Flathead Valley Looking Glass: Kalispell, Montana News

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.

I missed the 2007 and 2008 installments of this student-driven multimedia collaborative, but have thoroughly enjoyed watching this year's 2009 "Soul of Athens" projects. Produced by Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication students, along with students from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, the third project explores the question: "What is the 'soul' of Athens and its surrounding area?"

It's no secret that the magazine industry has pushed photoshopping its cover models to the limits. But there now seems to be a call to end what some photographers see as abusing the tool.

“My feeling is that for years now it has taken a much too big part in how women are being visually defined today,” (Peter) Lindbergh said in an e-mail exchange. “Heartless retouching,” he wrote, “should not be the chosen tool to represent women in the beginning of this century.”

Read the full story by Eric Wilson at the New York Times here.

Zachary Seward, the assistant editor of the Nieman Journalism Lab – a project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University – put together a nice post for their site titled, "Inside five newsrooms that H.L. Mencken wouldn't recognize".

Seward and a few contributors take us on a video tour of the Talking Points Memo's new offices, the new Gawker office, The Daily Telegraph in London, The Valley Independent Sentinel and The Spokesman Review.

I have posted below the video of The Spokesman Review but it's worth going to the Nieman Journalism Lab site and take the other tours and read about each newsroom.

The New York Times launched its new blog, Lens last week and they're going big. Not just big photos, but also big intentions.

The New York Times introduces Lens, a photojournalism blog that intends to present some of the most interesting visual and multimedia reporting: in photographs, videos, audio slide shows and any other medium that fits — our format.

and...

In time, we hope it will also become the center of a community of readers who are not just interested in photojournalism — in the broadest sense of visually chronicling the world around us — but actively involved in some way or other, whether professionally or informally. You can expect us to ask you for your photos on some topical subject or theme.