After the storms

Guy McCarthy at Watershed News photographed parts of the San Gabriel Valley foothills and mountains on Saturday and Sunday mornings to show what the storms had done. Ducks, snow, mud and more.

(photo courtesy of Watershed News)

Station Fire heads toward Acton

The Station Fire, which grew to about 35,000 acres overnight, continues to spread toward Acton where evacuations have been ordered. On its other end, the fire threatens the Mt. Wilson Observatory above Pasadena.

At left, a great photo from Wally Skalij of the LA Times. More photos here.

Bad exposure

The New York Times Magazine has been forced to pull a photo essay from its site after a reader discovered that at least one of the photographs - and clearly more, according to further analysis - were digitally altered. The photographer, Edgard Martins, has yet to comment. The Times photo editor has posted the following comment:

A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide show on NYTimes.com entitled 'Ruins of the Second Gilded Age' showed large housing construction projects across the United States that came to a halt, often half-finished, when the housing market collapsed. The introduction said that the photographer, a freelancer based in Bedford, England, 'creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation.

A reader, however, discovered on close examination that one of the pictures was digitally altered, apparently for aesthetic reasons. Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show. Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which has been removed from NYTimes.com.

A little rebellion

If a vice presidential candidate meets with foreign leaders and no one covers it, did it really happen?

The press corp threatened to boycott Sarah Palin's planned visits with dignitaries today at the UN after learning coverage would be limited to a few photo ops. The campaign, which wants those photos shown on all the nightly news programs, compromised on a few details, allowing producers to join their TV camera crews and one print reporter o attend two of the meetings.

Radio in pictures

This picture earned me my first, and probably my last, photo credit in the New York Times. It was taken to accompany a story about the gadget in fellow "To The Point" producer Frances Anderton's hand.

It took a bullwhip to convince Warren and David Corn of Mother Jones to sit down for a chat. They'd just finished a 40-minute interview for the real show and wanted to go eat. So did I, but our Web people were desperate for a shot of one of us using the Nokia camera phone to capture an interview. So, I stood up on a chair and this is the magic that resulted.

Unfortunately, the Times got the caption wrong. We weren't in our Santa Monica studio, but inside our makeshift broadcast booth in Denver on the final day of the Democratic National Convention. If you want to watch the interview, click here.

Two pictures, thousands of words*, **, ***, ****

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris makes fascinating use of the Internet in a project over at the New York Times, asking readers to help cut through the psychological suppositions to get at an unanswerable answer.

The question has to do with cannon balls on a road (and not on a road) in two famous photographs from the Crimean War. Is one of the photographs staged? If so, which one?

I've only read the first of three stories so far. Asterisks to come.

*In reading through the first hundred or so comments on Morris' first story, a pattern emerges: Most of the readers think a simple examination of data within the frames will provide an easy answer. They discount motivations and psychological factors that could easily change the interpretation of their facts. Then there are a few comments scattered among the others from readers who wonder why the question needs to be answered at all.

**Oh, I forgot to mention the more studious readers who keep asking for better quality photographs to examine. As if higher resolution will bring a resolution.

***As the day moves on, later commentators (those who sleep in are less empirically minded?) start to look at motivations and come back to theory. The odd grouping of the cannon balls on the road, the fact that they could have been brought in from somewhere else, that light and shadow in 150-year-old photographs isn't a reliable measure, that other "facts" are based on assumptions... Again, fascinating stuff.

****My own questions: Why take a second photograph if he was not looking for improvement? Why not mention in your letter (you have to read the article) what happened during the gap between the two photographs, especially if it was something significant like A. a new volley of cannon balls or B. soldiers out harvesting in a dangerous place? Which is the better picture/the one he favored? Couldn't he have carried additional balls out to the field in his photographer's van? (I guess he staged the cannon ball shot in the road) OK, enough asterisks. I'll create a new post for the second article.