Dith Pran

Dith Pran 1942-2008

My Dear Friend,

Peace, love and compassion. You always wished that for others.

You had love and compassion in spades. At the end, I hope you found peace while holding the hand of your cherished Meoun Ser Dith.

Seeing Machine

And here's another impressive MIT video interview with poet who is going blind called the "Seeing Machine" in which the poet discusses a collaboration between MIT scientists and herself that allows her to see text for the first time in months via images from a computer projected onto her retina.

Elizabeth Goldring is an artist, poet and Senior Fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Her collaborative research at CAVS includes visualizing her own vision loss and developing both a visual language and "seeing machine" for people who are blind or visually challenged. This video was produced in collaboration with the MIT News Office in April 2006 as a video news release about Goldring's Seeing Machine Prototype.The video includes excerpts from an earlier documentary produced by Goldring and Ellen Sebring, as well as video art collaborations with Vin Grabill

Music and the Expressive Hand

Also on one of the MIT Media lab's student blogs on Digital Dialogues is quickie sound bite by neurologist Frank Wilson, who Glorianna Davenport says...

...has devoted much of his life to studying the connections between the hand, music and emotional commitment. How can our use of hand create deeper engagement? Does the enormous emphasis on typed text that is so prevalent in today's digital world constrain us? When will tangible digital objects and broader sensory interfaces transform our engagement in the digital dialog and how will this transformation effect our development as artisans and citizens?

Fly With An Eagle

Fly with Tilly the Eagle who is equipped with a web-cam on her wings. In the process you will learn all about eagles in flight and marvel.

I found this wonderful link through MIT's Interactive Experience Group in the MIT Media Lab. Students keep blogs. This blog is called Media Fabrics.

Teen Career Video Website

Free Tips & Career Advice from Production Industry Professionals

The amazing 26-year old entrepreneur Joel Holland built up this video career advice website called Kidzonline for teens, while still a student attending Babson University. The videos are free to view and quite interesting.

Here's a video spoof he filmed with Charlie Rose.

Here's an interview with National Geographic's Donna Meir. Holland writes that Streaming Futures is...

......a free, web-based show dedicated to helping teens choose the right career path. We have over 90 streaming video interviews on our site with celebrities, business leaders, athletes, musicians, and career professionals from all different industries.

Hollywood Futures is a free series of videos showcasing short 3-5 minute interviews with hit Hollywood producers, movie studio executives, success production company founders, and others who have risen through the ranks to find great success in the production industry. Interviews are conducted by Footage Firm's Joel Holland.

New interviews are added weekly, so check back or subscribe to the video podcast on iTunes.

Coyote Blog

Photo Copyright Shreve Stockton 2007












So here's a super-wonderful blog called The Daily Coyote filled with beautiful photos of one photographer's newly adopted pet coyote. Equipped with a fading Canon Rebel she teaches us the lesson that it isn't the equipment that takes the photo. It's the eye and heart of the shooter.

Shreve Stockton, 30, a Vespa rider, tells us

Charlie came into my life when he was just ten days old, orphaned after both his parents were killed. He lives
with me and a tomcat in a one-room log cabin in Wyoming.

$5/Month Buys a Daily Feed of Coyote Pix
You can order prints or calenders of Charlie for $15.95, or an 8x10 print for $45 or pay $5 a month to get a daily feed of Shreve's coyote photos...

This website is an archive of Charlie's daily pictures and my stories of life with a coyote. I post a new photograph every day, but it is a five month lag behind real-time. Subscribe to The Daily Coyote to get current photos delivered to your email inbox.

I wish Shreve the very best. I hope her blog catches on in a viral manner and these semi-micro-payments earn her enough money to support her rural lifestyle and feed Charlie a steak dinner nightly.

Art Buyers Search Copyright Free Amateur Pix

Adding to my previous post "Anyone Can Be a Photographer" let me show you a query I just received from Guru.com. This art buyer wants to pay someone $1 an image to find copyright-free pix online they can use.

Cheap Art Buyer

Category: Photography / Videography
Description:
I need someone whom can search for copyright-free photos on the web. I need simple images of presents for a bride and groom (25 of them). They will need to be reduced to about 80 x 80 without loss of quality, and be png format with the alpha channel set to transparent.

