Images
Ian Tomlinson, interactive maps and digital journalism
How interactive maps are being used in today’s journalism
Last week, Paul Lewis, a Guardian reporter, linked to a piece of collaborative journalism that he had been working on and had just been published. ‘There can be no better example of how digital technology can hold the state to account than this,’ he wrote on Twitter.
The link in question directed readers towards an interactive map, depicting the movements of the newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, who was unlawfully killed during the G-20 Summit protests in the City of London in 2009.
The interactive map is a clever, clear, accessible piece of journalism. The protestors and police are plotted, mostly huddled about Bank tube station; Ian Tomlinson’s path is shown, zigzagging along St Swithans Lane and on his ill-fated route to Cornhill. PC Harwood’s numerous scuffles with protestors are also documented, starting in Cornhill and extending out to Threadneedle Street and into a side road, where he met with Ian Tomlinson at 7.20 p.m.
Twenty different interactive boxes, beginning before and concluding after the incident between Tomlinson and Harwood, annotate the two men’s paths – all numbered in chronological order. The boxes contain captions, snippets of mobile video clips, CCTV outtakes and snatched photographs taken by protestors.
This is one of the most effective map mashups that I have seen. It portrays a clear yet raw account of what happened on 1 April 2009, using material from a range of non-traditional sources and stitching them all together with code and graphic design. The videos convey the brittle, hostile atmosphere of the day with an immediacy that is difficult to replicate with words. They also carry the additional benefit of being more faithful and incorruptible than human memory. When Paul Lewis claims that there is no better example of how digital technology can hold the state to account, I know what he means.
Interactive maps are a useful tool for journalists, for digital storytellers or for simply setting data out in a digestible way. It’s now more than six years since Google Maps launched and in that time they have been used for all manner of purposes with a steady stream of the latest creations featured on a site called Google Maps Mania.
Still, I wonder if journalists could make more use of these maps. Last week I saw Joseph Stashko give a great example of how a Google Map could be used to visualise the results of local elections in Preston. And there are other tools too, such as UMapper, which allows users to create maps with more flexibility – from basic embeddable maps, to maps of tweets, to specially-tailored weather forecasts and so on.
I’ll finish this post off with a nod to the British Library. Though not a journalistic outlet, they seem to have taken to digital with surprising comfort over the last few years. At the last count they had something like 16 blogs from experts that covered a range of topics. They have released a beautiful iPhone App, which includes material from their ‘treasures collection’, and, during the last of their exhibitions, they produced an interactive map of their own.
The Evolving English Voice Map is a patchwork of different Audioboo recordings, all geo-plotted, that demonstrate different accents from around the world. Is a clever mix of new technology and ancient habits (the pleasure of looking over a map), and it works well. All those who participated were asked to read an extract of a Mr. Tickle story – recording it on their iPhone or computer. The result was a mass of submissions from all around the world, including one listed as Abbots Bromley England 1983 Male – I’ll let you guess who that is.
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Image credit: Chris JL on Flickr – Note, the photograph of the policemen above is not from footage of the G-20 riots in 2009.
The Decisive Moment – Flickr, the Royal Wedding and the Death of Osama Bin Laden
Night and Day
The royal wedding and the execution of Osama Bin Laden are a good reminder of how far the news agenda can lurch in the space of a couple of days. On Friday and during the weekend, the run was all for images of expensive dresses, dashing Rolls Royces, cheering crowds and flapping plastic flags. By Monday morning these pictures had been replaced by other more grisly ones, of Bin Laden’s very odd, stark hideaway in rural Abbottabad – his old rooms upturned in the chaos of the gunfight, his carpet smeared in blood, a smashed clock and half-full medicinal bottles on an empty shelf.
Among all the interesting coverage of both these stories are a number of images on Flickr. For some years governments, organisations, political parties and so on have been using Flickr as a medium to publish official photographs and images. A British Monarchy Photostream documents the doings of the royal family and, over the weekend, they uploaded a wide-range of wedding shots that include sets devoted to the balcony scenes, the RAF flyover and a specially-commissioned McVities Cake, which had been requested by Prince William.
More interesting than this, for several reasons, is the Official Whitehouse Photostream. The photos published here are the work of Pete Souza, a photographer who travelled across the Hindu Kush in 2001 to cover the fall of the Taliban and, in 2009, was appointed Official White House Photographer.
