David Rabin: A Life in Images

David Rabin, my wife’s father, died recently after a terrible couple of years with Alzheimer’s. He was a doctor, a good father and all-around sweet man. (Here is his obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle.)

Born in 1930, his life spanned a wide range of photographic tools. As I put together a slide show in his honor, I scanned in formal B&W portraits made with a large format camera, yellowing square snapshots made with a Brownie-era box and dozens of 4×6 prints that came from the point-and-shoot cameras of recent years. I even had a few digital files from a few years ago before he got sick.

Photographs, of course, can’t capture the essence of a whole life, but they provide a welcoming taste for those who have lost a friend or a member of their family. The digital revolution has made serving up that taste so much easier that in many ways it has changed the way we mourn.

I’m used Soundslides to create the slide show. Take a look.

Here’s to you, David.

Grab Shots

* Bite Me, I’m an Art Director: Hey, if you’re going to rip off someone else’s cover concept, why not steal from among the best — the New York Times’ T Magazine? T chomped on Coast Magazine after the Orange County publication cloned one of its cover (see left). Cheesy, cheesy, cheesy –even for a food feature. Full story here.

* Quoted! “If I could tell a story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug a camera.” —Lewis Hine.

* Big Pixel Power: Boston.com, the web presence of the Boston Globe newspaper, is serving up mega-size web images of powerful photojournalism. Check out this dramatic shot of the California fires, or this one of a starving Ethiopian woman.

* Shoot a Tornado: The new Nikon D700 apparently takes great weather pictures. (Via Nikon Watch.)

* In a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Brit photographer Steve Schofield crosses the bond to document life in the Queen’s former colony and finds — Americans cross-dressing as Star Wars characters.

On the Job: Father’s Day

Father's Day Little Leage GameEach month for Marin Magazine, I make a photo and write a short essay (200 words) that fills a page in the front of the book. Here’s an example about Life on the Edge, and another about being Between Sea and Sky.

For June, the editor wanted something about Father’s Day, a cliche idea, but I liked the challenge of creating something that wasn’t a cliche and thought I might find it at a local Little League game.

I spent a couple of hours at one game and made some fine actions shots, but couldn’t capture the moment I wanted between a coach and a player or a father and a son. I was looking for that instant, communicated visually, when knowledge moves from one generation to the next.

I returned a week later, this time to a night game and spent about an hour shooting before the game as the kids and dads warmed up, playing catch and a bit of pepper. As the light faded, I looked for some final shots. It would soon be too dark to shoot the game. Suddenly, the coach called all the boys near and he knelt before them. I has to change lenses and got off two frames before the huddle broke. The above frame image ran in the magazine.

Below is the essay I wrote to accompany the picture.

—————————————–

… And They Will Come

“Little League baseball is a good thing ‘cause it keeps the parents off the streets and it keeps the kids out of the house.” — Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra, the language-mangling New York Yankee, also once said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.”

What you observe when you watch the boys (and a few girls) take to local Little League diamonds is that this diminutive form of baseball depends as much on the coaching talents of fatherhood as the hitting and fielding skills of the sport.

Take a night game, for example. The fathers arrive fresh from work, some in their suits, others already changed into colorful T-shirts bearing the names of their children’s teams – Thunder, Storm or Raptors, outsized words for such pint-sized players.

Out come the gloves, the bats and the balls. A simple ritual begins. Catch. A child throws. A father catches. Back and forth. Back and forth. Encouragement is given, adjustments made. The moment is timeless, the lessons eternal.

As game time nears, the young players gather around their coach. He makes eye contact, commands attention. A man never seems so large as when he is surrounded by children who look up to him. A good coach, like Eric Dahlke of the Timber Rattlers in the Mill Valley Little League, takes a knee before his team, knowing that little ballplayers need men who are big enough to meet them at their level.

Grab Shots

* Get Visual, Buy a Book: Here’s a good list of photo book publishers compiled by A Photo Editor. The cover on the left is from Once Upon a Time in Wales by photographer Robert Haines.

* Hope Amid the Flotsam: Another good read from A Photo Editor on the “endless stream of photography” and, with it, the proliferation of mediocrity. He connects through to a farewell post from photographer Liz Kuball in which she comments:

“It is so easy, when your Google Reader is always full of excellent photographs, to feel as though the rest of the world is producing constantly, consistently, at a level you’re simply incapable of.”

