Our friends over at PDN have found an interesting photo angle to Colin Powell's recent endorsement of Barak Obama, finding he was in part moved by an image he saw by British photographer Platon – of a mother grieving for her son, killed (presumably) in Iraq or Afghanistan.

"...as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards, Purple Heart, Bronze Star, showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian Cross. It didn't have a Star of David. It had a crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan. And he was an American."

Powell was talking to Meet the Press.

Kiefer Sutherland the star of the popular 24 will show off his hidden skill as a photographer in a special exhibition celebrating the launch of the series’ seventh season, the LA Times reports.

While filming the season's two-hour opening episode - 24: Redemption - in South Africa, Sutherland, director Jon Cassar and producer Michael Klick captured behind-the-scenes images of the film shoot. The 48 photographs include pictures of local wildlife and population in the surrounding areas of Cape Town.

The exhibition will be on display from 10 November at the Paley Center for Media in Berverley Hills, Los Angeles. To read the full story, check the LA Times' blog.

First Brad Pitt, now Kiefer. Who's next?

Last night wealthy art collectors Fatima and Eskandar Maleki opened up their frankly jaw-dropping Mayfair home to celebrate the Prix Pictet, the photographic award in sustainability (the winner of which will be announced next week in Paris).
Chair of the Prix Pictet judging panel and head of photographs at Sotheby's Francis Hodgson gave a speech, declaring his immense satisfaction with the award. 'Photography prizes have tended to be very specialist, known only to people within the photographic community,' he said. 'This is a prize for photography that is really taken seriously, just as prizes for art and cinema are.'
Photography, he added, has long played second fiddle to other art-forms, but the balance is now, at last, being redressed. It was something perhaps borne out in the Maleki's own house - of the many amazing works of art on display, very few were photographic, but the couple has nevertheless got behind the Prix Pictet - a sign, perhaps, of changing times.
The Malekis did have a few photographs in their collection though - snapshots, depicting their family and friends at various social events and lovingly presented in ornate picture frames. Perhaps it's easy to be snobby about such images, but I found it very touching that a couple who number original artworks by Damien Hirst and Jean-Michel Basquiat among their collection can also find space for this kind of imagery. In next week's BJP, Paul Lowe refers to the 'memorialising power of the still image', and that's a unique power, really. Photography's now considered art - brilliant. But if and when it is art, in my book, it's not just art. It's art and more, something above and beyond.

Camera manufacturers' advertising campaigns don't always set BJP's collective heart beating but Canon's most recent effort is a definite exception.

Featuring four innovative images, each of which uses light to illustrate Canon's mastery of speed, light, motion and detail, it's a cut above the norm and naturally we wondered who'd shot it. Perhaps Dan Tobin Smith, famous for his innovative use of light? Maybe Jonathan Knowles, master of the liquid still life?

The answer was a bit of a surprise - Rick Guest, best-known for his innovative 'jumping' ad portraits. But we felt smug about it nonetheless - Guest was our cover star just a few months ago. Good to see him going from strength to strength and pushing his portfolio forwards.

Thousands of commuters in New York City were greeted with a free copy of what appeared to be the New York Times on Wednesday morning, only to find it dated 04 July 2009 and bearing the headline ‘IRAQ WAR ENDS’.

Fronting a photograph of Apache helicopters in flight, the spoof newspaper carried articles ‘reporting’ the indictment of President Bush for high treason, the nationalisation of major oil companies and the introduction of a maximum wage.

The bona fide New York Times notes that an anonymous email statement was circulated to the news media regarding the spoof and included claims that it had taken six months in preparation and had achieved a distribution figure of 1.2 million. The latter is dubious to say the least, given that it’s greater than the real newspaper’s own figures.

The Guardian reports that a group of leftwing activists called the Yes Men were responsible for the distribution of the fake NYT, while it had been funded by a number of wealthy donors and written by journalists from a variety of New York newspapers.

The photographs used in the publication, however, appear to be genuine and featured legitimately, having apparently been sourced either from the photographic skills of the pranksters themselves or through free distribution from various organisations.

You can view a website for the elaborately conceived spoof here – complete with fake adverts for many global companies.

Photographers can be honoured in many ways – winning a prestigious award such as the World Press Photo perhaps, or being knighted by the Queen. However, an American nature photographer has now been given the rare honour of having a mountain named after him.

Ira Spring, who died in 2003, was a keen climber who spent his life exploring and photographing wilderness areas in the US and across the rest of the world. He was also a dedicated campaigner for the protection of the American wilderness, which led to him being awarded a Roosevelt Conservation Award by President George H.W. Bush in 1992 (so presumably he would have been unhappy at this recent news). As reported in the Seattle Times, Spring’s photographs of remote parts of his home state of Washington may have featured in as many as a million copies of various books and guides.

The mountain chosen to be named after the photographer is fittingly inaccessible – the 5,700-foot Ira Spring mountain cannot be viewed by road and there is no trail leading to its peak.

This is not the first time photography has influenced the naming of the America’s expansive geography. In 1948, a group of surveyors exploring a previously undocumented area of Utah even named the region after the brand of film they used, and the Kodachrome Basin State Park was born.

Hmmm... Feeling paranoid?

Brighter now?

Nostalgic?

Excuse me?

Yay!

That's nice, but what's all this got to do with photography?

Londoners have been noticing these strange messages around the Underground recently. They're the latest installment of Platform for Art, which since 2000 has been presenting new artworks to 'enhance and enrich the journeys of millions on the Tube every day'.

(There's a grand histroy of this on the tube, and from 1908, managing director Frank Pick began commissioning leading artists such as Man Ray, Edward McKnight Kauffer and Graham Sutherland to work on innovative poster campaigns.)

The latest commission is Anna Barriball's typographic artwork About 60 miles of beautiful views, featuring enigmatic texts. The reason for featuring them here is that each of the texts is taken from the back of found photographs. Tenuous I know, but we thought we'd share.

