SnapperTalk

The US-based National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) has published an online collection of articles written by photojournalists reflecting on their coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre and its aftermath.
Articles are by Todd Maisel of the New York Daily News, Rick Wilking of Reuters, Matt Gentry and Alan Kim of The Roanoke Times, and freelancer Casey Templeton. Also included is a pretty nice 360-degree VR image/audio of a post-massacre ceremony by Alan Kim that’s quite effectively done.

Photojournalists reflect on Virginia Tech massacre (NPPA)

Canon have rolled out an updated website for pros dubbed the Canon Professional Network. The site features information about Canon Professional Services as well as training, technical and product information, plus interviews with working professionals. Also on the site are a bunch of videos about the new EOS-1D Mark III.

Results have been announced for the UK-based “The Press Photographer’s Year” awards, with The Guardian’s Sean Smith scooping the top prize.
A slideshow gallery of the winners, strangely without any captions, is available here and an exhibition of all the winning photographs will run from Saturday 16th June to Saturday 28th July at the Royal National Theatre on London’s South Bank. Congratulations to all involved.

Or not… if you work for the Dallas Morning News where 11 out of 24 of their staff photographers now shoot their assignments entirely in video.

This month’s edition of The Digital Journalist edited by Dirck Halstead - a long-time proponent of photographers shooting video - features a trio of articles about the new trend: An editorial by Halstead expressing the belief that changes in technology in the next 10 years will force a seismic change in how “photographers” operate - on a level much greater than the shift from film to digital; and articles about the attitude and ways of working at the Dallas Morning News by its Director of Photography Leslie White and by Halstead himself, plus an image gallery (although I’m not clear if the gallery is all from video, or not)
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Photographer Yannis Kontos recently spent some time in North Korea, travelling as a tourist, and a gallery of his photos providing a fairly rare and interesting insight into life in the country has been published in the latest issue of The Digital Journalist.

Watch, listen, read… two talks and an old but great book by three leading photojournalists:

James Nachtwey’s acceptance speech of his 2007 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Prize in MP3 Audio, MP4 Video, and excellent quality high-res 480P Video

Josef Koudelka speaking at the Aperture Gallery in MP3 Audio recorded by Max Pasion

Also read this blog post from David Alan Harvey on an afternoon with Koudelka & Gilles Peress. Reading this reminded me of one of my favourite photo books - Telex Iran by Peress. If you haven’t read it already, there’s some good background material on the book here.

Guardian photographer Dan Chung and reporter Angelique Chrisafis have created a duo of well-produced multimedia pieces in the run-up to the French presidential elections. After the Riots focuses on life for residents in France’s run-down housing estates, whilst opposite viewpoints are presented in Le Pen’s Heartland.
Produced with the ubiquitous SoundSlides, the slideshows have a different feel to most due to their often fastpaced transitions that give a somewhat cinematic style. A nice use of the multimedia format that’s well worth watching.

Mac OS X keeps itself pretty tidy without much maintenance by the user but it’s not a bad idea once in a while to clean the system a bit - especially if you start to have any problems.
The UNIX core of OS X contains a number of built-in utilities for this but if you’re not a command-line geek you’ll want to use a 3rd party utility to simplify the process. They mostly do the same things - some more some less. Here’s a few to consider in my rough order of preference:

MainMenu
IceClean
OnyX
Tiger Cache Cleaner
Cocktail
Yasu