But cheer up, brave hearts, A Photo Editor also points to Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey’s more sanguine view:

“… but if you are “special” there are also way way more opportunities…and so so much room for invention….i swear, i have never seen so much room!!! “

* Get on the Grid: Sportsshooter Robert Hanashiro sings the praises of Dave Honl’s grids (and other gadgets) for speedlights. They work. I use them. Get some.

* Rumor Focus: Nikon Watch keeps the full-frame Nikon mill churning with word of 12mp D400 and a 24.8mp D3x.

* Sync & Swim: Check the Journey-to-the-Bottom-of-the-Sea rig Jill Greenberg used to shoot the U.S. synchronized swim team for a Radar magazine fashion spread.

Cartagena: Dancer

Cartagena Dancer
A wedding of two friends in Cartagena last week was a good excuse to end the vacation drought my wife and I have been in. We’d been working non-stop for about 18 months and whenever a getaway window opened we’d manage to slam it shut for one reason or another. So, when the couldn’t-say-no-because-we’d-help-bring-them-together invite to the boda in Colombia came, we jumped at the chance.

I couldn’t leave work behind completely, though, so I pitched a travel story to local magazine, packed a camera bag and booked a room in a luscious hotel fronting the Caribbean at a wedding rate that was 60 percent of rack.

Cartagena has hit the travel-writing radar lately. The New York Times just did a 36-hours-in-Cartagena piece, as did Travel & Leisure, which called it:

” … one of the prettiest cities anywhere: Imagine Havana with a fraction of the population, or San Juan or New Orleans without the sophomores on spring break. It’s both crumbling and majestic.”

I agree with all that, and would add that Cartagena is also home to some of the most beautiful human beings — women and men — I’ve ever seen. Skin colors range from the deep cocoas of the Afro-Caribbeans, to the mochas of the native South Americans, to the near ivory blanco of descendants the European pirates who pillaged the Colombian coast for centuries.

The dancer above was one of a troupe who accompanied the wedding party on its short walk back from the (blessedly air-conditioned) Iglesia Santo Toribio to the Sofitel Santa Clara Hotel. (The photo was shot with an SB800 on camera, using balanced TTL and rear-curtain shutter.)

The old-walled city of Cartagena was beautiful and a delight to photograph. The newer sections of town (where most people live) was a standard Latin America mix — flourishes of prosperity set amid wider pockets of poverty. The beaches were wide, the sand heavily tramped down (except on the outlying Islas del Rosario), and the water 80 degrees.

Fish fresh from the sea dominated menus — robalo, mero and, especially, pargo (red snapper). Street vendors fried up crunchy corn fritters called arepas, some filled with eggs, cheese and meat. Eating one was not an option.

Nothing, though, beat colder-than-cold limonadas, especially those made in a blender with lime juice, sugar, ice and club soda. Add in some leche de coco (coconut milk) and you get a concoction we gringos dubbed a Key Lime Pie.

On the Job: Run & Shoot

One of my great challenges in photography has been making new techniques work the first time out on the job. I haven’t always been successful at that, so if the job permits (meaning there’s enough time or the art director doesn’t have a specific shot in mind) I usually plan on a back-up shot as well, something I’m sure I can pull off.

I shot the two pictures in this post to illustrate a story in Marin Magazine on trail running here in the Bay Area. The women belong to a Luna Chix running team headed by the magazine’s web mistress.

We chose a trail on Mt. Tam called the Sun Trail because it provided some great views (I wanted the context of the geography) and was close to a road (to cut down on the gear lugging.)

My original idea was to light three of the runners along a curve in the trail (like in the shot below), but after a few test shots I realized it would be very difficult to time the runners so a strobe hit each one as she passed. Also, I was shooting from 100 feet away on a rock out-cropping and would have needed an assistant to help reposition the lights after each test shot. Since this wasn’t a Chase Jarvis-type-budget-shoot, meaning it was just me and five runners, I went for Plan B.

First I shot three of the runners going through the curve. This was my sure shot. They were great sports because it was about 90 degrees out and they ran it a half-dozen times.

