TTP Recap of the Week

For your convenience, here's the past week's (April 28 - May 4, 2008) most popular posts on TTP:

Photog's Togs
PDN's 46 Reasons To Love Photography
John Stanmeyer:Malaria: NG Award

Read more »

Frederic Lagrange: Travel

Photograph © Frederic Lagrange-All Rights Reserved
Frederic LaGrange is based in Brooklyn, and specializes in portraiture, travel, and fashion photography. He started in fashion, but found his true calling in travel photography. He balances his commercial assignments for international magazines, such as Travel and Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Destinations, and Vogue, with personal projects, such as a reportage on the people and land of Mongolia.

This is the meticulous work of a commercial photographer, and from his many galleries one can immediately sense that these carefully composed images are destined for the pages of glossy travel magazines.

I suggest you visit all of his Voyage galleries, then his Portraits where his Mongolia images are. Lagrange says that he became obsessed with Mongolia, especially because of Genghis Khan, because of its historical dominance of the known world from Europe to Japan and Siberia to Indonesia; its beautiful landscape; and the amazing faces and features of its people.

Read more »

Terry Sebastian: 30 Days Africa

Photograph © Terry Sebastian-All Rights Reserved
Canadian photographer Terry Sebastian is involved in the international educational, arts and travel & tourism community, and his images have appeared in a large number of published projects, in the private and public sector, and in the tourism industry in Africa. He creates multi-image shows, utilizing music, video and photography, and completed many audio-visual projects and print material for various industries.

30 Days Africa features a Soundslides gallery (why is it the demo version?) of some of Terry's images from a photographic journey into the wilds of the countries of Botswana, South Africa, and Tanzania.

Read more »

New York Photo Festival

New York City is finally getting its very own major photo festival with the inaugural New York Photo Festival on May 14-18, 2008. Despite its countless galleries, photo agencies, studios, history of magazine publishing and reputation for breeding leading photographers, New York lacked its own a major festival of photography, but powerHouse Books and VII Photo Agency are launching the new, annual New York Photo Festival, and the first international-level festival of photography to be based in the U.S.

The New York Photo Festival will be headquartered in DUMBO, an easily accessible neighborhood on the Brooklyn waterfront between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.

Read more »

PDN's 46 Reasons To Love Photography

The May 2008 issue of Photo District News magazine landed in my mailbox with a thud. The magazine has 264 pages so it's quite heavy...and it has a number of interesting articles including the Photo Annual 2008. But the one that immediately caught my eye is the "46 Reasons To Love Photography Now"; a compilation by the magazine's editors and writers of things that make photography as rewarding and exciting as ever. Most of the 46 reasons are predictable to some degree, many are sensible and some are quirky.

I won't list all the 46 reasons here, but those I liked are:

#4. National Geographic magazine. (Nobody else does what the National Geographic does, and after its impressive awards this year, no one can argue with that choice).

#6. The Multimedia Triumvirate: Soundslides, Final Cut Pro and Flash. (Tools that revolutionized documentary photojournalism. I'm an unabashed fan of Soundslides).

#15. You Don't Have To Wear A Necktie. (A long scarf or Kaffiyeh is considered a part of the uniform. I laud the values of having a Khmer scarf in a previous post).

#26. B&H Photo's Overhead Conveyors. (Anyone who shopped/visited at B&H knows how efficient -and futuristic- these overhead conveyors are).

#44. Online Photo Essays. (The Web made it possible for photographers to publish long form photo essays).

Read more »

Lightroom 2.0: Decision Time

Well, time does fly. It's been a month since I signed on to try Lightroom 2.0 which means that the free trial period is over, and I now have to decide whether to buy it for $300.

There are many websites that offer tutorials, and here's one recommended to me by Dave Thompson, a regular reader of this blog and who frequently offers me his insight on photography.

Julieanne Kost's Lightroom Tutorials

I still have some free time on my Aperture trial period, which I'm still fiddling with. Despite Aperture's "fit" with Apple software, I am leaning heavily towards Lightroom.

