

FYI, another workshop opportunity ...

WPOW ANNOUNCES WOMEN-ONLY PHOTO WORKSHOP
BOLIVIA, JULY 2009

This beginning and intermediate photography workshop will directly benefit Women
Photojournalists of Washington (WPOW), a nonprofit based in Washington, DC.
Instructors include Pulitzer winner Carol Guzy and AOL’s Cathaleen Curtiss.
WASHINGTON, DC- April 6, 2009: WPOW (Women Photojournalists of Washington)
announces a fund raising workshop for those interested in beginning and intermediate
photography in beautiful Bolivia from June 28 - July11, 2009 to support a scholarship
program for young women in visual media.

This workshop is catered to challenge any skill level but geared towards those just
starting out in their learning process. Whether attending photographers have just
begun taking pictures for fun or want to start honing the skills they have already,
this workshop will help students grow into competent travel photographers under
the guidance of WPOW’s talented members. More advanced photographers can also
benefit as instructors will work to create a challenging photo stories and essays.
Workshop instructors will be Photographer of the Year and three-time Pulitzer Prize
winning photographer of the Washington Post Carol Guzy and international award
winning photo editor and Director of Photography at AOL Cathaleen Curtiss.

This benefit workshop will features lectures on the history of photography, how women
have influenced the media, understanding how to build your documentary portfolio
and so much more. Students will photograph every day with instructors and staff who
will help each photographer craft a narrative documentary essay on Andean culture
and history. Students will get 1-on-1 editing with WPOW’s amazing instructors daily
and they will soon become proficient in travel photography. Proceeds will help form
the basis of a scholarship program benefitting young women in visual media.
All information for the workshop and registration online is available at http://www.
momentaworkshops.com/bolivia09.php.

Momenta Workshops has agreed to do logistics for this benefit trip and donate
instructors to make this a success. Visit http://www.momentaworkshops.com for
company information.

WPOW is a 501 (c) 3 organization based in Washington, D.C. and dedicated to the
advancement of women in the media and educating the public about the work of
women photographers around the globe. Visit http://www.womenphotojournalists.
org to learn more about this nonprofit.
############
For additional information on Women Photojournalists of Washington, please contact
WPOW President Jamie Rose at 202.203.2598 or jamie@womenphotojournalists.org.
WPOW’s outreach programs are growing every day, please check our site frequently for
the most up to date information. Women’s Photojournalists of Washington, WPOW, and
our logo are trademarks of WPOW. Copyright WPOW 2009

Pictures with Purpose

FYI ...

2009 Pictures with Purpose Details


Who should attend?

Photographers who have a desire to increase their visual storytelling skills, learn how to use their “voice” in a more meaningful way or revive a spirit numbed by the daily grind.

What to expect?

A magical, life-changing experience! Be prepared to shoot pictures, look at pictures, talk about pictures, discuss careers, and share your dreams in an intimate setting with a caring teacher. This year we will be focusing even tighter on advocacy and intervention photography.

What NOT to expect?

To be bullied, embarrassed or intimidated. This is not a “knock-you-down” boot camp. Nor is this workshop about gear or stuff or computer programs. It is about people, and telling their stories and learning about yourself in the process.

When?

This year's workshop will begin Sunday, July 12, at 2 p.m. and run through Sunday, July 18th. We cut the days in half and lowered the price.

Where?

The 2nd annual Pictures with Purpose workshop will be held again in Oak View, California, about 70 miles north of Los Angeles, 30 miles south of Santa Barbara.

Cost & Size?

Tuition for the workshop is $795.00. A $200.00, non-refundable deposit will hold a spot.
Workshop is limited to 12 students
8 spots left as of March 18

What do I need to bring?

A digital camera or cameras, laptop computer (not required), good attitude and a willingness to work hard and learn. You are welcome to drive but a car is not essential for this workshop.

Housing? Food?

Students are responsible for arranging their accommodations.We will provide information about housing upon request. Students are responsible for their meals.

Contact?

Email us at labelledave@gmail.com

The Mexican Suitcase Unveiled

Lost for years, some of the negatives of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour found in the "Mexican Suitcase" are starting to be shown. 

Oh, how I'd like to see the whole set ...