Then, I set up four SB800s along an upper portion of the trail — two in front and two along the side — and had them run toward me. When the led runner crossed a line I had made in the trail she shouted to me and I shot the group with a 12mm lens. I could only get off one frame each time since the flashes were firing on full power and needed recycle time, so the team ran it about 20 times. I did several variations of this shot, including backing way off with long lens.

The final shot (above) isn’t perfect, but it worked for the magazine and I learned a lot about lighting a group of moving people outdoors. Next time, I’ll concentrate more on separating each person, targeting them with an individual light and watching their expressions more.

The magazine used the above shot in the index and the below one as the lead shot for the story.

Luna Chix

Going with the Flow

Just a quick post on this portrait because I am jamming to finish a couple of magazine projects before I head out of town for a working vacation — to the wedding of a friend in Cartagena. Vive los novios!

The magazine wanted a picture for Father’s Day and we found Greg Snowden, the owner of a local green building materials company, and his three sons.

I met them in the store after it closed, put up a big softbox over a picnic table and threw a couple of smaller lights on the background.

The boys were rambunctious and never settled down, mugging for the camera, grabbing at each and pulling Dad into the fun. At first I tried to control them, then realizing I couldn’t I just went with the flow, hoping a make a couple of good frames.

The result is above, one of about four or five usable shots out of 75 or so. I happy with it, although it’s not what I set out to do and therein lies the lesson:

Never try to teach a pig to sing. It doesn’t work and it only P’s off the pig. In this case, the pig sang when it was good and ready.

Grab Shots

* Expanding or Contracting? Jim McNay, in a column at SportsShooter.com, tells us to do a Seriousness Gut-Check about our work. Am I “sending out portfolios, meeting with potential employers, pitching assignments to editors and the like?” Or am I “doing none of the above mentioned activities?” Me? I’m doing No. 1, but not as much as I should.

* Fair Use, Explained: Photo Attorney, aka Carolyn Wright, parses the “fuss about fair use.” After explaining the entitlements of copyright and the boundaries of fair use, she concludes:

“It is always a judgment call until a court gives a final ruling whether the use of a photograph is fair. But if you find your work has been used without your permission and the defense is “fair use,” don’t be too quick to accept that answer. “

* Don’t Shoot II: Hirlpoo points to more harassment of photographers for, ah, taking pictures. (Read: Don’t Shoot, I’m a Shooter.)

* Photojournalism and Passion: Self-taught photojournalist Colin Summers talks about his career at ProPhotoLife. He shot for more than a decade in places like India, Cambodia and Indonesia before gaining recognition. His mission: “I try … to convey the truth in a compassionate and inoffensive way”

I’ve Got a Hangup

Some people say their love affair with photography came when they first picked up a camera. It didn’t happen that way with me. I had been idly making snapshots with my first 35mm camera — a Pentax — for months before I felt a moment of magic, and that happened not with my eye in a viewfinder, but with my hands in a tray of developer. I fell in love with the print.

The first time I saw an image form on a piece of wet photo paper I was hooked. Even though that first image only lasted seconds before it turned black (because I had overexposed it in the enlarger), that we enough.

When I shot film, I came to live for the print because the print enabled me to see the image I’d made. Later, as I switched to digital I realized I didn’t need the print to experience the excitement of the image. There it was, on the computer, large and vibrant. I still enjoyed the “darkroom” work — enhancing contrast, extending tone, shaping color — but now the darkroom was dry and digital instead of damp and chemical, so I stopped printing.

Until now.

I have a show this week of photos I made in connection with a cookbook I wrote and photographed about organic food from Marin County (Organic Marin, Recipes from Land to Table, Andrews McMeel, July 2008).

It is a small show — 13 photos (one of them is above) — and is part of a month-long arts salon put on by Marin Magazine, which I do a lot of photography for, and a local home decor showroom.

At first, I was reluctant to do the show. Digital printing is dicey, at best, these days, with quality varying from printer to printer; and framing is expensive. But with some trial and error, I found good people to do both (Alesha Rogness at Vivid Imaging in Sausalito, 415-331-8272, and Bob Woodrum at Sausalito Picture Framing) and when I saw the finished prints, 20 x 30 and framed, that old excitement returned.