An example of a site is flickr.com but you can choose other sites of your choice.

I will pay $1 a photo. I need a fast turnaround. Reply only if you know you can retrieve the photos. I have more work in this area for the competent provider.

Scary indeed. But is fright the proper response? Change is good. Right? Or at least Krishnamurti tells us so. The guys shooting daguerreotypes who were frightened probably went out of business. Those that re-tooled survived. Is there a lesson for everyone in all that?

Audio Blogging

Click Here to Hear This Post :


It looks as if my favorite blogging utility, Audioblogger, has been sold or re-cast as a start-up with the new name Hipcast. When I started blogging I often read passages from poets using this easy program. You register, get a code and then phone a number and blog by phone.

Today while singing the praises of this utility I checked out my past posts to send along the info and found that the podcasts didn't work. After searching around I found the Audioblog folks at Hipcast...cool name...with a much bigger agenda. What used to be free is now $9.95 a month. But you can sign up for a fee one week trial.

Think about it as marketing tool. Blog a thought or tip each day by Hipcast , calling in by phone. Then put that link on your website or in the signature line of your e-mail messages.

Blog By Telephone

Hipcast now offers three new ways to upload audio. By telephone

Call a number, speak your mind, hang up. From anywhere you've got a phone*. From the club, the game, in traffic, at the mall, at a trade show, you name it. Talk up to 60 minutes. Interview someone or even record a conference call.

Record Audio Through Your Web Browser

Have you recorded and produced audio using one of the numerous software programs like Audacity, GarageBand, Soundtrack, CoolEdit/Audition? Are you a musician that's created a new track you want to share? Upload files up to 250 MB in size and publish. It's that easy. We support most audio formats.

Or Upload Audio files

With a simple computer microphone and high-speed internet access, you can record high-quality audio right through the web browser, with no additional software needed.*

Linking Video To Your Website

Do you want to embed a video player into your website without writing lengthy and complicated HTML? One typo in HTML code and it doesn't work, right? And if you're a poor typist like me...


Here's a page on The University of California's website where you can easily create an Embedded Media HTML Generator.

And you can read all about delivering video from your website at EventDV.

My Gifted Dad

I watched the Oscars last night with my father, 86. It's an emotional time as he packs up his apartment to go into assisted living near my brother. After eating Vietnamese take-out we settled into two unpacked office chairs amidst piles of boxes to watch TV.

In 1963, during a brief respite from an illustrious career as a still photographer, my father was Director of Photography for the film, "Lord of the Flies". The renowned British stage director, Peter Brook, asked my father to shoot this award-winning film and gave my father ten days to learn to use a movie camera before film production began on the island of Vieques. My father had never touched a movie camera before.

The rest is history. My father, a genius of sorts, developed a whole new system for tracking and zooming. He created a gate that swung and panned along the actors as they moved. In fact Tyson Kubota, a film student at Dartmouth, recently posted this critique of my father's shooting technique. I don't think he knew about Dad's swinging gate.

First, some technical lessons:
Zooming may not be so bad after all! The cinematographer Tom Hollyman (trained as a still photographer, Lord of the Flies is his one and only credited feature film) claims that this was the first feature ever shot [entirely?] using a zoom lens. He explains an efficient technique used for camera movement: walk at a right angle to the subject and pivot the camera/zoom in slowly to create a faux-dolly effect: this allows one to continually vary the background to obscure the fact that you’re zooming (so you’re not zooming in on the same spot, which is the core reason why static zoom-ins often look ‘cheap’).

Zooming Back to Puerto Rico

Brook and my father worked in the second floor of our apartment in Puerto Rico to develop Dad's tracking technique. If you look to the left of this photo you can see me watching. If I look solemn it's because maybe I felt the production of this movie was a family affair in which everybody but me played a role. Perhaps I took the constant commands for " All Quiet On Set!" too personally.

My brother Burnes, an extra, shown here, behind his father's camera, played Douglas, while my Mother took stills and helped with casting. I flirted with the Surtees twins and did get to play a stand-in for Piggy while my father learned to use a movie camera by making tests. Click here to see a slideshow of some low res pix of my father at work with Peter Brook.

Last Night

During a commercial break in the Oscars last night I asked my father why he didn't get further into film-making after " Lord of the Flies."

