Department of Defense - Military Photographer of the Year Awards

The Department of Defense runs an annual competition for all military photographers, called MilPhog. The latest results are now online - good chance to see what combat photographers work on.

(And three of my former students have done well - Stacy Pearsall, David Murphy and Christopher Stoltz were all in the Military Photojournalism program at Syracuse University when I was there.)

Leicas, free film and a pixelated future

It's an odd day here in Athens. This morning, I took four boxes of frozen Fujicolor film out of the freezer and brought them to work. In a few short hours, I'll be handing out the seven year old film to some of my students who are experimenting with their parents 35mm cameras.

I've moved this film from freezer to freezer since 2002, leftovers from when my newspaper went digital in 2001. With the sale of my beloved Leica M6 in January (and subsequent purchase of a Nikon D200 - the most amazing camera I think Nikon has ever made), I have no use for 35 mm film anymore. Sure, I still have my original Nikon F3HP - brassed beyond recognition - on a shelf, along with a battered FM2 and a well worn N8008s, all workhorses of my shooting days. And the Pentax Spotmatic that my dad taught me to shoot on is still in my possession, along with a couple of point-and-shoot play things.

But my days of being a film photographer are pretty much over. The Leica sale came after the realization that I had shot 12 rolls of film in 2006. One a month. Hard to justify keeping a lot of money tied up in one camera for one image a day.

And then, today, over on The Online Photographer is an entry praising Leica for creating the M8 - the digital rangefinder (that I admit to lusting after, but the price ... the price ...). And I think the piece is a good read, because it talks about learning the craft, of experimenting - something I'm not sure a lot of us are doing any more.

When was the last time you went out and played with light? But images down to just see the images?

That's what I thought ...

(And in a semi-related tone, Greg Mironchuk up in Massachusetts has a great series of pages about equipment and craft, well worth spending some time on. I'm a big fan of Mironchuk.)

USA Today has been assimilated ...

In this era of rights-grabbing work-for-hire contracts, USA Today was a refreshing break. A fair wage for one-time usage, a payment schedule for re-use on the web or in print. It was a good deal - the paper got high quality work from respected journalists and those journalist received decent pay for their work.

That's changed according to an article on Photo District News' web site.

*Disclaimer - I was emailed the new contract last week as I have freelanced for USA Today in the past. The very distant past - 2000, I believe.

twitter.com - World's Greatest Time Suck

I listen to a couple of podcats each week (MacBreak Weekly and This Week in Tech) and they've been yammering on and on about twitter.com ... so I decided to try it.

There is no reason to do this. Absolutely none. Yet, here I am ...

So, there must be a reason ... right? Productivity monitoring, perhaps?

The New York Times - on the move, literally

The Gray Lady is pulling up stakes - and moving in to a news building in the city that never sleeps. After a century at 229 West 43rd Street, staffers are beginning to move to a new tower at Seventh Avenue and 41st Street.

Why is this important? The new building represents as much of a philosphical shift in the Times as a geographic one. In the new building, online will be integrated across the board - multimedia producers will sit on all desks, brainstorming ways of getting the news out faster. The NY Observer has an interesting take on the changes, well worth a read.

I liked this quote from Jill Abramson, managing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, about the move and the shift:

“The biorhythms were set to the newspaper. What everyone thought about first, and sometimes thought about only, was the Platonic ideal for a newspaper story.”

Saving Texas newspapers

Vicki Vaughn of the San Antonio Express-News writes that newspaper expers are saying they "must engineer their own transformation" in a story about a Texas editors meeting.

Say it together - progress or perish. Choose one, then do it well.

Biased photos in Cleveland?

Ted Diadiun at the Cleveland Plain Dealer takes on the question of biased political photos in a recent column. Readers had been complaining that images of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice always seemed to make her look bad, so he asked the photo editor to take a look at the last year's worth of published images. The results will ... well, go find out.

For what it's worth, while I spent a large chunk of my shooting career doing sports and politics, I don't ever remember making a conscious decision to make one candidate look better than another. Did it happen? Probably. But I never chose sides while shooting, I always tried to shoot the event.