Shot for ZUMA Press. If you want to license these images please contact sales@zumapress.com.
Wednesday was a chilly and rainy November evening but hundreds of Occupy Seattle protestors showed up to show opposition to Jamie Dimon’s visit to the Seattle Sheraton hotel, where he was speaking to the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Dimon is the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. Police showed up in force, with rubber bullets, paintballs and riot gear at the ready, but they only used pepper spray sporadically on the protestors. See some of my photographs below …
Is this the new face of photojournalism? Google Maps is certainly part of the future of photojournalism, like it or not. (Related: See my Google Maps photo essay.)
Below is a screen shot of SeattlePI.com and you can see how they have utilized a Google Maps Street View image for reporting purposes. It’s very sad that a woman was shot and in this case an actual human photographer I think would be able to cover this story quite well, but instead we have a Google Maps image taking the place of traditional photojournalism. Of course I’m sure the SeattlePI.com journalists would agree that using a human photojournalist would be ideal – and seeing Google Maps in this story probably comes down to a case of budget constraints.
I’m actually surprised that I have not seen more Google Maps images in the press, but I am wondering how the readers are responding to this. Right now there are four comments on the story but they all relate to the rather shocking content of the story, not the use of a Google Maps image. My guess is that viewers/readers do not care one bit. They probably do care that the image presented is pretty boring, but that is not necessarily because it is a Google Maps image. There are plenty of pretty and interesting Google Maps images out there, but just like traditional photojournalism it takes time, energy and expertise to find those images.
For me, I really am intrigued by the use of Google Maps images for photojournalism, reportage and photo essays, but the image below isn’t exactly a good supporting argument. Aren’t I afraid of losing my job? Not really. I actually think that the more that Google Maps images pop up, the more that media consumers will realize that their lives are constantly under surveillance. For this reason, and others, I think folks will begin to remember why they love images made by real, empathetic, human photojournalists. There is something great that people love about images made by other humans, and the screen shot below can help with understanding that. However, as a photojournalist myself I’ve found that using Google Maps can be rewarding. Part of my graduate school capstone work included a Google Maps Street View photo essay.
I’m working with the Diversity Recruitment & Outreach team at UW Bothell again, this time to document a special project at McKnight Middle School in Renton, Washington. UW Bothell student volunteers are spending time with the middle school students each week to build leadership and communication skills as well as self and cultural awareness. The volunteers are also facilitating conversations about how McKnight Middle School can better serve these students and set them up for success in college and beyond. The middle school student group consists of mostly African American and Latino young men, which are largely underrepresented groups on college campuses. Programs like this one can hopefully change that. It really is a remarkable program.
At the end of the year we will be producing a short documentary film that explains what we were able to accomplish. In the meantime, you can watch the first video installment of a series of updates about this outreach work. I am doing some of the filming, taking photographs, and most importantly mentoring a UW Bothell senior, Amen Mengesha, who is the director of the project. He is a media production star of the future, so be sure to watch that first video installment here, or below, to see what he created. I’ve included some of my photographs from week two below.
These Diwali pictures are from celebrations near Seattle on the first day of Diwali, October 26, 2011. Special thanks to the Hindu Temple & Cultural Center as well as the Gurudwara Sikh Centre of Seattle for your hospitality.
Six grants of $4,000 each. What a great way to support photojournalists who want to be more educated and be industry leaders.
Why did they have to wait until after my graduation to create this fund?? Well it’s too late for me, but you should apply! See the full announcement below from the NPPA’s National Press Photographers Foundation.
I returned to the University of Washington Bothell to pursue a master’s degree and to be a Seattle photographer again after working at my first newspaper job at The Park Record in Park City, UT; I would have loved to see more scholarships supporting photojournalists who want to be more informed and educated.
Here is the info:
New Scholarships Available for Photojournalists Returning to School
The National Press Photographers Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of new scholarship money for photojournalists who have returned to school.NPPF president Mike Smith said the funds are being made available through the Foundation, the National Press Photographers Association, and a grant from the Author’s Coalition of America.“If you are a photojournalist with three years experience and your work has been published in newspapers, magazines or through agencies, and if you have returned to school in the past year, you are eligible to apply,” Smith said.
“These scholarships are particularly important now when so many photographers have been forced to learn new skills just to keep their jobs, much less find a new one. We are fortunate to have some money to support photographers who are trying to keep up with the head-spinning changes in their industry.”
Six grants of $4,000 each, called the NPPF-NPPA Career Expansion Scholarships, will be awarded this year.
The application deadline is November 15, 2011. Applicants must include a resume, completed application forms (which can be downloaded at http://nppf.org) and recommendation letters from their instructors.
Send your application materials to: Tom Hardin, NPPF vice president, 1622 Forest Hill Drive, Louisville, KY, 40205. Hardin can be contacted by eMail to answer questions about applying, and his eMail address is hardin@aye.net.
