Hugs for Free!

I've never been a huge fan of Valentines Day.

That's not to say I'm not a fan of love, and romance, a nice meal, flowers, soft music. Kathleen and I are on the same page when it comes to allowing this extremely commercial day to come and go without much fanfare at all.

I stood in the rain on Valentines Day, while taking a break from another story I'm working on, to get a photo of a young woman and man giving away free hugs. I thought it was very refreshing to see this, and was pleased to learn that there were absolutely no strings attached. It was just a nice gesture by two people trying to pass along a kind act.

Stephanie Mulhall, 23, right, and Fernando Brava, 22, behind, braved the cold rain to stand on the corner of Yonge and Dundas Streets in Toronto to offer free hugs and valentines to passers-by on Feb. 14, 2012.(Photo by Peter Power/The Globe and Mail)

While I'm happy not to participate in the mad dash for flowers and chocolates, I have to admit that I am still of two minds about the whole thing.

I don't think we need a special day to tell those most dear to us how we feel about them, or to do something romantic. However, as a society that seems to be getting busier and busier, with each passing day, if it is necessary to have a special day to kick-start some lazy lovers then I guess that can't be all bad.

"Maybe Next Year!" and mean it!

Every year I say, "Maybe next year," and this year is no different.

Today the results of the World Press Photo contest were released and I have to say that the winning images are seriously impressive. Congratulations to the winners!

While we don't, or shouldn't, work as photojournalists to win awards, it is nice to have your work recognized. WPP is the worlds largest photo contest and a prize in it isn't exactly bad news to wake up to.

But as I've said in the past, a person can't sit on any single contest prize and hope to be successful on bragging rights alone. Photographers who are successful over time, and some time and time again, repeatedly use their skill, their motivation, their creativity, and their opportunities to make images like many that are included as winners in this year's WPP.

Success at anything is about continuing to work hard to improve yourself and your craft. It's about not being happy with the status quo, and about thinking outside of the box. It's about never giving up and finding inspiration in the work of others around you.

Finding the proper and most efficient ways to do this is more than half the battle.

What strikes me often about many winning images I look at from contests, beyond the memorable images of course, is the access that photographers were able to secure, for one reason or another. Access takes forethought. It takes planning. It takes organization. And it takes vision. It takes patience. And it takes persistence.

There will always be award winning images that come from a photographer "just being there," but in my opinion these are the exception.

Beyond the stellar images produced this past year - and not just those that placed - I want to congratulate those photographers and photo editors that see the value of time spent planning, envisioning, and working to create those rare situations where compelling photographs are made.

The starting point for great photojournalism is foresight and fortitude.

I think we all have the potential to make stunning images, and to tell compelling stories, but you have to be there, and getting there is where the difference is made.

So, again this year, I'm doing my best with the opportunities I have, and trying to reach beyond what's immediately obvious, or available. We should all do this. And in doing so we can hope for great images and stories to develop from it.

And then we can say, with conviction, and not hollow words, "Maybe next year!"

Photography's Dark(room) Days

I just read an interesting article by Peter Turnley about a printer to the greats in Paris named Voja Mitrovic and while it was enjoyable it also made me think about how our industry has changed through technology.

The art of print making may be slowly disappearing but we are also losing the great art of photo editing. Every photographer can benefit from the critical eye of a talented photo editor. Today's photographers rarely ever have another eye looking over their work, finding the frame within the frame, or the elusive moment missed by the first edit.

While I personally do miss spending time in the darkroom, like many I'm sure, I don't yearn for those days.

New technologies have helped the process of making images by photojournalists, and I guess specifically by those of us working for newspapers, but we are paying the price for speed and immediacy in other ways; good editing being the greatest of these IMHO.

While we are now able to shoot and deliver our images more quickly, our ability to do so means that editors want to see more, sooner, and more often; for the blog, the tweet, the web, the gallery, ....and of course to appease the query, "do you have any other good ones you could send?" We all need to be reminded that quality, not quantity should be our goal.

It's rush, rush, rush now for many of us, especially if you want to capture a few jerky seconds of video as well, and throw it together quickly back at the office, so it can be posted, clicked on, and clicked off just as quickly. We are in a reckless rush toward mediocrity that needs to be examined more critically.

While we are all expected to do more, in less time, staffing issues, expanded use of photos, and a broader field to search for photos in, means that most photo editors have much more demands on their time as well. It would be nice to say that we should all have a photo editor oversee our work more often, but could you imagine how many of them would react to a small staff of people sending them hard drives full of images to edit? This would sadly be an overwhelming situation in most cases, if possible to do at all.

The path our industry has taken through changes in technology has been an interesting one to say the least. There have been  many positives, but also many negatives - the loss of the negative certainly being one.

I don't wish for a moment to go back in time. I love what I do, and I love the immediacy of it now. But I also love that I have had many years to experience the process of developing negatives, and producing prints in the darkroom. There is a certain Zen quality to time spent working on a print that all photographers would enjoy I'm sure.

If you haven't yet had the darkroom printing experience I would encourage you to seek out the opportunity. Shooting on film, editing from a strip or a selection of square negatives, and painstakingly producing a print in a darkroom will give you an enriched appreciation for the art of what we do, and the value of the single, solitary, perfect moment that we all seek.

Photographing Death and Hope in Somalia

Note: This blog entry was originally published here on globeandmail.com 

Stepping off the aircraft in Mogadishu, Somalia, I recognized the wall of oppressive heat that I’d first felt there in 2006. This time I was there to work with The Globe and Mail’s Africa correspondent Geoffrey York, and the situation would be dramatically different from each of our own previous experiences there.

Every assignment I’ve ever accepted that involves some level of risk has always been accompanied by a series of emotions. Packing and waiting to get on with the job is an anxious time. I find foreign assignments to be more difficult as my children grow older. Now teenagers, their understanding of the world and the places I am sometimes asked to work in adds to their own anxiety. As hard as it used to be to leave behind two small children, I found it more difficult knowing how worried they were while I was away this time. Unfolding events in Mogadishu didn’t make this any easier to deal with.

As I passed through security at Pearson airport, I received sad news from Geoff that a Malaysian cameraman had just been killed in Mogadishu. At the time details were sketchy, but it was still a very blunt reminder of the place I was about to visit and the need for constant vigilance. I hoped my teenagers wouldn’t see that report in the news.

Words of Cartier-Bresson

I just had to post this before heading out on the road today. I found it through Duckrabbit on Twitter. As he says, "Listen and Learn." This video - the voice and images of one of the great masters of photography - "Henri Cartier-Bresson - Life is Once Forever" by bt645 on Vimeo is well worth your time.

While Mr. Bresson denies he is a photojournalist, there is no doubt he set the  bar as far as composition and timing are concerned. He insists that facts are boring, and facts without interpretation are meaningless.

As photojournalists we are presented with the "facts" on a daily basis, and I submit that while we all attempt to portray events accurately, our personal interpretations of the events, and how we elect to capture them in images, is indeed photojournalism. Try as we might, we cannot escape our own vision.