Two Down, One to Go: Student Work Roundup

At the end of every semester, the deluge comes in: semester-long projects, last minute reshoots - they all flood in. They come on my class server, by CD and flash drive. In the last week alone, I have ingested 8 gigabytes worth of images, audio and video ... the little iMac in my office was really looking forward to this weekend, after having pulled two over-nighters compressing video. 

But it's worth it ... I think ... as two of the Documentary Photography projects are now in the wild. The first was a look at Rural Health Care issues in the counties around Athens, done in collaboration with Prof. Patricia Thomas's graduate Health and Medical Reporting class. Students tackled everything from aging to gangs in text, photos, audio and video. Considering only two of my students had ever shot video seriously before this semester, the results are pretty amazing. Spend some time with those stories.

On Friday, I built and released the second project - A Day at UGA: One campus, one hour, one story. This was a joint effort with Prof. Valerie Boyd's class and is fairly close to a dreaded "day in the life," but man ... some of these stories just rock. My sixteen students worked on profiles with the sixteen students in Prof. Boyd's class, but that left eight hours uncovered ... so my students paired up and did eight more. 

We'll launch one more project next week - and it's huge. I'm hopefully these sixteen students realize what they've accomplished this semester. It would have been very easy for this class to become a technical class - shooting HD video, editing in Final Cut Pro, refining audio - but they never once looked at it that way. During our weekend workshop in early March, when they were struggling with the tech stuff, they did not waste time with editors asking about those problems - they talked about their stories. 

And that, to me, is what this class was all about. Stories. 

Fisheye on CNN

CNN has apparently modified a Flip camera with a fisheye lens and is giving you - yes you! - a tour of their work space. 

Nice to see they're using technology to save journalism ...

(Okay, that was pretty snarky, and it is kind of cool ...)

Ethics ... What Else?

Here we go again ... is The Washingtonian a journalism entity? Or did they step over a line? You decide. 

SEPPA Show in Athens

The Southeastern Professional Photographers Association's 2009 convention is being held later this week in Athens. Some things work looking into. 

Rural Health Care in North Georgia

Over the last few months, the students in Documentary Photography have been working with students in Prof. Patricia Thomas' Health and Medical Reporting class to look at health care issues in the rural counties around Athens. A few moments ago, the final package went live on The Grady Journal.

Working in teams, 22 students produced eight videos, eight audio slide shows and eight text stories covering everything from aging to teen pregnancy. Go take a look and leave a comment, they'd love to hear them. 

Truth With A Camera Workshop

This note came in from Josh Metzler about the Truth With A Camera workshop, well worth investigating as I've heard many positive things about it ...

Truth With A Camera will be held here in Guadalajara, Mexico at the end of May. We're very excited about the workshop, which continues a 15-year tradition in the workshop which has before been held in Norfolk, VA. The course, a weeklong intensive photojournalism course, will pair American students with Mexican journalism students as they spend the week covering a story found in one of the partnering local NGOs on topics ranging from healthcare, migration, and children's rights. At the end of the week, a small portfolio of images will be donated to the NGOs for their use.

The course, which is designed for undergrad and grad journalism students, is affordable (around $1100) and is nearly filled. The deadline is fast approaching and we hope to fill it up very soon. I hope that you'll get a chance to pass the info around and mention it to your classes this week. I really appreciate it.

Here's the site for more info and for registering.

www.truthwithacamera.org

Women in Photojournalism Photo Competition

Women in Photojournalism Call for Entries
Juried Exhibit and Gallery Reception Information

There are no categories, only your interpretation of the theme, "Celebrating Our Past Looking, Towards the Future". Your photographs can represent your definition of the theme through people, place, action or event milestone. Submissions must be by women photojournalists. Single entries only.

Photos must have been taken between July 1, 2008 and April 25, 2009.

Deadline for entry is Midnight, May 1, 2009.

Up to 50 winning images will be selected by judges, including up to 2 best of show. Winners will be contacted and asked to submit an exhibit quality 14x18 matted print for the opening reception June 11, 2009. Copyright holders retain rights to the photograph. NPPA will have the right to print winners in the magazine or on the official website for conference or promotional materials.

