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Places Honorable Mention
In Japan, ancestral spirits come back to their families in mid-August every year. People gives repose to the ancestors’ spirits for three days and send them back to where they came from by putting them on lanterns to drift down river. Ms. Setsuko Sugino took this picture of a small girl praying for ancestral spirits and lanterns waiting to be set adrift into foggy river in Shikoku, Japan.
by Setsuko Sugino, Japan

People Winner
Old women in Mozambique – by Ilvy Njiokiktjien, Netherlands

Judges’ Comments
“This is one of those wonderful moments when everything comes together visually,” says freelance photojournalist Maggie Steber. “There is a musical rhythm to the image.” National Geographic design editor Darren Smith agrees: “The composition is intriguing with the mirroring of the women’s bodies. I find it to be very harmonious and soothing. There is something reassuring in the play between the colors, shadows, and light. It appears simple at first but gets more complicated the more you look at it.”

Check out winners from the 2008 International Photography Contest along with honorable mentions from each category at National Geographic 2008 International Photography Contest Winners.

The book is thick: 352 pages, and is packed with information. This book stands out as a rather comprehensive collection of photographic knowledge.

Beginners and advanced users alike will find a staggering amount of information, all of it illustrated with interesting and well annotated photographs, illustrations and charts. One would think that such a description would go well with the term ‘Information overload’, but the book does no such thing. It leaves you with enough information to understand a topic and appreciate it’s key points and then moves on.

Most books such as these tend to focus mainly on film photography, with digital added-on as an after thought or footnote. Fundamentals of Photography, on the other hand takes you through the basics of both film and digital photography in an intimate and comprehensive manner. It helps you understand the processes going on behind the scenes when you press the shutter release. This book is also a safe bet if you want talking material or feel like oozing geekery at the next photo-walk. The breadth of material is so wide and varied that it will look right on just about any photographer’s bookshelf.

If you’re a newbie who really wants to understand photography, this book will take you where you want to go. If you’re an experienced photographer who feels out of touch with the internet, self-learning and digital photography, this book will bring you back up to speed in the traditional manner – with wisdom in black and white.

If you’re a pro, this book cant hurt… I’m sure you’ll find snippets of information that you’ve not seen before… For example, did you know that there are three stages in JPG compression, and that not all of them are lossy? Some of these nuggets of information may just help you squeeze out that extra 2% of brilliance in your photographs.

Selections of close-ups from my friends.

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November Selection

Photography on a Budget
Retouching Your Photographs
Pixels and Digital Cameras – Pixel Counts Can be Misleading
Digital Photography Market Worth $230.9 Billion in 2013
What Kind of Camera and Gear Should I Buy?
The Ultimate Tool for Street Photography, Kid Photography, and the Camera-Shy
Birds in Flight Photography, Nikon D700
The quiet revolution in photography
Photoshop Workbench 152: High Dynamic Range Photography Using Photomatix Pro
The future of photography
Photography History I – Before Film
Types and flavors of Photography: Get versatile
Photojournalism: Where to find the best in news photography
Food Photography Lighting Secrets Revealed
On Monotony: The best and worst of recount photography
11 Money Saving Tips for Photography Enthusiasts
HOW TO – “Homemade strobe photography”

FLORA PHOTOGRAPHICA: MASTERPIECES OF FLOWER PHOTOGRAPHY FROM 1835 TO THE PRESENT
Flora Photographica is a bouquet, a striking and extravagantly designed album of images that celebrate the beauty and pathos of flowers in all their forms. In these pages flowers speak to us with a greater intensity and more subtle modulation than in nature itself. For each bloom shown here has been observed with an acuity of vision that only the most sensitive of photographers can bring to bear.

What we see is both reality and revelation. The artist’s eye decodes the flower’s message and sharpens its beauty. Here are Mapplethorpe’s tulips, half-metal, half-living creatures; Steichen’s delphiniums, preserved in an everlasting summery perfection of blues and pinks; Atget’s open-air profusion of poppies; Cunningham’s magnolia, richly fertile and lush; Man Ray’s surreal yet pure calla lily; Chris Enos’s dying poinsettia, its colors curdling in decay.