Pete Souza’s photographs are remarkably revealing and candid. They give a glimpse into the day-to-day life of the President and his aides, and also the decision-making processes behind important acts of government. The photo at the top of this piece is taken by Souza. It shows Obama, Vice President Biden and other senior members the administration receiving a briefing on Sunday night, a time that was described afterwards by counterterrorism adviser John Brennan as ‘one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time in the lives of the people who were assembled here.’
Souza’s photograph has appeared in the world’s press over the last few days. On a macro level, it is a perfect example of what the French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson referred to as the decisive moment. Obama is hunched forward on his chair, cold eyes on the screen. Hilary Clinton covers her mouth with a hand, concealing an expression which might either suggest shock or concentration. It feels like a decisive moment because the fate of the mission is not yet determined and, on a grander level, Obama’s hopes of re-election next year might even rest on its success.
Social media is helping to expose these moments, even at the top of society, and more transparency can only be a good thing. It connects people to the political process; shows the care and concern of those in power and encourages interaction. I’m writing this at a quarter to twelve in the morning of 4 May and, over the past few days, 1,621,516 people have viewed the image on Flickr – a staggering number.
Just about all of the White House’s images are available to be re-published by others, being licensed under a special category United States Governmental Work. In the UK all of the royal family’s photos and most of those from the Prime Minister’s Official Photostream are produced by the PA, and are therefore protected by copyright.
While I’m going with Flickr, I thought that I’d list some of the other interesting photostreams that are currently being updated. There are four here which are particularly useful for journalists, as they are licensed to be reused:
Metropolitan Police – Great images of events, vehicles and so on.
Cabinet Office – Good quality photos. They include useful profile shots of various politicians like Nick Clegg and Francis Maude
UK Home Office – Day to day work of the department.
HM Treasury – Really useful. Not just day to day work of the department, but also official graphs and stats.
And some others: (mostly unlicensed)
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Image credit – Official WhiteHouse on Flickr
Royal Wedding Photo Set
I suppose it was a sense of occasion which pulled me out of bed at half past six this morning, and drew me off to Westminster to take a few photographs of the Royal Wedding crowds.
I’ve put a set up on Flickr. This post doesn’t stem from any deep interest in those getting married, rather it is just a little document to record that ‘very strange but happy and peaceful atmosphere’ that exisited in London today.
And in other news, this website has just benefitted from a redesign. I hope you like it.
iPhone Photography: 360 panoramas and stereographing
A different perspective
I’ve used a few iPhone photo apps over the last year, but I have never seen 360 Panorama before. A web-developer friend of mine, Xavi Esteve, put together this post of a stereographic photograph that he had taken using the app – and I thought I’d have a go.
It’s not too easy to take the perfect panorama – but as most mobile photos feel more like a work in progress than a finished article, I don’t suppose that it matters too much. Mine is a 360 tour around a room at my family home in Staffordshire that is flattened down to make the image about – which is called a stereographic.
If you do manage an acceptable stereographic, then it can give a beautifully stilted snapshot of your surroundings. Xavi’s works nicely among the fish and chip huts and amusement stalls at Brighton but I imagine that it could work quite nicely in various other surroundings: in stadiums, at conferences or music festivals and so on.
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Here’s a link to the complete photo on Flickr
Another busy autumn
Autumn 2010 is bearing a distinct resemblance to autumn 2009. It’s busy. But the excellent new PC Site website that we are just finishing off at work will be my last. After three years I’m going to try my hand at something a little different.
If you want to keep up with my writing work, then I’m blogging a little more regularly on my posterous blog.
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Photo of the Boris Bikes – full photograph on my Flickr
Twitter art, Irkafirka and tweet #3125
Art, an octopus and social media
Strange things happen in social media. Last night was stranger than normal.
Yesterday morning I was using Twitter to complain about doing Excel spreadsheets at work. I felt, I said, like #afishoutofwater – or, I then wrote, exercising a Spanish idiom, ‘Como un pulpo en un garaje.’ – which translates into English as ‘Like an octopus in the garage.’
Less than 12 hours later a website called Irkafirka published this:
Oddly, I first saw the illustration moments after getting home from El Camino Spanish bar in King’s Cross. And waking up this morning I imagined that I’d probably had a little too much sangria – but, after checking, it’s quite real.