I’ve learned to loved the print again.

The show is up this week at California Closets Showroom 610 Dubois St., San Rafael. The party is Thursday, May 15, from 6-9 p.m, free music, snacks and wine. C’mon by if you can.

Don’t Shoot, I’m a Shooter

The harassment of photographers in the name of security continues, reaching the point of ridiculous in some instances and infringing on basic civil liberties in others. Here are a few recent examples of America, home of the paranoid:

* Scott Kelby writes on his blog, Photoshop Insider, how he and some fellow photographers were braced by security guards in a New York hotel for carrying tripods. (Hold it right there, fellow, and don’t unfold that thing!). In response, Rob Jones, one of Kelby’s readers, created the shirt you see at left is selling it on Cafe Press. Get one.

* The yahoos in the Shelby County, Tennessee, sheriff’s 0ffice are asking the local citizenry to call in reports of photographers taking pictures of buildings. “You may think a guy is just shooting pictures, but if you report it to us, we’ll send it on to the FBI and they may have four or five other reports of the same thing.”

* War on Photography is a blog that keeps track of these sorts of things, like the Minnesota photographer accosted by guards while shooting a refinery.

* Do your know your rights? Good. Then carry them around with you so others will know them too. Get a printable PDF of The Photographer’s Right.

* Photographer or Terrorist? That’s the headline in this BBC News Magazine story about increasing harassment of photographers in Britain. (Tip from Thomas Hawk, who’s been all over this issue.) Quote from the story:

“It’s a sad state of affairs today if an amateur photographer can’t stand in the street taking photographs.”

A sad state indeed. Keep shooting.

Grab Shots

People Magazine cover* People Who Need People: The New York Times asks the question we’ve all been wondering about: “Can a few snapshots of a baby or a bride, accompanied by a fawning article, really be worth millions of dollars?” Read the whole story about why tab magazines now routinely pay celebs to play (like this cover of Branjelina and child).

* Gulf Twosome: The two shooters atop the current photo how-to heap — David Hobby and Joe McNally — report back from the doings at Gulf Photo Plus. David offers the behind-the-scenes story on this SB800-laden image. Joe calls Dubai “3 parts Vegas, one part planet Tatooine, and 6 parts oil money.

* Photographers Wanted: Want to be a photojournalist? These newspapers are hiring.

* Pitching a Home Run: Rob Haggert (A Photo Editor) tells us how to make winning pitches to photo editors. Rule #1: “The absolute fastest way for photographers to get a story made is to approach a writer that the magazine uses on a regular basis.”

* Jumping the Canon-Nikon Divide: Freelance sports photographer Preston Mack switched from Canon to Nikon when he heard these words from an editor: “The cover image doesn’t look in focus.” Read Mack’s whole tale of learning to love the D3 on Sportsshooter.com.

Grab Shots

Lindsay Siu* Blog I Like: Heather Morton is a Toronto art buyer who often writes about photography on her blog. In this post, she highlights Seattle photographer Lindsay Siu.

* Oh, Miley, We Hardly Knew Ye: Plenty of discussion about the Vanity Fair-Annie Liebowitz kerfluffle. There’s outrage in the Flickr Strobist group, puzzlement over celebrity worship in Utata, and James Danziger at the Year in Pictures makes it official:

“Annie Leibovitz’s work reveals four things: one – she likes to get people to take off as many clothes as possible; two – she loves to photograph skin, loves the different textures and colors; three – she loves to show a family bond and loves to show touch; four – she designs her pictures to cause a reaction. Her work is about making contact on every level. “

* From PJ to Plastic: ReyGuy is a Dallas Morning News photographer and photo editor who indulges his creative side (or sides) with polaroids and Holgas. Here’s his Texas highway sign set.

* Phono-journalism: Live news — a shooting — broadcast from a mobile phone. Jeff Jarvis has the link. Definitions of journalism and photography are continually in flux.

100 Years of Photos: The Melbourne Age, an Australian newspaper, has compiled a Century of Pictures from the paper. Take a look. (Via Rob Galbraith.)

