Good Reputation Sleeping

Blog City, It's Alive!

My last labor of love after a 6 year run as photography editor of The Washington Post Magazine has launched. 'Blog City' makes its debut in this weekend's magazine. It features the work of several D.C. area flickrites, and lives up to my dream of perfect synergy between web and print.

Thank you to the editors of the Post Magazine for not being afraid of the future!

Next month I become the Picture Editor for The Washington Post newspaper. What a strange journey this has become!

Blog City - The Washington Post Magazine

The Washington Post Magazine is launching a new feature for D.C. area photographers. It will be called 'Blog City - Seeing Ourselves Through the Lens of Washington's Photobloggers.'

Anyone in the metro D.C. area who regularly posts photos to their own photoblog or flickr site is welcome to submit photos for consideration. You can send in 3 photos per month and they should be at least 300 dpi and 8x10 inches in size. You should also include a brief description for each photo submitted. We also require that you send us the URL for you photoblog or flickr site. While you won't receive any fee if you photo is selected, we will publish your work along with the URL of your site.

A couple of words of caution; since both your photo and your site's URL will be appearing in the Washington Post Magazine, we will be screening for 'family friendly' content. Also, if you photograph people in public places, you don't have to get their permission for us to publish their picture; however, when it comes to submitting photographs of children, only do so when you know you have the parent's consent. We won't be able to publish the photo without that.

Email your submissions to - blogcity@washpost.com.
Thanks and Happy Photoblogging!

Keith W. Jenkins
Photography Editor
The Washington Post Magazine

Sunday Morning Reads

The Dark Side of the Mountain - Michael Leahy, The Washington Post Magazine.

"Lisi wouldn't need to send Nils Antezana's effects anywhere. He wouldn't need to do a thing because Antezana's daughter, Fabiola, would be flying to Katmandu, Nepal, within four days to get both the effects and a meeting with Lisi, during which she would demand an explanation for what had happened. What she had heard in telephone calls made to other climbers led her to believe that Lisi had made mistakes no guide should make, and therefore was responsible at least in part for her father's death. Fabiola knew she wouldn't be bringing her father back, but she wanted to leave Katmandu with the truth about how his dream went awry."

Photo Editing-What I Do

Boots on the Ground - The Washington Post Magazine

Washington Post photographer Andrea Bruce Woodall has traveled to Iraq five times since the war began. Most recently, she arrived a week shy of the first anniversary of the invasion in March and stayed through a period in which a widespread insurgency against the U.S. occupation flared anew, and U.S. fatalities approached 1,000. For some Americans, the chaos and violence in Iraq has receded to a kind of grim background noise, distant and impersonal. Woodall set out to dispel that creeping indifference by getting up-close and specific. Here, through her camera's lens and her personal journal, is Iraq as it's seen from the bulletproof window of a Humvee.

The photos in this week's magazine were sitting, unpublished, on Andrea's memory cards and the words were in the personal journal she kept on her travels covering the war in Iraq. Finding these images and putting them on the page with her words is the best work a photo editor can do.

Sunday Best

Sometimes it is frustrating being second best. First, the New York Times Magazine introduced 'T', a beautiful new style and design mag, and then this past Sunday, there was the great text-great photos spread on director Pedro Almodovar.

What helps set the N.Y. Times Magazine apart is the great connection between their print and web products. While we (The Washington Post Magazine) have a great story on a neighborhood pool with a fabulous portrait series by Greg Miller, all you'll see on the web is the cover image and ONE photo from the story. In contrast, the Almodovar story's online version includes a photo gallery (of Almodovar's female stars), an audio slideshow, and a dip into the Time's Almodovar archive to round out his film career.

As newspapers struggle to find a future in a world where people don't read, and websites try to create an audience for people who have less and less time; The New York Times type of symbiotic relationship between print and web seems like an excellent way to move your old readers forward and to capture some new readers as well. Everyone in print looking for the new business model should be paying attention.

Spring Fashion, Part 1

Yesterday my moblog, burnt pixels, shot past the 1000 page view mark when I posted some pics from our spring fashion shoot with photographer Cedric Angeles. We are now at 1572 and counting! Should I be surprised?

Reasons I Love My Job!

This has been a hella tough week! As anyone in the magazine publishing industry knows - fall is the season. This is the time when you have big pages, run 'important' articles AND make most of your money. Our tiny rag is no different.

So my brief time out of the office this week, on a research project, was supposed to further the no time-lots-to-do agenda, nothing more. Boy was I surprised when I stumbled on one of the largest, least known photo collections in the whole world!

It turns out that the Smithsonian's Museum of American History - as eclectic as the nation itself - houses the very first museum collection of photography in the U.S., started in 1896. Since then, in the name of history, of course, they have collected everything and anything to do with photography they could get their hands on. In a brief 3 hour period I saw 140 photographs by Erich Salomon, the German photographer who was the first to adopt the Leica and is cited as a major influence by Cartier-Bresson (this is what I was looking for); turn of the century Egypt by Francis Frith; prints from Diane Arbus (that she did herself), a collection of weird and wacky Polaroid cameras; a 'secret' portfolio by a rather famous photographer that I am not allowed to talk about, and some rather cool stereo daguerrotypes.

WOW!!! Who knew? This made my day and week - hope to visit explore again soon!!!

Fall Fashion Gallery

Just up, my first Typepad photo album!
Its a look at the Washington Post Mag Fall Fashion shoot from last week.
The photo album mech is pretty cool, but a little buggy -
getting pics in the right order seems to be dependant on things
other than the stated criteria (like file name). Oh well, we are still in beta!

Don't Hate Me ('cause I'm Beautiful!)

As previously noted, I spent most of last week dealing with the start of our busy season at the mag - 1st up, Fall Fashion!!!

Logistics are always the make or break; this time we chose to shoot in Georgetown and made the new Ritz-Carlton our home for 2 days. They did a great job providing 'atmosphere' despite our being surrounded by Secret Service agents preparing for the arrival of the new Palestinian Prime Minister, Abbas.

Our models were WONDERFUL!!! Viola (the blond) talked politics and Francesca (the brunette) played piano (see quickvid below) in between shots. Otherwise they just looked great for photographer Ericka McConnell's camera.


(Pics and quickvid by me-Keith W. Jenkins)