"An Image Is a Mystery for Photo Detectives"
by Randy Kennedy

"The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the world’s leading Talbot expert and asked if he could grace the sale’s catalog with any interesting scholarly details about the print — known as a photogenic drawing, a crude precursor to the photograph."

"More grief for Canon"
The British Journal of Photography

"Canon is investigating fresh claims of camera faults, this time affecting the top-of-the-range EOS 1Ds Mark III camera.

Photographers have been documenting instances where a scene appearing straight in the viewfinder leans up to one degree clockwise in the final image. The fault is said to be due to a misalignment of the camera's sensor with the viewfinder."

"China Eats crow over faked photo of rare antelope"
by Jane Spencer and Juliet Ye

"HONG KONG - It turns out that train tracks in Tibet aren't where the antelope play.

Earlier this week, Xinhua, China's state-run news agency, issued an unusual public apology for publishing a doctored photograph of Tibetan wildlife frolicking near a high-speed train.

The deception -- uncovered by Chinese Internet users who sniffed out a Photoshop scam in the award-winning picture -- has brought on a big debate about media ethics, China's troubled relationship with Tibet, and how pregnant antelope react to noise."

"The game of death"
by Shahidul Alam

"She may well have been the best leader available. With a military dictator and a corrupt businessman as the alternatives, Benazir Bhutto, with her western admirers and her feudal followers, was clearly a front-runner. How she died will probably remain a mystery, but she was playing the game of death, and it was unlikely she would win every time."

"Radiohead find sales, even after downloads"
by Jeff Leeds

"Los Angeles — In a twist for the music industry’s digital revolution, “In Rainbows,” the new Radiohead album that attracted wide attention when it was made available three months ago as a digital download for whatever price fans chose to pay, ranked as the top-selling album in the country this week after the CD version hit record shops and other retailers."

"US Department of Transport announces restrictions for Li-Lon batteries"
Digital Photography Review

"The US Department of Transportation has announced new safety rules relating to the storage of rechargeable Lithium batteries when flying to, from and within the USA. The new restrictions, effective from January 1st 2008, dictate that loose Lithium cells may not be packed in checked baggage under any circumstances - batteries installed in equipment are unaffected. Carry-on baggage may contain up to two loose batteries but only if there is no possibility of short-circuit, containing them individually within simple plastic bags or their original packaging is sufficient to prevent this and will satisfy inspectors. Click through for the DOT press release."

"The untold story: How the iPhone blew up the wireless industry"
by Fred Vogelstein

"It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, "We don't have a product yet"."

"Thumbs Race as Japan's Best Sellers Go Cellular"
by Norimitsu Onishi

"Tokyo — Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, “The Tale of Genji,” a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it.

Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere."

"Gore wins Oscar and Nobel Peace Prize for slide-show presentation"


"Stockholm — 2007 was an extraordinary year for former vice president Al Gore, who received the highest honors in both film and humanitarianism for his tireless efforts in creating a visually pleasing, hour-long slide-show presentation using the popular computer program Keynote.

The slide show, which features approximately 80 full-color pictures of landforms and people, as well as a vast array of detailed line and bar graphs, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that a successful visual presentation must utilize both an application's audio and graphic capabilities. Furthermore, Gore effectively silenced many of his critics by incorporating short videos."

"The assassination of Benazir Bhutto"
by John Moore / Getty Images

"Benazir Bhutto, she was always known for her white head scarf, and I thought that showing the head scarf from behind and with all the people on the background, it would be evident who it was.

She was very emotional during this campaign rally. It was all in Urdu, and I don't speak Urdu, so I asked one of my Pakistani colleagues what she was talking about. She said, well she is talking about the need to fight terrorism, the need to fight Al Qaeda, and she was doing it with such passion. I said, well does she always yell into the microphone during this demos? No she said, this is very rare, she's very much into it. And when she left at the end of the rally, the crowd flocked down to the street and surrounded her car, and danced and wanted to touch her, and it was very emotional and is maybe one of the reasons why she took a chance and decided to stand up through that sunroof, despite clear and present danger."

"Photofinish and a home-brew digital camera"
by Guilherme Maranhão

"Very likely you already seen a photofinish image, either of a horse track or ones from the Olympic Games. They all look alike, the background is usually of a single color and seems stretched with a bunch of athletes or horses as they cross the finish line of a race. There's a timeline either on the bottom or at the top of the image, numbers that represent elapsed seconds from the beginning of the race. These images were generated by a camera equipped with a slit instead of a regular shutter and 35mm film moving behind this slit. Nowadays the linear CCD substituted the slit and made this cameras very similar to most scanners with have (or maybe scanners are similar to those cameras)."

