Tag Archives: journalism

Overhasty Obit for Aperture

Macworld sits down with Apple’s Sr. Director of Pro Apps Marketing to dispel rumours which were rampant last week that the development of Apple’s flagship pro-image workflow application had fired or reassigned it’s entire staff.

“The reports of Apple reducing their commitment to Aperture are totally false,” Kirk Paulsen, Apple’s Senior Director Pro Applications Marketing, told Macworld. “In fact, we’ve got more people working on Aperture right now than ever before. (Macworld)

Think Secret had reported that the team had been axed after extensive criticism of the first version of the application, but Paulsen says this is not the case at all. Daring Fireball heard from his sources at Apple, the departures were an ugly bit of mismanagement of the original team – and all had left of their own volition. This quote sums up the situation:

Aperture’s current engineering team was assembled before the original team left. Aperture was never without an engineering team, and the product’s future was never in jeopardy. (Daring Fireball)

Back in the Day

Conflagration

It’s been almost ten years since I  picked up a camera to earn a living on a daily basis, back when I was in Savannah, Georgia as a staff photographer for The Savannah Morning News and Evening Press. I was recently doing some housecleaning and found an old Kodak PhotoCD I’d created from my best chromes and black-and-white negatives when I was job hunting in 1994. I posted the collection of images on Flickr, seen in the photo gallery here. I was trying to be so bleeding edge – I remember sending out portfolios on a floppy disk (yeah, a 1.4 dual-sided deal) and I put together a slick one-page dye-sub print from this collection of images using all the gusto our office Mac IIcx could muster. Meanwhile, we shot all our color images on Fujichrome 100 or 400 – talk about challenging. Later that year I took on my next job at Morris Communication’s Augusta Chronicle as photo editor, and cut way back on daily shoots – and at least had the chance to shoot color neg film! I do miss those days, chasing news on the scanner, trying to produce something compelling from otherwise mundane assignments. Today’s work has it’s own set of challenges, and thinking on my feet – but at least I’m not working nights anymore!

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CNN’s Anderson Cooper by Diane Arbus

dd
As featured in last Friday’s New York Times (free registration required), there is a new retrospective of Diane Arbus’ spooky photography currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum after touring several other US cities. Baby-rearing blog DaddyTypes points out a centerpiece of that collection is a portrait of Gloria Vanderbilt’s infant son, Anderson Cooper. Yes, CNN’s own Anderson Cooper.
The portrait, shot for Harper’s Bazaar, is described in Patricia Bosworth’s Arbus biography:

“To dispel the growing myth that [Arbus] only took pictures of freaks, she made up a list of elegant people she wanted to photograph…As if to prove her point, she took a remarkable portrait of Gloria Vanderbilt’s sleeping baby son, Anderson Hays Cooper, for a Harper’s Bazaar Valentine issue. In this truly astonishing picture, the infant resembles a flat white death’s head — eyes sealed shut, moth pursed and moist with saliva. When Gloria Vanderbilt saw the photograph, she forbade Bazaar to publish it, but eventually she changed her mind and this stunning image opened Diane’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.”

A current photo of Mr. Cooper can be found here.