Issue Archives

Welcome to the December issue of The Digital Journalist, the monthly online magazine for Visual Journalism.

Here are some suggestions for books we like, most recently published, arranged alphabetically by title

What is the recommended user maintenance for the external weather seal of Canon "L" lenses?

For most of the Vietnam War I was overseas, first in Vietnam, then Hong Kong and finally, London.

Many of us started out shooting pictures for newspapers. Many freelancers raised families on revenue derived from newspaper assignments. But that's yesterday.

David Hume Kennerly photographs with an exact sense of balance and great humanity.

Gerald R. Ford took on the office of vice president left vacant by the disgraced Spiro Agnew, stepping into a role that he never aspired to play, but taking it on because he believed it was his duty as a citizen and a statesman.

For December we have three Dispatches and an Update. Chris Hondros returns and goes to court with Iraqi prisoners, William B. Plowman looks at gang life in Gary, Indiana, and Veronique de Viguerie takes on the challenge of a story about the prostitution of young Iraqi women in Syria.

After covering the suicide bombing on Benazir Bhutto's convoy last month in Karachi and the events surrounding her return to Pakistan from self-exile, I left for an assignment in Rwanda and then returned to Beirut thinking that I wouldn't be back in Pakistan until the lead-up to their elections a few weeks down the road. How wrong I was.

The men didn't seem to understand what two blond girls where doing in this dirty casino.

The only way to get things done around here is with gunplay.

Iraq, many people might be surprised to learn, has a functioning court system. Well, "functioning" might be too strong a word but it does have an array of non-religious criminal courts run by the Iraqi government.

It's actually cool, looks like a neutron bomb took out all the students and left all the enlargers, trays, etc. in place.

The new Nikon D300 seems to live up to all its hype and even exceeds it in a couple of cases, especially high ISO shooting.

She's not at all scary to look at. She has a rangy, casual style to her and an easy laugh. She comes sauntering in with her cameras and you think, Where's the harm? Let her snap a photo or two.

There is one subject that keeps coming up in the digital age, and it is related to McLuhan's notion that the medium is the message.

I only met Bilal Hussein once, in Ramadi mid-September of last year, but the story he shared with me as we stood outside the bullet-pocked entryway of the Al Anbar provincial capitol building has stuck with me ever since.

Welcome to the November issue of The Digital Journalist, the monthly online magazine for visual journalism.

When covering a show as big (and noisy) as last week's PhotoPlus Expo

local photographer here in California suggested I contact you to see if you could offer some advice.

When I first started out in the business someone told me that 5 percent of photojournalism was the actual picture taking and the other 95 percent was the stuff that got you to the place you needed to be to take the picture.

Sometimes in the gym, when on the treadmill or working the weight machines, one of the three TV sets is on CNN and its late-afternoon show, "The Situation Room."

On Tuesday, Aug. 21, 2007 I took delivery of a pre-production version of Sony's exciting new XDCAM EX-series solid-state camcorder: the all-new PMW-EX1.

Remember using the Motion Tab in the FCP Viewer to set keyframes in order to pan & scan with still photographs using a Cross Dissolve?

I arrived in Toronto Wednesday afternoon, Oct. 17, a damp day with unusually high summer temperatures similar to New York.

Getty Images has stuck its finger in a beehive.

So many tragic events start out after you've awakened in the morning, the sun shining and you think to yourself, "What a brilliant day."

'Monetize' is apparently business-speak for creating a cozy relationship between the news, sales and marketing departments.

During the last three weeks of October, an extremely popular item swept through cyberspace via e-mail exchanges.

A number of my friends and acquaintances are shooting digital professionally, but shooting their personal projects on film.

The Burmese military, accompanied by plain-clothed thugs, stood at the opposite end of the street, machine guns and riot shields at the ready.

The ceremony begins with a Roman Catholic prayer.

The term "hero" has evolved over time.

On Friday, July 27, five news helicopters in Phoenix scrambled to cover a car chase.

I'm sitting in the Continental lounge at the Houston airport on my way back from a fun weekend.

The introduction about a year ago of 12-color pigment printers by Canon was a major addition to the fine art and photo printing area.

During my simultaneous house restoration and television series production, I had been too busy to deal with the stove, what with alternating surprise bouts of plumbing and sound re-edits, and also the fits of depression that punctuated both processes.

Sometimes, using a big SUV to go to the corner grocery is overkill and a waste of gas.

