Flathead Valley Looking Glass: Kalispell, Montana News

The Sacramento Bee photo blog The Frame and the Boston Globe's The Big Picture have a comprehensive collection of images from the solar eclipse on Wednesday, July 22. The eclipse is the longest total solar eclipse we'll see this century.

The Bee has joined a number of newspapers featuring "big picture blogs," including the Denver Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe. I can't think of better subjects than the vastness of space, the sun slowly being carved by the moon as it casts the Earth into shadow and the thousands of people who watch the event as an excuse to run large images on the Web.

See The Frame cover the eclipse here.
See The Big Picture cover the eclipse here.

I jumped on the Richard Koci Hernandez fan-wagon a few years back out of appreciation for his wonderfully produced multimedia pieces and the innovative design of MerciuryNewsPhoto.com. Read more and see a video produced by Hernandez after the jump.

Photojournalist and multimedia producer Anne Medley documented stories of Montana residents quietly living with HIV and AIDS across the state as a part of her master's project in journalism at the University of Montana. See her project and read a full description after the jump.

An amateur cell phone video captured the death of Neda Agha-Soltan during street protests in Tehran on June 20 and has gone on to be viewed by millions on the Internet. Her image has elevated her to the revered status of martyr and is known as the “Angel of Iran.”

The image has joined the ranks of John Filo’s 1970 photograph of shootings at Kent State University and Eddie Adams’ 1968 image “Vietnam Execution” as the new iconic image.

It was inevitable that the mix of cell phone cameras and social networking would propel an image to iconic status. CNN reporter Jessica Ravitz writes about the history, the effects and the place in mass media of these iconic images in her piece, Neda: Latest iconic image to inspire, on CNN.com.

I’m not the first to bring up this classic Paul Simon song, but the lyrics seem appropriate:

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the worlds a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

Well … after 74 years of production, Kodachrome is going away as Kodak ceases production of its most iconic slide film.

I found this via A Photo Editor (a fantastic industry blog if you have not been there) and it's quite interesting.

Photographer Alexx Henry walks through his set-up and philosophy of using the innovative Red One camera to shoot a living movie poster (or "One Sheet"). This is a textbook example of how to take traditional still photography techniques and revise them for modern means of information dissemination. See the video after the jump.

I have been a big proponent over the years of not using (or adding) music to multimedia productions. I felt that by adding a soundtrack to "life" the integrity of the piece – the credibility of the journalist – was compromised and that the music added for effect or a quick fix was the same as a reporter interjecting themselves as a source in a story. This of course isn't the case when music is a part of the ambient sound or the story itself.