Karla's Quinceañera Portraits

The Quinceañera is a right of passage for a young woman.  It not only signifies her fifteenth birthday, but also her passage into adulthood.

The venue for Karla's quince was the Nueva Vida First Evengelical Free Church in Southwest Austin.  This beautiful church offers stunning archways and corridors of native Texas limestone, an incredible backdrop for such a beautiful young woman.

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

Progression of the Angel

Street performing, also known as busking, is a centuries old profession likened to the work of troubadours. Performers range from mimes, to clowns, balloon men to fire-breathers, sword swallowers to contortionists, the list goes on.

This tableau vivant has a rich tradition in places like on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado and at Jackson Square in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana.

One such street performer, Gabbie Burns, is a living statue of an Angel.

A Photo a Day

As a member of the UTNPPA we took part in a project called A Photo A Day. It's not a new concept to be shooting a picture a day, but these pictures are different. They are more personal and meant to expand personal vision.

There is a group that started in Florida called APAD. I learned of the them when I was working as a photojournalists for the Daytona Beach News Journal. A lot of times there are images we were unable to publish in the newspaper for whatever reason so we published them online at APAD.

We decided to do a photo a day to inspire us to look at the world around us and to be shooting every day. The first week I started out with my M6 shooting black and white. Then I moved over to my Canon digital for the second half.

The FSA Fab Fotogs

When I began studying photography at the University of Texas School of Journalism I quickly learned about the FSA photographers. The Farm Security Administraion photographs are some of the most well known in the American collective consience. The FSA sent photographers to locations across the US with the mission to bring back images that would explain to Congress what the American public was facing during the Great Depression.

There were about twelve photographers altogether working under economist Roy Stryker. The FSA was part of the New Deal program to combat joblessness in America.

A few of the most famous photographs are from Dorthea Lange who incidentally was fired and rehired a number of times by Stryker.

Dorthea Lange, Migrant Mother

Gordon Parks

Arthur Rothstein

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