Vision Slightly Blurred

What once seemed like a distant threat has turned into a major nightmare for photographers. The rapid spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) has led to major uncertainty for freelancers dealing with a "black swan" event that has resulted in cancellations of music festivals, tech conferences, weddings, and nearly every sporting event. 

In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Sarah and Allen discuss how COVID-19 has already impacted freelancers, how photo editors are trying to help, how the media is using photography to illustrate the outbreak, and much more.

TikTok, the video-based social media app, usually conjures visions of teens mimicking the latest dance craze, but it's probably better described as short attention span YouTube. In 2017, ByteDance, the Chinese-owned parent company of TikTok, acquired the Musical.ly app, which had gained a toehold with an under-18 demographic by becoming a replacement for the comedy-oriented Vine app along with a burgeoning lip synching community.

Although the app still skews heavily towards music, it has predictably evolved as a youth-oriented, generic video delivery platform. As such, a whole gaggle of teen photographers has emerged as "experts" – delivering pop song-soundtracked mini-tutorials that are largely devoid of narration.

On this week's episode of the PhotoShelter podcast Vision Slightly Blurred, @sarahjake and @allen3m discuss how TikTok is helping inspire a new crop of photographers.

Late Winter and early Spring bring another cycle of photo contest season – that time of year when many major prizes are announced (especially in the photojournalism realm). And with each year bring another round of punditry regarding the value of photo contests and an almost inevitable controversy regarding the winners.

In this week's episode of PhotoShelter's Vision Slightly Blurred podcast, Sarah (@sarahjake) and Allen (@allen3m) discuss the controversy around the 77th Pictures of the Year contest, as well as the Sony World Photography Awards'  decision to censor images of the Hong Kong protest taken by Ko Chung Ming (高仲明) and David Butow.

The New York Times investigative reporter Kashmir Hill uncovered some unsettling details about Clearview AI – a facial recognition start-up that scrapes publicly available photos from sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Venmo and makes the data searchable by law enforcement – even if you're not suspect or convicted of committing a crime.

Facial recognition is an incredibly useful consumer tool for organization burgeoning albums, but the privacy implications are enormous when third parties start to aggregate images and make the data commercially available.

In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Sarah and Allen revisit the issue of facial recognition (first covered in the inaugural episode of Vision Slightly Blurred last year), and see how far the technology and ethical implications have come in less than 12 months.

As a part of the launch of the Fuji X100V, Fuji posted a video of Japanese street photographer Tatsuo Suzuki at work. Suzuki's aggressive style rubbed people the wrong way, and within the week, he was scrubbed from the campaign, and then erased from the Fuji website.

But Suzuki is an accomplished street photographer who has also helped build a community of street photographers with his zine/collective Void Tokyo. Why does Suzuki get canceled when photographer like Bruce Gilden earn gallery shows? In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Sarah and Allen discuss Suzuki's body of work, his aggressive style, and the effects of cancel culture on the arts.

Last week, Emerald Expositions, the owner of Photo District News (PDN), announced that PDN would no longer publish new content online or in print. The magazine was a staple of the professional photography industry, particularly for advertising and commercial photography. Their articles covered a wide range of topics from pricing to major campaigns to the venerable PDN 30 list. In addition, PDN produced a number of photo contests including the PDN Annual.

In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Sarah and Allen discuss the climate that makes it nearly impossible for niche print publications to exist, what PDN could have done to potentially thwart its demise, and ideas for the future of PDN 30.

The crash that killed Kobe Bryant, his 13-year old daughter Gianna, and seven others aboard a helicopter shocked millions around the world. Near the Staples Center in California where Bryant played for 20 years as a member of the Los Angeles Lakers, make-shift memorials appeared. And online, fans posted messages of grief and condolences on social media. 

Unsurprisingly, images of Bryant were widely shared as if a way to collectively remember him through the most accessible and visceral medium available to us – photography. And photographers who had the opportunity to shoot Bryant during their careers expressed a connection for having done so. Even in the most public of settings, there is something intimate about taking someone’s photo.

In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Sarah and Allen share some of their favorite images that they've seen on social media in the wake of Bryant's death, and talk about the role of photography in creating a collective memory.

Does knowing the science behind photography help us create better pictures and/or get more out of our equipment? Or does the accumulation of such knowledge simply make more technical photographers feel superior?

In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Allen Murabayashi makes the case that beyond understanding the exposure triangle and acquiring specific knowledge for the types of photography that you practice (e.g. astrophotography), it's unnecessary to be pre-occupied with understanding the physics of lenses or how sensors work. 

On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded during liftoff due to a faulty O-ring design on the rocket booster which allowed hot gas to ignite a fuel tank. STS-51-L was the 25th space shuttle mission, and in the mid-1980s, launches still captured public attention and imagination.

On hand that day was photographer Bruce Weaver, who has been a mainstay of Cape Canaveral launches for over 30 years. Although the NASA video of the tragedy was available immediately, the grainy, low-resolution video couldn’t hold a candle to the still image that Weaver captured.

Weaver’s image perfectly captured a major inflection point for NASA and space travel. NASA grounded the program for three years, and there was a palpable sense that the heroic age of space flight had ended. The image was just an explosion, but it carried with it the baggage of hubris, bureaucracy and seven dead astronauts.

On Sunday, January 19, 2020, Elon Musk blew up a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on purpose to test a crew escape system – and I’ve never felt so hopeful after seeing a photo of an explosion.

Freelancer Joe Rimkus Jr., a long-time Miami Herald staff photographer, captured the moment in an image widely circulated by Reuters. Unlike the unruliness of Challenger’s unplanned explosion, the Falcon 9 explosion appears almost orderly. It's the emerging phoenix. The cloud cover mutes the color palette, turning the image into something almost painterly.