Roses and irises, zinnias and eglantines, orchids and camellias all submit to the photographer’s gaze, in opulent still-lifes, in spare renderings of a single sprig, in elegant anatomies, and as emblems of personality in portraiture and nude studies. These are masterpieces of photographic art in an astonishing range of media, from photography’s beginnings up to the present day. Full details of the techniques and processes used are elucidated in the commentaries and introduction. But, above all, here are flowers as we have never seen them before, an unparalleled display to marvel at, contemplate, and enjoy. 215 photographs, 56 in color.

Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and naked men. The frank, homosexual eroticism of some of the work of his middle period triggered a more general controversy about the public funding of artworks.

Robert Mapplethorpe is very well know of making impressive portraits, and is skilled in the arts of the flower and black and white photography. I’ll be showing you a collection of his flower art. He especially likes orchids and calla lilies. He brings the best out of them, beautiful colors, contrast, composition and lighting. All that is taken into consideration to make something really impressive.

You can learn a lot just by looking at each of his photos and analyzing them. The backgrounds are hand painted in my opinion. The flower seems to be positioned either next to the window if he uses natural light or he uses a window between the flower and his studio lights to make those nice shadows. The straight lines of those shadows that make diagonals work really good on our eyes. A really nice feeling not having a seamless background.

Robert Mapplethorpe also uses a really nice format that fits the flowers well, it’s almost a square(1 by 1), but that almost makes a really big difference. He also puts all those elements in a way that he creates balance. Every element works really well with other elements of the whole flower art photography.

Biography:

Mapplethorpe was born and grew up as a Roman Catholic of English and Irish heritage in Floral Park, New York, a neighborhood of Long Island. He received a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he majored in graphic arts.
Mapplethorpe took his first photographs soon thereafter using a Polaroid camera. In the mid-1970s, he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, and socialites. In the 1980s he refined his aesthetic, photographing statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and highly formal portraits of artists and celebrities. Mapplethorpe’s first studio was at 24 Bond Street in Manhattan. In the 1980s Sam Wagstaff gave him $500,000 to buy the top-floor loft at 35 West 23rd Street, where he lived and had his shooting space. He kept the Bond Street loft as his darkroom.

Mapplethorpe died on the morning of March 9, 1989, in a Boston, Massachusetts hospital from complications arising from AIDS; he was 42 years old. His ashes were buried in Queens, New York, in his mother’s grave, marked ‘Maxey’.
Nearly a year before his death, the ailing Mapplethorpe helped found the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc. His vision for the Foundation was that it would be “the appropriate vehicle to protect his work, to advance his creative vision, and to promote the causes he cared about”.

Balancing Point from DANNY BROWN on Vimeo.

From Roger Fenton’s prints of the Crimea to mobile-phone images of Baghdad, every era of war photography has been marked by new technology. But what has always mattered more than technical brilliance, argues Geoff Dyer, is getting close enough to the epicenter of history.

Geoff Dyer’s text is about Robert Capa’s photography. He debates the authenticity of war photography, specially the famous “Falling Soldier” picture.

“The Falling Soldier” shows the moment of a republican soldier’s death in the Spanish civil war. Or so it was claimed and widely believed. Then doubts began to circulate. Perhaps the picture was posed, fake. Capa’s biographer, Richard Whelan, has gnawed away at this issue for decades. The explanation put forward by him in the catalog accompanying an exhibition at the Barbican is that, during an informal truce, a group of soldiers simulated a bit of a battle charge for the benefit of the camera. Fearing a genuine attack was being mounted, enemy troops opened fire. The trigger was pulled, the camera clicked simultaneously – and a man died. Make-believe became tragically real.

