“Visitors take a picturesque ferry across the bay from the airport on the leeward side of the base to the main camp where the prison is held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Star security reporter Michelle Shephard snapped these iPhone Hipstamatic photos this weekend covering the Sept. 11 trials.”
Posts tagged war
From the report: “Perhaps the most profound talk of the conference came at its end, from photojournalist and 2010 TED Fellow Teru Kuwayama. Kuwayama took his iPhone 4 to Helmand, Afghanistan, to cover the lives of U.S. Marines at war, and mostly used the Hipstamatic app for photo processing.”
Read my interview with Teru.
Photojournalist Benjamin Lowy, the Libyan revolution, and Hipstamatic
Photographer Benjamin Lowy has been shooting startling, visceral photos of the Libyan revolution, and he’s been doing it with his iPhone and Hipstamatic.
In an essay at Getty Images, he writes about the attraction of the iPhone for war reporting. “As photojournalists our responsibilities include not just communicating content, but also creating an aesthetic, a visual narrative that will capture our audience’s attention,” he writes. “Using my iPhone allowed me transmit images from the field updating my blog like many of the Libyan revolutionaries around me,” he writes. “Embracing this new paradigm of journalism - no middleman, no publisher - I posted images from Libya and gained over 500 followers in a week, regular curious people - Libyans, Americans, Europeans - who bypassed traditional traditional news sources.”
Lowy recently arrived back in Libya, and MSNBC posted some new images from his travels.
You can learn more about him at his website.
Female soldiers in Afghanistan, via Basetrack and Hipstamatic
Here’s a fresh and interesting perspective on iPhone photography from Rita Leistner, a professional photographer who joined the Basetrack effort that’s documenting the war in Afghanistan.
She’d never used a phone for photography, and there were a few surprises.
The first thing I did, as with any piece of new equipment, was look for the instructions. But there weren’t any. We were using the Hipstamatic app, which simulates analogue photography.
As she notes later:
But the limits of the Hipstamatic iPhone app are also part of its appeal – the discipline of the single objective square frame, the absence of artificial lighting, being forced to slow down. And while some amateurs will benefit from the funky effects of the app, no device can direct the shot: establish composition, subject and background, the relationship with your subject, the semiotics of colour, access to a war zone…
Her photos are beautiful, raw, and visceral. There’s a slideshow, “Female Engagement Teams in Afghanistan.”
Afghanistan war photos from Teru Kuwayama
Here’s a gallery of photos from Basetrack, an experimental media project documenting the deployment of Marines in southern Afghanistan. Read my interview with Teru Kuwayama and learn more about Basetrack.
Want to witness an truly innovative photojournalism and reporting initiative? Look no further than Basetrack, an experimental effort to report on the deployment of Marines in southern Afghanistan.
Visit Basetrack, and soon you’ll be viewing photos from photographers embedded with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines — yes, including many iPhone images — and hearing the stories of the Marines in their own voices. As the Basetrack website notes, “Basetrack’s forward team is supported by a network of technologists, analysts, artists, and journalists, working around the clock, from around the world, to connect over a thousand Marines and Corpsmen to their families, and to connect a broader public to the longest war in US history.”
I contacted one of the photographers behind Basetrack, Teru Kuwayama, and spoke to him about the project and his use of the iPhone camera to take photos for it. Here’s my interview with Teru. You can also view a slideshow of his images.
What made you decide to use the iPhone rather than a more traditional camera to capture images?
Maybe this is counterintuitive, but I wanted to demonstrate that it isn’t about technology, and that journalism (whatever that means anymore) doesn’t require “professional” gear. That said, I’ve been pretty amazed at how well the iPhone works — at least as a camera, I’ve never used it as a phone — but as cameras go, it might be the best piece of gear I’ve ever used.
Hipstamatic debate stoked by New York Times war photos
The Hipstamatic app—either you love it or you hate it.
That seems to be the attitude among a lot of iPhoneographers. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating, but more and more I read anti-Hipstamatic rants (or tweets, or comments). What’s at the heart of the negative attitude toward Hipstamatic? The complaints often fall along these lines: Hipstamatic is cool, sure, but maybe too cool for its own good. It’s being used, the anti-Hipstamatic crowd seems to say, to generate quick, interesting-looking shots, but the processing is too extreme, the effects are often random, and too many of the images look alike.
