Look what happened while we weren't looking! American Photo Magazine tagged the Lightscoop as an Editor's Choice in its June 2008 issue...

"Among the many cool lighting tools we've seen in the last 12 months, one of the most clever comes from photographer Kenneth Kobre, author of a bestselling textbook on photojournalism. The Kobre Lightscoop (about $30, at lightscoop.com) does something that was difficult if not impossible before: It provides the lighting benefits of a ceiling- or wall-bounced shoe-mount strobe from the pop-up flash built into the pentaprism of most SLRs.

Basically an angled-up mirror in a plastic housing, the Lightscoop slides over the camera's hotshoe and deflects the flash output upward toward a ceiling or sideways toward a wall (when the camera is held vertically). In addition to providing a much softer, more flattering on-the-spot light, that technique eliminates redeye and shadows cast by long lenses, as well as opening up the backgrounds of interior portraits."

We're actually selling the Lightscoop for $34.95 on our site these days in order to give the price advantage to our exclusive online reseller, Adorama.com, where it sells for $29.95.

Have been working on some videos to show new users how to set up their cameras for best results with the Lightscoop. Here's one for the Nikon cameras. The demo features a Nikon D80, but the menus, etc., will be very similar for other compatible Nikons.

Am in Arles, France, this week for the Recontres Internationales de la Photographie. Olympus is this year's major sponsor... which is great news for the Recontres and also for Olympus owners who have been asking about Lightscoop compatibility. I spent yesterday morning testing the universal-foot Lightscoop with the Olympus E420, E520, and the E3. Got great results with all three cameras. I am told that users of the E410 and E510 can expect the same performance. (Anything wider than a 11mm lens (22mm film-equivalent) does result in some spill at the top, but the intersection of shooting that wide while using the pop-up flash should be a rare occurrence. The Olympus lenses that operate at that width are in the very top professional line.)

Here's a step-by-step guide to setting up a Canon 40D (should also work with the 10D, 20D, etc.) to use with Professor Kobre's Lightscoop.

Former student Mary Calvert of the Washington Times has just learned that she is the winner of this year's Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for her project "Lost Daughters," about sex selection in India. This Award is particularly poignant for me, given that Mary was on the team that won the student division of this award back in the 1980s for the project "Helpers in the War on AIDS," carried out in the photo story class at San Francisco State. Congratulations, Mary.

The Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award honors the outstanding reporting of the lives and strife of disadvantaged people throughout the world. Known as the "Poor People's Pulitzers" within the press arena, these award recipients have brought to light issues spanning from child abuse and juvenile crime to discriminatory banking practices and prejudice against AIDS victims.

Established in December of 1968 by a group of reporters covering Robert Kennedy's presidential election, the award program has far exceeded the expectations of its founders, according to its site. Led by a committee of six independent journalists, the Awards are judged by more than fifty journalists each year. It has become the largest program of its kind and one of few in which the winners are determined solely by their peers.

I've got an exciting announcement to make, about a project that you’ll love and will want to participate in. But first a little background.

A curious thing is happening in the world of online news photography, precipitated by three converging trends:

1) More Web users have access to high-speed broadband;

2) Digital technology and easy-to-use software is enabling more people to shoot and edit slideshows (with audio!), and upload them to Websites;

3) Similarly, more people can now shoot and edit videos — quickly and inexpensively — and upload them to Websites.
Popular user-generated sites such as Flickr and YouTube are proving how fast, cheap and simple it is to create moving pictures that dance and sing.

But as we’ve seen with most blogs, just because someone can write does not mean they can write well. And now we’re finding, no surprise, that just because someone can create a video and show it to the entire world doesn’t mean it’s going to be any good.

So where are the true professionals when you need them?

Excellent question.

The first place you’d think to look would be on the Websites of daily newspapers, where seasoned photojournalists ply their trade.

However, most newspapers dived into the deep end of the pool of Web videojournalism without filling it properly, and ended up hurting themselves pretty badly. Specifically, in an effort to save money in these budget-crunching times, instead of hiring trained video crews and editors, newspapers handed digital videocameras to their reporters and told them to shoot their stories as they were reporting them – and then edit and upload the resulting video themselves.  Heck, any teenager can use YouTube, they reasoned; how hard could this be?