In the first week of September I got an e-mail from a reader who was good enough to inform me that someone was plagiarizing my work on MySpace, and gave me two links, one for the place where the copied work appeared, which my informant claimed was a fake profile, and one for the real profile of the plagiarizer.

In science "double blind" refers to a testing system in which neither the subject nor the administrator can predict the outcome because crucial information has been withheld from them.

They started on a journey together in Paris that would sadly end in her untimely death during the Spanish Civil War, and for him immortal fame as possibly the greatest war photographer who ever lived.

This month our dispatches come from Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert exploring the ubiquitous use of cell phone in Tokyo and Carsten Snejbjerg reporting from Greece about the August wildfires.

The telephone number you have dialed is inoperative.

The stench of sulphur and dead animals completely dominated the air.

The end of September brought us to another new phase in world affairs, as we witnessed the chaotic situation in Myanmar.

Seong Joon Cho was looking forward to graduating from school next year and starting a career as a freelance photographer.

Here are two reasons you shouldn't read this column - at least if you have limited time to spend on the Web. Instead, check out these sites

You are invited to submit questions about photo equipment, imaging technology, or photo industry trends that may have a bearing on your work or interests.

This month we present three dispatches: Dai Kurokawa reporting on the Thailand-Burma border. Shapiro visited Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, staying with a remarkable family who helps many children while dealing with the alcoholism of a son. In Afghanistan, David Bathgate observes heroin addiction and sees firsthand one of the country's very few treatment centers.

Fotocare, one of the top-of-the-line camera stores in New York City, has an umbrella reflector on display that reaches from the floor almost to the ceiling.

The story was repeated in the mainstream media and widely across the Internet.

Momentum. It's what keeps your business going. Momentum is what builds up between assignments.

The golden sunlight of a summer afternoon warmly caressed the lush, verdant expanses of a typically Southern, rural antebellum scene.

During the 1980s, if you wanted to turn my brother from the even-tempered, easygoing individual that he normally was into a rage-consumed animal, all you had to do was to mention the two words "Margaret Thatcher" within his hearing and that would do it.

At the end of July, CNN and YouTube got together to put on a TV event they believed would take political debate, and, thus, this current campaign for president, to new heights.

From time to time, I see an "ERR 99" on the LCD data panel of my EOS Digital SLR. What does it mean?

I received the Complete Training for Episode and EpisodePro DVD and promptly spent almost 4 non-planned hours mesmerized by their content and easy-to-follow instructions.

Wanderlust has created the world we know today. Ever since our human ancestors walked out of Africa in search of a better life, the journey has not stopped.

During a recent six-week trip to Iran, I shot exclusively with a Leica M8. This camera was lent to me by Leica for assessment, but I want to stress that there is no financial deal involved either way.

It has now been almost a year since the release of the landmark Leica M8 digital rangefinder camera, a year fraught with setbacks and triumphs.

Putting the viewfinder to my eye became not just the way to make pictures -- it offered a momentary escape from the macabre scene playing out right in front of me.

Pine Ridge Reservation knocks you on your ass. The feeling of oppression and poverty is ubiquitous and extreme.

The rainy season was just around the corner at the Thai-Burma border along the Moei River.

Scholars have filled the shelves of the world's great libraries with books and articles about the Indian diaspora, a collective term that describes people who have migrated out of South Asia, but who generally think of themselves as Indian and are tied to the culture of India no matter where they might live.

They're sick, they're dying, and they're dead.

After slipping deep into the memory hole last month about my first impressions and experiences in photography, there is no more time to linger or wax poetic about the past.

For September we present four dispatches and one update by photographers Marco Di Lauro, Jean Chung, Nasim Goli, Sarah Shatz and Roger Arnold. The first two deal with very different subjects in Afghanistan. Nasim Goli shows us an Iranian national family tradition and Sarah Shatz takes us to Kansas where a May 4 tornado nearly wiped a town off the map. In his update on the CIA's secret war in Laos, Roger Arnold continues his account of the Hmong people's brutal struggle for survival in Laos.

You are invited to submit questions about photo equipment, imaging technology, or photo industry trends that may have a bearing on your work or interests.

Many clients' only experience with photography is that magical click of the camera. Heck, it's so easy anybody can do it. So why are you charging so much?

He'd phoned twice the week before, and I'd returned the call to his hotel voice mail on both occasions, but we hadn't connected.

All my life I have been a reporter.

I used to soup film and print negs; I had a darkroom. Today, I am told, I have a digital workflow. That kind of creeps me out.