For a comparison of the two, check Gavin Gough's post on the matter. I won't divulge his preference, but I found his analogy to be interesting:

"If they (Lightroom and Aperture) were people, Lightroom would be a dour, stodgy Yorkshire lass sitting in the corner of a smoke-filled, dingy pub drinking Stout and Babycham whilst fingering her moustache and mumbling at her whippet, whilst Aperture would be a leggy blonde model perched elegantly on a stool in the corner of a Soho wine bar, sexily sipping a cocktail before beckoning you over to her table with a smouldering pout and a suggestively raised eyebrow.

I reckon I'm a Yorkshire lass kind of guy.

Read more »

John Stanmeyer: Malaria: NG Award

Photograph © John Stanmeyer-All Rights Reserved
The National Geographic magazine won three National Magazine awards; the general excellence in a publication with over 2 million circulation (the top honor), as well as the awards for reporting and photojournalism. This was more than any other publication, and the most that the magazine has won in a single year.

The awards, presented during a ceremony at New York City's Jazz at Lincoln Center, are the industry's most prestigious honor. The general excellence award is based on NGM's June, August and December issues.

The photojournalism award, which honors John Stanmeyer's photographs in the "Bedlam in the Blood: Malaria also names Senior Editor David Griffin, Deputy Director Susan A. Smith, Design Director David C. Whitmore and Senior Photo Editor Sarah Leen. The article ran in the July 2007 NGM.

I'm pleased that John's photographs were recognized with this prestigious award. His work is consistently superb, and he is -in my view- among the best photojournalists/photographers in the industry. I chose the above photograph from the many in the Malaria gallery to highlight John's compositional 'eye'.

There's also a section Field Notes which shares John's best, quirkiest and worst experiences from the Malaria assignment.

Read more »

Gateway of the Gypsies

Here is a trailer for "Jaisalmer Ayo! Gateway of the Gypsies" (2004), a 54-minute piece by documentarians Melitta Tchaicovsky and Pepe Ozan. The documentary follows nomadic castes in India. The trailer's soundtrack is of a Rebari song. I really like this type of song and music...Regrettably, I don't understand any of the words but I'd like to think that it's all about chivalry, heroism and bravery. Many wandering minstrels can be seen during the Pushkar fair, where they perform similar songs.

Melitta Tchaicovsky and Pepe Ozan spent seven months traveling with members of nomadic castes in Rajasthan, in northwest India, filming as they trekked to the capital, Jaisalmer, a 12th-century fort city on the edge of the Thar Desert. The documentary is an exploration of the challenges these people face, as well as the ethnic and cultural link between these Indian nomads and the Romany peoples of Europe and around the world.

This reminds me of Robyn Davidson, the Australian woman who lived with the nomadic Rebari tribes of Rajasthan. She wrote a book of her experiences titled "Desert Places". A brief review of the book is here

Read more »

The Barbican: Homeland Lost

Photograph © Alan Gignoux-All Rights Reserved
The Barbican Arts Centre in the heart of the city of London is showing Homeland Lost, an exhibition consisting of 16 black and white images taken by the photojournalist Alan Gignoux. These photographs of Palestinian refugees, displaced from their homes by Israel in 1948, are an artistic slice of life from a dramatic point in Middle Eastern history.

The photographs provide "an antidote to a western media saturated with images of exiled Palestinians as either extremists or victims, whereas the majority are individuals trying to build a life for themselves in complex circumstances.

Homeland Lost shows from 18 April 2008 - 2 May 2008.

The Independent newspaper reports that "Jonathan Hoffman, of the Jewish umbrella group the Zionist Federation, has complained to the London arts venue's director Nicholas Kenyon about captions accompanying the photos, which state that the 800,000 Palestinians who left their homes were "uprooted" and "dispossessed". He accused the Barbican of "falsifying" history.

Mr Hoffman is also quoted as saying ""The exhibition contains historical distortions which have the effect of demonising Israel."

There's a word in Egyptian slang (perhaps it's no longer used) that came to mind when I read Mr Hoffman's statement...the word is "Bagaha" or effrontery. Its Yiddish approximate equivalent is "chutzpah" but in this context, it's chutzpah squared.

Read more »

Updates: 1D Mark III, 1Ds Mark III

Canon has released firmware updates for the EOS-1D Mark III and v1.1.2 for the EOS-1Ds Mark III which include both feature additions and promised improvements to AI Servo autofocus.

Full information and links available from Rob Galbraith DPI

Read more »