NATURE | Behind the Scenes of "Hummingbirds" | PBS

Filmmaker Ann Prum describes the breakthrough science and latest technologies that allowed her and the crew to reveal incredible new insights about these aerial athletes.
Very cool photography/film stuff - check it out!

A fake wolf in any other clothing is...

... still, apparently, a fake wolf, at least according to the judges of the 2009 BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards.

In an article published on the BBC website Wildlife photographer stripped of award photographer Jose Luis Rodriguez was the recently crowned winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award has been disqualified after judges ruled that the featured wolf was probably a "model".

Despite the panel's decision Rodriguez strongly denied that the wolf was a trained animal, according to a statement from the competition organizers. His photograph was selected as grand prize from more than 43,000 entries in October 2009.

The panel stripped Rodriguez and decided this year will be the first in 43 that no grand prize winner will be awarded.

I'm deeply saddened by this "problematic photo". Since the photographer denies the wolf is fake and the panel has ruled otherwise it resurfaces the question of what I refer to as the "covenant with the image". There has long been fakery in photography - since virtually its inception. In fact the miracle of photography is its ability to capture many things our eyes can not, and in so doing reveal worlds, emotions, perspectives that can awe, amaze, motivate and inspire. The one thing that we have had is a long standing agreement, that is photography, inclusive of the creator, when the image being shared is from realms of wildlife, nature, and journalism, respects a covenant with the image. That covenant allows all viewers to engage, rely, depend,... simply put, to trust, and in turn make valued decisions about our world based on that trust. Tear the covenant and you tear the trust.

Whether that trust is broken by a would-be contest winner or a trusted publication as in the mysterious moving pyramids in National Geographic (No one might have noticed had Gordon Gahan [the photographer], not voiced a complaint) the fallout becomes a source of controversy and erodes if not murders our trust. Some say all photographs are a lie, since they freeze a moment, but that's a comment of sheer stupidity. Is Henri Cartier-Bresson's leaping man frozen moment a lie? Is Eddie Adams' Vietnam execution of Nguyen Van Lem photo a lie? Is a memory a lie because it's frozen in our minds? In each we trust the source.

I have no idea if Rodriguez is pulling the wolf over our eyes. The leaping wolf photo is a wonderfully executed image, and if his covenant with us is indeed intact, I am saddened for him, if not then bravo the panel, regardless, the covenant with the image has been tarnished.

remembering that life is fun

Why is it we forget that - after the age 12?
What's amazing is, when we are having fun, like a kid, all the horrible things disappear.

No one laughing ever invented a war
No one playing with finger puppets ever committed a murder
No one practicing hula-hoop ever engaged in bigotry
and
No one playing stair piano does it with hate in their heart.

More Fun @ the Fun Theory dot com

A year in review worth watching

By years end I'm certain everyone was sick-n-tired of yet another top ten this, and best of that, so it begs the question - was there anything worth seeing, hearing or thinking about one more time before the New Year and New Decade race away with us in such frenetic craziness that what was wasn't?

One man did find a way, a simple way, a lovely way, to consider the essence of what has past. His name is Eirik Solheim


Eirik is very generous and open to sharing what he did and how he did it - more here on his website/blog @

eirikso.com

"The end is where we start from." - T.S. Eliot

When we least expect it life begins living and we are washed ashore in the joy.

I love cycling up hills on my bike, this past year I have begun enjoying the downhills equally (almost) and that has as much to do with becoming as skilled at descending as I am ascending. Confidence.

As the year/decade has concluded and another opened I'm starting to get the hang of it again, my photography and my writing. It's beginning to feel right, the "feeling" is returning. I'm exploring more photography and writing of others and much further afield than I did a decade ago when I boxed up one life and opened up another. I now see those new clothes were only partially mine, the rest I was trying desperately to make fit.

Most of the past half year I have been trying to unpack that old box, retry thoughts, notions, ideas, and see what still fits. It's taken a while, but surprisingly I discovered that I gained no weight, yet grew; didn't shrink, yet have a smaller footprint; and most importantly, never lost my curiosity appetite for the world explored through words and images and sounds.

Growing up we are told there are no short-cuts to success, and on some level I've paid my dues to that credo, but this past year the decade has come more sharply into focus and I've concluded living a life is about learning short-cuts, and more importantly they exist and every well lived life has them.

I'm discovering a strange new attraction to the web and ironically it has increased my enjoyment of reading and writing - both things all its critics rioted against it for destroying. Blogs in particular are becoming ever increasingly a part of my daily/weekly reading agenda. I'll try and share more of them here, and those of consistent interest I'll also post to the new blog section I have started in the right column.

