Books: Claudia Wiens: Burma

Claudia Wiens was based in Cairo, and is now in Istanbul working as a freelance photographer, and is represented by Getty Images. She has now published a book of her photographs of Burma and titled "Of Dung-Beetle Messengers And Infamous Crickets" which, although I haven't seen yet, does provide Claudia's interesting visual narrative of this lovely country and its people. Have a good look at the section involving Nats.

I'm glad that Claudia chose this blurry image for her book's cover since, as regular readers of this blog know, I'm enormously partial to motion blurred images myself. Good choice, Claudia! For further images of Burma and other galleries, visit Claudia's website.

I met Claudia at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop (FPW) in Mexico City, where she worked on a project involving female Lucha Libre wrestlers.

A previous post of Claudia Wiens on TTP is here.

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Posted in: Books,Burma

Zhou Mi: Where The Ganges Flows...

Here's a black & white photo essay Where The Ganges Flows... by Zhou Mi, documenting his traveling down the Ganges from its source in Gangotri to Kolkata, passing through Rishikesh, Haridwar and Varanasi.

It brought to mind the classic book Slowly Down the Ganges by Eric Newby, which may have been the photographer's inspiration.

Zhou Mi was born in Wuxi, Jiang-Su, China and worked as an engineer in his country before gaining a M.A. Communication Arts from the New York Institute of Technology. He then worked for Young & Rubicam Inc./ K& L Advertising before being a freelance photographer in San Francisco.

An eclectic photographer, Zhou Mi's galleries are mostly black & white and range from documenting lost and found objects on San Francisco's beaches to Burning Man festival in Nevada, passing through a photo essay titled Wu Yong in Kangding, Sichuan.

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Posted in: China,India,Photographers: Travel

Robert Caplin: Cuban Life

© 2009 Robert Caplin-All Rights Reserved
I came across Robert Caplin's work through a recent interview published in The New York Times' Frugal Traveler. Moving from this interview to his website, I immediately saw that much of his work was typically that of a quintessential travel photographer.

Caplin started out in Athens, Ohio, with a Nikon N50 film camera, but subsequently moved over to Canon, currently crams his expensive gear into a cheap bag and is enamored of one of the least sophisticated cameras on the market today: the iPhone.

He is also a full-time freelance editorial, corporate and portrait photographer based in New York City, and works regularly with The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News, and has also been published in the National Geographic.

It's been a while that this blog hasn't seen work from Cuba, and Caplin's lovely work on Cuban Life fills this gap. Drop by and it will transport you to the streets of Havana. If only there was an audio track of Cuban Son!!!

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Posted in: Cuba,Photographers: Travel

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Beta

Adobe just announced its Lightroom 3 as a public beta version, which means anyone with an Internet connection can download it and start putting it to the test. You do not need to own (or have tried) a previous version of Lightroom. The version of Lightroom 3 beta software available for download is offered in English only. You can download the beta and use it until the product expires on April 30, 2010.

By the way, those who are on a Mac PowerPC are out of luck. Lightroom 3 Beta will not download on your machines.

Notable new features are:

* Brand new performance architecture.
* State-of-the-art noise reduction.
* Watermarking tool
* Portable sharable slideshows with audio, which allows us to save and export slideshows as videos.
* Film grain simulation tool

I'm interested in two of these features; the grain simulator and the sharable slideshows with audio. However, the latter does not seem to allow any adjustment (or sync'ing) individual frames to the audio....so it has a long way before it can be used for semi-serious multimedia. I'm sure the reviews will start flowing in soon.

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Posted in: Soft Gear

Magnum: In Silence: Susan Meiselas

© 2009 Susan Meiselas/Magnum-All Rights Reserved
In Silence is the beautiful and powerful work (a combination of still photography and video) by Susan Meiselas as featured by Magnum In Motion which deals with the tens of thousands of Indian women and girls who die during pregnancy, while in childbirth, and in the weeks after giving birth, despite the Indian government's programs guaranteeing free obstetric health care.

Each year half a million women around the world die in childbirth. Twenty percent of those deaths are in India, and most are preventable with access to proper healthcare. Both photographer Meiselas and reporter Dumeetha Luthra traveled to India for Human Rights Watch to retrace the steps of one woman who dies after giving birth to a son.

I watched this feature a couple of times, saddened by the combination of red tape, ignorance, indifference, by the overwhelmed doctors and staff, and by the undercurrent of corruption at the Indian clinics...all of which indirectly and directly cause this high level of mortality.

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Posted in: India,Multimedia,Photographers: Photojournalists

My Work: Debate At The Sangha

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Just a short post today to share the above image (still undecided as to the placement of the title) from a project I'm currently working on.

Debate At The Sangha will be a gallery of photographs made during two of the weekly debates at the Kharchhu monastery in Chamkar (Bhutan). I've also recorded the animated debates as they were occurring, along with the traditional hand-clapping and the sound of the prayer beads, so it'll probably end as a multimedia essay.

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Posted in: Bhutan,TTP Show Off

New! EOS-1D Mark IV

Canon has just announced the EOS-1D Mark IV, a 16.1 megapixel digital single lens reflex camera (DSLR) camera body, and the successor to the Canon EOS-1D Mark III. It is the first Canon APS-H format DSLR to feature HD video recording at 1080p resolution.

I've been waiting for a worthy successor to my beloved Canon 1D-Mark II and this may just be the one, effectively doubling the megapixel count but more significantly for my style of photographing, the 10 frames per second makes my heart sing.

Some of its features are:

* 27.9mm x 18.6mm; 16.1 effective megapixels APS-H CMOS sensor
* Dual DIGIC 4 image processors
* New autofocus module (45 AF points with 39 cross-type AF points)
* Integrated sensor cleaning system
* 1.3x crop factor
* 100–12800 ISO speed equivalent (expandable to 50, and to 102400)
* Magnesium Alloy weather sealed body
* Live preview mode
* 10 frames per second continuous shooting
* Dimensions (WxHxD): 156 × 156.6 × 89.9 mm

The suggested retail price is estimated to be $4,999.

For fuller details, go to DPReview.com.

The question is whether the new Canon 1D-Mark IV is worth the $3,300 price premium over the recently released Canon 7D, whose specifications are nothing to sneeze at.

As a reminder, the 7D has a new 18-megapixel APS-C sensor with a 1.6x crop factor, and is equipped with dual DIGIC 4 chips to speed processing of large 14-bit files, as well as to handle the shutter's 8-frame-per-second top speed. It retails for $1,699.

The proof will be in the pudding as they say, and the quality of the images will determine that issue. Rob Galbraith DPI refers to the 7D and the new Mark IV as such:

The EOS-1D Mark IV is meant to be a better-specified camera than the 7D in most respects, and ought to be, given the much higher price tag on the camera being unveiled today. That said, the 7D incorporates several features that didn't make it into the EOS-1D Mark IV, features that would be equally useful in Canon's latest news and sports camera.

These include the 7D's combo mode switch and start/button, Q button for quick access to key camera settings, unparalleled control customization options, an electronic level and revised 63-zone meter.

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Posted in: Hard Gear