Picture Power: Portraits of Five Leading Press Photographers is a series of BBC Radio 4 programmes featuring famous press photographers and how they recorded one day.

Largely recorded in real time…. in the first programme James Hill of the New York Times gives up the chance to go to Libya in order to shoot the famous balcony kiss at this year’s royal wedding between Catherine Middleton and Prince William. “I don’t know if this was a reward, or a punishment. Perhaps it was both,”

It’s that time of the year again when British photographers have a good moan about the winners in the “Take a View” Landscape Photographer of the Year. The biggest selection of the winners seems to be here on Sky, but there

I really liked last year’s winner, didn’t think the previous year’s was really “landscape”, while this year’s winner by Robert Fulton is OK – he derserves congratulations despite my lacking enthusiasm. I think I just don’t care for the foreground. the lines yes, but I guess I would have been wanting the sun to illuminate them, and I think he’s got better wintry pictures like this. As for the rest, I’m not sure there’s another I would pick out – certainly not the old armchair in ruined house “landscape”. Maybe Adrian Hall’s Raw Teeth (image 19) or Tim Harvey’s Winter Storm (image 4). And in Sky’s selection there are a lot of rolling farmland pictures from the South Downs, an awful lot from Scotland, amazingly none from the Lake District – but thankfully not too much train and railway photography this year….

I suspect these guys were as bored with their Sunday as I was by my third visit (only) this year to Speakers Corner. I didn’t stay long and wandered off to nearby Oxford Street.

In a fascinating piece Why Would a Digital Camera Have a B&W-Only Sensor, Mike Johnson makes a case for such a camera. As he acknowledges, analogies often end up in arguments about the analogy, but I think the core is here:

Taking a color picture and converting it to B&W is trivial. What’s not trivial is learning how to see in B&W. To name one trivial effect, you stop being attracted to, and taking pictures of, pretty colors. Why? Because your camera can’t capture them. It ignores them. So you have to do so as well. Working with a camera that can convert color to B&W is not the same as working with a camera that cannot record color. The latter affects the way you see things when you’re out photographing. When you know that B&W is all the camera will do, then you start to ignore colors and see luminances, tonal relationships, surface, and structure. It’s a different way of seeing.

An analogous example is what happens to blind peoples’ hearing. It becomes more acute. When you “can’t see” color, your understanding of values becomes more acute.

Not everybody needs such a thing for their work. Only a small minority of people do. A small minority of those people are artists whose work might enrich the world.

I just don’t feel so confident that such a camera would be so beneficial in heightening the B&W sensibilities and bringing to the fore a few great artists in the medium. They already have the choice of Canon-DPP or Nikon-CaptureNX workflows – plus self-discipline – if they do want to deny themselves any possibility of ever seeing their pictures in colour, and I don’t see any sign of distinctive artists emerging through such self-imposed restrictions. But deep down I also still deny the concept or need to “learn to see in B&W”. It’s such cliché, so much that last week I noticed it being rolled out in at two “how to” articles online, and I’ve more-or-less forced to include it in each of my B&W books. I just don’t think you do need to learn to see, and it’s rather a matter of recognizing what looks good in B&W which can be done later in Lightroom or Photoshop. Much though I appreciate the virtue of manual labour, I don’t want to go back to lugging around two bodies or two (or three) film backs.

I hadn’t heard of Stephen Crowley before noticing this NY Times report on the East Coast earthquake and his accompanying series of pictures of the Washington Monument. According to this showcase page also on the NYT:

Stephen Crowley has spent most of his career masquerading as a newspaper photographer while producing idiosyncratic projects that push the boundaries of photojournalism and reveal unvarnished truths behind his most frequent subject: Washington politics.

Some of his pictures like this are wonderful observations. Others both clever and funny. Tell me if you don’t give you a laugh.

August’s Photo Professional carries the third of my four-part series on aspects of workflow.

This time I’m looking at raw processing but not from the usual angle of how to squeeze out the best image quality. Instead I discuss how to respond to the problems caused by having large numbers of raw files to process. So the article looks at how one can automate Photoshop and the pros and cons of actions, scripts, droplets and Configurator.