After using the software for a few months now, I finally feel that I can write a well-informed Final Cut Pro X review. Let’s get right to it: don’t buy Final Cut Pro X. Not just yet.
This was a massive overhaul of the software and anyone should know that it’s risky to jump on the bandwagon with a 1.0 release. Don’t get me wrong – I like Final Cut Pro X and I think it has a lot of potential, but there are too many bugs right now. Extremely frustrating bugs. Bugs that make this software a huge waste of time and inappropriate for professional use.
The trailer you see below is one I made for With Nature in Mind using Final Cut Pro X, along with a full 7-minute video that is almost finished. It was fun to learn the new software while creating these videos, and there are a lot of great features in the software, but this is an honest Final Cut Pro X review so I have to tell both sides of the story.
The bugs are frustrating. The worst one happens when using the lower third templates (the little name and title animations for interviews). What happens is that I insert a lower third over someone talking, type in their name and information, and then move along with my editing. But after a while, the changes to the lower third get lost over and over again at different times in the editing process. Sometimes, I’ll have the video project completely finished in Final Cut Pro X and I’ll export it. Everything looks fine. Then I go back in to change something small – and completely unrelated to the lower thirds in the project – but what will happen is the lower thirds reset themselves and just say “Name” in place of the interviewees’ actual names! This has happened too many times. Often times the formatting that I have applied to the lower third is also lost. See pics below.
Another weird bug that happens that I haven’t read in other Final Cut Pro X reviews is that the audio becomes distorted upon export and upload to YouTube. When I export a video and watch it on my computer, it sounds fine, but when I upload to YouTube, often the audio gets very scratchy. I know this is a transcoding problem because I found a way to work around it. The problem disappears if, after export from Final Cut Pro X, I open the video in Quicktime and use that program’s “Save As” function and select “1080p.” This essentially re-transcodes the video file and somehow fixes whatever Final Cut Pro X is doing wrong. Very weird. And another time waster.
The funny thing is, I started using the software in order to save time, but this Final Cut Pro X review is sadly going to tell you that Final Cut Pro X wastes more of your time than it saves. Yes, it’s true that you can sync an audio track with a video track in one click (something huge for DSLR interview shooters like myself). Yes, you can edit h.264 footage without having to first transcode to something like Prores 422 via MPEG Streamclip. And yes, it’s true that you don’t have to wait for Final Cut Pro X to render (at all). But what they don’t tell you is that the program becomes quite slow during the “background rendering” that Final Cut Pro X uses, but this is probably not a big deal on newer machines. My Macbook Pro is from mid-2008, but still is generally quite fast and does great with the previous versions of Final Cut Pro. Also, in general, Final Cut Pro X is just slow overall compared to previous versions. Again, yes, my machine is older, but comparing Final Cut Pro 7 to Final Cut Pro X head to head … the older version is way faster.
So here is my advice – since you have invested your time in reading this Final Cut Pro X review, do you yourself another favor and save your time by avoiding Final Cut Pro X until 10.1 comes out. If you don’t like that, then switch to Adobe Premiere. Call me too patient, but I’ll wait to see if 10.1 works or not before I switch. Unlike many, many other photographers and video producers out there.
Exciting news – I just saw the announcement of the upcoming release of the Canon 1D X, which combines the 1Ds line of camera bodies and the 1D line. You can see the official press release here.
Before I can actually get my hands on it (can I borrow $6,800?) I’ll have to say that the Canon 1D X will be a useful update for photojournalists and filmmakers/videographers because of a few new things – first, it is now a full frame camera body, unlike the 1D series, which had a 1.3x crop factor. That meant that you didn’t see everything the lens gave the camera; everything was cropped/zoomed in by a factor of 1.3. Now, the 1D X matches the 5D mark II in full frame capability, so the image will be much nicer. Additionally, you can adjust the audio levels on the 1D X while recording video. Before – and with the Canon 5D mark II – you had to pick an audio level setting and leave it. On-the-go adjustments are crucial for filmmakers, especially when it comes to audio.
Another great thing is that the 1D X shoots 60p video, which means you get 60 frames per second so that you can get more out of your slow-mo shots, especially with the help of Final Cut Pro plugins like Twixtor. Again, the 5D mark II lags behind – with a max of 30p (though the 7D shoots 60p as does the 1D mark IV).
There is a whole host of other new features and crazy upgrades (14 frames per second for sports … or LOTS of pictures of your cat), but I just wanted to highlight a couple of my favorite things. We’ll see how the thing functions when it actually comes out and if there are any issues like with the last time Canon released such a heavily redesigned product. 1D mark III auto focus defection nightmares anyone?
Shot for ZUMA Press. If you want to license these images please contact sales@zumapress.com.
This is a selection of images from the ongoing Occupy Seattle protests here in Seattle, Washington that are organized in conjunction with the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York. Protestors on Saturday, October 15 illegally set up 150 tents and stayed in Westlake Park until police finally removed them Monday morning.
