Alan Taylor, late of The Big Picture, is up and running at The Atlantic with his new site, In Focus.
In Focus is The Atlantic’s news photography blog. Several times a week, I’ll post entries featuring collections of images that tell a story. My goal is to use photography to do the kind of high-impact journalism readers have come to expect on other pages of this site. Along the way, I’ll cover a range of subjects, from breaking news and historical topics to culture high and low. Sometimes, I’ll just showcase amazing photography.
I almost stopped reading this about halfway through because she wouldn’t stop having children, but it’s worth sticking it out until the end. (via dooce)
As I mentioned on Twitter, we got Ollie a camera for Christmas and set it up to post automatically to Flickr. He loves it so far, and it’s been fascinating to see how he sees the world…which is mostly low-angle and mundane. The account is private, but here are a few of my favorite shots of his:
Ollie’s great grandpa
Looking out the door (note the low angle)
Making espresso
But often the camera is a tool for him. Yesterday morning we were trying to build a boat out of blocks…”the same as we built last week,” Ollie said to me. I couldn’t remember how we’d built the boat last week and Ollie couldn’t really describe it or duplicate it by himself. “We should have taken a picture of it. Then we would remember,” he said. And a couple of weeks ago, his toy computer (basically a glorified Speak N’ Spell) ran out of batteries and when he came running in to the kitchen to tell me, he held up his camera with a photo of the computer in question, “see Daddy, the screen’s not working”…as if I wasn’t going to take his word for it.
After I tweeted about the camera, a number of people asked what setup we were using. We had an old Powershot SD450 laying around, so we gave him that instead of buying a kids camera. Ollie’s three and a half now and pretty conscientious; he doesn’t throw stuff around or smash things so we figured we could trust him with an actual camera. And for the most part, he’s been really good with it. He puts the cord around his wrist so the camera won’t fall on the floor if it slips out of his hands. For the first few days, he was accidentially sticking his fingers in the lens area and that caused the little shutter that covers the lens when the camera is off to stick a little bit, but he stopped doing that and learned how to fix the sticky shutter himself. He sometimes gets stuck in a weird menu after pushing too many buttons, but mostly he knows how to get in and out of the menus. He knows how to use the zoom and can shoot videos. He also can tell when the battery is running out and knows how to remove the battery to recharge it. Giving an “adult” camera to a three-year-old may seem like a recipe for confusion and broken electronics, but I’m continually amazed at kids’ thirst for knowledge and empowered responsibility.
For the automatic uploading to Flickr, we put an Eye-Fi card in the camera. The Eye-Fi is a regular SD memory card with built-in wireless networking…the low-end 4GB card is only $45 on Amazon. And you can link the card to a Flickr account so that when the camera is on and in range of a trusted wifi network, the photos are automatically uploaded. Pretty simple once you get it set up.
Two and a half years ago, Alan Taylor started The Big Picture at the Boston Globe; he basically ran the site in his spare work time as a web developer for the company. Now he’s moving on to The Atlantic, where he will edit a new photo site called In Focus.
I wanted the opportunity to do this — telling news photo stories — as a fulltime job, and the Atlantic has offered that to me, for which I am grateful. I also think the Atlantic is a better overall fit for the type of international, wide-ranging storytelling I’ve practiced over the years. The Globe has been a good home and a great platform for over 425 entries since 2008 and I am truly grateful, but I’ve chosen to move on now, and really hope you’ll come along and see what I’m up to. I feel very fortunate for what I’ve been able to accomplish to date, and for the opportunity given to me now. I really can’t believe this is going to be my fulltime gig!
Smart move by The Atlantic, which is increasingly looking like one of the media properties that may make a smooth-ish transistion from print to online/app media. As for The Globe, well, I don’t think they quite knew what they had there. Eight million page views per month out of nothing with a less-than-maximal effort…that’s the kind of thing you want to encourage if you’re in the media business.
My pal Mouser has started a sand collection and is using a macro lens to take photos of each sample. This sample was collected in Hawaii.
The green grains are olivine, the black are basalt, and the white are possibly bits of shell. Green sand is reasonably rare; the southern tip of the big island of Hawai’i is the most common place to get it.
A really lovely seven-minute documentary about Scott Schuman, aka The Sartorialist.
Watching the concentration, focus, and determination in Schuman’s eyes and body as he walks around looking for photographic subjects immediately reminded me of an elite athlete; that same look was documented at length in Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait. And that’s no accident…what Schuman does is an athletic pursuit as much as anything else. The way he holds his camera while walking, down by his side, slightly behind his back, hiding it from his potential subjects until he sees an opening…he’s like a running back cradling a football, probing for an opening in the defensive line.
Just as Abramovic’s piece concerned duration, the photographs give the viewer a chance to experience the performance from Abramovic’s perspective. They reveal both dramatic and mundane moments, and speak to the humanity of such interactions, just as the performance itself did. The resultant photographs are mesmerizing and intense, putting a face to the world of art lovers while capturing what they shared during their contact with the artist.
Vivian Maier’s photographs were seemingly destined for obscurity, lost among the clutter of the countless objects she’d collected throughout her life. Instead these images have shocked the world of street photography and irrevocably changed the life of the man who brought them to the public eye. This film brings to life the improbable saga of John Maloof’s discovery of Vivian Maier. Along with her documentary films, photographs, odd collections, and accounts from people who knew her, we take you on the journey of ‘Finding Vivian Maier’.
The object, called AFGL 3068, is a binary star, two stars in an 800-year orbit around one another. One of them is a red giant, a star near the end of its life. It’s blowing off massive amounts of dark dust, which is enveloping the pair and hiding them from view. But the system’s spin is spraying the material out like a water sprinkler head, causing this giant and delicate spiral pattern on the sky. And by giant, I mean giant: the entire structure is about 3 trillion kilometers (about 2 trillion miles) across.
Photographer Sacha Goldberger has his depressed grandmother pose for a series of outlandish superhero photos. The result was very theraputic for the 91-year-old woman.
Initially, she did not understand why all these people wrote to congratulate her. Then, little by little, she realized that her story conveyed a message of hope and joy. In all those pictures, she posed with the utmost enthusiasm. Now, after the set, Goldberger shares that his grandmother has never shown even a trace of depression.
If you crossed The Sartorialist with The Selby and put the whole thing on a bike, you’d get Downtown From Behind, a collection of photographs of creative people biking the streets of downtown Manhattan, shot from behind.
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