good overview for beginners

After the 7.0 earthquake rocked Haiti on January 12th of this year, I was deeply moved as most of you were. For days I watched as the television flashed images of gloom and doom... dead bodies, crumbled buildings... It just felt like a heartless display of numbers and statistics. "How were the people feeling?" I wondered. I was tired of hearing endless reports from strangers that just arrived to this devastated nation. So I decided to go to Port-Au-Prince myself and ask them directly. My question was simply "What do you have to say about all this?" This photo essay reveals the many answers to that question.

The truth about the images from my trip in 1988 is that not one image from that body of work has ever been included in any of my portfolios. Not one image from that trip has ever been published. I did sell a few awful prints to people who must have felt sorry for me. But the bottom line is that I had laid an absolute photographic egg. I had visited some of the most beautiful landscapes on the planet and in over 7000 clicks of the shutter had not even gotten lucky.

Conventional wisdom would say I had seriously failed the ultimate photography aptitude test. Conventional wisdom would also say I should give up on what looked like a dead ringer for a pipe dream and move on to something else. I clearly was lacking a "natural ability of a superior quality". In fact my trip was almost proof that when it came to photography, I had something closer to a natural ability of an inferior quality. But true wisdom would say that as a beginner I had done the only thing I was capable of doing.

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These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

Nice.

Laura Brunow Miner, former editor of JPG Magazine, loves photography.

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portfolio of designer-slash-photographer steph goralnick

Some good ideas here that I hope to put to my own use.

Now that the Library of Congress and NASA and the New York Public Library all have their collections online, there are more copyright-free pictures around than you can shake a stick at.

In August of last year, I was happy to be able to share some amazing photos of London, as seen from above at night by photographer Jason Hawkes. That entry continues to be one of the most consistently popular ones I've ever put together, so I was happy to hear from Jason again recently, and to find that he wanted to share another 24 photos from 2008 below. Jason shot these images with a camera attached to gyro-stabilized mounts from a Eurocopter AS355, hired out at around £1150 (GBP) per hour, using Nikon gear and either a 14-24mm or a 70-200mm lens. Even with that, the low light and heavy vibrations can make things difficult, Jason says "I often shoot tethered to my MacBook Pro to check the sharpness of the images whilst I shoot." Mr. Hawkes has agreed to jump into the comments and answer some of your questions as well, so feel free to ask.

There are 178 people in the picture, all shot in the course of 20 days from the same spot on a railroad bridge on Warschauer Strasse in Berlin in the summer 2007. Only few of the people on the photograph seemed to know I was taking their picture.

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