Eventually though you have to recognise that you’re trying rather too hard to turn a program designed to work on one image into a batch processing tool worthy of Heath Robinson (Rube Goldberg). So the article then looks at the role the new workflow tools such as Lightroom and Aperture.

September’s article, a sceptic’s guide to colour management and soft proofing, is already submitted.

See The shot that nearly killed me, a Guardian special report where war photographers talk about their profession (not sure that’s the word). There are some horrific pictures and lots of comments like “I’d just finished a master’s in photojournalism and thought I’d go to Pakistan to cover the elections.” or “This is the last picture I took before I got shot”, but probably the most shocking words were from João Silva who continued taking pictures after stepping on a mine:

I’ve spent enough time out there for my number to come up. I was one of the few who kept going back to Iraq. People think you do this to chase adrenaline. The reality is hard work and a lot of time alone. Firefights can be exciting, I’m not going to lie, but photographing the aftermath of a bomb, when there’s a dead child and the mother wailing over the corpse, isn’t fun. I’m intruding on the most intimate moments, but I force myself to do it because the world has to see those images. Politicians need to know what it looks like when you send young boys to war. If it’s humanly possible, if the prosthetics allow me, I’ll go back to conflict zones. I wish I was in Libya at the moment, without a shadow of a doubt.

Via @Russian_Photos (Jeremy Nicholl)

Also see Inside Sarajevo: A photographer’s tale by Anja Niedringhaus who photographed in Sarajevo (pictures here).

A striking image jumped off the front of the latest Cam magazine yesterday. At first I thought it might be a restored painting, as Cam usually contains articles on historical and academic subjects, but as soon as I realised it was a photograph I lost no time in tracking down its creator. That was Christian Tagliavini and apparently he carefully constructs his mise-en-scenes:

Swiss-Italian, born in 1971, educated in Italy and Switzerland, where he lives and works as an graphic designer and a photographer. This provides him the perfect frame and background to invent, create and totally produce images that blend fine arts and craftsmanship.

No, not simply images, as Christian Tagliavini loves designing stories with open endings (requiring observer’s complicity) on unexplored themes or unusual concepts, featuring uncommon people with their lives and their thoughts made visible. This rich and exciting collision of circumstances results in photos as a final product.

I also liked his Dame di Cartone series where he created costumes from cardboard, but the picture shown here was from last year’s 1503 series. One curious aspect was how they all seem to have very long necks. Is that coincidence, or is it by design? I’m not sure, but it certainly encourages one’s “complicity”.

Andrew Burton has some interesting thoughts Regarding Parachute Journalism:

Accusers of parachute journalists say, “they fly into hotspots around the globe, enter cultures they have no understanding of, work in places where they don’t speak the language, tell surface level stories of what has occurred and leave before the story has truly been completed.” Accusers say, “this style of watered-down news turns major stories that deserve in-depth, localized reporting into pop-trivia facts and catch phrases for the nightly news.”

Having just been to Egypt for their revolution, and now Japan, those comments hit me pretty hard. I find myself thinking, “jeez, I don’t want to be a part of that, those parachute journalists sound like terrible people.” And to an extent, their accusers are correct – to turn those accusations on myself: I don’t speak Arabic or Japanese, I don’t know a lot about Egyptian or Japanese culture, and I haven’t been able to stay in either country to tell the long term stories about what happens after the biggest events occur.

Maybe he shouldn’t beat himself up too much. At least he’s trying to make it more than just a job.

Just been listening to Max Milligan on Excess Baggage talking with Beirut hostage John McCarthy about his Lebanon project and discussing the artistic rather than a photo-journalistic motives behind his pictures. When you make pictures such as this, I’m wondering if there’s any conflict at all between the two.