~SUBMITTING YOUR PHOTOS~
You can submit by clicking here or going to the Convergence09 page and clicking on the link to enter the Women in Photojournalism Contest. Once you click the contest link and login it will automatically take to you to the entry form. Enter info in each field, then hit the browse button and select image from your computer. When done hit "Submit." You must do this for each photograph you want to enter. Files need to be 200-300 dpi, jpeg files and Include the following information under the Photoshop FILE INFO or IPTC fields for each image: 1) Caption Field: image title followed by complete caption (DO NOT INCLUDE YOUR NAME HERE). 2) Caption Writer: your initials. 3) Headline: image title. 4) Byline: photographer’s name. 5) Credit: your affiliation or school. 6) Source: copyright holder.

~ENTRY PAYMENT~
Payment must be made with a credit card at the time of print submission.

~CONFERENCE INFORMATION~
Women in Photojournalism Conference – June 10, 2009
Juried Exibit June 11, 2009
Flamingo Hotel – Las Vegas
FOR MORE INFORMATION GO TO WWW.WOMENINPHOTOJOURNALISM.ORG
Join our group at Linkedin.com to get up-to-date news and information.

Get A Job, Kid ...

And here's something that may help: The Poynter Institute's News University has an upcoming webinar on getting your first journalism job. It's cheap, and you can do it from the comfort of your chosen coffee shop. It goes live on April 8 from 2-3 p.m. (though they usually archive them for later viewing).

Can Design Save Newspapers?

So asks Jacek Utko at this year's TED conference.

Earth Hour Sequences

Boston.com's Big Picture blog has collected a series of time-lapse photos from Earth Hour. Most of these come from Reuters, and I have to give them credit for coordinating this idea - very thoughtful. (Some of the images came from other places, too.)

Click on each image to watch it fade, click again to watch it come back.

Grimm Infographics

It's not a typo - it's Little Red Riding Hood done as a Flash infographic.

Building Your Web Site

Over on the Photopreneur site is a post on "How to Catch a Photo Editor's Eye." While not aimed at the journalism realm, there is a lot of good info in there - particularly on letting the images shine, not the web site. 

Personally, I think Flash is a fantastic tool for interactive design. But it can also be slow to load and often the designers using it try to wrestle too much control away from the site's viewers. Don't do that. Let your pictures carry the page.

Juggling on Assignment

Adam Westbrook, a reporter for a British radio station, talks about balancing the needs of audio, stills and video while on assignment. (Thanks to Koci at Multimedia Shooter for the link.)

Flash Day in DocPhoto

Pictures with Purpose Workshop

FYI ...

The 2nd annual Pictures with Purpose workshop will be held again in

Oak View, California, about 70 miles north of LosAngeles, 30 miles
south of Santa Barbara.

This year's workshop will begin Sunday, July 12, at 2 p.m. and run
through Sunday, July 18th. We cut the days in half and lowered the
price.

This year we will be focusing even tighter on advocacy and
intervention photography.

Tuition $795.00

A $200.00 deposit is required to hold a spot

Workshop is limited ot 12 students
8 spots left as of March 18

David LaBelle

For more info write to:

labelledave@gmail.com

On Audio Slide Shows ...

I love audio slide shows. They are wonderful journalistic creations, able to mix the depth of still images with the power of a subject's voice. I teach all my students how to do them - and they do them well.

The wire services have started to push them out, as well, which is fantastic. There are so many stories that can be told so well this way.

But ... and you knew there was a but ... not all of them succeed. It is not enough to just do one anymore because they are easy to build with programs like SoundSlides. They have to be crafted, they have to be shot for this reason and they need to have a story.

Take, for instance, Brian Synder's foreclosure auction piece on the Reuters site. Snyder, who I've known for 15 years, is an amazing photographer - and the images here prove that. Good variety, strong technical skills and great moments.

But the audio - of one auction, start to finish - doesn't tell us a story and it doesn't match with the photos very well. During our workshop last week, one of our editors was showing me a few audio slide shows his staff had done. Thirty seconds into one of them - one which was beautifully shot - I stopped the player and said I couldn't watch anymore. There was no connection between the photos and the audio. There was no sense of synchronization, there were really good photos AND really good audio, but they weren't working together. The timing of the transitions didn't make any sense. Even the types of transitions didn't make any sense.

It's time we stop playing with audio slide shows and start telling stories with them. It's not enough to say, "Gee whiz, that's cool!" when one finishes watching. You need to have a deeper understanding of the story.

