This is making me panic as a Photo Journalism major. -top voted comment discussing Who Pays Photographers? at reddit

Pricing journalism always feels like a dark art. Following the online payment for journalism back-and-forth last week, Manjula Martin started collecting payment rates for writers at the Who Pays Writers? tumblr. Following that lead, one of our friends set up Who Pays Photographers?, a collection of anonymously-submitted reports of rates paid for (primarily) assignment work. Not long after the site took off, I got a call from the creator concerned about the popularity of the site (averaging 15,000 unique visits a day), and we talked a bit about what purpose the site might serve and how to make it a reliable resource. You can submit rates anonymously through the site.

An interview at PDN tells a little more about what goes into collecting this information and the goals. You can see all of the submitted rates paid to freelancers around the globe, from Gazeta Wyborcza’s $26 day rate to Forbes’ $1250 day rate including assistant and digital fee. The entries also have notes about contractual terms and the time it takes to receive payment. It’s not always a rosy picture, though that’s hardly a surprise.

The response to Who Pays Photographers? has been generally positive, spreading quickly via twitter, facebook, and reddit. At reddit and elsewhere, though, people have been dismayed by the low fees for most photojournalism.

I’m of the opinion that Who Pays Photographers? is an incredibly important resource. While many organizations and blogs work hard to educate freelancers about the business of photography, the actual fees paid for assignment or stock are often kept secret by photographers (though some do publish rate cards). The best way to improve our lot is to be honest and open about what it’s like to work in photography, and a major part of that is a conversation about money, since we all know exposure doesn’t pay the bills.

Make sure to submit some of the rates for your assignment work. I have already, and you should, too.

At Popular Science, we’re pretty good about paying for work; I’ve certainly never asked someone to write a piece for free (photography, sadly, is a totally different story. I feel for photographers!). -Popsci.com editor Dan Nosowitz in a discussion between editors on paying writers

There’s been a lot of talk in the past few days after Nate Thayer posted on his blog about an Atlantic.com editor asking him to write for free. There’s a good summary of the events here. To any freelancers, it’s a common enough occurrence. If you haven’t seen Fuck You, Pay Me, start there. The Atlantic has issued an apology to Thayer, no doubt due to the attention given Thayer’s blog post.

One of the most interesting things to come out of the discussion, though, is a branch thread (?) involving editors and writers from a number of well-known online and print publications on the subject of paying writers for work. It’s called How Much Should A Writer Be Paid, If Anything. The quote above, about the sorry state of payment for photography for online journalism, is cherry-picked from well down in the discussion, but the rest is definitely worth a read for insight into how online publications compensate their contributors. It’s a very interesting look behind the curtain of pageviews and budgets.

And while the situation for writers isn’t rosy, the quote at the top shows it can be even worse for photographers (as we all know). I was happy to read last year (search for “Well, I think it has to do with paying people”) that the NYT’s Lens blog has started paying photographers. Ironic for this discussion, the Atlantic’s In Focus blog, one of the premiere photography showcases online, doesn’t pay photographers last I checked (see update below; the blog does pay for wire service subscriptions). As more and more media entities get into the online photography game, it’s important to make sure photographers are paid fairly for their work.

Update: Thanks to In Focus editor Alan Taylor for adding to the discussion with his comment down below.

Gizmodo has written about the “World’s Highest Resolution Camera”, with 1.8 gigapixels, which is being developed for the US government. They shared this clip from the PBS show NOVA which recently broadcast an episode called “Rise of the Drones”.

This is the next generation of surveillance. … It is important for the public to know that some of these capabilities exist. – BAE Systems Engineer Yiannis Antioniades, who designed the sensor

I know some folks working on drone-related journalism and drone-related photography. This should give you some more ideas about what might be possible. And I can’t help but think of what extreme ‘Google Street View’ style projects could be possible from a camera also known as “Wide-Area Persistant Stare’. Maybe some day we’ll see such a thing, for now it remains a classified US Government program.

Scott also recommends having a look at the Dronestagram project, which compiles Google Maps aerial landscapes of the sites of drone strikes. You can follow them on Instagram or on Tumblr.