Have you been the victim of the UK police's misuse of stop-and-search powers (many photographers have been stopped in their usual line of duty, reporting news, or even just shooting a wedding, despite reassurances that this will stop), and if so, what did you do about it?

Perhaps you didn't know you could do anything, but in an entertaining piece in The Guardian this week, comedian and activist Mark Thomas details how he managed to prove his own experience of stop-and-seach was unlawful.

Thomas was stopped in September 2007 outside an arms fair in the Docklands in London after he attempted to walk past the police with an "over-confident manner". No kidding.



He writes:

"Although protesters are often targeted for stop and search, often claiming these are unlawful, they seldom seem to put in official complaints. So with the help of solicitors at Fisher Meredith I brought a complaint against the police. Being Britain the first step in a complaint against an official body is for the very body you are complaining about to investigate itself. And lo the police did find themselves innocent."

So he took his compaint to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, and to his own surprise, it delivered a verdict that the stop and search was illegal, stating that "it would appear that the officers had misinterpreted their powers under Police And Criminal Evidence Act (PACE)".



Thomas concludes:

"It is in the cases where they get it wrong that attitudes towards police are sharpened and the rights we feel we have as citizens practically defined. So I am writing to the police requesting a formal admission of liability on the part of the commissioner and damages for assault and false imprisonment".

The Convention offers "a call to all concerned with attacks on our fundamental rights and freedoms under pressure from counter-terrorism, financial breakdown and the database state".

In this week's BJP, Julian Lass talks to Nick Simpson, the guy who came up with an off-the-wall idea for Focus-on-Imaging's annual ad shoot - a pompous photographer appropriately named Justin Focus. For the past two years, the character has been used for the event's press ads, catalogue covers, online videos and on-site materials, including a Justin Focus exhibition stand.

This year there are four new promo-videos. You can find them here:
http://www.focus-on-imaging.net/jf/jf-main.htm

A couple of weekend ago I met up with one of my favourite portrait photographers, Brian Griffin, and he told he was planning to go to Michigan to shoot a personal project. So, I asked if he'd share some comments about his progress with you on 1854.eu. And he agreed:

At present I'm over here in Michigan USA doing a personal project on the labour movement. Yes, believe it or not a self-funded piece of photography in these less than certain times. When things are quiet I just take myself off to do my own work or else I'd be crawling up the walls.
I'm over here staying in a B&B, nothing fancy. Bought myself some cheap amateur tungsten lights in downtown Ann Abor. The box says "ideal for beginners". Three 1500w heads, umbrellas and stands for $150. No assistants, just me humping around in the snow my Mamiya 7's, Tri-X film and Phase One Camera. Left all my lighting equipment back in London and traveled light.
Having a day off I decided to go to Hell, just to see what its like. Pretty boring actually. The real one is probably far more interesting. Its a small village 30 minutes drive south of here. I then took myself off to the Detroit Institute of Art for some inspiration and to see the Henry Fuseli painting Nightmare.

Just gearing myself up for 10 days portrait photography starting next Tuesday.

Brian will be speaking at The Hub at Focus-on-Imaging on his return. He is scheduled for 4-5pm on Sunday 22 February.

As if it's not tough enough out there for the creative industries, advertisers and marketeers are facing pressure to justify their activities promoting companies bailed out by the US government.

The thinking seems to be that ads and promotions are an unnecessary expence, rather than a revenue generator, which is bad news for the freelancers creatives commission – such as photographers.

"The conundrum: To drive much-needed sales, Tarp recipients (Troubled Asset Relief Program funds) must spend on marketing," writes Advertising Age. "But that's tough to do when some lawmakers, the media, and perhaps a section of the general public seem to denounce marketing or advertising as an unnecessary expense."

How about a bail out for the photography industry?

In my Comment in this week's British Journal of Photography, I asked readers if they'd take part in a future survey into how the recession is biting, and to supply any anecdotes about how business is going. I've had many responses – all of them detailing extensive fee cuts, rights grabs and a massive downturn in the amount of work available.

Email me at bjp.editor@bjphoto.co.uk if you're a pro photographer living in the UK or Ireland and would like to take part. Put 'fee survey' as your subject heading.

Liz Elliot at The Neurostimulation Technology Portal writes something quite interesting about the colour Magenta: it does not exist.

A beam of white light is made up of all the colours in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence. Pink (or magenta, to use its official name) simply isn’t there. But if pink isn’t in the light spectrum, how come we can see it?

She concludes that magenta is in fact a construction of our brain that tries 'to bridge the gap between red and violet, because such a colour does not exist in the light spectrum. Magenta has no wavelength attributed to it, unlike all the other spectrum colours.'

Read it here.

Pierce Brosnan's production company is said to be developing a movie on the life of photojournalist Robert Capa.

According to Reuters, Paul McGuigan, director of Lucky Number Slevin, is expected to take the helm. The movie will follow the life and death of Capa, born Andre Friedmann in Budapest. Capa is most famous for his images of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. He co-founded Magnum Photos.

He was killed in 1954, when he stepped on a land mine while covering the Indochina War.

Financial Secretary, UAW Local 651 (c) Brian Griffin.

Brian Griffin, the Surrealist influenced portrait photographer best known for his images of post-punk musicians of the 1980s, is currently working on a personal project in Michigan – in many ways a complimentary study to his celebrated book Work from London's Broadgate development – and he's agreed to keep 1854 visitors updated on his progress with occasional posts and pictures. Here's his latest entry...

My moustache continues to grow as my head rests on the pillow at night, in my guest house in Ann Arbor, the once home to Iggy and the Stooges. I'm slowly metamorphosing into a Michigan Auto Worker, to the accompaniment of the horns of the freight trains that pass nearby throughout the night. Snow falls, snow thaws, snow falls.

I feel I'm photographing the work mates of my late parents, also factory workers, as on this trip I mix with so many workers and retirees of an industry that is going through massive upheavals.

On Wednesday at one of the Flint, Local UAW buildings they celebrated "White Shirt Day", which is the anniversary of the 1936/7 Sit-Down strike. A very moving moment occurred when 3 to 400 of them from all ages linked hands and sang a song of solidarity. A tear ran down my cheek.