Also see Robert Fisk’s article. “Max Milligan’s imperishable photographs of Lebanon – and I have to say that he has sought out things that I have either never seen or have forgotten in the 34 years I have lived here – do not avoid the war”

From the opening paragraphs of Don Whitebread’s fascinating Yemen: A Leap Back in Time, and a Creative Transition it’s obvious it wouldn’t be the usual type of landscape photography porn  :

I love a good adventure, but that usually involves the Great American West, not some place with tribal kidnappings and Al Qaeda training camps. What finally turned the tide was reading the first chapters of the book Joshua was writing about his experiences in Yemen, and realizing that this was a place and culture unlike any I had imagined, and the opportunity of a lifetime. Risk was overwhelmed by curiosity, and the chance to photograph, guided by an insider’s knowledge, in an unknown place on the other side of the world.

There are more wonderful pictures of Yemen, and lots more excellent b&w landscapes, on his web site.

You’d think I was Chinese if you knew how often I seem to be killing time before a dim sum, but a damp Sunday morning is also good for getting to an exhibition so yesterday I nipped into the National Portrait Gallery for the Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize (I saw Jason Bell‘s An Englishman in New York show too).

What did I think? Well, it was OK, not too bad. Plenty of fine portraits such as this one of Charlie Waite or Felix Carpio’s Wafa, but nothing that really wowed me (Bell’s show had a few stunners). I suppose I wasn’t too taken with the predominance of not-quite-heroin-chic – undernourished bored-looking people stuck onto drab environments (for example). Nowhere near enough b&w either, though I liked Sylvain Deleu’s gymnast (better ones on his web site?) and far too many pictures claiming to be “explorations”.

The winner itself doesn’t do much for me. The subject matter, a teenage girl who has just killed her first wild animal for sport, is well-framed and provocative. I couldn’t help feeling the picture would have been stronger if she’d found some other animal to slaughter – the bock’s chestnut brown fur doesn’t stand out against the horse’s chestnut browns. It does match her hair though. So again, that’s faint praise for the winning entry. But even seen in the flesh I still couldn’t work out what made the judges choose the runner-up – an artfully-casual composition personal snap showing the photographer’s wife (oh she’s British) having her breakfast with her legs wide open. Is it art or “readers wives”?

So a pretty underwhelming view, but if you’re in central London it’s a small but worthwhile show – and the ticket costs less than the price of a prawn cheung fun (though there are three on each plate).

Take a look at two excellent articles by David Riecks – The Top 12 Myths about Embedded Photo Metadata and Why Embedded Photo Metadata Won’t Help Your SEO (at least without some help) :

There have been several recent articles, such as “The Definitive Guide to SEO for Images: 6 Steps to Image-Ranking Success” by Stephen Chapman, and “How To Add Embedded Meta Data To Your Images For Relevant Image Search” from NateBal, that recommend adding embedded information to the images on your website in order to enhance your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). While the idea certainly has merit, and I’m all for encouraging the practice of added embedded metadata to increase findability and protect intellectual property, there is one hitch to what they propose. That hitch is that while it is possible for automated search bots to be configured to read the embedded photo metadata embedded in digital images, there is no evidence to suggest that the search engines are currently doing this; nor is there any evidence that it will help with the SEO for your images or your website — at least not without some additional work.

That’s some hole in the SEO advice, don’t you think?

I know David tried pretty hard to make comments on those blogs. Maybe their moderators deemed his posts were too lengthy, or too densely-worded, but I’ve little doubt they were proper and polite ways of “calling BS”. And people wonder why SEO has a “negative stigma”?

This is probably going to be the memorable image of Wednesday’s student demo in central London, but as Ciara Leeming writes, almost all picture desks have used the same, rather misleading crop:

It might just be me but the wider view poses some interesting questions about the media’s role in events like this demo. Without all the photographers egging on people like this student, or EDL meatheads on extreme right-wing marches, would this kind of drama happen to the extent it does?

….Maybe they [picture editors]  just think it’s the better photo, that it tells the story better. I happen to disagree. The wide shot tells me everything I need to know and more. As the print business continues to evaporate, there seems to be a collective will to collude, self-censor,  and avoid – at all costs – taking a critical stance on its own role and behaviour. Maybe it was always thus, I don’t know.

I think Ciara has a point, but I do wonder if it’s too much of an examination of established journalism’s own navel. After all, you don’t need a colluding photojournalist to create the story. We’re in an era when a camera of some kind is in everyone’s hands, and it matters little if the person holding it earns a living from taking pictures or is just an innocent bystander with an cellphone – the event will still happen and be reported.