A correspondent who paints queried me the other day about color photography, saying that he remembers being ecstatic the day Kodachrome ASA 64 film came out because it made possible saturation of the blues and reds never achieved before.

On May 4, 2007, an F5 tornado ripped through Greensburg, Kansas, and leveled the town. An F5 is the most destructive level of tornado.

Living in Afghanistan for almost one year since the summer of 2006, I've been covering various women's-rights issues such as education and politics. However, I did not realize that Afghanistan has the second highest maternal mortality ratio (MMR) in the world, only after Sierra Leone, as of February 2007.

In late December 2006 I flew to Fresno, Calif., to witness Hmong New Year celebrations and meet a CIA legend – Hmong General Vang Pao. I was nervous and excited. Vang

The most advanced hospital in southern Afghanistan is housed in a tent in the middle of the desert and provides life-saving treatment to the injured personnel of NATO's International Security Assistance Force, Afghan government troops, Taliban fighters and the innocent civilians caught in the middle of the conflict.

Welcome to the July issue of The Digital Journalist, the monthly online magazine for visual journalism.

I replaced the focusing screen in my EOS 5D with the "Ee crop lines focusing screen set.

Sometimes you can't do it all yourself.

Sometimes, for brief moments only, it seems advantageous to live in a place where fear and ignorance can indiscriminately take the upper hand.

"Digital is the Devil's work." "Digital is bad." How

I arrived in the Sayeda Zainab quarter of Damascus around 9:00 in the evening where an eponymous shrine to Muhammad's granddaughter is located.

I never went to Northern Ireland to photograph "The Troubles"; I had had enough of them here in the U.S.A. The '60s were a rough time here; the anti-war movement was in full swing and I had been documenting it whenever I could.

Sometimes it is interesting to take a refresher course in something one has studied in the past. After initially delving into a subject, it's not uncommon to tuck information away with a confidence that fails to take into account the changing circumstances. New perspectives may be required to forge a new consensus.

Imagine a completely abstract space, a world without context, a place that is no place at all apart from what you bring to it.

When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, there were a series of meetings in Washington conducted by the Department of Defense about how the press covered the war.

Welcome to the June issue of The Digital Journalist

Exhibitionism will exist as long as there is voyeurism.

an you provide any info on write speeds for the EOS-1D Mark III with Compact Flash cards?

The good guys are always stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and we always defeat them and save the day.

"You know, Jim-Jim, this nonviolence shit really pays."

Reviewed by Marianne Fulton

As sometimes happens the Europeans are showing the way forward in photojournalism.

A recent column comparing raw files to jpegs generated a fair amount of correspondence, not about the advantages of one form over the other, but how to deal with the limited exposure latitude of jpegs and the limitations of a camera's reflected light, automatic TTL metering.

In June we have three dispatches: Rafael Ben-Ari explores a groundbreaking medical procedure; Philip Poupin reports on the continued dangers of the Afghanistan war, and Danfung Dennis writes of the so-called American surge into the "self-sustaining" conflict in Iraq.

"We are trying more to get the bad guys to use their resources to flee."

As my senses returned, the first thing I was conscious of was agonized screaming.

I have found lighting Nirvana and it's name is LitePanels.

When I passed patients and medical employees with my camera equipment they gave me suspicious looks.

In "What's It All About?" E-Bits Editor Beverly Spicer takes us on a video tour to a struggle for survival on the African savannah, then a fusion of 500 years of portraits of women in art, and finally, to what could only be called a pipe dream.

It sounds like the beginning of a really bad joke: There was this Englishman, Frenchman, Hungarian and Pole who got together to form a photographers' cooperative.

At 15 years old and living in Norway, taking pictures becomes important to young Jonas Bendiksen.

First of all can I say that this column is not, repeat not, meant as an attack on anyone but as a warning and, perhaps, something to think about.

We live in a time when it is virtually impossible to keep up with change and retain one's sanity.

I have a new definition of heaven.

They may be breaking up the old gang of Creative Fees and Usage.

I remember when the word came in. I was home from school for the summer, doing full-time manual labor at my family's small weekly newspaper in Central Louisiana.

My basic shooting rig is two DSLRs. I have three gadget bags for those two camera bodies. You guessed it. Each bag has a different set of lenses.

In May five dispatches with fine images cover a variety of subjects

The next thing I remember is strapping on body armor and grabbing my camera as small arms fire cracked overhead...

Women light a candle at the door of one house and pass to another one...

I'm not a spot-news junky although I enjoy the challenge presented by covering most news events.