"Mexican Photography exhibition in China"
by Pilar Jiménez / Reforma

"The present diversity and vitality of Contemporary Mexican photography can be seen in an exhibition with 450 images of 45 different photographers, brought together for the first time ever in China by master photographers Pedro Meyer and Francisco Mata.

The title of the exhibition is The Gaze of 45 Mexican Photographers and it is held at the Guangdong Contemporary Art Museum, one of the three most important museums of the Asian Giant. The curators managed to gather an all-inclusive collection with the work of photographers of different ages, styles and temperaments, yet, this collection sums up the plurality and rigor of Contemporary Mexican Photography."

"The chinese novel finds new life
on-line"
by Aventurina King

"Zhang Muye is a thirty-something office worker who shows up to his Chinese investment company on time. Yet to millions of Chinese fans, he is the author of "Ghost Blows Out the Light", an internet novel viewed more than 6 million times online. It has sold 600,000 copies in print.

"It's only when I am at work that I can write; when I'm at home, I can't," says Zhang. His novel, which narrates the travails of a gravedigger plagued by ghosts, has been acclaimed across China for its creativity, if not for its critical value. Zhang began writing Ghost to relax and kill time during slow mornings at his office. "I don't think of it as literature," Zhang says. "For me it's just a game"."

"A record price for a Radiohead Album: $0
The famed British band lets fans decide what to pay for a new release on-line"
by Geoff Boucher and Chris Lee

"The great riddle facing the record industry in the digital age has been pricing. Napster and its ilk puckishly offered music for "free" in the late 1990s, and the major labels have largely clung to an average of $13 for CDs despite plummeting sales and seasons of downsizing.

Now, one of the world's most acclaimed rock bands, Radiohead, is answering that marketplace riddle with a shrug. "It's up to you", reads a message on the Web page where fans can pre-order the band's highly anticipated seventh album and pay whatever they choose, including nothing."

"TrueGrain"

"TrueGrain is a pro-grade tool for accurately recapturing the aesthetics of black and white film with digital photography.

With TrueGrain, you can:

-Accurately recapture the aesthetics of particular film stocks—including “lost” films—while retaining an all-digital workflow.
-Creatively employ credible film aesthetics.
-Add high resolution film grain information to digital images to elegantly minimize the pixilation effects of upsampling.
-Match digital imagery to existing film images for restoration and compositing purposes."

"When the waters came"
by Shahidul Alam

"It was nearly twenty years ago when I had written this. After one of my first photojournalistic assignments:

What does one photograph to depict a flood? A submerged house, a boat on a highway, people wading in water?

As we boated through the branches in Jinjira we found a wicker basket in a tree. The family had long since abandoned their home, and their worldly belongings, gathered in that basket, waited patiently for their home coming".

Photographers of the majority world unite! Friends, please take a minute to visit majorityworld.com, a database of images by photographers of the developing world. The idea is to create a website where photographers from developing countries get exposure on their work, offering opportunities for publication, recognition and commissions.
The quality and content of the images is superb and so is the generous spirit which is the foundation of the project.  Take a look and see if perhaps your work could be part of this incredible multi-national project.

http://www.majorityworld.com

Incisive Media Investments Ltd 2007
"Rowling loses privacy action"

"In a landmark case, JK Rowling, author of the phenomenonally successful Harry Potter series, has lost a privacy battle against one of the world's biggest celebrity agencies, writes Katie Scott. JK Rowling has lost her bid to win a High Court injunction banning the further publication of an image of her infant son.

The photograph showed the author and her husband, Dr Neil Murray, pushing their then 20-month-old son in a buggy down a street in Edinburgh. It was published by the Sunday Express on 3 April 2005 with a piece about Rowling's approach to motherhood. The image was taken covertly using a long lens by a photographer working for the international agency, Big Pictures. The author claimed the image violated her son's right to privacy and applied for compensation under the Data Protection Act 1998."

"Picture New York without pictures"

Dear friends, please take the time to read the petition of fellow photographers and filmmakers whose right to photograph in public space is threatened by a new set of rules currently under consideration in New York City. The petition calls for the city to dismiss the regulations and hold a new public hearing so that the community has a saying in the shaping of the new policies. We invite you to sign the petition and show your support on this very important issue. We invite everyone to participate, no matter where you live, since it is an issue that affects us all, even as tourists.

www.pictureny.org/petition/index.php

Please share with us your comments in our forums.

"En Foco and Nueva Luz"

"En Foco is a non-profit organization that supports contemporary fine art and documentary photographers of diverse cultures, primarily U.S. residents of Latino, African and Asian heritage, and Native Peoples of the Americas and the Pacific.

For over 30 years, it has been in the forefront of documenting the artistic journeys created by artists often overlooked by the mainstream media and the arts. Through its programs, artists are free to explore or reinvent cultural traditions, challenge preconceived notions, and engage audiences in a manner that honors all."