He said that after shooting Lord of the Flies he realized how much there was to learn in the craft of cinematography and that he felt he was too old at that time to begin at the bottom, learning the craft.

Kubota on Dad

Kubota continues in his critique:

On improvisation:
Famed director theater director Peter Brook got these non-actor children to convincingly live the experience of their characters—he reportedly shot over 60 hours of footage. Onscreen I could sense the free, wide-open editing process this approach must have allowed him. Each shot, no matter how briefly held, has a unique richness, an eloquence and brevity that comes from a confluence of unpredictable factors: the child performers, the environment, weather and lighting conditions, not to mention everyone behind the camera and offscreen.

The precisely exposed, carefully modulated tonalities contrast with the sense of contingency and spontaneity in the framings and actor movement. The way Hollyman/Brook shoot faces is particularly inspiring: the frequent close-ups on faces with starkly lit sky backgrounds or negative space decontextualize each boy’s position in the narrative, imbuing each image with a mythic weight (I could sense the cinematographer Tom Hollyman’s background in still photography most strongly in these moments).

The film is also a masterclass in the efficient and effective use of location shooting. The film’s power comes from the aesthetic tensions it contains: between the boys’ completely ‘real’ physical ‘performances’ (their physical presence in the actual conditions of the narrative) and the almost-entirely-postdubbed dialogue that they ‘speak’; between the gritty, pocked texture of the hunters’ volcanic rock fortress and the smooth grey tones of the open sky; between the use of unexpectedly disjunctive shot compositions and editing rhythms and the supple gliding camera movements; and between the occasional music (almost always used ironically or as thematic counterpoint, never in a conventional melodramatic sense) and the ambient beauty of the rest of the naturalistic sound design. The overall attention to detail and affect is staggering; I am convinced that Brook’s daring formal approach was the perfect choice to balance the broad-strokes allegory of Golding’s storyline.

Strut Your Stuff Dad @ The Heritage

Hey Dad...Someone's blogging about work done some 36 years ago--if all of us could be so lucky. Kubota says the film is a "masterclass in the efficient and effective use of location shooting."

So Dude, listen here. You may be difficult. But you're also gifted.

You're a true Technoratti presence. Cool enough. The ladies at the Heritage will surely swoon when you show them Kuboda's blog post.

Way to go.

I be proud.

Deadly Fake Anti-Malarial Drugs

Photograph Copyright Stephenie Hollyman

Click Here to View Slideshow on the anti-malarial wonder drug, made from artemisinin. This herb, also known as wormwood is now being grown in Tanzania by Awaarusha farmers. Photos Copyright Stephenie Hollyman 2007.

Indeed my heart sank yesterday while reading In the World of Life Saving Drugs, a Growing Epidemic of Deadly Fakes, in The New York Times Science Times , which says that in Southeast Asia " 53 percent of the antimalarials bought were fakes."

Estimates of the deaths caused by fakes run from tens of thousands a year to 200,000 or more. The World Health Organization has estimated that a fifth of the one million annual deaths from malaria would be prevented if all medicines for it were genuine and taken properly.

“The impact on people’s lives behind these figures is devastating,” said Dr. Howard A. Zucker, the organization’s chief of health technology and pharmaceuticals.

Internationally, a prime target of counterfeiters now is artemisinin, the newest miracle cure for malaria, said Dr. Paul N. Newton of Oxford University’s Center for Tropical Medicine in Vientiane, Laos.

SLIDESHOW ON ARTEMESIN

If you click above you can view a slideshow of photos I took in Tanzania of a village where the live-saving herbal plant artemisin annua is being grown in Tanzania.These photos are part of my ongoing multimedia project on malaria called " Fever Zone". Also include ( the white folks) are photos of agri-biz growing artemesin in Tanzania.

FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE: GETTING SICK

In May of 2005 while traveling to document malaria I was thrilled to see how well artmemisinin worked against chloriquine-resistant strains of malaria. In fact I had a chance to try out this wonder drug first hand-- thank god not conterfeit-- in Tanzania after my blood smear proved positive for malaria falciprium on a Friday afternoon. While photographing a woman with malaria who had dropped into a coma in a neighborhood clinic ouside of Dar es Salaam, I suddenly found myself dizzy, sweating heavily, and about to wretch. At first I thought it was a sympathetic reaction. But as I photographed the symptoms worsened. And I recalled that I had been weak all day.

