My thanks to Davis goalkeeper J.T. Webster. This guy was all over the place vs. Skyline, making leaping saves, diving saves, and putting his head in the way of several pairs of flying cleats.
Give me a cloudy day and a soccer game anytime, especially with a goalkeeper like Webster.
The site Raw Take published an interview with Sydney Morning Herald sports photojournalist Tim Clayton today. Clayton excels at his craft, and is known as one of the best. This interview is so good, so healthy. He says a lot of important things that everyone should hear (photographers, editors, reporters, readers, etc.)
Some of my favorite quotes:
We are like most newspapers, run by word people for word people. Generally they want pictures for ten-year-olds and have little or no understanding of photojournalism at the top level. The paper has no space for story telling through photo essays.
He said it, not me.
What has actually happened is many photographers have evolved beyond the wants and needs of the newspaper. We are shooting stories that don’t get published and shooting personal projects to keep our brains stimulated. The ‘cat sat on the mat’ images pay the bills. In many ways it is a sad reflection of photojournalism today, there are so few places where top end photojournalism can be seen.
This is a great statement. I know photographers who have so much to contribute but they’ve given up. They see a lack of support and devote their energy and passion to personal projects away from their newspaper, shortchanging the reader of their finest work. And year after year some of the best work recognized in contests was unpublished for whatever reason.
it’s all about attitude. In the UK where I learned my trade, they used to say “You are only as good as your last picture,” in Australia they say “You are only as good as your next picture.” Attitude is everything!
What a great line. Why didn’t I ever realize that the “only as good as your last picture” line that I’ve heard for years was complete crap?
I had about six more quotes that I wanted to put into this post, but why don’t you read them at the Raw Take site instead of mine. Here’s the link to the interview: http://rawtake.net/2008/03/30/tim-clayton-sydney-morning-herald/
The lede of the story in the Sunday Herald said it all:
One of the nation’s most acclaimed young photographers has pledged to burn his folio of entries for the Scottish Photographer of the Year awards in a protest against the event’s organisers.
Finally, I thought, somebody so fed up with contest judges that they were going to take action, even if it was photographic hara-kiri. What a great bit of press!
Roddy Mackay was on the list of finalists for the Young Photographer of the Year. He must have been so excited, like he was nominated for an Academy Award or something. But then when the awards were presented, no award was given in his category. The judges explained by saying the entries were, “not good enough.” Ouch!
Mackay was quoted saying the judge’s actions harmed him, “mentally and physically.”
For the record, Mackay (or someone using his name) left a comment on the Herald’s story saying he was misquoted and had no intention of burning his photographs.
I, for one, would like to encourage Mackay to go through with it. Burn those images! The mere threat of burning your work has brought you a lot of attention. Think of all the attention you’d get if you actually did destroy the photos, Roddy.
A lot of people try to comfort the losers of contests by saying that winning contests doesn’t matter, that it’s not important. But the fact is, everyone who says that has won awards and used those awards to get better jobs.
For young photographers who haven’t yet won an award, maybe burning your photographs in protest is the new way to move up the ladder. And the first one who does it will get the most points for originality. Not since Brett Weston threw his work into the fireplace in 1991 have we had a good old negative burning!
Okay, now I’m being serious. To all of you young photographers looking to be the next big thing: Invest your emotion into your work, not into contest wins. Contests are not science. The results are subjective and unpredictable. If you work hard and stay focused on your art, then recognition will come.
I’ve had more than my share of contest success. But if I burned all the photographs that didn’t win, most of my portfolio would be in ashes.
Breaking News: A Stunning and Memorable Account of Reporting from Some of the Most Dangerous Places in the World
Martin Fletcher, the NBC News Bureau Chief in Tel Aviv with a penchant for posing on top of destroyed tanks, provides a great look back at his life covering conflict.
War reporters face moral dilemmas all day: Is it reasonable to film a crying woman two feet from the lens? How about a lost child screaming for its parent? Should one film him or take him by the hand? If a man is to be executed and the soundman’s gear suddenly doesn’t work, what do you do? Delay the execution? That’s what the BBC’s David Tyndall did in Biafra in 1970, when he yelled, “Hold it, we haven’t got sound,” and the quivering man about to be killed had to suffer that much longer while the soundman sorted out his gear. Later, Tyndall was mortified by his instinctive response to the dilemma, as was the BBC, which severely reprimanded him. But every move in this job poses a different dilemma, and nobody can be right all the time. In fact, the most critical question is usually not moral in nature but practical: How far down this road can I drive and stay safe?
Fletcher takes us through his experiences beginning with the Yom Kippur War in Israel and then on throughout Africa (Somalia, Rwanda, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa), Cyprus, Afghanistan, etc. This from Albania, covering the Kosovo war:
Then there was the small matter of the bandits who preyed on travelers, especially foreign journalists flush with cash. One BBC television team hired a small truck and driver. Just as they were approaching the final leg of the journey into the country’s wild and poor northeast, they ran into a group of armed men who stopped their vehicle at gunpoint and demanded money. The producer handed over his shoulder bag with envelopes of cash, and they were allowed to proceed unharmed. The team was shocked, but the producer chuckled and said, “Don’t worry, I’m not dumb, that was just a token in case we got robbed. The real money is in my boot.” The team laughed with relief, whereupon their Albanian driver stopped the car, put a gun to the producer’s head, and stole the rest of the money. Then the driver forced everybody out and drove off with their gear. And he was one of the good guys.
