The Archive
Sarah Mazzetti
What We Learned This Week: Making Facebook Face Up to Censorship
The nipple is powerful: In response to recent campaigning and an action staged with photographer Spencer Tunick, Facebook is taking another look at its nudity guidelines. This week we learned that the social network has agreed to convene a group -- including artists, art educators, museum curators, activists, and employees -- to consider new nudity guidelines for images posted to its social-media platforms. Meanwhile, we also learned how some photographers have been sighting social-media censorship of nudity in a variety of clad and unclad ways.
How To: Use a Pan Shot, Avoid Beginner Drone Mistakes ... and More
Sometimes it's good enough just to not be wrong. Today's roundup of filmmaking tutorials from around the web features a number of lessons about how to avoid common mistakes -- including five mistakes you mustn't make when switching from photography to video. You'll also find out about eight beginner drone filmmaking mistakes, and five big no-nos of shooting B-roll. But it's not all negative -- there's a tutorial on speeding up your music-video edit and another on how (and when) to pan. We've also got a primer on 10 camera shots every filmmaking should know.
The DART Interview: Chemin Hsiao
Peggy Roalf: Which came first, the pen or the brush? Chemin Hsiao: The brush. In Taiwan, where I grew up, it was customary for children to learn how to use the brush to write calligraphy in elementary school. It was considered an honor back then if you could write beautiful characters. I was among the kids who had to practice diligently and followed the trend. So later on, when I would hold a brush for painting purposes, it felt natural to me. PR: What are some of your creative in...
Spotlight: Documenting the Life of a Mexican Transsexual Saved by Opera
She was born as Saul, in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. In 2012, she ended her transition to Morganna and took up a new life as a singer. "She had no support at all from her very traditional family," says Mexico City-based photographer Annick Donkers. "She had lived in two worlds and hid her true self. Music saved her life and was her way to escape." Donkers spent two years documenting the life of Morganna for a project that was named a winner of the Latin American Fotografia 7 competition.
On View: Gallerist Robin Rice Shows Her Own Work, In Her Beacon, NY, Loft
Robin Rice has taken up spinning. Not the kind you do on bikes, but the kind deejays do. She's got turntable set up at her loft in Beacon, New York, in a converted 19th-century textile mill along Fishkill Creek. A photo of her at her turntable was included recently in Chronogram, a lifestyle magazine focusing on the Hudson Valley, which coincided with an exhibition of Rice's own photography at her eponymous New York gallery -- the first time her gallery had shown the work, which she's been doing since the disco days of the 1970s. This month the images will be on view in her loft as part of Beacon Open Studios, an annual event in which artists open their workspaces to the public.
The SONY a9: What the Pros Have to Say
"Eventually you knew it had to happen. Sooner or later cameras would get so good at what they did that basically your job as a photographer would be to look for interesting things to shoot and then try not to get in the camera's way as it did it's thing capturing them. I mean, imagine if a camera had pretty much flawless exposure capability, flawless focusing and could fire and focus so fast it never missed a frame?" So writes Jeff Wignall in todays Street Test of the Sony a9 full-frame mirrorless camera. Sony Artisans of Imagery Katrin Eisman, Andy Katz, and Pat Murphy-Racey join in with their takes on the 24.2-megapixel camera that has caused an uproar in the photo industry.