Children of the Canal

About a year ago, I photographed competing immigration rallies in San Rafael. On one side of the street were advocates for the local Latino community; on the other were members and supporters of the Minutemen, a conservative anti-immigrant organization. Both groups were a rarity in Marin County, an affluent, mostly white, heavily liberal enclave just north of San Francisco.

A few weeks earlier, federal immigration agents had raided homes and businesses in the city’s Canal neighborhood, a tightly packed area of run-down apartment buildings and small homes that is home to 12,000 people, 86 percent of them immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. The agents arrested 65 people, 23 of whom were eventually deported.

The raids were part of the broader immigration debate in the country, a divide that had spawned huge marches across the country. I wanted to put something together for Marin magazine about how the issue played out in suburbs, but was hesitant for a couple of reasons. First, I was jammed with doing the book. Second, after 20 years of traditioal journalism I didn’t want to write an on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other type story where the emotion got buried under a slag heap of official statements from either side.

After I finished the book this spring, I began talking with Tom Wilson, head of the Canal Alliance, the Canal neighborhood’s primary social service group, about different story ideas. He pointed me to an after-school program that tutors neighborhood children, teaches them other academic skills and exposes them to a world of possibilities outside the Canal. The program guarantees that if a child sticks with it, he or she will graduate from high school and enter a community college.

I told Tom I’d like to photograph the kids in the middle-school program and ask them a few questions about their dreams. Then I pitched the idea to the magazine, adding that I’d write an introductory essay — not a story — about the immigration issue. To my surprise, they loved the idea.

I made the photographs over three afternoons in a classroom. I wanted the pictures to be simple portraits, so I posed the children in the middle of the room and lit them with one umbrella and a big reflector, using the far wall for a backdrop. I spoke with each for about five minutes first, talking about their dreams, their families and their countries of origin. Most of the interviews were in English, a few were in Spanish.

Some of the children dreamed big — to be doctors or lawyers. Others wished for little more than a visit home to their family in Mexico. Some rushed forward to be photographed. Others I had to persuade through cajoling.

If you look at the photographs, you will see the faces of children, but also, in many of them, the eyes of adults who have seen more of the world, a rough world, than any 12- or 13-year-old should.

If you read the essay (below), you will learn how I feel about this children, which is that regardless of how any of us feels about immigration the children of immigrants should not pay the price. Who are we to deny them better lives — especially in the United States, a country founded on that very principle?

* Here are the photographs.

* Here is a PDF of the Marin Magazine package, including the essay.

* Or, click the jump for the essay.

Continue reading

Choices: Mine, Yours, the Editor’s

Samantha ParisAnyone who has worked in media knows the end product — magazine, newspaper, film — represents a series of choices and decisions made by individual creators, the team as a whole and, increasingly in films, the audience. (And, of course, web-based media like You Tube or Fark is almost wholly based on audience selection.)

How much weight your decision carries in influencing the final result is often relative. When I ran newsrooms, I had little control over what the creators — the writers and photographers — chose, but quite a bit more over the final product.

Now that I’m freelancing again, I have creative control over how I shoot something, but less to say about how the photo is going to be used or even which one from a shoot will run in , let’s say, a magazine. I have learned, though, how to shoot things differently for different clients — some like light glossy and bright colors, others prefer darker, edgier shots. I shoot to match their style, then always add in some preferences of my own.

The above picture of Samantha Paris, who runs a voice-over training school in Sausalito, provides some good examples of the choices I made in photographing her and the decisions my client, in this case Marin Magazine, made in using the photographs.

I stopped by Samantha’s studios while the writer was interviewing her, just to look the place over and meet her. As soon as I saw the recording booth, I knew I wanted to shoot her in there, but also knew I’d be pushing my technical skills because the space was so tight (about 3 feet by 5 feet) and so dark.

I wanted to use the shapes of the microphone and the pop screen as graphical elements and also have a spotlight effect to the photo. The booth had a window in front so the actor and sound engineer could see each other and I decided to use one light to shoot through that window.

At home, I blocked out a space in my living room similar to the size of the booth, and saw that I could get another light stand in the back corner of the booth and a shorty studio stand on the floor behind Samantha. I did some tests shots and felt I at least had technical control of the shot.

