What is Multimedia?

Do a Google search for the term multimedia and you will get thousands of results that don't give a clear definition. What is multimedia anyway? Is it a Flash gallery on a website, SoundSlides? Animation, sound, and text in a combined slide show? Video on the internet? A gallery of photographs that are navigable? Is it all of these?

Multimedia is many things. It is multifaceted, multifunctional, multicultural, multifarious, multinational, multidimensional, multidisciplinary, multilingual, multipurpose, multiplayer.

As a photojournalist today potential employers want candidates to possess skills in producing audio visual slideshows, short video clips in Final Cut Pro, and flash presentations. The National Press Photographers Association offers a Multimedia Immersion Workshop May 18-22 in Syracuse, NY.

Like learning a new language photographers learning Multimedia must be immersed into it. In today's competitive job market it is sink or swim. For students like me it's great to have a resource like the website www.MultimediaStandards.org

Eddie Adams Film Screening October 28 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM

South Vietnamese Police Chief Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan is shown executing a Viet Cong Officer with a single pistol shot in the head Feb 1. The Viet Cong officer grimaces at the impact of the fatal bullet.

"When I saw the picture I was not impressed, and I'm still not impressed," said Eddie Adams of the picture that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1969.

Eddie Adams, who died in 2004, is one of the most well known photojournalists of our time known for his war photography of 13 wars. This year the film An Unlikely Weapon: The Eddie Adams Story, directed by Susan Morgan Cooper, was released. A trailer of the film is available at "An Unlikely Weapon" Trailer from American Photo on Vimeo.

It will be screened on October 28th at the Blanton Museum of Art.

In addition to the screening of the filml, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History which holds a number of photojournalist's collections recently aquired the archive of Eddie Adams from his widow.

Twenty-two years ago Adams started The Eddie Adams Workshop or Barnstorm. It is one of the most prestigious photographic workshops in the country. Admitting only 100 students, the tuition free workshop takes place every October.

"This radical alteration is photo fakery. " David Hume Kennerly

This cropped photo left the photojournalist David Hume Kennerly, of Getty Images, disappointed with its usage. "The meat on the cutting board wasn’t the only thing butchered," wrote Kennerly on his blog, "Lens: Photography, Video and Visual Journalism." When Cheney is taken out of context does this make the viewer/reader understand something other than reality? What is the reality of this situation? Cheney was indeed cutting meat, but does the lack of context imply a different meaning?

Seething Kennerly goes on to write about the denigration of photojournalism by unscrupulous editors who choose to alter the meaning of the news to fit their own interpretation and therby causing the public to mistrust the media.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/essay-9/?partner=rss&emc=rss