Breaking News: A Stunning and Memorable Account of Reporting from Some of the Most Dangerous Places in the World
March is Shakespeare time at the boys’ school. Days of memorizing lines, sewing costumes, building sets. It’s really fun watching my kids quote from The Tempest or MacBeth.
But being the photographer dad isn’t always as fun. I’ve taken photographs of these plays over the past couple of years and never really got anything I liked, let alone anything I wanted to share with the other kids’ parents. It’s always very dark and more than anything I’m wanting to watch rather than photograph. Then I’m faced with the dilemma of getting a good shot of every single kid. It’s impossible.
I was faced with that dilemma again this year as I sat in the front row before the 6th grade production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. How was I going to make meaningful photographs of this play, in this dark classroom, with a cast of thirteen kids coming and going?
Some other parents walked into the room, looked around and said, “Wow, look at the set. How beautiful!”
That’s when the lightbulb went on and I knew exactly how I wanted to photograph the play. Here is the result:
As always with my composites, I wish you could see the 13×30 inch print sitting on my desk right now. Way better than the 550 pixel version.
It all started when a friend approached me with, “Have you ever thought about doing a book?”
I’d heard that about a million times so I gave my usual, “Yeah, that sounds like fun,” never expecting it to go anywhere.
Well, this time it went somewhere. I ended up writing a complete guide to photography (as I see it) for Zibtips.com, complete with a selection of my photographs. At the Zibtips website you can find my guide, which covers photography theory and technique at the basic and intermediate level.
Writing is a tough job. There were many times in the project where I felt like I was running a marathon and my brain just wouldn’t go any further. In those dark moments I would turn to the Xbox360 and play a thirty-minute (okay, sixty-minute) session of Crackdown, a videogame where you play a superhuman-type cop in a rough city.
(Description from xbox.com: Low on ammo? Never a problem. Thanks to an amazing amount of props and a deep physics system, you can use whatever you get your hands on as a weapon: Trash cans, vehicles, even people.)
Yes, using people as weapons turned out to be a great way to relieve the stress and get my mind back on task during these intensive writing sessions. Such are my memories of June 2007. I was so proud when I earned the “Body Juggling” achievement. Who knew I was so skilled with a rocket launcher?
“An indigenous woman holds her child while trying to resist the advance of Amazonas state policemen who were expelling the woman and some 200 other members of the Landless Movement from a privately-owned tract of land on the outskirts of Manaus, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon March 11, 2008. The landless peasants tried in vain to resist the eviction with bows and arrows against police using tear gas and trained dogs. REUTERS/Luiz Vasconcelos-A Critica/AE (BRAZIL)”.
This isn’t my photo. It’s from Reuters’ Luiz Vasconcelos and it is breathtaking. More symbolism than you could shake a club at. A woman with a naked child confronting a squad of faceless riot police. What more could you ask for?
But what really got me thinking were the comments about the photo on the Reuters blog, which you can see by clicking here.
The first comment that got me thinking said: “Serves her right she should not be there anyway!!!”
Pretty harsh, was my first thought. Then more comments expressed concern for the child, asking why this mother would endanger her naked child in an act of protest? Other comments called for more context, saying the photograph didn’t provide them enough information to judge the situation.
Now I’m not going to defend, oppose, or even try to explain the Landless Movement to you in this short blog post. But this photograph and the resulting comments demonstrate that without background information and a clear understanding of the situation, even great photojournalism (which this photo is) can create confusion as viewers attach their own feelings on society, authority, and culture to someone else’s experiences.
More than a few referred to the photograph as nothing but propaganda. And I’m sure I’ll see it on display at Revolution Books the next time I’m in Berkeley. But regardless of how organizations use the photograph, it’s a powerful moment. And that’s no matter who was wrong, be it the police, the mother, the Landless Movement, or even me.
Just picked this one up on my lunch break in Bountiful.
This year Skyline won. These post-game celebrations are full of great moments and faces. It’s a shame I can’t stop time (yet) so that I could do some real compositions. These chaotic moments when players go crazy become a frenzy of grab-shots. Both of these frames were made with the camera held up over my head. The key is to know your camera and know your lens, so that you can point it at a scene and know what you’re capturing even when you aren’t looking through the viewfinder.
That’s Skyline senior Jenteal Jackson, letting out a scream after they beat American Fork for the state championship. Key player, key moment. I’ll admit it: Luck.
Richfield – Piute High School’s Krystyna Lamas (left) wipes a tear from her eye after fouling out of the game in the 4th quarter of the 1A State Championship game. Rich High School went on to win the title.
Another series of state basketball championships and the only photos that matter to me now are the storytelling moments. The jump shots, steals, rebounds, and scrambles that I captured at high shutter-speed— you could literally throw them all out and I would never notice them missing.
For those of you like Ben Weasel who don’t care about high school sports, just one more post and we’re out of this series.