The following I found on a blog by photographer Sean Gallagher that I have enjoyed for what he connects me to as much as what he says. The following quote he posted, found via the NY Times photography, video and journalism blog LENS - well worth checking out regularly. It hit me in a particularly wonderful way today, as I just purchased a range of new cameras and lenses to launch 2010, both new year and new decade, rededicated to images and words.

“What kind of typewriter did Hemingway use?” Jim Estrin, photographer at the New York Times for the last 20 years, asked his news photography class by way of an introduction this morning.

Nobody knew.

“That’s because it doesn’t matter,” said Estrin.

Short-cuts keep surprising me, but come more anticipated by the day.

A Decade In Search Of Truth

In 1999 I began one last project, one that I thought would define my career as a photographer, and nudge forward perhaps my career as a writer. It started off to be my journey, a last journey with cameras in hand. A few years later I was, I thought, embarking down Frost's road less traveled.

Now, a decade later, I found myself looking back to the future. Wild Orphans once again is surfacing as my photographic savior, my sanity check, I need it. As NY Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich, "A decade that began with the “reality” television craze exemplified by “American Idol” and “Survivor” — both blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth." As the last hours of 2009 flicker out, I realize I need 2010 to be a flight back to truth.

Appropriately, the decade's last December epitomized our collective disengagement from the truth - Tiger Woods, the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and the US sending 30,000 more troops to "win" a game that has no finish line, buzzer or top-of-the-ninth - or maybe our decade of delinquent decision-making was exclusively due to “bad intelligence,” (to coin a phrase by Bush administration alumni), that pushed us into these fiascoes. Unfortunately the tigers of truth, print journalists, are as rare as their Asian counterparts, and as the decade comes to a close, we are watch their habitat disappear as well. In Washington DC they opened the Newseum — "a 250,000-square-foot museum of news — offers visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits." As the director is quoted on the Newseum's own website, "Visitors will come away with a better understanding of news and the important role it plays in all of our lives,". Frighteningly we don't build museums to the living and vibrant, but to the vanishing and disappeared - is news habitat gone?

Much of 2010 I will be back on the road, exploring this planet, personal and public perambulations. In search of truth I already have some sense of where to look, but know many new roads will appear--filled with excitement and that tingling trepidation when perambulating on a precipice. But the search for truth will be alive, and that's what I crave and that's why so much of life is "blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth." it's not alive. It's as if we have become our own avatars. Gleefully cocooning ourselves into our make-believe reality. And most frightening of all... as the climate conference in Copenhagen insanely pointed out - inside that reality we don't need to care.

I care. I have but this solitary existence. I have no guarantee of second chances, no do-overs,no redemption after missing the warning, or as the chorus rings out:

This is it
Make no mistake where you are
your back's to the corner
This is it
Don't be a fool anymore
This is it
the waiting is over

No room to run
No way to hide
No time for wondering why
It's here, the moment is now

So about Frost's road less traveled. I only know roads are man-made, and that any new road is not so much littered with leaves unworn by human footfalls, rather shiny tchotchkes of world blinded by it's own make-believe reality. "Follow them, use them and forget them.... Don't park. [roads] will get you there, but I tell you, don't ever try to arrive. Arrival is the death of inspiration." (Ernst Hass) Truth lives in inspiration.

A poster ad featuring Tiger Woods forebodingly chimes, "tougher than ever to be a Tiger." Paradoxically over the past decade the world has discovered that too, hiding from one lie, while not questioning the other. The caption on another Accenture Woods poster reads "It’s what you do next that counts." True enough for Tiger in 2010, but not just Tiger. Inside the cocoon I think it's easy for life to imitate art because you can never stand back far enough to get a proper perspective.

Nike’s chairman, Phil Knight, told The Sports Business Journal, in perhaps the most prophetic quote of the decade's closing month, that when Woods’s career "is over, you’ll look back on these indiscretions as a minor blip." Decades hence I think we will look back on this first ten year span of the new Millennium and realize there were too many "blips", I hope not too many for us too survive. Those blips, like the make-believe reality TV shows that launched the decade, held no truth.

Tomorrow morning is just another morning, but it begins a departure. I have reconstructed a camera bag - filled with all new Canon gear, three decades Nikon left behind; I have the love of my life that will see me through my days on this Earth; I travel first to India for a friend's wedding, a global wedding in a sense; then to Europe to understand why we are willing to suffering to know the truth about ourselves; and to East Africa in search of where all new roads began.

It's no secret I love animation and the mind of the animators that, "boldly go where no man has gone before", or what ever Capt. Kirk uttered. Well here is another one my friend Jenn's brother Craig just sent over (Craig has the enviable joy of seeing this stuff a lot in his job at Pixar). This one is from the mind and scribbling of animator Alan Becker - a battle of digitally galactic proportions - click on the image above to see the action.