Alexandra Boulat

PDN reports that conflict photojournalist Alexandra Boulat (and member of the collective VII) suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm and was in a medically induced coma Friday, according to her agency.

Alexandra, who was in Israel working on assignments, is being treated at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem.

Frank Evers, managing director of VII, said those wishing to help should contact VII through its Los Angeles office: 920 Abbot Kinney Boulevard, Venice, CA, 90291, or (310) 452-3600. Additional contact information is on the VII web site. Evers said VII will collect money to help with Boulat's medical expenses.

She spent years throughout the 1990s covering ethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia for Sipa. In 2001, she became one of the founding members of the VII cooperative. She has covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, and elsewhere. Alexandra was born in Paris in 1962 and is the daughter of Life staff photographer Pierre Boulat and Cosmos photo agency founder Annie Boulat.

May she recover quickly.

Update:( Information via Frank Evers): If anyone would like to help Alex and her family deal with the medical costs involved, contributions can be sent to VII Photo, 920 Abbott Kinney Blvd, Venice, CA 90291. Please make the check out to VII Photo with the words “Alex Boulat Fund” in the memo. Contributions can also be sent to us via paypal to frank@viiphoto.com (again, indicate that the money is for the Alex Boulat Fund).

MSNBC: Kingsley's Crossing

Courtesy MSNBC-All Rights Reserved
MSNBC bring us Kingsley's Crossing, a multimedia production featuring the desperate migration of a man from the Cameroon (Kingsely) to France. The photography is by Olivier Jobard, who eventually sponsored Kingsley's residence permit in France, and found him a job.

A sober and sensitive depiction of migration in contrast to our own media's (and politicians) histrionic convulsions about illegal immigration.

Watch it here

WNYC: Photographing Conflict

WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show (well, a stand-in for Lopate) interviewed photographers Jonas Bendikson, Alec Soth and Magnum's director Mark Lubell. Although the interview is primarily aimed at a general audience, it's an interesting listen (click on small arrow on the left of the player).

Wendell Phillips: Xinjiang

Image Copyright © Wendell Phillips- All Rights Reserved
Wendell Phillips is based in Vancouver, and started his career as a staff news photographer in Manitoba, Canada. He was voted Canada's News Photographer of the Year in 1988. He documents environmental stories, social issues, international development images for numerous agencies that include United Nations Canadian International Development Agency and the Canadian Red Cross. His images have been featured by hundreds of publications and networks to include the South China Morning Post, McLean 's Magazine, Time magazine, Los Angeles Times, London Times, Toronto Star, Photo Life Magazine, National Post, Globe and Mail, and BBC World News.

He covered stories in war zones, and produced documentaries in Africa, the Indian subcontinent, South East Asia, Latin America and Europe. He also raised funds for human development agencies, food banks, HIV AIDS, Cancer research and women's shelters.

Although his portfolio on his website has numerous photographic gems (just take a look at his black & white portrait of Maria Famosa in the Cuba section), I chose his images from Xinjiang, China for this post.

Wendell's Xinjiang

American Photo: 2007 Best

If you're into this kind of thing, American Photo magazine just published its annual 2007 Editor's Choice of photograph's best new products. Utterly predictable and probably designed to 'play nice' with manufacturers (aka advertisers), you'll find everything but the kitchen sink in the exhaustive listing. I was amused when I saw that both Adobe's Lightroom 1.0 and Apple's Aperture 1.5 were listed.

Editors' Choice 2007

NY Times: Steak Out In Paris

Ed Alcock for the New York Time-All Rights Reserved
This has little to do with travel photography, however I couldn't resist featuring it for many reasons. The first is that it's about the type of food I ate almost daily while I was growing up, the second is that it's narrated by Mark Bittman (more on him later), the third is that it's about Paris (one of my very favorite cities) and the fourth is that it's about brasseries and bistros (my favorite type of restaurants).

Mark Bittman is an interesting character...he's a celebrity cookbook author, appears on PBS and has a weekly culinary column in the New York Times, but what makes him unusual is that not only does he subscribe to the minimalist cookery school but he's as opinionated as they come....and that makes him interesting and a must-see on television.

His choices of the bistros in this piece are equally interesting...Le Severo, Chez Georges and Au Boeuf Courrone are traditional no-fuss eateries, and are quintessentially Parisian. These are the places I look for when I visit this eternal city.

The photographs are by Ed Alcock, a Paris-based photographer who shoots for the NY Times and The Guardian, who happens to hold a PhD in mathematics. That's interesting too.

An enjoyable multimedia slideshow, but I wish the producer (Emily Rueb) could've added a snippet or two of Parisian street singing, especially since the biopic movie of Edith Piaf is currently in theaters...that would've completed the circle nicely.

The New York Times' Steak Out In Paris

X-Drive: Free Storage

As most people, I'm always on the lookout for free but useful products such as X-Drive.com. It's an AOL-owned company that offers five gigabytes of free online storage. This can be useful for backing up files, images and movies. It can also be used to transfer large files to other people, and even has a feature that allows you to have slideshows backed with music.