I feel this is the first pure documentary piece of work that I've done since art college days, which will continue my ever evolving project on America.

It's snowing again and I'll be off up the freeway to Flint like a fisherman, hoping in my case of catching a good image. Sometimes I return with nothing but that is the beauty of the quest, and that is why I continue to go back.

See his last entry here.

Today, Press Gazette is reporting that OK magazine is making a fortune thanks to Jade Goody's wedding pictures. The magazine paid £700,000 for the exclusive rights to the images. Now, OK's editorial director, Paul Ashford, is telling Press Gazette that more than two million copies of the special issue will be sold.

OK's average circulation, according to ABC, is 508,504. So, OK is expected to generate an extra £4.4m in sales revenue! Talk about getting your money's worth!

Read the interview here.

That's a photo taken by Annie Leibovitz. Find something wrong with it? Look at Sam Mendes' sleeves. Now, we wonder how much did Vanity Fair pay Annie Leibovitz for this, and more importantly, how come no one at VF realised the obvious Photoshop disaster?

More at Photoshop Disasters.

Discussions about privacy continue outside the walls of Parliament, with the most recent case revolving around the death of David Cameron's son. Last week, The Times was criticised for publishing photograph of the parents returning home. Critics called it 'an intrusion into grief'.

The Times feedback editor Sally Baker has defended the use of the image. ‘The Times takes very seriously this sort of criticism, but although we are sorry that we have given some readers cause for concern, it remains the view of the Editor that we were justified in using a photograph that will have contributed to the enormous public sympathy directed towards the family,’ she wrote.

Read more about it on The Times' website.

Lily Allen has got an injunction against two picture agencies and other paparazzi photographers, says MTV, preventing them from pursuing her.

The star’s lawyers took action after an incident last week, in which a persistent paparazzo drove into the back of her car. Allen punched and kicked the photographer, before calling in the solicitors.

‘In a court hearing that took place this afternoon, my client, Lily Allen, has resolved issues surrounding her constant harassment with two picture agencies and has also obtained from the High Court an injunction restraining further harassment of her by other paparazzi photographers,’ Allen’s lawyer, Mark Thomson, stated on Friday.

The injunction applies to Big Pictures and Matrix photo agencies as well as ‘individuals responsible for taking photographs of the claimant outside her home and in other public places during February and March 2009’.

Back in 2007 Allen was arrested after attacking photographers outside a London nightclub. Her US working visa revoked as a direct consequence.

Barack Obama's inauguration was ground-breaking in so many ways, it's good to see that one of them was photographic.

David Bergman used a GigaPan robotic camera to record the day, stitching together 220 shots to create a final image 56,646 x 27,788 pixels in size, in which you can zoom in on every single face in the crowd. Truly amazing!

There's a huge fire in London right now, and once more the first reports and pictures have come from the micro-blogging site Twitter. Here are a few shots: http://twitpic.com/27v2e, http://twitpic.com/27wn2, http://twitpic.com/27wq2 and http://twitpic.com/27v8p.

Earlier this year, the first picture of a plane landing in the Hudson river in New York was also published by a Twitter member.

BJP is also on Twitter and can be followed @1854.

The US division of Hachette Filipacchi is looking to sell both Popular Photography and American Photo, according to Advertising Age.

The two consumer magazines are leading brands in the US, along with Photo District News (which targets professional photographers). According to AdAge, Hachette has been 'scrubbing its budget' since its current CEO took over last autumn. The report also says that ad pages from January through the April issues fell 15.3% at Popular Photography.

The news comes three months after US magazine JPG announced it would cease its activities unless it found a new investor. Last month, it was saved by Millennium Ventures and Adorama Camera, a New York-based camera shop.

Karen Strunks, a photographer based in Birmingham, has called for everyone with camera or camera phone to capture the peace (or chaos) of their surroundings at 4am on 04 April.

The project started as collaboration between the photographer and her blog readers. ‘They thought it’s a good idea,’ Strunks tells BJP. She only realised the scale of the project when it was launched and admitted it to be her first wide-ranging brainchild. She used Twitter and Flickr to promote the idea internationally and looked through other photographers’ work offering them to submit photos as preparation for the set date.

‘I don’t want the project to end after the 4th of April,’ Karen says. She plans on proposing 4am scene ideas to her followers every month. ‘Maybe the view outside your window or countryside where you live in,’ Strunks comments.

The 4am Project also invites impatient snappers to send in their early morning images to 4amproject@googlemail.com or tag them as 4amproject on Flickr. The idea has already attracted sleepless photographers from around the world, including Russia, Canada, USA, Australia, Malaysia, Sweden, and Brazil.

To get involved visit www.4amproject.org.

London’s largest street exhibition, the Urban Gallery, was revealed last month as part of a collaboration between art and commercial institutions. Alex Knell’s winning piece We Are Our Only Future and the work of 12 other Royal Academy School students and graduates now decorates the One Grafton Street building currently under development.

Image © Marina Scukina.

The winning artist Knell emphasizes the idea of ‘connectiveness’ in his composition. ‘It’s about openness, infinity, potential and a little bit of hope as well,’ he says. ‘In the wider world you come across symbols, signs and messages on public boards and spaces, which are very restrictive and directive. They tell you what you want, what you need and the way you should think. They isolate you,’ she adds.

With the initiative of cultural consultants Futurecity, real estate company Hines offered a one-year scholarship to document the renovating process of the One Grafton Street building. ‘It is a documentation of the changing space with an artistic view and vision,’ Alana Lake tells BJP.

The artwork of RAS students and graduates will be displayed for the next six months.

The Home Counties aren't famed for riotous behaviour but, it seems, dissent is in the air and when the Google Street View car rolled into Broughton, near Milton Keynes, the residents didn't take it lying down.