I asked the nurse at the clinic to test my blood for malaria and continued working.

One half hour later the clinic's doctor approached me laughing, saying that I must take my subject matter--malaria-- quite seriously, because I had caught it. " Welcome to Tanzania" he boomed out as he wrote me a prescription for artesunate pills.

My WHO driver took me to a reputable pharmacy where I bought this life-saving medicine before retreating to my hotel to recover. After sleeping around the clock between taking pills during what became my malarial " Lost Weekend" I awoke on Monday. Weak but recovered.

By Tuesday I was back at work. I was lucky. If I had taken counterfeit artesunate I might have died. With excellent reporting Donald G. McNeil Jr. details the peril in which these counterfeit drugs place their users.

Many of the fake artesunate pills found by Dr. Newton’s team were startlingly accurate in appearance — and much more devious in effect than investigators had suspected.

Not only did the pills look correct, as did the cardboard boxes, the blister packing and the foil backing, but investigators found 12 versions of the tiny hologram added to prevent forgery.

In one case, even a secret “X-52” logo visible only under ultraviolet light was present, though in the wrong spot.

Another hologram was forged by hand, Dr. Newton said, by someone who obviously spent hours with a pin and a magnifying glass making tiny dots on a circle of foil to imitate the shimmer.

But the most frightening aspect appeared when the pills were tested. Some contained harmless chalk, starch or flour. But the latest, he said, contained drugs apparently chosen to fool patients into thinking the pills were working.

Some had acetaminophen, which can temporarily lower malarial fevers but does not kill parasites. Some had chloroquine, an old and now nearly useless antimalarial.

One had a sulfa drug that in allergic people could cause a fatal rash.

And some had a little real artemisinin — not enough to cure, but enough to produce a false positive on the common Fast Red dye test for the genuine article.

Those would not merely fool a laboratory, Dr. Newton noted. They could also foster drug-resistant parasites, so if patients were lucky enough to get genuine artemisinin treatment later, they might have already developed an incurable strain and could die anyway.

Such resistant strains could spread from person to person by mosquito and ultimately render the drug ineffective, as already happened with chloroquine and Fansidar, two earlier malaria cures.

“We make no apology for the use of the term ‘manslaughter’ to describe this criminal lethal trade,” Dr. Newton and his co-authors said last year in an article in The Public Library of Science Medicine. “Indeed, some might call it murder.”

Multimedia Dogizens

I just read an interesting post called The Pedigree of Goodness . It's a must read for those involved in working in teams on multimedia projects. It really brings home people's need for validation and the need for team-mates to acknowledge colleagues' contributions.

She writes..

Perhaps you have seen the latest Pedigree dog food commercial? In it, the camera pans on a series of ordinary looking dogs in a dog pound, and the voice-over gives them language. The dogs say things sequentially like "I don't know where I am..." "And I don't know how I got here..." "but I know that I am a good dog..." "And I just want to go home."

She then deconstructs the notion of goodness...

And, like the dog in the pound, at the core place in our hearts all any of us really want is to find whatever reads out as h-o-m-e for us, and to be able to be there.

The dogs in the commercial want to be seen, to be noticed and ask to be acknowledged for what it is they have to give. They are the quintessential Everyperson.

Not Madonna's Malawi

Photograph Copyright Stephenie Hollyman 2006

We all read about Madonna's "adoption" of a child from Malawi last month. It was probably the first time most have read about Malawi in the paper. Which just goes to show you the power of celebrity to sell news. In June you may have read my post about Brangelina selling toothpaste.

Here's a link to photos I did in Malawi in 2005 on malaria as part of my multimedia work in progress " Fever Zone."

Here, Families of Yao fishermen live in small villages along the shores of Lake Malawi, a reagion that has one of the highest rates for malaria in the world. For residents here, an attack of malaria is as common as flu to a resident elsewhere.

For although we read almost daily about the scourge of AIDS in Africa it is also a fact that malaria kills an African child every 30 seconds. Almost 97% of Malawi's population is at endemic risk for malaria. Children under five suffer on average 9.7 malaria episodes per year, while adults suffer 6.1 such episodes.