And I feel the same way about video ... when did we decide to abdicate storytelling and just play with technology?

Gear Guides

We're getting close to that time of the year, the time when many of my students will start fretting about graduating. And it's not so much the Becoming a Real Person Dilemma as it is what do I need to buy?

I say it often - we do a great thing here at UGA in providing gear to our students. It completely eliminates an economic barrier to taking the classes and finding your passion. But it also means the students don't have to buy anything or start building their kits. So when their last class ends and they have to hand back the kit, they go into a bit of withdrawal. Or, more accurately, they go into shock over what it costs to build their own.

David McIntyre over at Black Star Rising has a short post on the basic gear a freelancer needs and it's a great starting point for a discussion that will go on for a few weeks here.

UGA PJ Alumni on Verve Photo

Kendrick Brinson, a 2005 UGA PJ alumni, is the current featured photographer on Verve Photo's New Breed of Documentary Photographers project.

Networking to Survive

Over on BlogHer, Kim Pearson has a piece up on, "Survival Tips for Journalists in the New News Economy." Two of her main ideas - that everyone is now a potential entrepreneur and that networking matters - are things students can easily latch on to and do something about.

"Sex, Lies and Photoshop"

Jesse Epstein has an opinion piece - done as a video - on the New York Times site about, "Sex, Lies and Photoshop." It comes from a proposed law in France that would require magazines to delineate how much retouching has been done on the photos. Not overly deep, but worth five minutes of your day.

Hey Dave, How's the Workshop Going?

Administrivia

File this under ego ... today marks the second anniversary of the UGA PJ blog. While there was one experimental post in February, on March 5, 2007, the first two real posts went online - a look at the Faces of Rochester and another on low angle sports photography.

There won't be a cake, but a simple nod to surviving for two years would be appropriate.

Weekend Workshop Round Table Talks

As part of this year’s Photojournalism Weekend Workshop, we’re going to have a few informal round-table discussions on issues the editors and our students are wrestling with. The schedule is below and all of these will be held in the Photojournalism Lab (room 130 of Grady College).

If you’re around and want to sit in, you’re more than welcome to join us. Each of these will run about 30 minutes.

If you’re coming to the Saturday or Sunday talks, I’ll be at the first floor, south west corner door about 10 minutes prior to the start to let folks in. (That’s the door closest to Tate Center with the automatic opener on it.)

Friday, 1 p.m. - Using "Social Media" to Build Communities - How do sites like Facebook affect our readership? How can we take advantage of those communities? Do we need to draw readers to our sites or do we go to where the readers are?

Friday, 4 p.m. - Communities Without Borders - How do you make coverage decisions when geography isn't as strong of a defining value? Do we need to redefine "community journalism?"

Saturday, 1 p.m. - Back Pack Journalism - It’s spreading, does it work? Can it work? Do concerns about quality and depth trump the immediacy of it?

Saturday, 4 p.m. - The Role of Video - How important is this? Do we use it because we have it or do we use it when it works best?

Sunday, 10 a.m. - How to Survive - It has been a brutal year in the journalism realm, so how do students keep hope alive? Or should they?

Final Edition

This has been all over the web already today. It was Twittered and emailed thousands of times. But in case you missed it, the Rocky Mountain News published its final edition on Friday morning. And Matthew Roberts posted the video story, 21 minutes long. And worth every second.

There are only a handful of two-newspaper cities left, Denver deserved to be one of them.

Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Manali, India

Passing this along ...

I wanted to let you and your students know about the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop that will be held this year in Manali, India in July. The workshop is intended for PJ students and young professionals who want experience with international reportage. Students are expected to work independently on a story under the guidance of their teachers. This year we have an amazing list of faculty including Ron Haviv, Ami Vitale, Andrea Bruce, Michael Robinson Chavez and the Bombay Flying Club will be teaching a special multimedia course. After shooting all day, there will be nightly presentations and discussions regarding the logistics of working on int'l projects. We are completely non-profit and no one makes a dime off of the workshop. Our esteemed faculty and dedicated staff all donate their time.

Last year the first Foundry workshop was held in Mexico City and was, on all accounts, a smashing success. This year, we are reserving at least 20 slots for South Asian journalists, who receive a substantial discount to ensure that we have a diverse student body. We are also offering several merit-based scholarships to emerging talent from the US and Europe.