The car carries a roof-mounted camera which records 360° views of the UK's streets for Google's interactive online maps, and, when it drove into Broughton, locals gathered to block its path until the driver drove away. The residents accused Google of invading their privacy and 'facilitating crime' by creating images that allow users to peer into their windows, making them ripe targets for theft. Google protests it is working fully within UK law and only films in public areas.

The BBC reports Thames Valley Police's statement: 'A squad car was sent to Broughton at 1020 BST on Wednesday to reports of a dispute between a crowd of people and a Google Street View contractor. A member of the public had called us to report that he, along with a number of others, were standing in the middle of the road preventing the car from moving forwards and taking photographs. They felt his presence was an intrusion of their privacy. When police arrived at the scene, the car had moved on.'

Image by LordKalvan, licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0.

Is it a camera? Is it a gun? It's the Zenit camera Photosniper!

A camera mounted on a shoulderstock, it's designed to be held and shot just like a rifle (check out the trigger) but is actually a 35mm Zenit with a 300mm f4.5 Tair lens. It's available in various models, manufactured by Russian (and formerly Soviet) KMZ company, which also produces the better-known Zorki rangefinder cameras namechecked by Jonathan Eastland in our recent Soviet rangefinders piece. Never has the verb 'to shoot' been more blurred. Not recommended for G20 protests.

Birkbeck College, University of London, held an extremely interesting academic conference on The Photobook on 03 and 04 April, featuring presentations by Liz Wells, David Campany and BJP contributor Gerry Badger among others.

Most relevant to working photographers was Campany's paper, which considered a spread Walker Evans put together for Fortune magazine in May 1946, entitled Homes of Americans. Interestingly Evans didn't shoot the piece, though seven of his images were included in it - edited and designed it. Comparing and contrasting 37 images of American houses, but run almost entirely without text (the captions were printed separately) it was, argued Campany, a sophisticated investigation of the power of the image.

And as such, he added, it was also a severe disruption of the usual distribution hierarchy, in which images shown in galleries have most kudos, and those shown in the press rather less. Evans' work on Fortune, he argued, was just as interesting and valid as his better-known photographic endeavours of the 1930s.

The conference was intended as a work-in-progress discussion - a book is planned for early next Spring.

Attentive readers may remember Brian Griffin's contributions to the blog earlier this year, written while shooting a personal project on America's devastated auto industry. Now you can hear more about it online, in his recent interview for Derby's Format Festival. Including sage advice on photography, portraiture and the history of trade unions, it's well worth a listen.

Never a stranger when it comes to making the news for reasons other than art, an update into one of the lawsuits regarding Annie Leibovitz has emerged. Part of the Briese lawsuit against the renowned photographer has been dismissed, according to PDN Pulse.

The lighting rental company Briese USA initially sued Leibovitz for close to $400,000 in April 2008.

Broken down, this amounts to $220,000 in unpaid rental services, over $5,000 for damaged equipment and $165,000 for ‘for failing to deliver enough business to justify the discount rates she was getting’. It is this part of the suit that has been dismissed by Justice Tingling, still leaving the remaining to be solved.

This follows on from Leibovitz borrowing two successive loans amounting to $15,000,000. The huge amount borrowed from Art Capital Group involves putting up the copyright to all of her photographs as collateral; the consequence being the group will gain ownership of all her photographs, including the ones she hasn't yet taken, if unable to pay. Money problems affecting all in trying times it seems.

The latest copy of Ag just hit BJP's desks, and its a cracking issue. Photographer Andy Gotts describes how he came to photograph Hollywood A-listers, Tim Daly talks through black-and-white ink jet, Gerry Badger reports on a new series of books on books by Errata Editions, and - most hilariously - renown photography writer and educator Bill Jay provides a guide on how to be profound.

'Copy down a paragraph (any one will do) from a current critical theorist,' he writes. 'Stick to banalities...Create a diversion...Be political...If all else fails, act dumb.'

Right now there are dozens if not hundreds of final year photography students musing the veracity of photojournalism in the digital age for their graduation thesis. So this one's for you....

Earlier this year the judges of Denmark's Picture of The Year contest decided to ask some questions about a set of pictures they felt uncomfortable about. Just how much Photoshopping had been done? Did the pictures cross the line between simple cropping and enhancement into unseen territory?

They asked Klavs Bo Christensen to submit his unedited raw photos from Haiti, and they didn't like what they saw. To them, the colours in the edited comparisons were 'too much', too 'surreal', and ultimately they rejected them. But, says the aggrieved photojournalist, can you really judge reality by looking at a raw file?

'In my opinion, a raw file has nothing to do with reality and I do not think you can judge the finished image and the use of Photoshop by looking at [it]... 'There are also huge differences between raw conversion tools, and on how the files from different cameras are converted. And there are significant differences in the profile you choose to use in the conversion tool for each camera.'

Now pressefotografforbundet.dk presents the before-and-after shots in a translated article that offers a fascinating insight into the dilemmas faced by photographers, editors, jurors and just about anybody with a healthy interest in news media.

There's no doubt about the striking difference between the two sets of images, but are they any different from a little old-fashioned darkroom magic? And if a raw file doesn't constitute a sufficient 'digital negative' can any such thing ever exist? Does it really matter when a simple change of shutter speed would have delivered a different image anyway?

(Thanks to Yasmina Reggad for passing this on.)

An alternative look at the history of Photomontage has been developed in glorious detail through this website.

Dubbed Nu-real, an extensive timeline is on show regarding ‘Fantastic photomontage’ from 1857-2007. It covers everything from René Magritte, to the evolution of Photoshop montage in the last two decades, to Victorian postcards - the European postcards of the early 1900’s in particular are both bizarre and enlightening.

A whole range of montage eras and influences are delved into, only skirting through the Surrealism and Dadaist movements of which most are familiar with, while avoiding the classic Propagandist montage of the same era.

Even Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland published in 1865 is cited as an influence, principally regarding “girlhood and the sleeping/dream state”. Dreams are treated as central to the movement in general, as D. Haden says “it is about loss and the fervent nostalgia felt by the exile for a land or a dream-time that has faded into memory.”