Screenshot of the Atlantic with sponsored Scientology article

The Atlantic, a 156-year-old publication, has been at the forefront of digital media. Its diverse blogs (I read James Fallows and Ta-Nehisi Coates) and online projects (InFocus, Atlantic Cities and the Atlantic Wire, for instance) have helped the Atlantic lead the push into the new media environment, all while making the publication profitable again. That’s what makes Jan. 14′s missteps, publishing an ‘article’ sponsored by the Church of Scientology in the same format as the Atlantic’s online news, so confounding and laughable.

Here’s what happened: The Atlantic is experimenting with models of funding online journalism. The Atlantic decided to start running paid content in line with its regular reporting, the first of which was something called “David Miscavige Leads Scientology to Milestone Year” (archive of article with a few comments) posted at 12:25pm on Jan. 14, 2013. This article and some associated sidebar content looked indistinguishable from regular Atlantic content (and showed up in searches of the Atlantic’s online archive), though they were marked with the words “sponsored content.” The Atlantic’s marketing team was monitoring comments on the Scientology article and deleted a number of negative comments. Criticism of the article spread across social media. And at 11:35pm, less than 12 hours after it was published, the advertorial was removed from the site and links to it forwarded readers to a message stating, “We have temporarily suspended this advertising campaign pending a review of our policies that govern sponsor content and subsequent comment threads” and saying “We screwed up.”

Advertising content that looks like editorial content is nothing new. You can see “special advertising sections” in many newspapers and magazines. The Chinese and Russian governments have been particularly persistent with advertorials that look like news reporting in international news publications, including the Washington Post and New York Times. But the Atlantic’s Scientology debacle was a step too far for readers, not least because the Church of Scientology has a reputation for being a threat to democracy and unfriendly to those reporting or sharing information about the church.

For more about the Church of Scientology, make sure to read the New Yorker’s piece about director Paul Haggis and the Tampa Bay Times series investigating the inner workings of the Church.

And in the vein of editorial independence in online media, earlier this week a CNET writer resigned after CNET’s parent company CBS forbade the writer from giving a technology award to a company that CBS is currently suing.

(via Metafilter)

At that extreme distance [44miles] vision itself collapses. Literally you can look as hard and with the most powerful equipment you can and there is nothing to see. Because at those distances there is so much heat and so much haze and so much turbulence in the atmosphere that the photons that make up light are literally coming apart from each other. Color is literally coming apart.
…
Now it turns out that it is harder to take a picture of something on the ground that is 30 or 40 miles away than it is to take a picture of Jupiter, for example, that is hundreds of millions of miles away.
…
You come up against the physical limit of vision. That is really what you see in the photograph, is you see vision falling apart. Now at the same time it is a photograph of this weapons range, but it is also a photograph of the impossibility of trying to see this weapons range in a certain way.

We have previously written about Trevor Paglen’s groundbreaking photography projects about military patches, spy satellites, CIA Black Sites and Limit-Telephotography but I just came across this video interview with him explaining the physical limits of light and photography that his work about “black sites” is confronting. An interesting thought.

(via ASX.TV: Trevor Paglen – “Black Sites” (2012))

“The claims arise from a series of incidents in connection with Occupy Wall Street protests beginning in and around September 17, 2011 and continuing to the present day in which the City of New York in concert with various private and public entities have employed Officers of the New York City Police Department (“NYPD”) and others acting under color of state law, to intentionally and willfully subject Plaintiffs and the public to, among other things, violations of rights to free speech, assembly, freedom of the press, false arrest, excessive force, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution and, furthermore, purposefully obstructing Plaintiffs carrying out their duties as elected officials and members of the press, including oversight of the New York City Police Department.” -Rodriguez Et Al v. Winski Et Al. First Amended Complaint (pdf, scribd link)

