livebooks blog

"A little pop of light from a Nikon SB-900 speedlight zoomed to 200mm gave me what I was looking for," Chris explains about capturing this beautiful shot of sea ice. Photo by Chris Linder, WHOI

In addition to documenting the tools and techniques scientists are using to understand the Bering Sea ecosystem, my other mission here on the icebreaker Healy is to showcase the beauty of this otherworldly environment. A key part of that environment is sea ice. Sea ice is formed from the freezing of seawater, as opposed to icebergs and ice shelves, which are formed on land as compacted snow and ice and slide into the ocean. Sea ice ranges in thickness from paper-thin to up to ten feet. Most of the ice we have encountered has been between 1-2 feet thick. Seals and walrus use sea ice to nurse their newborn pups. Ice cores reveal brownish-green ice algae growing on the underside of the ice, which nourishes tiny animals, which in turn feed the rest of the web of life. Without sea ice, the Bering Sea would be a very different place.

You might imagine that ice pretty much looks the same-it’s all frozen water, right? Turns out that when water with salt in it freezes, it actually goes through a number of different phases, each one of them quite beautiful. While it’s hard to say which type of ice is my favorite (I’m an ice junkie; I love them all), I am particularly drawn to the broken up bits that mark the ice edge, where waves from the open ocean cause the floes to bump into each other and crack up into tiny jagged pieces, giving the ocean surface the look of a big jigsaw puzzle. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this is a stormy place. Cloudy days and gray skies have been the norm. So I am often looking for scene-setting icescape shots at the edges of the day just after sunset and before sunrise when the sky glows blue.

One of the tools in a photographer’s bag of tricks is the ability to stop action or blur it based on their choice of shutter speed. One evening as I watched the broken up chunks of ice slide past the side of the ship, I got the idea to shoot ice in an impressionistic way that conveyed that motion. I set up my tripod and connected a cable release. My first attempts, using just a several second shutter speed, rendered the ice as long wavy lines streaking across the frame. It was interesting, but almost too surreal. I needed to see some definition in the ice while retaining that sense of motion. A little pop of light from a Nikon SB-900 speedlight zoomed to 200mm gave me what I was looking for. I set it to a slow, rear curtain sync mode and blasted away at the moving ice again and again, hoping that just the right shapes would come into view at the right time. After a few dozen tries this composition floated into my frame.

Gertz HS student Gigi Rodas taking a picture of her mentor, Immigration Attorney Victoria Duong

Carmen Suen: Tell me about how the “I Dream To…” program works.

Amy Tierney: It is a semester long program where me and my co-instructor, photographer Emily Hart Roth, go to the participating schools every week for a one-and-a-half-hour class to teach the girls the skills that they need to be a photojournalist, including how to use a camera, how to use Lightroom to produce edits, how to conduct an interview, and so on. Each of them has to choose a woman who they want to do an interview with, usually someone in the career field of the student’s dream, or someone who inspires them.

Towards the end of the semester, they interview their subject, take pictures during the interview, and write up an article as their final projects. We then post these articles on the “I Dream To…” blog, so others can see their work. We also take the girls to a photography studio so they can see what a true working studio and a photographer’s daily work life is like.

But the highlight of the program is the exhibition. Not only do the girls get the chance to show family and friends their own work, but they can also be introduced to different people in the community. It’s a great way for them to practice their social skills.

LA Leadership student Narvy Vasquez, as photographed by her fellow student Jacky Rodriguez

CS: What is your role in this program?

AT: I am actually a founder and mentor of the “I Dream To…” program, which started in 2007. At the time, I was already involved with StepUp Women’s Network’s L.A. Chapter. One of the mission of StepUp is to inspire and empower high school girls in underserved communities to achieve their dreams. I believe art can help us understand the world around us. And so I decided to bring art to these high school girls. Because of my own background, photography seemed to be the obvious choice.

Through photography, photojournalism in particular, you get the opportunity to interact with a multitude of people. I think people skills is one of the most essential skills for one to succeed in life.

CS: Do you feel like the program is achieving its goals?

AT: I would say it’s very well received. Jamie Kogan, Step Up Women’s Network’s program manager really keeps us going.  This year is the third year, and the program has expanded from L.A. to Chicago and New York. We got so many hugs and thank-yous at the end of each semester. Some of the girls who have participated in the program have taken a serious interest in photojournalism and have decided to pursue it as a career. That’s a very big encouragement for us.

We also have to thank our sponsors for helping us financially. Our organization is non-profit and depends largely on financial assistance from our donors. We hope that they will continue to help make this program happen.