Check it out here.

Not content with watching everything above sea level, the US police forces have taken a step-closer to surveillance under the sea.

VEEcamO, a body-worn video system from Perside, has previously been bought up by police forces in the UK, including Norfolk, Kent and North Wales Police, using Home Office funds. The recording devices attach to body armour and can record an entire day’s patrol, and high quality still images can be grabbed from these.

Specialist police officers taking photographs of press members taking photographs of them is nothing new, as those that attended the G20 protest will already have seen. But with this new ‘Hands free’ technology being integrated, it will allow the Police Force to multi-task further.

Though perhaps given the fallout from the G20 protests, certain police officers will not want their every move recorded.

The same technology from Perisides is now to be used by Harbour Patrol and marine units in the US. David Doubilet and fellow underwater enthusiasts beware.

Now, for all you fans of stats and photography, here’s a fascinating study on Flickr, as picked up by former BJP news editor Katie Scott at Wired, forever a source of good photography stories.

A map of the world’s most photographed landmarks on Flickr has been developed by a team from Cornell University. The extensive study consists of 35 million images – more than two terabytes of information, gathered over a six-month period on a supercomputer using embedded metadata.

Of little surprise is New York as the most photographed city, though the fifth most photographed location in New York is the flagship Apple store in midtown Manhattan – making it the 28th most photographed place on Earth, higher than the Washington Monument in the US capital. The Eiffel Tower tops the list.

London gets four of the top six landmarks, with Trafalgar Square the most popular and also placing 2nd in the world, with the Tate Modern, Big Ben and the London Eye the others. The full city list:
1 New York City
2 London
3 San Francisco
4 Paris
5 Los Angeles
6 Chicago
7 Washington, DC
8 Seattle
9 Rome
10 Amsterdam

The six degrees of separation theory comes to mind with this killer, and amazingly precise, quote from the team:

"We observe that if two users have taken a photograph within 24 hours and 100km of each other, on at least five occasions and at five distinct geographic locations, there is a 59.8 per cent chance that they are Flickr contacts"

So, there’s no keeping up with Getty and its multi-billion-dollar resources, right?

Experts in stock photography have been banging on about keyword tags for years, urging libraries to add concepts as well as specifics (such as subject and location) so that picture buyers can search for terms such as ‘spirit’ or ‘success’ and come up with something meaningful. And when they don’t find the right picture immediately, your tags should point them to a bunch of alternatives.

Last week we got a note about Getty’s latest Mini MAP (What Makes A Picture) report, titled “10 Simple Things about The Simple”, illustrating “a new visual language that connects with people’s concerns in the economic downturn”, along with a lightbox giving examples of how simplicity can be interpreted through stock imagery.

The lightbox features 10 pictures, including a man covered in mud, another smelling saplings in a garden shed, several images of children, and quite a nice photo of a feather floating on the surface of a lake at sunset.

This last image (#85155531) seemed to illustrate the concept best, so I clicked on it, and then pressed the tab “Find similar images” at the end of the keyword search terms (Feather, Simplicity, Nature, Horizontal, Outdoors, Finland, Water, Cloud, Sunset, Reflection, Idyllic, Solitude, Scenics, Beauty In Nature, Floating On Water, No People, Photography, Tranquility). From there I was given a choice of searching by Subject, People, Location, Style or Concept. I chose the latter, and clicked the Simplicity box.

The results kind of surprised me. The first recommendation is from the 2nd Annual National Kidney Foundation Celebrity Golf Classic, a grip-and-grin portrait of US figure skating champion Michelle Kwan at Lakeside Golf Club in Burbank, California. Next up is a close-up picture of grass, which better fits the bill. But then I’m offered two photos from Sandown Races. Another grass picture. Two more from the Golf Classic. An apple on grass. Sandown. Golf classic. Sandown. Golf Classic. And so on…

Interestingly, the most relevant images (grass, apple, etc) were also tagged under Photographer’s Choice – an initiative Getty introduced in 2006, which allows photographers to choose the images they want to submit, but charges them $50 per picture for the privilege.

One assumes they also do their own keywording, and it seems they’re doing a better job than Getty’s editors.

I also came across an interesting article by Jim Pickerell on Black Star Rising, in which he surveyed (in 2007) Getty contributors and found most were making much less money from the agency, despite posting up more images. And more relevant to this discussion, they also complained about Getty’s keywording and editing schedule.

“The keywording is terrible,” says one anonymous contributor, “and at times the image title is wrong, making all the keywords wrong. I must inspect images in new uploads and write Getty to fix the keywords which takes four weeks or more.”

Another contributor reports that, “edits have been taking three to seven months. Art directors and editors seem to have been assigned too many photographers. The ‘Traffic’ staff was fired in the restructuring of the company, and it seems that therefore it is another three to six months until the work appears ‘Live’ on the website, once I have turned it in final files to my art director. So it is now taking nine months to a year to get work ‘Live’ on the website”.

Going back to the image of the feather on a lake, if I’d clicked on a separate tab, “More images like this” (under Image Details, to the left of the photo), I was given much more relevant suggestions, mostly natural landscapes. A few were by the feather photographer, Nina Monkkonen, plus a couple of rather beautiful images by James D Rogers and Marc+Crumpler. But I was taken to these images via the Reflections and Beauty in Nature keywords, rather than a real concept, like ‘simplicity’. So, for example, if I’d been looking for a picture to illustrate a story on a subject like downsizing or paired-down living, I’m not sure how relevant they would be.

I think what this illustrates is that small (or one-man-band) agencies still have something to offer that the blue-chip stock libraries can’t provide – service, specialisation and relevance.

Meanwhile, one area where Getty really excels is in art directed material, and in the trends research it produces to inform these shoots. “10 Simple Things about The Simple” (download it here) is definitely worth a read, even if you’re not in the stock business (portrait, lifestyle, still life, ad, editorial and reportage shooters will find it interesting).