Also…

See Ciara Leeming’s own site and particularly her pictures of Appleby Horse Fair, the annual travellers’ gathering up in the wilds of rural Cumbria. Perhaps needlessly, I felt a bit on edge the only time I went there, and though I was struck by how the travelling girls were all (fake?) tanned and glammed-up in shocking pink, I didn’t feel “allowed” to photograph them. Ciara’s really captured this less well known aspect of Appleby.

Though the spark may come from having enjoyed OK Computer in the car the same day as watching a Black Sabbath documentary on the BBC, a couple of recent posts seemed worth bundling into one gloom-filled diatribe. In one, Mark Wilson is having to bury one of his Lua progeny and writes an obituary “Death of a Lighroom plug-in”:

Earlier this week drop.io announced that it was acquired by Facebook and will be stopping its excellent file sharing and collaboration service.

This in turn has the effect of killing all the great products that were created based on the drop.io platform…including my Photo-drop Lr plug-in for Adobe Lightroom.

I’ve never used drop.io (and dislike Facebook with a growing intensity) but I heard about the acquisition earlier in the week and my alarming first thought was that it was something connected to Dropbox, which I do use. As far as I can tell, they are totally-unrelated services, so alarm over. Or not quite – cloud storage leaves you at the system owner’s mercy. And will that ever change?

"Sharing" sounds so sweet and innocent, but is there any other defence to how social media corporates treat your metadata?

The second post was on photo sharing services. Circle of Confusion’s Beware Social Media Platforms That Steal Big License Rights zooms in on the small print which could very easily allow the service provider to make money from using your pictures. For some of us this isn’t news, and when I was writing the Morel case post I actually read through Twitpic’s current terms and conditions, a series of interlocking loopholes to which the only defence seems to be sharing your pictures only once they are defaced with a nice big copyright watermark. But the other thing to mention is that it’s not just the terms and conditions that you need to watch – it’s also what happens to your metadata.

Here I would point you to David Riecks’s hugely-valuable ongoing survey Preservation of Photo Metadata by Social Media Websites. Make sure you look at the spreadsheet showing his findings, and also see the comment about Facebook’s stripping of metadata which describes it as “an overly aggressive attempt to comply with the users’ wishes for better privacy”.

Corporates like Facebook are really in a no-win situation and simply cannot be expected to be right in every case when they strip or preserve image metadata. For every photographer who must hide that they shot a great picture on an embarrassingly-crap camera, there will be someone else wanting to share the minutiae of exposure settings down to the D-Lighting, whatever that may be. Family members’ names, GPS co-ordinates and other location details, or simply the photographer’s own name can all be argued each way in different circumstances. Strip or preserve decisions are always individual judgement calls. Even if we (hypothetically) discount evil greed from the web service’s thinking process, “they” will never get it right and will always make wrong assumptions to delete or preserve certain metadata. Or they’ll just do something accidentally and without thinking of all the consequences.

I’m not absolving the social media corporates from responsibility for preserving metadata or from informing you of their policies in readable English, but would you ever trust any business whose future depends on monetising personal data? Even if their current terms appear reasonable and seem to protect everyone, will you pick up the implications when they subsequently change them? After all,we’re in a world where a sweet little “Search for your friends?” means “Can we data mine your email client?” And CollegeStartup.inc could easily be snapped up by Google or Apple or someone else with their own particular attitudes to your personal information (I’m not really picking on Facebook but they are already part-owned by mail.ru). Even if their small print doesn’t sign your life away, they’ll strip you bare and sell your worldly goods. Look after yourself.

The Financial Times used to be almost daily reading material…. OK, that’s a lie, despite my murky past, but I came across this article on the market for fine art photography concentrating on Annie Liebowitz’s predicament. Given how much she has enjoyed access to subjects who would attract collectors:

Leibovitz thus has the potential to do what Avedon and Penn did – to become as highly valued as an artist as a commercial photographer. The fact that she has not achieved it, so far at least, is because of something more vital than access, maybe even talent. It is something that has bedevilled the photography world from the technology’s earliest days. She lacks rarity value.

