News

My old friend Christopher Morris at VII agency has made a nice movie showing the effects of the gulf oil spill on the coast and its people. It's not an in-your-face kind of movie, rather it's more like an art-house film, short, sweet, poignent. Chris uses a lens with a very shallow depth of field to focus only on the center of the frame and then he moves the camera to what he wants to emphasize. It's certainly worth a look if you have ten minutes or so. 

You know I never thought of the Canadians as a particularly violent people but I guess when the G-8 or G-20 shows up to town it brings out the worst in them. The Sacramento Bee has a fine gallery of the riot which ensued during the course of the G-20 meetings this weekend. 
A police car burns after violent anti-G20 protesters smashed their way through downtown streets June 26, 2010 in Toronto, Canada. Getty Images / Simon Hayter

I think the best coverage of the situation in Kyrgyzstan is on the Radio Free Europe website. They have actual Kyrgyz people at their headquarters in Prague and people on the ground in Osh and Bishkek covering the story.

One question many people have is where is Kyrgyzstan and why does it matter. Well, if you're from the US, it matters because the US wants to base aircraft there to stabilize Afghanistan. It's also one of the main trafficking routes for Opium out of Afghanistan as I discovered with my former AP colleague Dave Carpenter some years ago. It's located just west of Tibet, north of Tajikstan, south of Kazakstan and east of Uzbekistan. That's a lot of stans to be sure, but places it squarely in the heart of central Asia. There are of course people made up of all the aforementioned ethnicities and they have lived in Kyrgyzstan for years. When the USSR broke up in 1991 there was some ethnic based civil-strife, but it died down and the people decided to live together. Since 1991 there have been two violent revolutions and two governments have been overthrown, the latest happening just April 2010.

So there's a stability issue in Kyrgyzstan now and the president who was overthrown in April repaired to his stronghold in Osh and is obviously using the ethinc wedge to create divisiveness and instability as a path back to power. The question, I believe he, and every revolutionary has to as to ask himself, is at what cost. What did it get the Slobodan Milosevic when he used the ethnic card to break up Yugoslavia? What about the Hutus in Rawanda? And look at Afghanistan, a myriad of ethnicities that has been at each other's throats for the past 20 years! What was left after the civil war from 1989-1996 was destroyed by the inflexibility of the Talaban.

But I digress, there are a very nice set of photos on the Boston Globe's "Big Picture," some of which are hard, but tell the story of the strife, the refugee crisis and the government's reaction nicely. Have a look for yourself. 

Kurgunbai Inambayev, an Uzbek, is seen in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh, on June 15, 2010. Inambayev said the bruises on his face were inflicted by Kyrgyz attackers during days of ethnic rioting in Kyrgyzstan. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)

If you have your photos posted on Flickr there's a chance that a Getty editor may notice something you have shot and ask you to license it to them. That means if Getty sells it you'll get 50% of the sale. That's not a bad deal for simply posting a photo onto the Flickr site. However yesterday Getty and Flickr announced that photographers could propose to Getty that some of their photos be licensed, thereby giving the photographer input into the editing process. I think this is pretty cool although keep in mind that Getty generally sells stock photos (called microstock really) for about $15 a photo. Still, it's always nice to see your photos appear somewhere else besides on your website or flickr page. And a check in the mail doesn't hurt either. And it could just jump start your career into the world of photography. Here's the article I found about the deal.

The Online Photographer has an interesting column today about the Raw vs. Jpeg quality at 6400 ASA using the Olympus PEN EP-1. Here's the lead to the story and you can click through to read the entire article: 

I've just hit upon something rather cool and somewhat unexpected. Some of you will recall a column of mine from a year or so back called "JPEG...Seriously?" Well, I've found a reason for photographing JPEGs with my Olympus Pen E-P1. I can use them to get much, much better results at ISO 6400 than I could pull out of a RAW file using every trick I know.

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This seems to be the year of the natural disaster interestingly. Let's stop and recount for a second all the natural disasters that have befallen the planet in the last five and a half months: Volcano eruptions in Iceland and Guatemala, Earthquakes in Haiti, China and Chile, flooding in Poland, Czech Republic, Rhode Island, France, massive snow storms in Washington DC and Colorado. This list doesn't include man made disasters like airplane crashes and clashes between government and protestors like in Thailand and Kyrgyzstan. All in all it's really turning into an amazing year for news and for very good pictures from the above mentioned events. The latest galleries feature a lot of Wow photos from flooding around the planet from the Sacramento Bee's "the Frame."

People walk by damaged cars in the aftermath of flooding in a western district of the French south eastern city of Draguignan on June 16, 2010. At least eleben people have been killed by flash floods in Draguignan and in the neighboring city of Luc, caused by heavy rains. AFP / Getty Images / Stephane Danna

The Boston Globe is doing us a favor by putting up lots and lots of photos of the oil spill in the Gulf so it doesn't fade from memory as many news events tend to do in the age of the internet. The Sacramento Bee's "The Frame" also has some more images from the spill. Here are some disturbing photos from the AP's Charlie Riedel showing birds which have been caught in the oil. If you aren't angry yet at BP yet, you should be. Remember to boycott BP and write an angry letter to your representative and senator expressing your disgust with the Corporation's control over our environment! 

A Brown Pelican is mired in heavy oil on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast on Thursday, June 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

There are two more photo galleries from Thailand, one from the Boston Globe and the other from the Denver Post. The government forces cracked down on the Red Shirt protestors and killed some people (journalists included) before the Red Shirts went off on a rampage burning down random buildings in the Thai Capitol. Have a look, there are some pretty graphic photos in the collection from the Big Picture. And the Denver Post's gallery is here.

A statue and a torn Thai national flag remain in front of Bangkok's Central World shopping mall, which was gutted by fire after army soldiers advanced towards an encampment of thousands of Red Shirt protesters, May 19, 2010. (REUTERS/Adrees Latif)

The violence in Bangkok continues, today the government troops took APCs and charged the barricades. As I write this the battle is still proceeding. Who knows how many will be killed and wounded. The Frame has put up a nice gallery with some photos not seen before. 

An anti-government protester 'Red Shirt' throws a tire toward a burning truck as the violence in central Bangkok continues on May 16, 2010 in Bangkok, Thailand. So far at least 154 have been injured and over 20 killed in the clashes as the military and the government launched an operation to disperse anti-government protesters who have closed parts of the city for two months. A state of emergency is in effect that spreads to 17 provinces in the country. The Thai army declared certain protest areas where clashes are taking place as a "Live Fire Zone." 
Getty Images / Athit Perawongmetha

The saddest photo I have seen from the oil spill in the Gulf was in yesterday's Guardian.

The accompanying story was as good as the photo, detailing the threat the oil poses to all the wildlife and people working on the Gulf Coast. Wow, what a disaster. I can only hope that BP finally goes bankrupt. They have a history, after all, of criminal negligence, be it chasing out a democratically elected leader from Iran in the 1950's to ignoring leaks in their pipelines in Alaska to this. I hope the government makes them pay for EVERYTHING and they go belly up. Here are some recent photos from the Sacremento Bee's The Frame photo gallery. 

An oil slick from the massive spill caused by the explosion of an offshore rig two weeks ago is seen near another rig off the coast of Gulfport, Miss., in the Gulf of Mexico, May 3, 2010. The latest satellite image of the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico indicates it has shrunk since last week. But scientists say that only means some of the oil has gone underwater. Mississippi's Port of Gulfport is the nation's second-largest importer of green fruit. The New York Times / Michael Appleton