It all stems from an idea that Irkafirka’s founders have had to illustrate a random selection of tweets then publish them as quickly as possible. On their website, they write:
The Rules:
1. Irkafirka is as fresh as possible. We aim to post illustrations within 24 hours of the tweet that inspired them.
2. We are not aquainted with our chosen tweeters. Tweets are chosen by a random process of dipping in and out of the massive data deluge that Twitter has become.
3. Suggestions are warmly welcomed but almost certainly ignored. Which isn’t to say that we don’t have a price. You want a commission, you’ve got to pony up. Call it becoming a patron of the arts.
4. We aim to post illustrations daily, but we have jobs, family and cinema tickets, all of which have to take priority from time to time.
5. If we stop enjoying it, we’ll stop.
6. We can break any of the rules except 5.
There are more illustrations on their website. I think it’s a wonderful idea that will work brilliantly over time – just so long as they can keep it going.
I’m after a copy of my tweet #3125 to hang on the wall, and when I asked if I could buy the artwork they responded with:
Nothing more for me to say to irkafirka then, but THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND I BLOODY LOVE IT.
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Image from Flickr
The Internet: five years ago
2005: social media?
About five years after its launch, last Sunday evening, You Tube announced that they are now receiving two billion hits per day. On their official blog they wrote:
Five years ago, after months of late nights, testing and preparation, YouTube’s founders launched the first beta version of YouTube.com in May, with a simple mission: give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself. [Link to full post]
Not only is the two billion milestone noteworthy, but the fact that the site is five years old is also well worth noting.
There’s a good argument that 2005 was the pivotal year in the shaping of the Internet as we know it. You Tube was founded, Mark Zuckerberg opened Facebook up to schools across America, and Yahoo acquired two year-old Del.icio.us and one year-old Flickr.
For the sake of nostalgia, here is what some of these websites looked like back then, five years ago.
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You Tube
Billed rather simply as a digital photo repository back in 2005 – their logo has hardly changed a bit in the last five years. The homepage design obviously owes quite a bit to Google’s, who, in any case, bought the site in November 2006 for $1.65 billion.
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Google
In 2005 Google was already looking fairly grown up and confident. Very few changes were made to this minimalist homepage design until just a few weeks ago.
You’ll spot here that back then Google were busy promoting Froogle, their price comparison service which was later rebranded as Google Product Search.
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Blogger
In May 2005, blogger was already six years old. Therefore it predates Web 2.0 and is one of a few notable survivors of the Dot Com Crash in 2000. It had been acquired by Google in 2003 and by the time of this screenshot it was by far the most popular blogging software available.
In May 2005 they launched Blogger Mobile, which allowed people to blog by text message –making them, by my reckoning, just about two years too early.
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WordPress
WordPress would supplant Blogger in popularity over the next few years. It’s interesting to note, however, their reasons for encouraging people to use their software. ‘You can stop sending mass emails to everyone’, ‘You can archive your thoughts’ and ‘Why the heck not?’
Indeed.
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Facebook
Facebook has retained this familiar feel from the start, but its evolution has been a little more complex than most.
Back in 2005 there were two Facebooks, one for people in college and one for people in high school. All the dots would be joined up over the next year as it began the march that would see it become the most popular site in America.
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The BBC
Back in 2005 I had never written a blog, had never used Facebook and only seen a handful of You Tube videos, but I was already mildly addicted to the Internet. And from a sunny Madrid and a fitful Internet connection, the BBC’s official site was where I spent most of my time.
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The Guardian
And 2005 was a time before guardian.co.uk existed. Back then it was known as the Guardian Unlimited – a website that promised such things as ‘All the headlines from today’s first edition.’
From that I suppose you can summise that the website was still being considered as some kind of digital reflection of the newspaper – and not really a strong publication in its own right.
(Click on the picture above to expand to full size)
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Flickr
Flickr now hosts more than four billion images and is the most popular image sharing site on the web. Back in 2005 PC World were offering them some kind words:
‘Cutting edge real-time photo sharing’, they said. They were right.
(Click on the picture above to expand to full size)
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And in 2006 … Twitter
Twitter didn’t exist in 2005 and it wouldn’t appear properly until more than a year or so later. Therefore it’s just tagged on to the end of this post. It’s a good demonstation of just what can be done in four years with a scruffily designed website, a clever idea and a willingness to stick with your logo through thick and thin.
(Click on the picture above to expand to full size)
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Top image credit: TonVC on Flickr
Screen shots pulled out of the Way Back Machine
The General Election 2010. Ha ha ha.