In brief, the report says:

• Conveying simplicity is difficult
• Simplicity is a value in itself – a humanistic aspiration
• ‘Simple is messy’. Think personal clutter rather than minimalism. It’s about the things that matter, rather than how they’re neatly ordered. (Reportage style is favoured for a more naturalistic look.)
• Think simple pleasures – work life/balance, craft, making things, nature, tradition and continuity. And most of all, think childhood.
• Simplicity is about sensuous, tactile pleasures – taking time to smell the roses (or plant samplings).
• Strip it down. Allow space for images. Cut out noise. Create simple compositions that bring subjects to the fore. And be bold with it.

All photographers know it now, it's becoming harder for everyone to find commissions and to make it in this industry. So, a lot of photographers are now turning to competitions and prizes to get their names out there. One UK-based company seems to be banking on this trend.

Duckrabbit, a new production company, is offering "fresh hope to the struggling editorial photograph community in the UK," it claims. Formed by photographer David White and ex-BBC Radio 4 documentaries producer Benjamin Chesterton, Duckrabbit, which just won a Pictures of The Year International Award and has been nominated for a Amnesty International Media Award, is introducing a series of training workshops.

The seminars, held at the Trinity Centre in Bristol, offer photographers tips about how to present their stories and win awards. "Photojournalism is far from dead, we just need to get smart about how we present our stories," says White.

You can check them out here: www.duckrabbit.info.

The police advises its officers that photography is not a crime:

“Given the City’s prominence as a tourist destination, practically all photography will have no connection to terrorism or unlawful conduct. Since photography and/or videotaping is rarely unlawful, absent any other forms of criminality, an investigation of a report of suspicious photography or videotaping thought to be terrorism related is governed by [normal rules…]”

“Members of the service may not demand to view photographs taken by a person absent consent or exigent circumstances...”

Shame its only New York City cops.

These are the same police that lost lives on 9/11.

Can someone at The Met take note...

via APE

Researchers at Cambridge University have found that seven social networking websites failed to delete photos from their servers even when a user asked for them to be removed, the BBC writes.

The team put photos on 16 different websites, noted the direct links where the images were stored, deleted them, and finally came back 30 days later to see what had happened. On seven of the sites, using the direct links, the Cambridge University researchers found that the images had, in fact, not been deleted. Facebook is one of these sites (MySpace, hi5, Bebo, LiveJournal, Xanga, and SkyRock also failed the test).

However, Flickr, Photobucket, and Fotki removed photos within one hour, and Blogger, Picasa and Orkut within 48 hours. The biggest surprise is Windows' Live Spaces, which removed photos instantly.

Photographers, you have been warned.

Sadly Bill Jay died earlier this year, but his website lives on. His essays and articles are freely available on it (although you need to observe copyright if you want to publish them), including gems such as Do Not Disturb: Photography, censorship and the Iraq war, and Diane Arbus: A personal snapshot, the latter describing a very strange encounter indeed.

'Diane Arbus noticed my bedraggled look and asked if I would like a jelly. The idea of a cold fruit dessert on such a day was appealing. While she mixed up the contents in a dish, she constantly needled me with remarks like: "Photographers are so boring I can't imagine why you would want to see them", or, "All magazines tell lies and yours is no exception". The jelly prepared, she placed it in front of me on the table and straddled the bench so that her skirt rode up her thighs, revealing a clear view of her panties. She either did not know, or care, and looked at me belligerently. I took a mouthful of the jelly, and thought I would vomit. It was the most foul-tasting stuff I had ever encountered, like a mixture of dishwashing liquid and gravy. Arbus' eyes were on me. By this time I had had enough, both literally and figuratively. I spat out the mouthful and said: "That's the most disgusting stuff and if I have any more I will spew all over your table". I was angry.

'Then Arbus astonished me. She suddenly burst out laughing. And at the end of her outburst, said: "OK. Now we can talk about photography".'

Since its announcement in September last year, the Leica S2 flagship camera - a 37.5 million pixel portable mastodon - has been the subject of countless rumours. At some point, it was thought that the project was doomed from the start or that delays would affect the ultimate release of the camera. Last year, when Leica presented the camera to the press, a summer 2009 release was announced. But, the appearance of an ad in the Norwegian photography magazine Fotografi has sparked rumours of delays, as the ad says the camera will only be released in September.

A quick check online or in a good almanac should put photographers' fears to rest: the last day of summer is 21 September.

Martin Parr's images can now become the first thing you see when you start up your browser and go on your Google page. The iGoogle team have now added the "Martin Parr" theme to its vast range of visual options. You can find it here.

As a lawsuit against Getty Images has been accepted by the New York State Supreme Court, information about the value of Annie Leibovitz's work has been released in the court fillings, writes PDNOnline in this insightful article. According to both parties - Getty Images and Art Capital, with which Leibovitz has a $24m loan - the archive is worth more than $50m.

"This past spring, Getty entered discussions with ACG about buying the archive. Talks abruptly ended after Getty allegedly offered $15 million for the archive that ACG valued at more than $50 million."

Read more at PDNOnline.

Last week, BJP wrote about Metro buying a Lightjet capable of printing 76-inch digital C-type prints in one piece (read our full article here). However, that Lightjet printer - one of only ten available in the world - is big. It weighs one ton and cannot fit through any doors. So how did Metro install it in its London premises? By taking down a wall and using a crane. 'Both machines were lifted over the top of the building Saturday morning and down through the basement window,' says Metro's director Chris Jackson. 'We now have a lot of kit in the basement!' For more details about Metro, visit metroimaging.co.uk.

Here are a few photos of the move.

Last week, we had the opportunity to hear from student photographers Ed Ou and Carl Kiilsgaard, after it was announced that they had both won $5000 each from Getty Images as part of the Getty Grants for Editorial Photography.

One question they were asked was what kind of equipment did they take on their various projects - Ou was back from a trip to Semey in Kazakhstan where the Soviets tested more than 400 nuclear weapons during the Cold War, while Killsgaard documented the life of a 'White Family,' as his project is called, for several weeks.