Whelan’s explanation is unlikely to be improved on, but it is worth considering something that David Simon, in his book Homicide, learned from ballistics experts: that “no bullet short of an artillery shell is capable of knocking a human being off his feet”. This is not to say that people don’t fall down when shot. They do, but only as “a learned response. People who have been shot believe they are supposed to fall immediately to the ground, so they do.”

This adds an unexpected twist to the moment of simulation, but there is a larger irony too: the more one learns about the circumstances in which Capa made his famous photograph, the less those circumstances matter. Even if it is now established that this is what happened, it is too late. Over the years, the photograph has come adrift from those circumstances, floated clear of what it depicts. One of the standard ideas about photography is that it is strong as evidence, weak in meaning. The Falling Soldier shows this formulation in reverse: it has become more and more questionable as evidence, but its meaning has continued to deepen. Somehow the image is able to accommodate all the different accounts of its making, accounts that have themselves assumed the quality of after-the-fact interpretation. Ultimately, the only proof it offers is of something that has long been accepted – that photographs can be as mysterious as works of art.

Capa said that he would rather have “a strong image that is technically bad than vice versa”. He realized early on that a little camera-shake created a dangerous air of bullets whirring overhead. In certain circumstances, then, technical imperfection could be a source of visual strength. When his pictures of the D-day landings were published in Life magazine, a caption explained that the “immense excitement of the moment made Capa move his camera”. The blurring actually came later, as a result of a printing error at the lab in London. In the excitement of receiving Capa’s films, most of the 72 pictures were completely ruined. Eleven survived, all wounded, maimed, but the darkroom accident imbued them with sea-drenched authenticity and unprecedented immediacy.

Alongside the Capa exhibition is another devoted to Gerda Taro, who died in June 1937, aged 26. Taro and Capa were lovers and collaborators, sometimes working together under the rubric “Capa & Taro Reportage”. After her death, and due to Capa’s increasing fame, Taro gradually faded from photographic history, except as girlfriend of the great war photographer. Through no fault of Capa’s, several pictures now known to be by Taro were attributed to him. Leaving the gender politics aside, such confusion is hardly surprising. As Susan Sontag pointed out in the early 1970s, “the very success of photojournalism lies in the difficulty of distinguishing one superior photographer’s work from another’s, except insofar as he or she has monopolised a particular subject.”

During the Photo Tour in October I came across many mushrooms. These elements of nature ( I can’t call them either plants nor animals), have beautiful shapes and sometimes amazing colors. Most of the time I came across groups of mushrooms hidden in the death leaves.

How you “see” your subject will portray the way it looks on film. No matter how exact your camera settings may be, your photographic “eye” will epitomize the concept. Consider your options when photographing your find. This is where you should try to photograph the mushroom in its natural state and habitat while disturbing the area as little as possible. Try capturing the species’ true essence and appearance as it most likely will present itself to others in the field. Even with the best intentions, a little manipulation is usually prudent to produce a good photograph. A blade of grass, a twig or bit of debris may need to be removed if it comes between your mushroom and the lens. This, along with other distractions in the background can compromise your photograph. Be sure to check the viewfinder completely before taking the shot. Likewise, a nearby nut or leaf may be added to enhance a situation. Another dimension can also be added by convincing some of the local wildlife to contribute to your photograph.

The other approach, documentary, is to capture the main identifying characteristics of the species. This usually requires several specimens with a more calculated manipulation of each. You may decide to tip one over to get a better view of the gills, or dig one up to reveal a hidden bulb or volva. Taking them out of their natural habitat and setting them up in a more controlled environment can also accomplish this concept. Better yet, you can try to capture their natural beauty along with depicting identification qualities.

Examine your mushroom setting from all angles before deciding on the best approach. Chances are, your first instinct will be the best. Start there, and then continue to explore other possibilities. Get up-close and personal. Zoom in on some interesting details of the mushroom. Experiment with the angle of your camera and flash. The more photographs you take and experiment with, the more likely you will get something you like.