Families in Malawi can spend almost a quarter of their small annual income treating malaria. Malawi is one of the world's poorest nations in the world with a 37 year old life expectancy at birth for women and 36 for men.

Brian Storm's Mediastorm

Last Fall MSNBC.com won exclusive internet rights to MediaStorm’s production, Iraqi Kurdistan by Ed Kashi. The private online auction ran for four days and was conducted at http://mediastorm.org. Participants included news, lifestyle and arts publications from around the world. MSNBC.com premiered the project on November 13th, 2006.

Since then Brian Storm has been producing and uploading exciting multmedia packages on his site. Check out Kristen Ashburn's BLOODLINE: AIDS and Family,
in which video and photos are combined with audio to create a moving cross media document. Visitors are greeted by a mother who addresses them directlt from a player window:

I said, my children, you know what I have HIV. One day I will die and leave you my children. So you must be brave and look after yourselves and look after me.

Rich Media Sells Cars

Photograph Stephenie Hollyman 2005

At Photo Expo yesterday I was chatting, briefly, with Holly Hughes, Managing Editor of Photo District News, about multimedia and Brian Storm's exciting new venture MediaStorm.org which just auctioned off a rich-media story package for the first time to MSNBC online, two days ago. I asked Holly if anybody was making any money yet from producing media-rich stories. She shook her head and said, " Not yet."

Nissan Sells Cars With Rich Interactive Media

That may be true for photographers but the ad agencies working for Nissan seem to be doing OK. When I returned home, people were dancing across the Street at the Seaport Museum, prancing on a red backdrop in the cold, in front of a van where their images were being projected onto a grid of video screens. Grunged type on the truck read " 7 Days, Seven Lessons, An Interactive Experience from Nissan." It is all part of a five-city cross media campaign produced by All Points Media to promote Nissan's latest model Sentra car to young urbanites.

The agency hired Marc Horowitz, to shoot in a You-Tubey manner, The Tennessean tells us

"a California-based performance artist and photographer's assistant, and the trials and tribulations he experienced while trying to maintain a normal life living in the car for a week in Los Angeles... Besides Web logs, a My Space page and online videos, the company also bought an online "island" in the fast-growing virtual reality game SecondLife..."We shot it in what we call 'reality plus,' " said Rob Schwartz, executive creative director for Nissan's primary ad agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day...The result is a $40 million to $50 million advertising campaign that includes seven different television commercials, a variety of print ads, at least three Web sites, a couple of blogs, 15 "Webisodes" and a spot in an online computer game, where players can get their own virtual reality version of the Sentra to drive around cyberspace (where they'll see virtual Nissan billboards, too).

Cool Cars With Plugs for iPods & Bluetooth Technology

Here at South Street Nissan's newest Sentra was parked next to the van. A " Product Specialist" invited a passing tourist named Stacy to check it out. Stacy, who owns a 2005 Sentra, settled into the car's roomy front seat. When she was told that the car had Bluetooth wireless technology and that she could plug her IPod into the car's speakers, controlling the volume at the steering wheel, she shouted out " Get Out! I love everything. It's a toy!"

Stacy now headed for the red backdrop where she watched herself moving as part of the " Lesson 5: Remember to Shower Daily" episode that played on the large screen on the van. A small web cam picked up her movements and projected them back as on the screen. Her interactive "real time" guide Alonzo Wilson, from Oregon's All Points Media told Stacy he was going to " Fog". After a flick of Alonzo's remote wand, Stacy saw Eric on the screen telling us that he needs a bath and is going to the car wash. Fog enveloped each of the squares in the screen. Alonzo instructed Stacy to " wave" it away which she did with a flourish.

Nissan has built a faux site on My Space for Marc, including videos and PDF files vistors can download.


Photo Stephenie Hollyman

But there are perils along this path warn experts.

"That lack of authenticity … can come back to haunt the advertiser," warns adman Garfield. "It's a real obsession with those who live online. They don't like people playing with their minds."

Pencil Hollyman The Devil Dog

Photograph Pencil Hollyman
Yes, it's true. Cindy Sherman lived down the hall from me in a loft here at South Street when she was just starting out. So inspired, my rescue dog, Pencil likes to dress up and have his photograph take in different roles, even though I tell him that he's a bit derivative. You may have read the previous post where he dressed up as a Bollywood star.