You can check it out here

Scott Stulberg: Myanmar

Image Copyright © Scott Stulberg- All Rights Reserved
Scott Stulberg is a multi-faceted photographer, specializing in travel and editorial photography...along with a wide-ranging portfolio of other commercial disciplines. He teaches digital photography at the UCLA Extension in Los Angeles, and is represented by Corbis, Alamy and Superstock.

You'll find that Scott is generous with the number of his travel photographs on the Far Away Places gallery, and for once, I didn't skip a website's introductory flash movie which is just wonderful. I didn't like the movie's soundtrack (nor the fact that I wasn't able to turn it off except by muting my computer's speakers) but I found the images and the movie sequencing to be really excellent. Most of Scott's travel photographs in his Far Away Places gallery are of South East Asia (Myanmar, Angkor, Vietnam, etc) and also of Japan. Most of these photographs, as the one above of a young Burmese girl in Bagan (or Pagan)- seem to be posed, but some are spontaneous as well. They do not fall in the category of what I like to call "hard core travel documentary", but are quintessential travel photographs.

All in all, a delightful website from a promising and talented photographer.

Scott Stulberg

Canon EOS-1D Mark III: Autofocus Problem?

Rob Galbraith analyses the Canon 1D Mark III autofocus capabilities and finds that, under certain conditions, it has a few problems.

Briefly, these are that the camera has difficulty acquiring focus initially in a multi-frame burst, it's sometimes unable to properly track a moving subject, focus can shift slightly but constantly at times when the subject isn't moving and tracking a subject that's moving somewhat erratically, and the camera is far too quick to shift focus elsewhere.

I always avoid buying the first batch of any electronic product, irrespective of the hype and the necessity, precisely because of teething problems. I hope these autofocus problems can be resolved quickly by Canon.

The full analysis can be found on Rob Galbraith's website

David Samuel Robbins: Himalaya Region

Image Copyright David Samuel Robbins-All Rights Reserved
David Samuel Robbins is a travel photographer based in Seattle, specializing in projects on indigenous cultures and adventure travel. He worked with major publications including the New York Times and National Geographic.

I share David's passion for the Himalaya regions, where he -as I do- worked as documentary photographer and photography tour leader. He has published a book 'Himalayan Odyssey", a culmination of many years of work and thousands of miles trekking in Tibet, Bhutan, India and Nepal. Since TTP is a non-commercial blog, I hesitated to feature his website since it publicises his book.

However, and although his website is primarily a commercial one, crafted to sell his book, it also features about 60 photographs of Nepal, Zanskar, Bhutan, Ladakh, Arunachal Pradesh, Mustang, etc. which are a treat to view. It's a real shame that his photographs are not much larger, but I guess he chose to show as many as possible.

Himalayan Odyssey

WP: Melting Glaciers Threaten Ganges

I have rarely seen an as badly-produced and photographed slideshow on a major national newspaper as Melting Glaciers Threaten Ganges. This one really takes gold for the worst I've seen so far.

The headline and lede were promising....I was interested to see what the editors of Camera Works at the Washington Post would offer on how the Ganges River, fed primarily by a receding glacier, could be the first place where global warming threatens religious ritual. I expected wonderful photographs of the Gangortri glacier and of the pilgrims who walk to heights of 11,000 feet to visit its source...but no, what I got was dull, lifeless 6 photographs of the banks of Varanasi. I could find infinitely more professional and powerful photographs on Flickr.

The Washington Post's Camera Works people really dropped the ball on this one, but if you're interested to see it, here's the slideshow. To add insult to injury, I had to endure a few seconds of a silly ad before the feature. If you're not interested in learning from the mistakes of others, do give this one a pass.

So that this post is not a total waste of time, here's some brief information: The Ganges originates in the Himalayas at the confluence of five headstreams – the Bhagirathi, Mandakini, Alaknanda, Dhauliganga, and Pindar at Devaprayag in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. Out of the five, the Bhagirathi is held to be the source stream originating at the Gangotri Glacier at an elevation of 7,756 m (25,446 ft). The streams are fed by melting snow and ice from glaciers including glaciers from peaks surrounding it.

Beyond The Frame: Bali Matriarch

Image Copyright © Tewfic El-Sawy- All Rights Reserved
I'm not exactly sure why, but I like this photograph a lot. It was taken near Canggu in Bali of an elderly woman walking to her house among the lush vegetation of her family's garden. In common with other Asian nationalities, Balinese families have considerable respect and affection for their elderly. Grandparents are cared for by their extended families, and this woman lives either with or near her children and grandchildren.

Traditional Balinese family compounds have a system of design that is in accordance with adat (traditional law and custom), and it is the norm to have three generations living together in one compound. Moreoever, the alignment of the 4-5 separate buildings and shrines within the family compound must follow strict rules involving the direction of Gunung Agung, the largest peak (the most sacred place on the island) and the ocean. Priests as well as master builders are consulted to pick the correct positions of each of these buildings....almost like feng shui.

For more photographs of Bali, check out my new multimedia gallery Bali: Odalans & Melastis....and details of my forthcoming Bali photo expedition.