"To hell with Frida"
by Luis Gonzalez de Alba

"I got tickets to the premiere of the opera "Frida", in Spanish, but I gave them away the night of the show. I hate Frida Kahlo and her era. It's not hatred without motive; I'm convinced that the very attitude that has taken to such heights a mediocre painter obsessed with her misfortune (For God's sake! Why didn't that tram finish her off?), is the one that forces Mexico to remain a poor country. Mexico has plenty of resources, in contrast to Korea Singapore and Ireland, which were examples of underprivileged countries 30 years ago. These nations used to produce massive tides of immigrants, but they are rich today, because they chose to follow a path opposed to the one of Mexico."

"The democratic image photography and globalisation"
by Pedro Meyer

"I have heard over and over, in many parts of the world. How new digital technologies have an unfair distribution as they follow a pattern of distribution according to wealth. Well, how could we disagree with such a fundamental reality as it applies, in our case, to photography and new technologies? We can’t, can we?

Let us look at this with a bit more skepticism and insight as this can actually lead us on to something beyond simple truisms.

I would like to say that this lack of equality is not only true with regard to photography and new technologies, but also with regard to access to water, to health care, to education, and so on."

"Chapnick Grant Invitation"

"Application deadline for the 2007 Howard Chapnick Grant is July 15th, 2007. Please download an application form from the link at www.smithfund.org.

The annual grant of $5000 is NOT intended for the creation of photographs, but in support of the ancillary field of photojournalism, such as editing, research, education and management."

Salon.com
"Writing in the free world"
by Amy Benfer

"Jonathan Lethem explains why copyright laws stifle creativity and why he's giving away the film rights to his new novel.

Jonathan Lethem's seventh novel, "You Don't Love Me Yet," is a parable of sorts about the ways in which art is created and commodified by a process of borrowing, stealing and transformation. Set in Los Angeles, the novel concerns four indie rock musicians closer to their 30th birthdays than they are to success. The fetching bass player, Lucinda, strikes up a friendship with an anonymous caller to her day job, a complaint line funded by an art gallery. The man, appropriately dubbed the Complainer, happens to have a genius for words. Lucinda passes the Complainer's musings on to Bedwin, the band's lyricist, who transforms them into songs that finally get the band some attention. Things get tricky when the Complainer demands a different sort of compensation for his work: Rather than cash payment, he wants to join the band."

Salon.com
"Iraq: Why the media failed
Afraid to challenge America's leaders or conventional wisdom about the Middle East, a toothless press collapsed."
by Gary Kamiya

"Apr. 10, 2007 | It's no secret that the period of time between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq represents one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media. Every branch of the media failed, from daily newspapers, magazines and Web sites to television networks, cable channels and radio. I'm not going to go into chapter and verse about the media's specific failures, its credulousness about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds and failure to make clear that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 -- they're too well known to repeat. In any case, the real failing was not in any one area; it was across the board.
Bush administration lies and distortions went unchallenged, or were actively promoted. Fundamental and problematic assumptions about terrorism and the "war on terror" were rarely debated or even discussed.
Vital historical context was almost never provided. And it wasn't just a failure of analysis. With some honorable exceptions, good old-fashioned reporting was also absent."

The Register
"How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer"
by Sion Touhig

"We're continually being told the Internet empowers the individual. But speaking as an individual creative worker myself, I'd argue that all this Utopian revolution has achieved so far in my sector is to disempower individuals, strengthen the hand of multinational businesses, and decrease the pool of information available to audiences. All things that the technology utopians say they wanted to avoid.

I'm a freelance professional photographer, and in recent years, the internet 'economy' has devastated my sector. It's now difficult to make a viable living due to widespread copyright theft from newspapers, media groups, individuals and a glut of images freely or cheaply available on the Web. These have combined to crash the unit cost of images across the board, regardless of category or intrinsic worth. For example, the introduction of Royalty Free 'microstock', which means you can now buy an image for $1.00, is just one factor that has dragged down professional fees."

The Register
"Photojournalism is dying - readers rejoice -"
by Andrew Orlowski

"Recently, we invited top UK photojournalist Sion Touhig to describe the grim economics facing photo journalists. His passionate essay: How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer prompted dozens of emails over the holidays.

Sion's piece described the concentration of power in the photo business over the past twenty years, but it was unusual in one important way - it broke a taboo.

When discussing "new media", and new technologies, it's easy to find eulogies to transformation and "empowerment". But it's very rare to find a discussion of the consequences - especially when the consequence means we're worse off than before. The result of all this individual empowerment, suggested Sion, is that big business ends up getting richer and more powerful."