Derivitive or not, he knows I've been a slacker as of late on posting on this blog, too busy with other work. But he is persistent. So he nuzzled me awake this morning with a poke of his pointed nose, all dressed for Halloween in his Devil Dog Suit. He asked me to take this picture.

So Happy Halloween from this girl and her dog!

Festivus & Allen Salkin

I mentioned Allen Salkin, the freelance writer with whom I worked last week on a NYTimes assignment. Do check out Allen's website " for the rest of us", Festivus. Salkin tells us there,

This is the home for all things Festivus, the holiday most people believe, wrongly, started on an episode of Seinfeld. This Website was set up by the author of Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us, the book which shows in hilarious and 100 percent accurate detail the stunning, bizarre and sometimes controversial ways real people all over the world are actually celebrating Festivus now.

Salkin's site tell us that

Allen Salkin is an investigative reporter. He is the author of the book Festivus - The Holiday for the Rest of Us.

Allen has written on subjects ranging from the last true waterbed salesman in the San Francisco Bay Area to corruption in the Brooklyn courts for The New York Times, Details, Yoga Journal, Heeb, and other publications.

Allen has been a rubber ducky salesman in Las Vegas, a farm laborer in Crete, a casting agent in Hong Kong, a busker in Melbourne, a stand-up comedian in New York, a cafeteria cashier in Squaw Valley, a slacker in San Francisco, and a chocolate chip cookie maker in Waikiki.

For Allen's blog, journalism and photos, visit his website: www.allensalkin.com.

Magic Flute Glow

Photograph Stephenie Hollyman Copyright 2006

Here's another example of my Magic Flute operatic lighting using Gary Fong's light dome with my Canon 580EX flash off camera. This was taken last week for a New York City museum.

In a previous post I spoke of letting ambient light burn in with the flash exposure to warm up a subjects'face, to produce a glow. For this portrait of elegance and elan I held the flash low and to the left, shooting with a slow shutter speed.

Operatic Footlighting

If you have read my previous posts on Gary Fong's Light Dome you know what an unabashed fan I am of the effects it can produce, when used off camera axis. This last week I shot three evenings for The NY Times for a story called "Fame at 72 Proof." I worked with the tremendously talented and charming Allen Salkin, who is among many other things, the author of the book Festivus. Our assignment was a story about owners of boutique liquors and how they promote their product by donating their branded booze to hosts of high profile parties and events.

To take this shot of the maker of African Starr Rum, Jeffrey Zarnow, I used Gary's Fong's diffused milk-white dome instead of the translucent version over my Canon 580 EX flash. This cone-like covered dome really produces a nice soft white light. But don't count on using it for subjects far away. The fall off is incredible.

I held the flash with the light sphere low, using the flash to emulate a footlight at the opera. I call this my " Magic Flute"effect...sort of like when Pappageno ( sp?) plays his flute.

Careful though. Doing this can cast wicked shadows. Check your screen " chimping" after each shot to make sure you have it in the can. Try to get the subjects away from walls where shadows' " hash marks" will land. Or if you do have a wall, place the flash so the shadows become a crafted part of the photo.

Shake and Bake Event Photography

Photography Copyright Stephenie Hollyman 2006
Last week while shooting an event for a major New York City Museum I played around with what I like to call " Shake and Bake " photography. No, I don't sprinkle seasoned bread crumbs over my subjects. I shake the camera as I shoot a long time exposure and let the ambient light " bake" in...while a nano-second pop of the flash produces an occasional surprise or two.

I set the white balance for the flash rather than putting an organge gel over the flash and setting the white balance for tungsten. It makes everything glow warmly and orange in the background. But the subjects in the foreground come out correctly balanced.

But do beware. There is an element of digital voodoo at work here. The ambient back ground blurs and the subjects lit by flash stand out in sharp relief...if you're lucky. So play it safe and take the standard shot before shaking your camera camera around for the next one.

And set your flash to overpower the ambient light by one stop. Otherwise your the orange from the tungsten will " burn" in to the exposure on your subjects' faces and make them look like pumpkins. ( Although occasionally I will warm up a pale subject by lengthening my shutter speed to allow a " glow" to burn in under the flash exposure.)