In Japan’s Rubble, Glimpses of Lives Past

Following the recent tsunami in Minamisanriku, a fishing port on Japan’s northeastern coast, most of the houses that were built on plains between mountains were gone. As photographer Ko Sasaki walked through the debris of Minamisanriku, a fishing port on Japan’s northeastern coast hit by the recent tsunami, he found very few signs of life. What he did find, spotted throughout the rubble, were photographs, the only fragments of people’s lives that still remained.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/in-japans-rubble-fragments-of-lives-past/

Other photographers to document the personal photographs and albums in the ruins of Minamisanriku include Chris McGrath of Getty Images, David Guttenfelder of The Associated Press, Robert Gilhooly of Bloomberg News and Carlos Barria of Reuters.

Photoreportage on child trafficking

Chatelaine.com has just published my photoreportage on child trafficking!
I was first introduced to this sensitive subject on the set of Wendy Champagne's documentary film "BAS! Beyond the Red Light", filmed in Mumbai in 2008. I hope to collaborate with various NGOs working to stop child trafficking in Nepal, India, Laos, and Cambodia during my travels this winter.

http://fr.chatelaine.com/dossiers/article.jsp?content=20100831_161050_10116

l'École d'été 2010

Last week, I had the honor of mentoring (for the second year) a photojournalism workshop at the Institut du Nouveau Monde's "École d'été" at Concordia University.

Here is a slideshow I put together with some of the images produced by me and my participants:

The world's first digital camera!

The Places We Live

We are witness to a major shift in the way people across the world live: for the first time in human history more people live in cities than in rural areas. This triumph of the urban, however, does not entirely represent progress, as the number of people living in urban slums—often in abject conditions—will soon exceed one billion.

From 2005 to 2007 Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen documented life in the slums of four different cities: Nairobi, Kenya; Mumbai, India; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Caracas, Venezuela. His lyrical images capture the diversity of personal histories and outlooks found in these dense neighborhoods that, despite commonly held assumptions, are not simply places of poverty and misery. Yet, slum residents continuously face enormous challenges, such as the lack of health care, sanitation, and electricity.

The images are presented both online as a multimedia presentation and also as a book published by Aperture Books.

Eyjafjallajökull Timelapse Video Shot With 5D Mark II

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

Using Canon’s 5D Mark II, a 16-35mm f2.8 lens, and a motorized timelapse motorized dolly loaned to him by MiLapse, photographer/ filmmaker Sean Stiegemeier made use of the day-and-a-half window of decent weather he got while on location to create the above video, shot from pulled-back vantage points around the base of the volcano.

The trip took Stiegemeier from Seattle to Detroit (where he picked up the dolly and got a tutorial on how to use it on the floor of the airport), back to Seattle (flight to Reykjavik canceled), then to New York, Glasgow, the wrong part of Iceland and then, a six-hour bus ride later, to Reykjavik.

Stiegemeier, who says he is “a firm believer in using technology to color correct and create the best looking images,” used HDR (high dynamic range) processing for some of the shots. He says it took four days for his computer to render the video made up of 7000 stills, but he didn’t spend very much time choosing images, color correcting or editing because he didn’t expect many people to see it.

BAS! wins at DOXA

Wendy Champagne's 'BAS! Beyond the Red Light' wins the NFB Colin Low award for most innovative Canadian documentary at Vancouver's DOXA Film Festival!

http://www.doxafestival.ca/doxa-10/festival/films/bas.html