We are hearing a lot lately about U-Turns, 180-degree shifts, tipping points and critical mass.

To look at a photograph by James Whitlow Delano is to peer inside a meticulously crafted poem.

The shooting of President Ronald Reagan changed Mary Calvert's life

instructions - David Leeson Tool Creation - David Leeson II

I cannot get my computers to communicate with my EOS-1D Mark II N

Frequently I'm asked a lot about how to do those "Ken Burns" moves on still photographs in Final Cut Pro, so I thought it was time to finally put it all down on paper.

Every day brings news of more casualties. Media company business managers literally laugh about photographers who assist them in turning a highly skilled profession into a commodity

The two parts of this column go together for reasons that will become apparent as you read on

Front pages do not interest me any more.

If you're going to spend a few months in France, bring aspirin. Or acetaminophen (Tylenol). Or whatever your over-the-counter pain reliever of choice is.

When Dirck asked if I would do a review of the HP 9180 printer I wondered if I was the right choice because I have been a loyal Epson user for a very long time.

When I was a child (in terms of the digital experience), I shot as a child and shot JPEGs.

This is the 17th Platypus Workshop to be offered since 1999. It is considered the "Gold Standard" of DV workshops.

In April our Dispatch from Derek Flood looks at the conflict in and over Kashmir. In 1947 the territory of Pakistan was split away ("partitioned") from India. Kashmir, located at the juncture of the Indian, Pakistani and Chinese borders, was joined to India by the then-colonial government.

I came to Indian-occupied Kashmir in the context of a larger trip around South Asia to document the fraying edges of the much-hyped Indian ascendancy that I'd been hearing about ad nauseam in the American media over that last few years

Last month, Time Inc. announced that it was suspending publication of the weekly Life magazine.

One nice thing about living in a university town is the constant flux of discovery and innovation, ideas and creative expression.

If one is tempted to think photography isn';t important – witness North Korea.

There is a battle raging in newspaper photojournalism.

The very continued existence of many majors is suddenly in doubt.

If the change from film to digital was the equivalent of a magnitude 5 earthquake, the changes to photography in the next 10 years will be equivalent of a magnitude 10.

You are invited to submit questions about photo equipment, imaging technology, or photo industry trends that may have a bearing on your work or interests.

Newspaper photographers tend to shoot in color and publish in black and white

I'm sure that the members of the present administration under the leadership of one of the most incurious presidents in history don't know this

When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly forty years at sea, I merely say, uneventful.

Not exactly a Stalin show trial.

I heard him again, just moments ago.

In March we have two Dispatches from war zones.

Welcome to the February issue of The Digital Journalist, the monthly online magazine for visual journalism.

Contact Press Images celebrated 30 years of remarkable photography in 2006.

For the past 30 years, the photographers of Contact have produced work in nearly every format and style, color and black and white, but there is one constant in our work: it almost always puts people at the forefront.

Does Canon have recommended sharpen parameters for 5D to counter the AA filter blur effect?

A recent story in the Ventura County Star, "Brooks Institute Under Microscope," reports on a recent visit by inspectors from the Bureau of Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education to the school.

The cell phone movies of Saddam Hussein's hanging brought back memories of the story I am about to tell.

New Year's resolutions represent a basic optimism that we can always do better. Here are 10 resolutions that I hope freelancers make for 2007

This month, Compression Session takes a detour into a problem of national security that has been on the minds of many.

"We were told the flight into Baghdad would be the most dangerous part of the trip."

"I had heard countless horror stories from other shooters of theft, knife attacks, and general harassment and distaste for foreign journalists."

Fifteen thieves are recently dead nationwide in the U.S., and I, for one, do not mourn them. These were humans who you could rightly judge from afar as none-too-scrupled and even less intelligent, without ever meeting them or assessing them individually.

Haunting. That is the only way to describe the suicide of a person who is the target of unexpected and harmful attention -- actual or anticipated -- from the news media.

Then again, maybe it's "Flying On A Wing And A Prayer" or "Pissing In The Wind."

Canon has a long history in the inkjet market, particularly in the desktop formfactor where their BubbleJet printers have been a popular choice for nearly 20 years.

A long time ago, in the age of film, I wrote, "Rangefinders take pictures, and Single-Lens Reflexes make pictures."

Many adages about change were written during times when in a relative sense nothing changed at all.

There are an abundance of dates and events that observers use to mark the beginning of the digital age, but for the media industry, it began in the New Jersey labs of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study in 1954, when a small group of engineers and other scientists created the first computer graphic image.