• RESOLVE contributor Michael Shaw is hosting his next BAGnewsSalon over at BAGnewsNotes this Sunday, May 3. Michael hosts these online, real-time image analysis sessions frequently and the discussion is always lively. The topic this time is Obama: The First 100 Days; guest participants include Alan Chin (another RESOLVE contributor), Nina Berman, David Burnett, Brian Ulrich, Mario Tama, and PDN news editor Daryl Lang, plus a bunch of historians and professors.

• In keeping with the Obama theme, the “I Do Solemnly Swear: Photographs of the 2009 Presidential Inauguration” exhibition is currently on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. David Hume Kennerly, the Ford White House photographer, and Robert McNeely, President Clinton’s official photographer, were commissioned to lead a team of more than 24 photographers in capturing the inauguration. It opened April 29, the 100th day of the Obama administration, and will run through July 12.

• The New York Times has a fantastic slideshow of pictures buried in the recently found “Mexican Suitcase,” three filmsy cardboard boxes of negatives of photographs taken during the Spanish Civil War by photographers Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour. Capa left the boxes of negatives in his Paris darkroom before he fled to America in 1939. It was believed that the negatives traveled from Paris to Marseille and eventually to Mexico City, where they resided for more than half a century before they were turned over to the International Center of Photography in NYC last year.

• Since the high-def video camera RedONE was launched last year, photographers everywhere have been curious to see how it would eventually make the still cameras obsolete. Then Greg Williams, uses one to shoot his June Esquire cover of Megan Fox and needless to say, people like APhotoEditor have things to say about it. You can also watch a sneak peek of Greg’s behind-the-scenes video.

The online tussle surrounding The Copyright Registry a few weeks ago grew out of a bit of hyperbole on both sides: C-Registry overused “orphan works” to stress the advantage of their service, and the blogosphere overreacted — as it sometimes does — by jumping to some unfair conclusions. The blogs that misconstrued the facts are as responsible as the company that proffered the facts. Most disappointing in this chaos was the email alert sent out by the APA. The fact that the ASMP endorsed C-Registry should have been a signal to the APA that they needed to do some additional fact checking before sending out their alert. This would have gone a long way to preventing the blog mob that rose to crucify C-Registry.

The orphan works bill that sits in Congress like an unstable nuclear device has the potential to radically shift the way photographers will have to manage their work that exists online. Understandably, the photo industry is jumpy about anyone or anything that mentions it, which has resulted in an overly suspicious atmosphere. When companies like C-Registry come along with an entrepreneurial solution to offer photographers a method of registering images, they need to be aware of this volatile atmosphere and word their references to orphan works carefully.

There were three other details that also served as flashpoints in this debate, and which deserve some clarification:

EULA (end user license agreement): C-Registry had an EULA that asked subscribers to their service to grant some of the rights of the work to C-Registry. This is very similar to the facebook fiasco that I wrote about a few months ago. Simply put, to display your work online, web services need your permission.

DOT US: Any American website that utilizes a domain suffix other than “.com,” “.net” or “.org” immediately falls under scrutiny because many nefarious internet companies have adopted these obscure suffixes for their endeavors. C-Registry was accused of trying to look like the government — “.gov” — by utilizing a “.us” domain suffix. My gut reaction was they were going to distinguish their services by country. It turns out I was correct.

Seeding a stock agency: Probably the most inflammatory detail that surfaced against C-Registry was the fact that the people who started C-Registry also own a stock photo service called StockPhotoFinder. Because of the first point above, assumptions were made that C-Registry was going to be a content supply service for StockPhotoFinder. That’s a broad and bold accusation, especially without verifiable evidence. C-registry would have been wise to anticipate that assumption and to indicate to the contrary on their website. But then again, obvious notions like that are often lost in the avalanche of details an entrepreneur has to contend with in getting a business started.

If you’d like a blow-by-blow point and counterpoint of this situation, you can read the blog posts and the emails from the APA and ASMP (PDN has a comprehensive and pretty fair rundown of the situation here). From my estimation, both sides had very valid arguments — as usual, it just depends on your perspective. If you’re a suspicious photographer, you could easily spin the rhetoric on the C-Registry site in a negative way. If you are not, then C-Registry could seem like an intriguing idea. I asked for an opinion from an independent individual who is a heavyweight in the business of online rights management and very close to the orphan works issue. His response? Many people assumed C-Registry was a scam when, in fact, it looked pretty legit from the outside. He did see some room for improvements, but he felt that the idea was sound.

So what’s the larger lesson here? The climate in our industry is tense at this point in our history. As such, we tend to assume the worst before collecting all the facts. Photographers are wise to keep a weather eye on the horizon. But let us not forget who we are. All of us know that due diligence and fact checking are cornerstones of our industry. If we as photographers weren’t under such a barrage of assaults from different fronts, the C-Registry issue probably wouldn’t have exploded as it did. Let’s give C-Registry the fair shake that any new business deserves before we start lighting the torches.