The Getty Museum, Trust Project
"Help create an archive of photographic materials from the pre-digital age"

"Digital photography is replacing traditional photography. And it's happening so fast that traditional photography, and the knowledge about how to create it, is in danger of disappearing altogether. We need your help.

Scientists at the Getty Conservation Institute need your old photographic papers, film, negatives, and prints to build an archive of knowledge and materials from the era of classical photography."

Aish
"Photo fraud in Lebanon"

"You might have heard the story by now, the weblog Little Green Footballs revealed photo fraud by the Reuters News Agency.

This Reuters photo extensively shows smoke rising from Beirut after an Israeli attack, but a closer look shows unnatural repeating patterns in the smoke.

It turns out that the Reuters photographer used photo editing software to add more smoke to the image to make the damage to Beirut seem greater than it really was."

"2006, a devastating year for the photographic development industry"
by Iliana Ulloa

"Darwin said: It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the smartest, but the one that adapts better to change.

In a devastating week for the professional development laboratories industry, we can see Darwin’s theory fully proved. Ceta and Sky Imaging UK, both renowned photo laboratories in London, went out of business last December 1st, following the footsteps of their fellow competitors Keishi Colour, who shut down last March."

"The womb as photo studio"
by Sam Lubell

"It's a rite of passage for many expectant parents: baby's first ultrasound. The fuzzy images of the fetus, produced during an examination in an obstetrician's office, are prized by couples, passed around proudly among friends and relatives.

Now, trying to capitalize on this phenomenon, a number of companies are selling elective ultrasounds that have little to do with neonatal health. The services, often in small offices or shopping malls, amount to fetal photo studios and use newer 3-D ultrasound technology to produce more realistic images than conventional machines."

"History brushed against the grain"
by Juan Antonio Molina

"When Raquel Tibol wrote the foreword of the catalog of the First Latin American Photography Colloquium, she proposed not a characterization of the photographic production in question, but rather a model of what Latin American Photography should be, both to be Photography and to be Latin American. This brief text (and the exhibition featured in the Colloquium) has been an obligated reference since, mainly for understanding which were the ideological schemes that would be used to evaluate Latin American Photography in the decades to come."

"China, Power of Photoghrapy 2006"
by Vicki Goldberg

"Photography was a powerhouse medium from the date of its birth in 1839 and was already on steroids and flexing its muscles when it was barely out of its teens. In 1860, Mathew Brady took a photograph that proved the medium had the power to affect events. His earliest portrait of Abraham Lincoln was the first photograph in history that influenced the election of a nation’s President, and it did so because of a change in the distribution of photographs."

"Daguerreotypes"
by Carlos Dario Alboronoz

"To think about working with daguerreotypes is to think about a photographic vision that entails a lot of difficulties and special technical conditions, but also a different photographic aesthetic."

"How is a paradigm born?"
by Pedro Meyer

"A group of scientists put five monkeys in a cage, and inside it, they placed a ladder with a bunch of bananas. When one of the monkeys climbed up the ladder to get a banana, they hosed the rest with ice-cold water.
After a while when a monkey climbed on the ladder, it got beaten up by the others."

"Emphasis"
From the body photographic to the photographed body
by Juan Antonio Molina

"All the concepts appearing in each title of this essay, which indicate its contents, seem to be in a crisis. They refer us to a language that is already out of the critical and theoretical discourse. At times, it seems that they never belonged in there anyway. However, these are terms that -when translated to the language of critics, art theory and contemporary cultural studies- refer to processes -such as subjectivization and ideologization, playing with the structures and signs, and anthropological, ethnographical or psycho-analytical methodologies- to the almost political criticism of representation and the “ “performatic” ” existence (or insistence) of the work of art."

"Black and White, Images.
Salvaging of Ancient Photographic Archives"
by Marilyn Dominguez Turriza and
Juan Carlos Saucedo Villegas

"A Brief History of Photography in Campeche. Photography has been a part of everyday life and been accepted by all social classes since its very beginning, thus it has become a means of expression of society. Photography is a valuable source of information and is considered a social document, since it allows the reconstruction of the past."

"If you liked documentary work, you are going to love Digital Images"
by Pedro Meyer

"We somehow were brought up with the notion that documentary pictures were the equivalent of a testimony that was credible because it was a photograph.

In other words, the very nature of being photographic was a good enough reason for all of us to consider the photograph as a reliable witness of events in our daily life. Because something was depicted in an image we had the firm conviction that things were as we saw them.After all we could compare that which we saw with that which we photographed and knew that they were identical. Or at least we thought that they were.

So the question is, aren’t they? and as so many other things in life, the answer is ambivalent. Yes and No."

"Bloggers drive inquiry on how altered images saw print"
by Katharine Q. Seelye and Julie Bosman