Brooklyn Museum on Flickr

The Brooklyn Museum has joined a growing number of organizations and foundations that are posting rights-free images, such as the one above, on Flickr.

You can see - and download - their archives of early lantern slides here.

According to the museum, Philadelphia daguerreotypists William and Frederick Langenheim introduced the lantern slide: a transparent image on glass that could be projected, in magnified form, onto a surface using a "magic lantern," or sciopticon in 1849. This new technology expanded the uses of photography, allowing photographic images to be viewed by a large audience. With lantern slides, Museum curators and educators could illustrate their lectures, letting audience members see detailed studies of objects and sites from around the world.

The Brooklyn Museum's lantern slide collection was started by the Museum's curator of fine arts, William Henry Goodyear, in the late nineteenth century. With the assistance of the photographers Joseph Hawkes and John McKecknie, Goodyear reproduced images of archaeological and architectural sites in Europe as well as images of the Paris Exposition, which Hawkes often hand-colored for more realistic effect. The lantern slide collection also developed through the efforts of the curator of ethnology, Stewart Culin, and his successor Herbert Spinden, who created and purchased images of objects and sites. The Museum’s Library now holds 11,710 glass lantern slides. Read more about the history of the lantern slide collection.

Multimedia Workshoppin'

The NPPA's Multimedia Immersion Workshop has ended in Louisville. It was a wonderful gathering of talented students and staff. Everyone, including the coaches, have surely come away with a deeper understanding of multimedia storytelling possibilities. It is good to see that the organization is dedicating the time and resources to help move people forward.

A very cool website for the NPPA's 2008 Immersion Multimedia Workshop can be viewed here.

Traveling Europe on a budget

New York Times travel writer Matt Gross, who writes the Frugal Traveler column, has begun writing about his "Grand Tour" of Europe on a budget in his blog here. The latest entry is about Paris. As usual, it is very informative.

Library of Congress on Flickr

The Library of Congress has posted more than a thousand images from 1910 and the 1940s on the photo-sharing site Flickr. All the images are copyright free.

The front-page of the LOC Flickr site can be found here.

Cornell Capa

Cornell Capa, founder of the International Center of Photography and former Life magazine staff photographer, died in his Manhattan home of natural causes today. He was 90.

Magnum Photos has a tribute to Capa here.

The New York Times obituary can be found here.

A Day in Pictures

Micro-journalism idea gets grant

California State University-Los Angeles journalism students and faculty will partner with community groups to launch Cool State Online, using “micro-bureaus” to cover the San Gabriel Valley’s largely Asian and Latino community. Computer science grad students will help build a news management system for the project.

New Voices is an incubator for pioneering community news ventures in the United States. It helps fund the start-up of innovative micro-local news projects. It spotlights independent citizens media initiatives. And it provides technical support with online training in creating, developing and sustaining Web sites grounded in journalism ethics.
New Voices is a project of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism.

National Geographic Commercial Service

According to a company press release, National Geographic has launched National Geographic Assignment, an agency representing 27 of the Society's photographers. National Geographic Assignment debuts at www.nationalgeographicassignment.com. The commercial agency was created in response to market demand for the high-production-value, reportage-style photography. The full text of the release can be found here.

Photographing Cambodia

Photo used with permission: © lecercle via Flickr
Defaced and Graffitized portraits of former Khmer Rouge soldiers on the walls of the Toul Sleng Genocide museum.

Phnom Penh-based Magnum photographer John Vink has posted a new set of images from the Crimes against Humanity by the ECCC (Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia) on his website here.

The first public hearing of the ECCC took place on Nov. 20th, nearly 30 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Newspaper killer

YouTube has hired a news manager to guide its new Citizen Journalist channel and glean content from people that represents "some of the best news content on YouTube."

The traditional media, especially newspapers, cannot compete with ideas like this. It is too difficult for Mainstream Media to respond to - and repurpose - user-generated content that a large majority of people want to consume.

Power of the Canon G9

Blingapore 1x1 from Sion Touhig on Vimeo.

Photographer Sion Touhig strolled down Orchard Road in Singapore, using a Canon G9 shooting timelapse video at one frame per second. It's interesting.

The G9 is an amazing still camera that has the ability to shoot standard-definition and high-definition video, in addition to RAW stills in Canon's CR2 format. Compact and well-built, it is about the size of a Leica.

Elizabeth Arnold on interviewing

The radio journalism website Transom has some words of instruction and inspiration from NPR correspondent Elizabeth Arnold. You can start reading here.

Click to listen to one of Elizabeth's reports from Alaska.

Elizabeth Arnold has worked in public radio for twenty years, fifteen as a national correspondent for NPR. Arnold's reporting experience with NPR began in rural Alaska, moved to the halls of Congress and the presidential campaign trail, and then back west, and home to Alaska. That path imbues Arnold's reports with both the seasoned experience of national politics and a personal understanding of the rapidly changing American landscape.