Wordblog

Journalism in a changing world

Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

Looking behind the story

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Aug 2nd, 2007

The story of News International being awarded more than £30,00 in damages and more than £40,000 in costs against the owners of a celebrity news site which had lifted pictures, attracted my attention this morning.
A report in Press Gazette says the costs were awarded against "Robert and Judy Douglass, who own and operate [...]



Altered reality in pictures

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Jul 21st, 2007

Ian Jack has a fascinating piece on the altered reality of documentary film makers in the Guardian today. The BBC trailer which used a picture of the Queen in an apparent strop after celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz had asked her to remove her tiara, is his peg. In reality the picture was of the Queen [...]



Are Getty Images and Corbis getting too big?

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • May 3rd, 2007

On the day Getty Images announced the $200m purchase of Wireimages, to strengthen its position in multimedia material (Press Gazette), Lewis Blackwell, group creative director of the giant photo library, was defending their policy of acquisitions.
Last month Eamonn McCabe, former picture editor of the Guardian, wrote about the move of the Sygma picture library [...]



When should children should not be seen?

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Feb 24th, 2007

This pixelating of faces in pictures of children is going too far. Today the Guardian has a pleasant picture, across four columns, of David Cameron, wife Samantha and daughter Nancy leaving a Oxfordshire church. Nancy’s face is obscured.
This is the same Nancy who was shown with her face unobscured on her father’s shoulder in a [...]



Paps pull back from Kate Middleton

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Jan 12th, 2007

The unseemly scrum of paarazzi surrounding Kate Middleton, the girlfriend of Prince William, wherever she goes seems to be dwindling. Fears of legal action and the danger of legislation seem to have concentrated minds.
The Sun reported yesterday that Jack Straw, leader of the Commons, was “sympathetic to a call from a senior Tory MP [...]



The pros and cons of publishing picture from execution video

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Jan 8th, 2007

Condemnation of the Guardian’s decision to print a still from the unnocficial video of Saddam Hussein’s execution was very close to unanimous among the 200 readers who contacted the paper, Ian Mayes, the readers’ editor, says in today’s paper.
Among journalists on the paper and the website there was a very small majority against its use. [...]



‘Saddam video is not citizen journalism’

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Jan 7th, 2007

The mobile phone video of the execution of Saddam Hussein is being treated as a defining moment in the development of citizen journalism. In the Independent on Sunday today, Tim Luckhurst writes that “for new-media enthusiasts, the fact that amateur film from a mobile telephone set the global news agenda shows citizen journalism has come [...]



Making money from citizen paparazzi snaps

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Jan 5th, 2007

Yahoo’s choice of Mr Paparazzi as the best UK entertainment website in its 2006 Finds awards suggests there is a way to make money out of “citizen journalism” or whatever you choose to call it.
The site is a spin-off from the Big Pictures business of Darryn Lyons who got a lot of free publicity from [...]



‘Black’ Kate Moss brings backlash

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Sep 23rd, 2006

Editing by gimmick has its dangers as Simon Kelner found out this week when he handed the paper over to “guest designer” Giorgio Armani. The result of the worthy second Red edition to highlight HIV/Aids in Africa has been controversy over the picture of a blacked-up Kate Moss.
Kelner, the paper’s editor-in-chief must be reflecting on [...]



Retrospective of altered images

By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Sep 8th, 2006

The slimming down of Katie Couric is the latest picture manipulation to become news and is the first example in a gallery of Pictures that lie at Cnet.
Some of them are clearly jokes and there is a good representation of pre-Photoshop examples including the erasure of Leon Trotsky. That one and quite a few of [...]