For starters, not many of those writers possessed any sense of visual aesthetics – why should they? And even among those lucky few that did, not many were up to the task of processing, editing, and producing multimedia packages. After all, they had a daily print deadline to meet, and there are only so many hours in a day!

Reporters became frustrated that their editors were essentially asking them to take on these monumentally time-consuming extra tasks, which required an entire different set of skills and talents. Consequently, their resulting slideshows and videos were less than stellar.

Photojournalists to the rescue! Well, almost. Again, just because someone has a good eye for taking pictures, and capturing newsmaking moments, doesn’t necessarily translate to being able to shoot, edit and produce a digital movie (or even audio slideshow) that meets the dual high standards of powerful journalism and compelling storytelling.

Traditionally, print reporters conduct interviews and photographers accompany them to visually document events. By arming photographers with videocameras, they were being asked to do everything themselves – reporting, writing, shooting, editing.

So the first round of Web videojournalism was basically a moving version of still photographs. Accompanying a text story about a garbage collector you’d find a short video of him dragging and lifting cans. Not exactly riveting – and no wonder that viewers didn’t want to invest the time watching these boring vignettes. Media outlets were desperately counting on big viewership so they could sell video ads to precede these stories, but because the product was so inferior, nobody was watching! The future of Web multimedia did not seem bright.

But little by little, a few newspapers started figuring it out. They paired up print journalists with photographers, and invested in hiring (and training) talented videojournalists.  Some still photographers took it upon themselves to learn new techniques and technology, so that they could be in the vanguard of a whole new medium.  Slowly the cream started rising. Gradually we started to see the emergence of high quality multimedia journalism.

Well, not all of us. In fact, most people will tell you that they hardly ever see multimedia journalism of any quality! It wasn't until I began revising my photojournalism textbook last year and started searching — REALLY searching — for the good stuff, that I started to see the high quality, exciting stuff that so few people know about.

There are two inter-related reasons for this. One, most people don’t realize it’s out there; two, the stories are well hidden. It’s a Catch-22.

The publishers can’t sell ads on or around multimedia until a lot of people see it, but at the same time they don’t want to invest a lot of money promoting it (or take up a lot of valuable Web real estate with it) because they aren’t making money on it – because nobody’s watching it.

Consequently, most people can’t even find it to look at it, even if they wanted to.  (And, let’s face it, when you’re cruising the Web for news and information, you’re unlikely to spend a lot of time exploring or taking a chance on watching a 5-minute video, especially if there’s nothing explaining what it’s about or why you might enjoy it.)  So it’s a vicious circle.

That’s where we come in. I decided to create a TV Guide, if you will,  to the best video and multimedia journalism on the Web, so that you can find the good stuff fast. We’ll find it for you, we’ll show you where it’s hiding, we’ll explain why you’ll want to see it, and we’ll lead you there with one click.

When you go to KobreGuide in a few weeks, you’ll be able to see, at a glance, the best the medium has to offer. Unlike YouTube and its ilk, KobreGuide is professionally curated, meaning that our seasoned editors and photographers are actively searching for and hand-selecting what we think you’ll most appreciate. 

There are plenty of sites that will offer you everything out there – go to Blinkx, for example, if you want to wade through a swamp of “18 million hours of video.” But if your time is precious, then let us point you to one or two truly prize-worthy video stories that will inform, entertain, and possibly even alter your perceptions. Stories you’ll love so much, you’ll want to tell your friends about them.

Here’s an example of an L.A. Times project that got a lot of attention in its print editions – and the story was even picked up by Rolling Stone magazine – but the original audio slideshow was buried so deep on latimes.com that hardly anybody saw or heard it. Titled “Marlboro Marine,” it’s a tale told by L.A. Times photographer Luis Sanco, whose closeup image of  Marine Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, cigarette dangling from his lips, became an emblem of the Iraq war.

In a series of emotionally charged audio-slideshows, we learn the dramatic story of what happened AFTER that famous photo was published. When Sanco found out that, after returning stateside, Miller was suffering severe post-traumatic stress disorder, the photographer himself set out to help the soldier – and documented their tandem “rescue” mission, not only with photos but also with accompanying audio narration by both men.