Image credit: My David Cameron
How to laugh at a politician
On election morning I thought it’d be a good idea to look back at the last few months’ online political satire. I’m not sure that it has been quite the digital election that I was anticipating, with TV being, if anything, the defining medium, but the Internet has certainly added something.
And here is a quick round up of the best digital satire.
1. My David Cameron
A website set up in January this year by by Clifford Singer, creative director at Sparkloop graphic design agency, shortly after David Cameron’s heavily airbrushed face appeared on 759 billboards about the country.
The site received 90,000 unique visitors in two weeks, with anyone able to share their version of the Cameron poster.
2. #itsnicksfault
After a furious press turned on Nick Clegg for daring to become popular without their support, their negative headlines were ridiculed on Twitter as Rory Cellan Jones explains in this blog post. Some of his highlights being:
“Just had a giant chocolate eclair with cream. All #nickcleggsfault”
“We’ve run out of houmous #NickCleggsfault”
“Pompey not being allowed to play in Europe. #nickcleggsfault”
“Got rid of the wasp and a new wasp has arrived. #nickcleggsfault”
“I got my debit card stolen #nickcleggsfault”
3. Charlie Brooker in the Guardian
Charlie Brooker has been on enormously good form in the last few weeks. I think my favourite paragraph of his was this, just after the final leaders’ debate:
According to some polls, Cameron won, or at the very least tied with Clegg. Which is odd, because to my biased eyes, he looked hilariously worried whenever the others were talking. He often wore a face like the Fat Controller trying to wee through a Hula Hoop without splashing the sides, in fact. Perhaps that’s just the expression he pulls when he’s concentrating, in which case it’s fair to say he’d be the first prime minister in history who could look inadvertently funny while pushing the nuclear button.
[Charlie Brooker - BBC debate was a cross between Songs of Praise and Over the Rainbow]
4. The Daily Mash
Odd and shocking as ever, the writers at the Daily Mash have obviously enjoyed the fact that there is an election on:
Clegg to clean up politics using his personal bank account – [link]
BNP launches aryan spread – [link]
Brown to be turned into glue – [link]
5. The election debates and social media
As Shane Richmond explains here, watching the leaders’ debates with Twitter added an extra dimension to the whole thing. Facebook was pretty good too.
6. Matt on the General Election
A cross over from the mainstream media here, but it’s well worth checking out Matt’s bank of General Election cartoons at the Telegraph. There’s a particularly good one of David Cameron pestering a sleeping couple.
7. Nope
Currently doing the rounds on Twitter. Published in response to the Sun’s front page.
Image taken from Mattlays’ Twitpic.
UPDATE 8am: It’s only an hour since I posted this, but already Liberal Conspiracy are publishing lots of different variations of the Cameron frontpage. It’s an echo of the airbrush moment, and it’s interesting to wonder what effect it will have – if any – on polling day.
8. The Peter Mandleson Experience
And, lastly of all, this video of Peter Mandleson and Gordon Brown having a jam is quite brilliant.
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Right. Enough silliness – I’ve got to decide who to vote for.
Having fun with the iPhone camera
Lost in Morocco
I last saw my digital camera in the Moroccan coastal town of Agadir on Boxing Day last year. I’ve no idea what became of it, but in my imagination it was spirited out of my pocket by a shifty chap with an ambitious moustache and squinty eyes. Anyway, my point is that since then I’ve not had a camera at all – just the iPhone.
Now the iPhone’s camera has a pretty dismal reputation. There’s no flash so you can’t do anything in the dark, it’s a little slow so you can miss spontaneous moments, there’s no zoom and you’ve got no control over the majority of its settings.
Still, the camera’s simplicity gives it a sort of honest charm and over the past five months I’ve not bothered to replace the old camera and, instead, I’ve preferred to rely on the iPhone.
Doing this is a flexible, dynamic way to collect images. As you have your telephone with you almost all of the time you have far greater potential a capture a wide range of everyday shots. With apps like Photoshop for the iPhone, CameraBag and Camera Plus Pro you can edit on the fly, and with the ability to email and subsequently publish them instantly – giving you the sort of inertia with it all that keeps you going.
Here are a few shots from the last few months.
1. BT Tower – April 2010
2. Mali – January 2010
3. Warren Street – April 2010
4. Pentonville Road – March 2010
5. Nigeria – January 2010
6. The British Library – April 2010
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My disclaimer is that I am not a professional photographer and I know less about photographic theory than I do about advanced weaving. I’m just enjoying having a play.