We’ve written before about photographers being abused while covering protests in New York City. Now, photographers Stephanie Keith, Charles Meacham, the National Press Photographers’ Association (see their blog about the case), five NYC city council members, and others, have joined in a federal lawsuit against various New York City entities and officials, including Mayor Bloomberg, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and a number of identified and unidentified police officers, as well as JP Morgan Chase and other businesses in the Occupy Wall Street area, alleging that they engaged in the intentional obstruction of news-gathering activities, the business of elected officials, and Constitutionally-protected protest activities. The complaint can be read in it’s entirety here. In an NPPA press release about the lawsuit, a quotation summarizes photographer Stephanie Keith’s complaints against the city and others, “I joined this lawsuit because as a working journalist I’ve been arrested, thrown to the ground, hit with batons and yelled at by the NYPD while doing my job on assignment. I have seen my fellow journalists being treated this way as well. Why should journalists be subjected to trauma inducing harassment on the job?”

(via PDNpulse)

Maddie on Things - Theron Humphrey - published by Chronicle Books

It’s funny how a project can sneak up on you. Theron Humphrey, whom we’ve featured previously, was on a cross-country roadtrip photographing a different person each day for This Wild Idea when he started posing his dog Maddie, a coonhound, on and in a variety of ridiculous places. Maddie poses on anything: a basketball hoop, the Statue of Liberty, under a semi truck, on a bike, or as a ghost. This is just the sort of thing that hits the internet’s collective funny/cute bones and the project blew up on blogs and the news media (Slate, Today Show, SwissMiss), tumblr (hundreds of reblogs/likes for each photo), and instagram (~100,000 followers). Eventually it turned into a book deal, and it’s available for pre-order. The book, published by Chronicle Books and which initially cracked the top 1000 on Amazon, will be out in April.

In a story similar to the famous “Afghan Girl” photograph by Steve McCurry and the efforts National Geographic followed to track her down in 2002, the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paolo has found the girl whose photograph was the cover of Sebastião Salgado’s book “Terra”.

Joceli Borges was 5 years old in 1996 when Salgado made the portrait along a highway in Brazil. Borges, 21, lives now with her husband and daughter in a Landless Worker’s Movement camp near Iguaçu Falls, on the Brazil-Argentina border. Read the original article for more details about Borges’ life: “Girl immortalized in a photo by Sebastião Salgado is still landless” (in Portugues), or click here for a Google Translation to English.

Rollover for navigation

I first saw this photograph in another of Salgado’s books, “The Children”, featuring portraits of children from around the world. Like McCurry’s photograph of Sharbat Gula, the picture of Joceli Borges lept out at me from the pages of the book when I was in the University of Washington library, and it has long been one of my favorite portraits, for reasons I cannot quite explain. I always felt I could see both a girl and a woman who had already lived a life of struggle in the very same eyes, the two people flashing together with the same face. It seems it has come true, sadly.

I had the good fortune to meet up with Emphas.is CEO Karim Ben Khelifa recently; he’s full of ideas for the future of photojournalism and Emphas.is. Emphas.is, a kickstarter-like funding platform for visual journalism, has helped produce many photo essays addressing major international topics over the past couple of years, and they’ve recently branched out into book publishing. Among the first books is Revolutions by Rémi Ochlik, a young photographer who was killed this year while covering the conflict in Syria. The video above gives a preview of the work in the book, photos from the Arab Spring uprisings throughout the Middle East last year and this. Now the book is available for sale through Emphas.is (there is also a collector’s edition available that includes a print along with the book).

Emphas.is has other books and prints available through their online store, including Peter Dench’s England Uncensored, William Daniel’s Faded Tulips (previously on dvafoto), and Rian Dundon’s Changsha.

(via Time Lightbox)

We’ve written a bit about iphone photography and photojournalism previously, and now Instagram has taken the photojournalism world by storm. The video (above), by LA improv group Olde Payphone, imagines the studio of a celebrity instagram photographer; while the joke goes on a bit too long, it hits a lot of the right notes.

While we’re on the subject of cell phone photojournalism, be sure to check out Michael Christopher Brown’s recent work from Congo using a phone. Sure, the iphone photojournalism fits in with the current trend, but he uses the phone with good reason for this essay: many of the materials used in producing the phones are mined in Congo.