That’s  the kind of powerful multimedia journalism you’ll have a hard time finding on your own, but you’ll  see prominently spotlighted on KobreGuide. (And here’s the link to the story, if you can’t wait for our official debut: www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-marlboro11nov11,0,4380908.story)

So. We’re just a few weeks away from launch. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve got. Meanwhile, if you’ve personally created or encountered multimedia journalism you’d like to share, please let us know. We welcome your savvy eyes and ears.

For our mission statement, and more details on our criteria of exactly what we’re looking for, please go to our placeholder blog at KobreGuide.com. And give us your feedback: kenkobre (at) gmail (dot) com.

We always enjoy hearing from you.

If you don't know Rick Smolan, you surely know the book projects he has created, starting with the Day in the Life Series, going all the way back to "A Day in the Life of Australia" in 1981. Rick's wife, Jennifer Erwitt, was project director for those books, and the two also collaborated on "A Passage to Vietnam" and other books through their company, Against All Odds Productions. They are a real dynamic duo when it comes to organizing and producing wonderful photography projects.

Rick and Jennifer's latest book project is called "America at Home: A Close-Up Look at How We Live." Whereas other projects dispatched 100 or more professional photographers to capture moments in time... in the US, the USSR, and even "in" Cyberspace, this time Rick and Jennifer invited not just pros but tens of thousands of amateurs to submit snapshots showing what their homes mean to them.

The editing job gives me a headache to think about it... 250 final images selected from—are you ready?—250,000 submissions! The resulting $40 full-color coffee table book is a fascinating collection of photos representing different cultures, rituals, and events that, as Rick says, make a house a HOME.

What makes this book particularly fun for photographers like you is that you can upload a picture of your own family, pets, etc., "at home" to create a custom book jacket. What a great way to personalize a gift... one for parents, another for aunts and uncles, etc.

Not only that, but by buying the book direct on the "America at Home" site, the $8 custom cover is FREE. (While it's true that I think you would be well-served to use a Lightscoop to light your images, you are welcome to upload anything from scanned old family photos to shots right out of your cell phone.)

Another cool feature of the site itself, by the way, is that it allows you to browse the book digitally. Enjoy the adventure... and put YOUR photo on the cover...

Congrats to Jessica Pons, who is the top finalist in the Picture Story/Series Competition of the Hearst Photojournalism Awards Program this year and is one of four who will compete for a semi-final round of judging in May. This was the third and final photojournalism competition of this academic year, entered by 43 students nationwide. Hats off also to SFSU student Jeff Enlow, who placed among the top 20 finalists.
 
            Jessica and the other three top finalists in the Picture Story/Series Competition, along with the top four finalists in the previous two competitions, will submit additional photos for the semi-final round of judging this May.  Of those, six photojournalists will be chosen to compete in the program's national photojournalism Championships in San Francisco, along with winners in the writing and broadcast news competitions.
 
            The photojournalism judges are:  Janet Reeves, Director of Photography, The Rocky Mountain News, Denver, CO; Mary Shanahan, Creative Director, Town & Country Magazine, New York, NY; and Pim Van Hemmen, Assistant Managing Editor/Photography, The Star-Ledger, Newark, NJ.
 
      

We're excited around here... As I wrote not long ago, we've signed an exclusive agreement with Adorama.com to be our sole online/mail order retailer partner. We're in the catalog! One of the purchasers there saw the New York Times' David Pogue's review on CNBC last December, and after months of discussions and preparations for the retail market, Professor Kobré's Lightscoop is OUT THERE! Both the CNBC piece and Pogue's end-of year column in the New York Times caught the eye of some major retailers, but after interviewing other small manufacturers like us, we were impressed by how much they respected and liked working with Adorama. We hope eventually to be in retail storefronts, but we're selling online only through our own site and Adorama. Adorama has a huge line of still and video photography equipment. We're very excited to be working with them and hope you will patronize them for your other photography needs!

SFSU photojournalist Michael Mullady took top honors in the WHNPA student division this year. His smashing portfolio featured two photo stories: “Children of Lead,” which studied a town in Peru where 99%
of the children have lead poisoning, and “Delicate Strength,” which followed a young woman struggling
to overcome stereotypes of people with disabilities.

Justin Maxxon, another SFSU student, earned an Honorable Mention.

Congrats, guys. You are doing amazing work.