While in a sense it’s a matter of her having created too many well-known images, I can’t help but feel that with a bit of marketing spin such as “limited edition printed by Buddhist monks on 1 kilo platinum-infused paper stock” you’d attract Russian oligarchs and money launderers or Abu Dhabi sheikhs who’ll pay big money for any old crap. But perhaps the moral is that to maximise your fine art collectability you shouldn’t work so hard, or just go crazy and burn your negs?

Not long ago I spent a great afternoon in the V&A examining 19th century tintypes and ambrotypes – I also got to see a few daguerreotypes – and it’s an amazing collection. But its online resources are put in the shade by the Library of Congress, which is just as well since it’s the wrong side of the pond, and I’ve blogged before about the wonderful Prokudin-Gorskii collection of early colour images which you can download as red, green and blue channel TIFs and re-assemble in Photoshop.

Almost equally special is the newly acquired Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Portraits, almost 700 tintypes and ambrotypes:

Among the rarest images are African Americans in uniform, sailors, a Lincoln campaign button, and portraits of soldiers with their wives and children. A few personal stories survived in notes pinned to the photo cases, but most of the people and photographers are unidentified. Tom Liljenquist donated the entire collection to the Library in 2010. An exhibition of the collection will commemorate the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War in April 2011.

All the images can be downloaded as TIFs, so you can have a really close look. And just check out some of those picture frames! Well done Mr Liljenquist.

Via

AFP v Morel looks like being a fascinating case. As Duckrabbit says:

So what argument are the photo agencies presenting in court which gives them the ‘right’ to continue to distribute and profit from these photographs without the photographers consent?

They presented two in court:

1. The terms and condition of Twitter (yes I know the photos were published on TWITPIC and so did the judge) allow photo agencies a license to take and profit from the photos.
2. That unless photographs have copyright embedded into them in written form then agencies have the right to distribute those photos for profit.

The first point is clearly nonsense, because Twitter doesn’t host photos.  AFP argued that Twitter’s terms and conditions were applicable to TWITPIC because of the way the two sites are linked.  It’s pretty obvious from the transcript that the judge was having none of it. It’s the second point that matters.

What AFP are arguing is that any picture on the web that doesn’t have the name of the photographer actually on the photograph is fair game for them to take and sell. The irony is that if this was true there would be nothing to stop me from stealing the photographs off  Reportage By Getty Images (the photos are niether watermarked, nor have the name of the photographer printed on the image) and then selling them on.

Hey, it’s my blog and I’ll make a bad pun if I feel like it!

Can’t wait to see the Eadweard Muybridge exhibition at Tate Britain (the old Tate):

Look closely at a stunning image of the Yosemite valley with its striking cloud formation; then look at a photograph taken a year later of a lighthouse at Pigeon Point in California – the sky is the same. A stunning image of Lake Tenaya, similarly, has had additional rocks added to its foreground, evident because they’re differently lit.

“He was doing all sorts of things to manipulate his images, from cutting and pasting and different negatives laid in,” said Warrell. “He would also have people touching up his photographs, improving them, painting out imperfections. He was a master of blending different elements.”

Also see “Feet off the ground“.

I’m busy for the next few weekends but the show runs until January. With my usual apology as a non-Londoner for those not living in London….

Rally for Concerned Photographers is a protest by Australian photographers in Sydney this Sunday. Nick Rains explains the big deal:

It’s about it being a criminal offence to sell a photo you have taken of all sorts of places like Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, Bondi Beach, any National Park and so on. Even if you are an enthusiast who happens down the track to have the opportunity to get an image published, or even win a prize in a competition.

This affects both pros and amateurs alike, not to mention it making it very difficult for a pro to do any sort of travel or street photography with out being pestered by council employees or having people assume you are a pedophile.

And another thing, it’s really tedious for camera buffs with half decent cameras to be assumed to be pros when out following their hobby. This means they get approached all the time by over zealous officials and have to defend their rights to go about their lawful pursuits.

As with the Photographer Not a Terrorist campaign in the UK, the less one distinguishes between “amateurs” and “professionals” the better.