I’m glad to see that there is a Flickr group for ‘Photos taken with an iPhone‘, and if you’re on Flickr, then I’m here.
Merry Christmas Flickr (The War is Over)
On Tuesday Yoko Ono published a Flickr album with various translations of John Lennon’s famous slogan: ‘War Is Over’.
I immediately liked it. I’ve always been interested in the effect of slogans on popular culture and human psychology (think of the power of Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’) and here was one of the most famous of the twentieth century, republished digitally to coincide with the anniversary of John’s assassination and Christmas.
The only problem was that Yoko – or more likely one of her administrators – had issued each of the images without a creative commons license. Her choice, but the strict license seemed contrary to the spirit of the message and in direct contradiction to her invitation to:
“Print & display in your window, school, workplace, car & elsewhere over the holiday season, and send as postcards to your friends.”
All Rights Reserved – the stiffest of the six creative commons licenses, would have prevented bloggers or website owners from reproducing the image digitally. This, in turn, would have reduced the chances of the images going viral, which I imagine was her intention. The creative commons was, I supposed, just another little quirk of the Internet which needed explaining.
And this is the thing that is wonderful about the Internet:
One email to her Flickr account and an hour later they were all altered.
Easy as that.
So here you go. All 47 images are available with the Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license. Quite a mouthful, I know. But it basically means that you can put them up on your blog or site and as long as you attribute them with a link, then that’s quite alright.
It’s sharing and crediting – two key characteristics of Web 2.0.
This will be the last blog post for My Digital Notebook in 2009. I’m off on Sunday on the Africa Rally. The first year for this blog has been a quiet one; I’m planning for much more next year. Merry Christmas everyone – (the War Is Over).
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image credit: Yoko Ono Official
Headlines and SEO
Outside Euston Square station this morning stood a model with blue eyes and a big smile. She was selling copies of today’s Sun newspaper, upon the front of which was the headline:
“Jordan jumper: I didn’t hump her”
The editor, probably happy with his splash, had decided to be proactive. They had sent people out to sell their Jordan and Peter Andre story directly. It was later pointed out to me that inside the paper was another headline:
“Sex with Jordan? That’s out of the equestrian.”
Tabloids have long been famous for their inventive headlines and today it was nice to see that the paper was being bold and creative with their front page. Two features of newspaper journalism that are becoming increasingly scarce.
It reminds me of a long list of such headlines, a few of which I’ll add here:
- “Super Cally Go Ballistic Celtic are Atrocious” (A Scottish newspaper in response to Celtic’s defeat by Inverness Caledonian Thistle in 2000)
- “Nut Screws Washer and Bolts” (A report of a mental patient who raped a cleaning assistant at an asylum in California and later escaped)
- “Slumdog has the Pedigree to Winalot” (On a portentous opening weekend for Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire in the UK)
- “Elton takes David up the aisle” (Elton John marries long term partner David Furnish)
When I look at such headlines I always recall an excellent article that was written by Shane Richmond in the British Journalism Review. He looks at the example of The Sun’s famous ‘Gotcha’, headline during the Falklands conflict and reasons why such a headline would be highly unlikely today due to the importance of SEO and page views for journalists. He wrote:
“The “Gotcha” headline on a Sun front-page splash about the sinking of the General Belgrano is one of the most famous, or infamous depending on your taste, in the history of British journalism. Yet no web producer with any experience would consider a headline like that today. The reason is search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO has been around almost as long as search engines themselves, but journalists were quite late to cotton on. It didn’t really reach newsrooms until a couple of years ago.
The concept is simple. It’s about ensuring that your content is found by the millions of people every day who use search engines as their first filter for news and those who don’t search at all but trust an automated aggregator, such as Google News, to filter stories for them. These people are essentially asking a computer to tell them the news. If you want your story to be read, you’d better make sure the computer knows what you’re writing about.”
Keyword journalism
SEO is important to journalists today and everyone should have a basic understanding of it. If The Sun were concerned solely with drawing the maximum number of searcher into their websites they should used tools such as Hitwise or Google Trends to give keyword information about relevant searches. Most likely the SEO headline that would have resulted would have to be to the order of:
“Jockey speaks following Jordan and Andre’s spit”
Which is obviously very different to:
“Jordan jumper: I didn’t hump her”
I’m glad that The Sun have decided to swap Googleability for creativity. It’s two fingers up to the people that think SEO and page views count for everything – and, if nothing else, it’s earned them a blog post.