Their answer was pretty simple - one camera, one lens. Another photographer, Maximiliano Braun added: "At the end of the day, the lighter your kit is, the more energy you have."

And you, how many camera bodies and lenses do you take on a documentary project?

Yesterday was the official opening of the Lomography store in London. The launch party was a HUGE success. Try to fit in 100 people in a small Newburgh Street-based store and you can imagine how crazy the evening was. The mood was excellent, the atmosphere was electric like you would imagine any Lomography party to be, and the lights... Well, the lights fell down from the ceiling half-way through the night.

This morning, the Lomography staff was busy cleaning up while electricians were there to repair the lights. But the store is now ready to welcome customers, and here are a few shots of the store that will become a must for many - Adam Scott, the director of Lomography UK, is even inviting people to have lunch in the downstairs area of the store. It's that cosy!

Yesterday was the official opening of the Lomography store in London. The launch party was a HUGE success. Try to fit in 100 people in a small Newburgh Street-based store and you can imagine how crazy the evening was. The mood was excellent, the atmosphere was electric like you would imagine any Lomography party to be, and the lights... Well, the lights fell down from the ceiling half-way through the night.

This morning, the Lomography staff was busy cleaning up while electricians were there to repair the lights. But the store is now ready to welcome customers, and here are a few shots of the store that will become a must for many - Adam Scott, the director of Lomography UK, is even inviting people to have lunch in the downstairs area of the store. It's that cosy!

On 09 September, one picture made the front pages of many news websites after a South Carolina Republican shouted "You Lie!" at President Barack Obama in the House of Representatives. The picture, shown below, was shot by Getty Images' photographer Chip Somodevilla. BJP asked him how he got that photo.

'The exclamation "You lie!" rang out inside the House Chamber at just the moment when President Barack Obama had finished saying that health care reform would not benefit illegal immigrants,' Somodevilla tells BJP. 'The rant continued and it was loud enough in the semi-quiet chamber that I could tell what general direction it was coming from and Rep. Joe Wilson made it easy for me to spot him in a seated crowd. He dropped his cupped hands from around his mouth and began to wag his finger and shout at the president. "That’s not true!" he continued. Without a thought, I lifted my camera, framed him up, auto-focused and fired a burst of shots all at the same time. The images I made before and after the one that has been most published are out of focus. It was pure luck.'

He continues: 'When I made the photo I was standing in what is called the Writers Gallery, a tiered row of desks and stools that runs the width of the chamber above and behind where the president stands when addressing Congress. So naturally, my primary responsibility that night was not the president but to look for the reaction to the speech by important members of Congress.'

As with most news photos, Somodevilla didn’t realize the importance of what he had at first. 'The reaction in the chamber was palpable. A collective gasp followed by very aggressive murmuring. I chimped the photo on the back of the camera, saw I had one in focus and quickly quizzed other photographers and reporters about who it was that had shouted and what exactly he had said. Congressional Quarterly staff photographer Scott Farrell asked some of the CQ reporters and gave me Rep. Wilson’s name and I wrote it on a sheet of paper and photographed it. This conveyed the information to Chief Photographer Win McNamee who was in the next room where he was live editing my images (I was tethered into his laptop via Ethernet cable). That was it. It was on the wire before the president finished his speech.'

But how was Somodevilla able to quickly find Wilson in a room filled with more than 550 politicians. 'He just happened to be sitting in my field of view at that moment,' he says. 'Had he decided to lose his composure five minutes before or after the time when he did then I would have missed it. Experience played a hand as well. In the last four years I’ve photographed three State of the Union speeches and four other joint sessions of Congress, including addresses by prime ministers Gordon Brown and Nouri Al-Maliki. The House chamber is a very big room but the more time you spend there the smaller it seems.'

This amateur 3D-movie shows an "editor" hiring a "photographer" for a one-day shoot. Of course, the editor refuses to pay travel expenses, wants to grab all copyrights to the pictures, and will only pay £50 for the whole shoot. We found this hilarious, but a bit of warning, there is quite a bit of fool language (which is to be expected in that kind of situation)...

Let's revue the facts:
1/ AmTrack (the US main train operator) announces a photography contest
2/ Photographer Kerzic takes photographs for AmTrack's photography contest
3/ Amtrack police arrest Kersiz for taking photographs

Here is an hilarious report from Stephen Colbert (at The Colbert Report) about a photographer who was arrested as he was taking photos of trains.

We continue with our foray into iPhone photography applications with Athentech Imaging’s ‘one click’ Perfectly Clear app. One major criticism iPhone users have for its camera is the low resolution of its sensor. Apparently, Athentech seems to have found a way to optimise iPhone images for exposure, colour accuracy, sharpness and depth using a single touch, the company says. The application allows the camera phone to correct images and save at a full resolution (1600x1200).

For more information, visit www.athentech.com.

If you were wowed by the full production quality of Vincent Laforet's film Reverie, shot on a Canon EOS 5D MkII, take a look at what Bill Frakes achieved with a Nikon D3s:

Shot on assignment for Nikon in Australia, and presented at the European launch of the D3s in St Andrews, it tells you much more about how photographers will be using DSLR cameras to capture video alongside stills in the near future. Reverie shows just what these cameras (and an army of assistants) are capable of, but it's a movie. Frakes' film tells me much more about how shooters can combine stills and motion to create really effective multimedia presentations that add more of a story element to their published pictures, and how online can work with and enhance the printed story.

Frakes, who shoots for Sports Illustrated, told us that as many as eight million readers see his pictures in the magazine, but his multimedia stories garner as many as 50 million hits, which drive visitors back to the magazine. (And who says multimedia doesn't pay?)

Frakes has used the D3s in extreme low light conditions in the film, but what's really interesting for me is that as they're combined together, the stills jump out from the video footage, proving that photographs still hold their arresting power in this environment.

There are, of course, many other examples of the effective use of stills and motion (Media Storm is a pretty good place to start your search), so let us know what's impressed you.