For the shoot itself, I used three SB800s — the one outside the window,the one in the booth corner and the one on the floor. The main and hair lights had snoots and CTO gels to warm up Samantha (not that her personality needed it) and the background light had a blue gel.)

We shot for about 30 minutes in the booth, including a sequence in which she acted out some scenes (left).

I also wanted to make some pictures of Samantha interacting with her students, so we set up some chairs in a front room with a big window and I shot about 20 or 30 frames using the natural light.

Afterwards, looking at the files, I was pleased with the shots in the recording booth (although I did underexpose by a half-stop), but I was pretty sure the magazine would use the more informal and more interactive shots with the students. I also liked the shots of in the booth more when she wasn’t acting and just looking at the camera.

I got first indication of which way the magazine’s choice would go later when my wife, a former journalist, looked at the take and loved the acting shots and those of Samantha with the students.

She was an audience focus group of one and her instinctive response mirrored the one the magazine editor made later. The image below of Samantha and her students, ran big. The “acting” shot ran smaller. My favorite (at the top of this page) didn’t make the cut.

Is there a lesson? Yes, and it’s that we shoot (or write) for many audiences — the audience of one (ourselves), the audience of many (readers, viewers) and the audience of economics (our clients). I love it when they overlap. When they don’t, I cash the check anyway.

Samantha Paris

Grab Shots

* Martin Gee, a designer at the Mercury News in San Jose, has posted a Flickr gallery of the effect in the newsroom of multiple rounds of layoffs and buyouts. Sad stuff. Empty chairs, discarded computers, blanks walls. (For a good analysis of the latest newsroom census, read Alan Mutter’s explanation of why it’s bunk.)

* A Photo Editor, aka Rob Haggert, has posted the results of his photo talent search. Here’s the Flickr gallery.

* Chase Jarvis says don’t let the internal demons get the best of you:

“At one time or another, we all get sideswiped by that little internal voice. It is that nay-saying voice that’s so often the barrier between each of us and our creativity. Shedding that calculated, censoring voice, is one path to success.”

* My current favorite photographer (that means for today) is Martin Prihoda. Bold lighting, striking portraits. Here’s a behind the scenes video of a band shoot he did.

The Hands of My Mother

Ines LehmanThis is a story about a simple picture gone wrong and why a do-over is sometimes the right thing to do.

Every month in Marin Magazine I do a small feature called Marin Album — a photograph and a short essay. Typically, the photo is some scenic slice of Marin life, like this one of a cyclist in the Headlands or this one of a little leaguers on opening day of baseball season.

For the May issue, the magazine asked if I could make a picture for Mother’s Day of a mom and her new child. Nice, I thought, that will be sweet. Plus, it’s simple. I can use window light and skip some of the complicated setups I’d been doing recently.

One of the magazine’s writers had a baby a month ago, a boy, so I arranged a visit to her home. When she opened the door, her dog, some kind of pug, started barking and never stopped — I kid you not — for the hour I was there. It was a sign I should have heeded.

I looked around the house. Too dark to shoot in except for the living room. But the windows were behind the sofa, meaning if I put her and the baby on the couch their faces would be in shadow.

This is where the “should have”s” begin — I should have brought in some lights instead of sticking with the natural light plan. I should have asked her to change her green shirt, which reflected an icky tone on the baby’s skin. I should have taped the dog’s mouth shut.

And, when she brought out her son from his crib I should have said, “This is not going to work.” He was a cute kid, as all month-old’s are, but his skin was bright red, blotchy and pimply. a condition I later learned to be “baby acne.” Without some serious Photoshop retouching, this little boy was going to look more like pre-pubescent teen than Baby of the Month. (And, don’t forget mom’s green shirt adding to color mix.)

I should have said I’d be back in a month, but I didn’t. I shot, I used reflectors, I turned them this way and that. Two gigs later, nada.

Later, looking at the shoot in the computer, I kept thinking, “How could I blow a shot of a baby.” All I wanted was this and the best I got is what you see to the left.

I fessed up to the magazine, blamed the dog and said I needed another mom and another baby. That’s how I met 3-month-old Maya, above, and her mother, Ines. This time I told them what to where, brought in some lights and put the dog outside. Better. Much better. And at the point when I wrapped Maya in the blanket and asked Ines to hold her head I knew I had the shot I wanted.