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Update:
As Martin Belam points out, it’s not quite the two fingers up to SEO that I was imagining earlier, as the title tag (the bit up in the left hand corner) for the article on The Sun’s website reads: “Jordan’s horseman friend denies fling” - which is far more palatable for the bots.
Different headlines for different mediums – another journalistic lesson.
Flickr and the Creative Commons
Photo by the White House Official Photostream
Digital Communism and the Creative Commons
Flickr has long been one of my favourite sites on the Internet. Easy to navigate, full of fantastic images, and with a system (the Creative Commons) that allows everyone to properly acknowledge the authors of work.
Any business, blogger or journalist can benefit from Flickr by properly (and ethically) using the Creative Commons. Just today Kate Day (@kate_day) pointed out that The Official White House Photostream had made available an album documenting President Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office.
The image at the top of this post is taken from that collection, and so is this below:
Photo by the White House Official Photostream
It’s almost impossible to estimate how much such a picture would have cost just a decade ago – or, indeed, if it would have been possible in the first place. Now you can use it for yourself for free. All you have to do is abide by the terms of the license which asks that the original author is given credit.
And testament to the pace, versatility and quality of Flickr, here are another five photos that have been added in just the last two weeks; each of them quite brilliant.
Five Creative Commons Photos from Flickr in April
1. Charlotte by Gattou/Lucie I try but miss time to catch up : o
2. Swing on BART by y3rdua
3. So Billy said, hey Stagger! I’m gonna make my big attack. I’m gonna have to leave my knife in your back by harold.lloyd (won’t somebody think of the bokeh?)
4. A spasso nel senese in primavera by carlotardani
5. The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad by this chaplady
Images, Right? From Flickr to Photojournalism
Point and Click
It’s all too easy to equate online content to online writing – but there’s much more to it than that. Today you’ll find that the best sites have a good mix between both static and dynamic content, video, podcasts and images.
Fantastic images can lend a site a real edge. Best of all for social media is using your own photos and thereby adding to your own narrative. But if you don’t have the time or the equipment, there is nothing wrong in tapping the Internet’s goldmine of free resources.
So, in the spirit of usefulness, and without further ado here is a post filled with links: (thanks to @noodlepie for pointing some of them out and @mattparsons for the logo site)
Seven image banks that every web-designer could use daily:
- Flickr – The best known and most useful. Contains more than 100,000,000 images with a Creative Commons license.
- FreeFoto – A website that bills itself as the largest collection of free photographs on the Internet
- Free Digital Photos – Good for wildlife and nature, also free
- Sport gfx – Probably the best bank of football photos from the Premiership, European and International matches
- Wellcome Images – All with a Creative Commons license – some excellent science photographs
- OpenStock Photography – A wide variety of photography all licensed under the Wikipedia Commons
- Best brands of the World – Image bank containing a good number of the world’s most famous brand logos. – You’ll need to get permission to use them.
(If you do use any licensed images, make sure you don’t stray outside of the boundaries of a specific license and it is important to check. Also, why not let the photographer know? They’ll probably appreciate it.)
Four useful online tools and applications:
- Tin Eye Reverse Image Search: Allows you to trace images across the net, and see where they came from originally, and if they have been copied or modified. Potentially very useful.
- Multicolour Search Lab: Excellent. It allows you to search for images by colour, and only returns results equipped with a Creative Commons license.
- Splashup: Probably the best substitute for Photoshop if you can’t afford the Adobe license.
- Photoshop Express: Touch up, tune, tweak and tint your photos. Or so it says.
Six examples of photojournalism:
The Internet and photojournalism seem to go together particularly well. Here are six examples of excellent photojournalism in newspapers and personal blogs that I’ve noticed recently:
- Gideon Mendal – A Deadly Cargo – documents the desperately sad fight against Aids on the Zambian, Zimbabwean border.
- Erik Gauger – Notes from the Road
- The Boston Globe – London From Above | Pirates of Somalia
- The Guardian – Charing Cross Bookshops - image-led, interactive feature
- Glenna Gordon – Scarlet Lion: Liberia
- Maladia – Maladia
One way in which designers can save the world:
And, I’ll finish this birthday party of links off by sending another one out, this time to Adam Blenford, another very talented photographer who appears to have been racking up some air miles.
And the future?