Mary Ellen Mark...

Profoto on Set with Iconic Mary Ellen Mark from Profoto USA on Vimeo.

Mary Ellen Mark, another one of my favourite photographers has gained worldwide visibility through her numerous books and exhibitions where she has addressed such difficult social issues as homelessness, loneliness, drug addiction and prostitution.

Working primarily with analogue camera's using black and white film, she has travelled the world extensively taking pictures that clearly demonstrate a high level of commitment and humanism. It is exactly what you will see from the above video, where Mary passes on some sage advice and you really get to appreciate her persona and begin to understand why she achieves such stunning and touching imagery.

It would not be time wasted, investigating further the work of this master photographer.

Stephen Dupont...

Stephen Dupont an Australian born Photojournalist and portrait photographer has received many international awards for his amazing work over the years.

Not only is he a great photographer he also produces hand made books of his images and exhibits extensively.

His passion for Afganistan, a country he has visited for over fifteen years almost cost him his life with a suicide bomber attack outside a police station he was visiting at that moment.

He also appears to have an amazing ability to connect with his subjects and project a level of trust and compassion which allows him to get close to people often in the most dangerous and marginalized regions of the world.

In the video below you will see him taking polaroids of people in the middle of Kabul with a Polaroid Land camera, his approach with respect to his book making and some of his portraits of members of the notoriously dangerous and violent 'Red Devils' gang from Papua New Guinea, an image of which you can see above.

Stephen Dupont Profile - ABC Sunday Arts from Stephen Dupont on Vimeo.

Pep Bonet...

Found out about this guy from the 500 Photographers website (by the way this is definitely one of the pages you should visit daily), and what really struck me was his approach to photography, travel and I suppose in a way, life in general.

Whilst War/Disaster photography is always difficult to view and digest, and almost always leads to questions regarding the morality of the photographers involved, I think its worth to see the video above and take a bit more of a look into the work and philosophy of Pep Bonet.

In the bag with David Burnett...

In The Bag with photographer David Burnett from PhotoShelter.com on Vimeo.

We've spoken about David Burnett in the past, recently I came across this series on Photoshelter which gets various photographers to open and explain what they have in their camera bags. Always interesting to have a nose around in the bag of a professional photographer.

One in 8 million...

The New York Times has a fascinating feature called 'One in 8 million' which is an oral history project in which a different individual among New York City's 8 million residents is profiled each week of 2009. The criteria chosen by the NYT to profile subjects is "Interesting person. Great talker. Never before mentioned in the NYT."

Its a fascinating series with a mixture of human interest stories with great photo reportage.

You can check out all the featured New Yorkers here and if you want to know some more background regarding the whole concept take a look here.

Word Press Photo Awards

The Word Press Photo Awards 2008 were announced yesterday. Have a look to the winner.

You can review the whole list of winners for the different categories here.

http://www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=blogsection&id=19&Itemid=223&bandwidth=high

Have fun.

Ricardo

David Burnett - "He's been everywhere, but only for an hour"...

I'm always on the look out for inspiration and idea's from fellow photographers around the world and I recently came across the work of David Burnett.

A photojournalist for over 35 years he is well published in Time, Fortune and ESPN Magizines. Was co-founder of Contact Press Images and has received various awards such as 'Photographer of the Year', 'World Press Photographer of the Year' and the ' Robert Capa Award' to name just a few.

Having read various interviews regarding his work, It was very interesting to hear him describe that nowadays all the photojournalists basically use the same digital SLR's with the same set of 4 lens.... and that he wanted to do something different.

What this meant was that he started photographing assignments with Holga's (a plastic camera from China), Rolleiflex TLR's (the de-facto professional camera from the 60's) and the Speed Graphic, which you see him pictured with above.

This camera, apart from being large, heavy and from the fifties, is made more unusual with the choice of lens, the Kodak Aero.

This lens was primarily used during the second world war for aerial reconnaissance. What is so special about this large format lens is that its minimum aperture is F2.5 which is almost impossible to find in a 'normal' large format collection of lenses as you need a lot of glass to get that much light in.!

This combination of minimum aperture on a 5x4 camera means that you get 'bokeh' to die for in your images and was what attracted me to his work.

Since that point I have discovered a whole underground of people using this combination. Definitely something to investigate further......

Anyway, hats off to David for daring to do something different and showing that 'digital' can't do everything after all....

World Press Photographer of the Year Winners...

This image of a US soldier in Afghanistan was chosen over more than 80,000 other images to win the World Press Photo Contest for 2007.

'This image shows the exhaustion of a man – and the exhaustion of a nation,' said Gary Knight chairman of the judging panel.

Apparently this year more than 5,000 photographers entered.

All the images of all the winners can be found here.

The Marlboro Marine...

Mediastorm have their latest presentation of the effect that the Iraq war has had on Marine Lance Corporal James Blake Miller.

The presentation documents both his time in Iraq and his coming to terms with what he did and saw upon his return home. Plus the coming together of a soldier and photojournalist under extreme circumstances...

Pulitzer 2007

Hi everybody

As all of you probably know, the Pulitzer prize awards relevant works in journalism. This year, the prize in the category of "breaking news photography" has gone to Oded Bality for this picture.

A sin the previous post about photography and ethics, I will say nothing else about it and let you judge by yourselves. The picture is impressing anyway.

You can read the full record in

http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2007/breaking-news-photography/works/

Vulture photo

I have read an article that is not about techniques or filters. I am almost sure you all can recognize the photo of a vulture behind a near death girl in Africa. It gained a lot of prizes (Pulitzer for example) and it showed a real situation in that continent.

But reality can have several faces. In this article we can see a bit about... ethical photography? It is lawful to show only what you want, or should your photos reflect the real situation?

In this case, the photographer decided to show a terrific, but not very truthful, photo. Instead of gimp/photoshop he used a "legal" camera technique.

It is up to you to decide.

Link - Enlace



PS: The articule is in Spanish

Heaven, Earth, Tequila....

Mediastorm, a company attempting to mix photojournalism with story telling, has some fantastic presentations on their website which bring together music, narrative and the latest slide show techniques... This presentation in particular I find absolutely stunning (click image to view)



.....and after you have finished with this one its definitely worth the time to investigate further the other presentations available... enjoy...