Ines’ hands wrapped around Maya’s tiny head reminded me of what my mother used to say about her hands, how as she grew older they resembled those of her mother.

I used that thought as the key for the text below (after the jump). Continue reading

Grab Shots

Amy Vitale * Nikon’s new website, Nikkor.com, is live and features the work of photographers who use — what else? — Nikons. Despite the marketing intent of the site, the work it showcases is terrific. Check the images by photojournalist Amy Vitale. (Thanks to Nikon Watch for the tip.)

* Strobist-in-Chief David Hobby points to this portrait of Admiral William J. “Fox” Fallon by photographer Peter Yang for Esquire Magazine. Yang made the photo with one light, a technique, says David, that anyone can attempt regardless of the price of their gear. (Here’s my mimickry of the Peter Yang shot.)

* The protests against China in advance of the Olympics are producing good images. Here is a vigil in San Francisco seen by professionals and an amateur (and in Flickr’s first use of video.)

* The Photoshelter blog, written by Rachel Hulin, has a Q&A with photojournalist Antonin Kratochivl (Iraq, Myanmar and other conflict zones) that includes a wonderful portrait of him by Clay Enos. (Tip from A Photo Editor.)

* Gregory Crewdson sells his set-piece images for up to $100,000 apiece. JPG Magazine spent the day with him on a shoot. Story and photos here.

Pulitzers, 2008

Pulitzer PrizeEven though the bulk of the 2008 Pulitzer Prizes announced today were won by large news organizations — the Washington Post took six — one of the awards demonstrates that capacity of great work exists even within the smallest of news organizations.

Photographer Preston Gannaway of the 20,000 circulation Concord (N.H.) Monitor on the Pulitzer for Feature Photography with her intimate essay of a family coping with death. Looking at her pictures is difficult emotionally, but rewarding in their honest portrayal of something that is real in all of our lives. (Slidshow here.)

In my previous blog about newspaper journalism, I once wrote about the power of one, the capacity of any journalist, writer or photographer, to strive for excellence. Gannaway proves the point.

* Also: The Pulitzer for Spot News was won by Adrees Latif of Reuters this picture of a wounded Japanese photographer being held at gunpoint during the riots last year in Burma. The photographer later died.

Grab Shots

Good work from around the web:

Golden Gate Bridge* Keep an eye on National Geographic’s Week in Photos, a set of some of the best recent photojournalism. The Golden Gate Bridge shot on the left is from this week’s and was shot by John Storey, a former colleague at the Examiner.

* Reuters has a photo blog for its shooters, pictures plus a lot of behind the scenes commentary.

* Getty Images has a blog, too. Here’s a post by Chris Jackson about shooting the royals for 10 days in the Caribbean. Rough life.

* Bryon Houlgrave, a staff photographer for a small paper in Waukesha, Wisc., blogs about this work, which is hella good. See the raging river night shot.

* Photos are where you find them. Here’s a nice feature shot by S.F. Chronicle staff Mike Kepka.

Private Lives, Public Moments

Holly SeelerA great privilege of doing journalism is the temporary passkey it gives me into the lives of others.

At times, this entrance is burdened with sadness or results in a stinging anger from the injustice in our society that holds so many at the bottom despite all their efforts to the rise up.

More often than not, though, I am rewarded with the pleasure of meeting someone who is charming or beautiful or enticingly smart. They allow me their company, permit me to question them in precise detail or engage me emotionally as I photograph them.

I treasure these moments, hold them in memory as long as possible and savor them for their simplicity of purpose. For me they are the essence of journalism — written and photographic — the inquiry, the interaction, the engagement.

Meeting Holly Seeler and her family — Tess, Jack and Victor — the other day in Sausalito was one of those moments. Seeler has multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease that is attacking her ability to walk. Her response to the illness is energetic and forceful, and she has left a career as a creative director to focus on spreading the message of personal change through positive outlook and action.

I spent less than an hour with her. We made pictures. Her husband, a photographer as well, showed me his work. I met the dog, Roxie. Then I left — reluctantly. This was a good house, a good family. They gave me hour out of their lives. I added it to my collection.

See a gallery of pictures of Holly Seeler and her family.