Grants for Good

Getty Images has posted info on their latest Grants for Good competition. The cash awards are "two annual grants of $15,000 to cover photographers’ costs as they create compelling new imagery for the nonprofit of their choice."

Video Workshop in Athens - March 28

Psst ... there's another workshop coming up in the college ... March 28, put on by the Telecomm Department. Cheap, lots of good info to be had. Go sign up.

Hard Times a the High End

We all generate Top 10 lists at some point ... the Top 10 Car Designs, the Top 10 Albums of All Times ... silly things like that. Some of them are relevant to what we do in our careers, some are not.

For instance, if I were to come up with a list of the Top 10 Portrait Photographers of Our Time, Annie Leibovitz would be way up on that list (along with her peers like Chip Simons and Mark Seliger). So to find out she's in financial trouble and has, essentially, pawned her archive is ... well ... disturbing.

Twitter Ponzi?

I've been capturing a lot of Steve Yelvington tweets and blog posts, such as this:

This is about Twitter getting another $35 million in venture capital funding. I love Twitter, I use Twitter. But I don't know how it will ever make money.

Anyone have an idea?

On Business

Our beloved industry is in trouble, but you can survive. Being smart about running your own business is extremely difficult, but extremely rewarding when done right.

The first thing you need to know is diversify your clients. Do not put your proverbial eggs in one basket. 

Facebook Showdown

Facebook instituted a change in its terms of service that drew a lot of complaints. Wednesday morning, they backed down.

Now, if only other entities would understand that content has value ... 

New York Times Multimedia Internship

Picked up off of Drew Vigal's Twitter feed: The New York Times is looking for multimedia interns. 

Speaker: Chris Weston, Feb. 18

Make sure this is on your calendar:

Chris Weston, managing editor at the Greenville (S.C.) News, will be doing a talk on "Transforming Newsrooms Amid Disruptive Innovations." It'll be in the Drewry Room on Wednesday, Feb. 18, at 12:15. See Sophie Barnes in room 233 by Tuesday so you can get free pizza.

Weston is a good friend to Grady and a guy who has an excellent grasp on how journalism is changing and needs to change to survive. Highly recommend you get to this.

UGA PJer Takes the Nikon Shootout

For the second time in three years, a UGA-trained photojournalist has won the Nikon Shootout at the Southern Short Course in News Photography. Josh Weiss, a 2008 graduate, won the live-shooting competition this past weekend in Charlotte. (Kelly Wegel won it in 2007.)

Weiss is currently on staff at the Gwinnett Daily Post. 

Super Twitter

Not intentional, but this post is much like the last - all about Twitter. The New York Times has an interactive ... well, I don't know what to call it ... thing that looks at what was Twittered throughout the Super Bowl Sunday night.

Click on the "People saying go" and let it play, paying attention to the timeline. Very entertaining. 

The Story of Twitter (in More Than 140 Characters)

I am still not convinced that Twitter is something of value. I use it. A LOT. But I do wonder whether it's just a play thing, a way to avoid time. And then some breaking news event happens and I know because I have a Twitter client running on my desktop (Spaz).

One of the creators, Dom Sagolla, has now told the story behind its creation. 

Photojournalism Talk on Campus

From the In Box ...

Dr. John Lucaites of Indiana University will be delivering a talk on Friday, February 6 from 4-5 pm in 214 Terrell Hall entitled "Boots and Hands: Photojournalism and Democratic Public Culture." The talk is part of the Department of Speech Communication's Colloquium Series.

Dr. Lucaites has made an undeniable impact in the study of how images and icons circulate through the culture. His most recent book, No Caption Needed (co-authored with Robert Hariman), has received enormous interdisciplinary acclaim in this regard. W.J.T. Mitchell called the book "the starting point for any future attempt to deal with the problem of the iconic photograph and its social uses."

Dr. Lucaites is a professor at Indiana University with appointments in Communication and Culture, American Studies, Cultural Studies, and is a fellow at the Poynter Center for Ethics and American Institutions.