Naomi Campbell hasn’t always been on friendly terms with photographers, as her privacy case against the Daily Mirror has shown, but now, the top model is looking for the world’s best new fashion photographer.

Collaborating with Talenthouse.com, a global community for talent in music, fashion, film, art, and photography, Campbell will be holding a competition to find the best new model and the best new fashion photographer.

‘For all you photographers out there who have dreamed of working within the fashion industry and have been searching for your first big break, now it may be closer than you think,’ says Talenthouse.com. ‘The challenge is simple. Submit a fashion story working with the theme of glamour. The brief: Be creative, bold, daring, stylish and most importantly be fashionable.’

Deadline for entry is 05 February 2010. For more details, visit www.talenthouse.com.

Today, we wrote about celebrated photographer Brian Griffin becoming the first of a series of high-profile photographers to be commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to celebrate the London 2012 Olympic Games.

However, we forgot to mention one thing. Griffin, according to some on the David Icke.com forum, is part of a wider conspiracy. 'These bizarre pictures are, for me, covert symbolism from the filth behind the scenes of the puppet nature of those they have do their work, in this case innocent celebrities and politicians,' writes the member of the David Icke forum about Griffin's images. 'They have been told to pose lifelessly in the photos, not knowing that the overlords are ridiculing them and the public.'

For this member, the 2012 Olympics are cover for something else. 'This was partly why London won the bid when the competition was fully expected to do so. I still remember the shock when London won. The elites gave it to London, under the despicable Blair creature, because it is part of the growing plan which is accelerating now towards this year. I suspect they intend to announce either the world government at that time in that city, or that some major trauma event will be stage similar to 911.'

Another member confirms: 'Wow, weird photos indeed!'

Thanks to Brian Griffin for finding this gem.

The traditional treasure hunt has been given a racy makeover by photography organisation Shoot Experience. They’ve merged it with speed dating, and brought us ‘Shoot Dating’: a day of clue-solving, relationship-sparking fun. On 05 December, teams of singletons will take to the streets of the City with a mission: to construct photographs as ‘answers’ to four different clues.

The day will culminate with viewing and judging of the images in the atmospheric Bathhouse - a recently converted venue that, surprisingly, used to be a bathhouse.

Participants will be asked to complete a card with the names of others who sparked their interest, and love-struck couples will be put in touch via email after the event. Or, in an adventurous twist, you might get chatting to each other at The Bathhouse’s Rock-a-billy themed night, to which daters have free entry.

Shoot Dating will take place between 2.30pm and 7pm on 05 December at The Bathhouse, 8 Bishopsgate Churchyard, London. Daters can be between 23 and 35 years old, and tickets are available, for £20, from www.shootexperience.com/tickets.

Last year, photographer Robbie Cooper made waves by filming and photographing kids playing video games, catching moments of joy, exhilaration and despair. Now, he's capturing similar sentiments from men and women watching porn. The project, commissioned by Wallpaper*, 'throws up any number of questions about voyeurism and exhibitionism and makes clear the incredible nakedness of the solo sex act,' says the magazine. Watch the video below:

The Wall Street Journal has published its list of the 200 best and worst jobs in 2009. At the top of the list is Actuary with a top-level salary of $161,000 and software engineers, who can hope to earn $129,000. Photojournalists, on the other hand, are way down in that list, coming in 189th position with a starting salary of $16,000 and a top-level salary of $60,000.

Only 11 other positions are considered worse than being a photojournalist. They are: Butcher, Mail Carrier, Meter Reader, Construction Worker, Taxi Driver, Garbage Collector, Welder, Dairy Farmer, Ironworker, Lumberjack and Roustabout...

The UK Government isn't particularly lucky when it comes with dealing with social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Last week, the Environment Agency was forced to apologize when it was caught asking amateur and student photographers to start working for the organisation without any financial compensation. BJP covered the story extensively here and here.

The Environment Agency's biggest mistake, despite the fact it announced its plans on Twitter, was how it managed the issue. Within minutes of BJP publishing its report on the Agency's actions, photographers flooded the Agency with emails, tweets and Facebook messages decrying the move. How did the Agency react? It started deleting Facebook messages and blocked access to the page. Within 24 hours, it was issuing a statement (both to the media and on Twitter) apologising for its overzealous use of the "delete" button on Facebook. Eventually, the Environment Agency scraped the plans for a database.

Now, it's time for the Labour party to learn it the hard way. As first revealed by the Photographer Not a Terrorist campaign, and as Kate Day at The Daily Telegraph writes, the party that has been in power since 1997 has launched a social media experiment using Flickr. 'Change we can see' asks for UK residents to send pictures of places that have changed over the past 13 years. Of course, and in this case this is a side point, the photographers would give an unrestricted license to Labour for use in its campaign.

The point here was that photographers seized on the occasion to pass a message to labour about the main 'change they can see': the rise of stops and searches under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which was enacted by this Labour government. "So instead of adding pretty pictures of their local hospital to the Flickr group," writes Day at the Daily Telegraph, "they have uploaded copies of the stop and search forms they were given while trying to take photos in public places."

And of course, Labour has done the one thing you shouldn't be doing in a socially connected media world: it tried to ignore the issue and started deleting images and comments it didn't agree with. The result is simple: a story that could have been dealt swiftly with is now getting a lot more press than expected (the Facebook group for "Change We Can See" is still open for comments, if you feel like having fun).

2009 has seen social media becoming one of the most important online tools for the dissemination of news and comments (whether true or false, positive or negative). 2010 should confirm this trend, and impose social networking websites as people's first source of news through, as Maria Popova puts it, curated serendipity. Isn't about time that politicians, institutions, commercial entities and government agencies learn how to use these sites?

British Journal of Photography relaunched as a big and beautiful monthly at The Photographers’ Gallery last night. The BJP team invited picture editors, curators, writers and photographers to check out the new-look magazine, which hits the newsstands on the 03 March. Here are just a few of the happy attendees - person to name the most attendees by 03 March gets a free copy of the magazine!

Send names to diane.smyth@incisivemedia.com

Image © Julian Lass