Some further detail regarding the talk itself:

Photojournalism is a vital public art for a democratic public culture, but not because it provides what we ordinarily understand to be "news." Rather, we believe that it does its work by helping us to see and to be seen as citizens. In this essay we examine the recurring visual trope of "boots and hands" in everyday photojournalistic practices, focusing on how it provides an iconography for thinking about political character, relationships, and events. A subsidiary argument concerns how the specific practice functions as a remediation of the role of bodily gesture in classical rhetoric and the 17th and 18th century elocutionary movement.

Students at Work ... Sort Of

It's that time of the semester. Old cameras in new hands, learning where the buttons are and what they do. Time to take the intro students on a brief walk-about, make them shoot ... well, nothing, really. Just get used to metering and focusing and firing off frames. 

There is nothing I can do in the classroom that will make them better at this than forcing them to shoot. Experience is not the best teacher, it is the only teacher when you're starting out. 

What have you shot today?

Southern Short Course in News Photography

The Southern Short Course in News Photography is coming up quickly - next week in Charlotte, N.C. See me about going and we'll help group folks to head up. 

17th annual Southwestern Photojournalism Conference

FYI ...

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is excited to host the 17th annual Southwestern Photojournalism Conference, Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009. The conference, supported by Christians in Photojournalism, benefits those who believe photojournalism is a calling and the act of bearing witness is essential. This year's speakers include Scott Strazzante, staff photographer for the Chicago Tribune; Bill Fortney of Nikon Professional Services; and Bob Carey, NPPA President and professor at Gardner-Webb University; as well as other experts in the field of photojournalism.

Register by January 31, 2009, for a $40 discount. Limited guest rooms are available at Southwestern's Riley Center (www.swbts.edu/RileyCenter), so make your reservations now. Portions of this year's event are sponsored by Canon, Nikon, and Chick-fil-A. Nikon Professional Services will be on site providing camera clean and checks. Additional conference information regarding registration, speakers and conference news, can be found at www.swpjc.org. We look forward to seeing you there.

Another (Former) Student Winner

From the in box ...

After Lindy (Dugger's) good news about scoring 2nd place for spot news in NPPA's monthly clip contest, I realized that I had placed third in NPPA's monthly multimedia contest! First place went to the The New York Times and second went to the St. Petersburg Times. Check me out. [Ed's. note: Lindy seems to have placed in third, but on two occasions ...]

I'm under the "Team Audio Slideshow" category because the reporter grabbed about 5 seconds of audio that I used...oh well.

iMovie Image Stabilization

The latest version of Apple's iMovie now has software image stabilization - and the results are, well, dramatic. 

I don't know how this works, I don't know if it's seriously degrading the quality or if it's better or worse than in-camera stabilization. But it is cool ... 

Streaming Video Hits New Records

CNN.com reports that Tuesday's presidential inauguration shattered records for online video streaming with 7.7 million people watching the event. 

(For the record, I wasn't one of them as I couldn't get the feed to load ... grr ...)

New View of the Inauguration

It may seem simple, but it means a lot to be able to get something different from a Presidential Inauguration. Chuck Kennedy managed to do it, with a low and wide remote shot from Tuesday's event.

UGA PJer in DC

Documentary Photography student Rachel Bailey has skipped out on class today to be in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration. (With my permission, for my class, at least.) She'll be bringing us a first-person report on the Grady Journal site this week, but in the meantime has managed to get two photos published on the New York Times' web site - one from Monday morning and another from Tuesday morning. 

Ms. Bailey is suffering from a bit of hypothermia and hyperbole, but said, "I just got in from the most frigid day of my life to find that (the second image on the Times' site). How come you never mention how much being a photojournalist feels like being a rock star?"

Well, somethings you need to figure out on your own ... 

Study Photojournalism in Berlin

John Freeman, at the University of Florida, sent along information on his May class that will be taught in Berlin this spring. I know one UGA student is already enrolled, and in 2005 several students went and reported it to be a great experience. (Work from that trip is still available for viewing.)

So why would I tell you about a May class elsewhere when we'll have one here? Several reasons, the first being it's a chance to travel abroad and see the world from a radically different perspective. But the larger reason is that it will let you learn about photojournalism from a different perspective. 

One of the weaknesses of our program here at UGA is that it is just one voice, one view. Getting to hear another view is critically important. Photojournalism can be approached and practiced from a lot of ways, not understanding that one photo can generate several different and valid responses might lead to a lot of frustration. 

Look at the work, look at the program. Time's a little short so get to it.