Photos From Collaborations For Cause
Last week’s “Collaborations For Cause” was a great success, with over 130 attendees participating! This was our latest workshop for nonprofits, communications professionals, creative multimedia storytellers, photographers, and socially responsible corporations. It was a great learning opportunity for me personally, and I know based on the comments we’ve received thus far that it was for many others as well.
Board member Tim Matsui, and also a former Blue Earth project photographer, was kind enough to share a few photos with us on the Blue Earth blog.
Spring 2012 Photo Contest Winners
Blue Earth is pleased to announce the winners of our Spring 2012 Photo Contest! Our work is based on the belief that a dramatic image can change our perception and alter our understanding of a subject. This idea defines our mission to raise awareness about endangered cultures, threatened environments, and critical social concerns through documentary photography. Our very first photo contest this spring was intended to exemplify our mission and the power of photographic storytelling.
1st Place - When The Ice Will Disappear, Samuel Feron.
Runner Up - Pronghorn Antelope Killed by Train, Christopher Boyer.
Runner Up - Demolition of the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant Cooling Tower, Dale Shank.
Everyone at Blue Earth, including our members without whom Blue Earth would not exist, wishes to congratulate our contest winners. And many thanks to our jurors: Jason Houston, Picture Editor Orion Magazine; Gary Halpern, President PhotoMedia & Blue Earth Board Member; and Eric J. Keller, Gallery Director Soulcatcher Studio.
From The Field: Taylor Weidman In Mongolia
“I’m going to be the last herder in my family,” Erdenemunkh, a herder I had just met, said. It was the same thing I had been hearing for the previous three days.
I had been traveling in Azraga, a small region in Central Mongolia that has been hit by a devastating “dzud” - a terrible winter that had killed 40% of Erdenemunkh’s livestock. And his losses weren’t even particularly severe - one of his neighbors lost all but 1 of his 80 cows. For these nomads, most of whom don’t have a bank account, their herds represent their savings, their net worth, and their future earning potential. Losses this high are shocking and recovery is a slow and arduous process.
Read more on the Blue Earth blog...
Blue Earth Accepts Three New Projects
We are very pleased to announce the acceptance of three new projects for sponsorship from our spring 2012 round of submissions. This most recent round was highly competitive, making once again a very difficult choice.
- After Chernobyl, After Fukushima - Michael Forster Rothbart
- Incarcerated Populations: American Prison Perspectives - Christoph Gielen
- Niger Delta - Samuel James
Everyone at Blue Earth, including our members without whom Blue Earth would not exist, wishes to congratulate our new project photographers! We very much look forward to working together to further their efforts to educate the public about these pressing issues.
Read more about these projects and view photos on the Blue Earth blog.
Our Members Make A Difference
Want to help us support great projects like these? Become a member or even just make a donation. With your paid membership, you can help us support photographers working to educate the public about endangered cultures, threatened environments, and urgent social concerns.
Every member makes a difference at Blue Earth!
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Tom Reese At The Burke Museum
New photos from his Choosing Hope: Reclaiming the Duwamish River project at Blue Earth by photographer Tom Reese will be on display at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle from April 5 - July 8, 2012. Admission to the museum at the exhibit opening on April 5, is free as part of the regular “First Thursday” event. Further details will be announced shortly - but if you will be in the Seattle area in the next months, be sure to check out this unique exhibit!
Also, we are very pleased to note that Tom Reese won the Second Place prize at the Earth Through A Lens 2012 competition. The competition is focused on promoting a sustainable environment, and a signature photo “Consume” from his Duwamish project is a perfect example of the power of documentary photography.
Our congratulations to Tom!
Painting With Time: Climate Change
Gary Braasch has launched Painting With Time: Climate Change a new iPad app featuring photos from his Blue Earth project on climate change. The app highlights the effects of climate change across the globe by allowing users to transform images of natural scenes revealing how quickly our planet is changing due to climate change. It opens a new, engaging way for people from grade school on up to directly see the effects of global warming.
The developer has posted a video demo of the app, and it’s available today for free in the iTunes app store.
Bruce Farnsworth In National Geographic’s Visions
Blue Earth project photographer Bruce Farnsworth contributes the opening image of the Visions section in the current issue of National Geographic. Ever the zoologist, Bruce gives us the behind-the-scenes story on how this image addresses a threatened ecosystem in populous southern California:
Life is getting tough for these guys, a keystone species of southern California’s coastal sage scrub ecotype. Just as metamorphs become mature, their natal and breeding ponds begin to dry. They burrow deep into the soil with cartilaginous spurs on their hind feet. During the dry summers and fall, they shut down their metabolism, literally shriveling into something like a dried prune as they survive on their own metabolic water.
Awakened by the first winter rains-triggers may be a combination of increased humidity and the sound of water percolating down into the claypan soil-they wiggle and carve their way to the surface. Each year, with urban sprawl and unregulated off-road vehicle use where ephemeral ponds tend to collect, they are finding fewer places to breed once they get topside.
All told, Bruce says, these spade-foots certainly deserve their “close-up.” :-)
Learn more about his project Amazon Headwaters and consider a donation for the June 2012 launch!
Garth Lenz: Provincial Distance in a Tar Nation
Blue Earth project photographer Garth Lenz recently spoke at TEDxVictoria and his address is now online. Given the ongoing coverage of the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, his message couldn’t be more timely and pressing.
Garth’s project with Blue Earth Energy and Ecology continues his work on the threat presented by unsustainable energy development, particularly unconventional fossil fuels. This work comprises both the photographic documentation of these issues, as well as the effective outreach needed to ensure that the resulting images make a positive contribution. He will be returning this fall to the Alberta Tar Sands to create new work as well as to give a tour of the area to environmental journalists. He will also be touring and photographing the shale gas region of northeastern B.C. on the same trip.
Florian Schulz’s Polar Bears In National Geographic
As part of his travels in the Arctic this summer, Blue Earth project photographer Florian Schulz produced a stunning series of photos featuring polar bears. If you have followed the news, it’s becoming increasingly apparent the dramatic effects global warming is producing in their Arctic habitat, seriously threatening their continued survival. A small gallery of his images from the trip is highlighted in National Geographic.
In addition, National Geographic has a behind the scenes video
profiling Schulz in working in the field, including his efforts in the
Svalbard archipelago capturing a polar bear feeding at the shoreline.
Conservation Photography As Pedagogy
Blue Earth project photographer Bruce Farnsworth has just published a new article “Conservation Photography as Environmental Education: Focus on the Pedagogues” in the journal Environmental Education Research (subscription required). In the article, he explores “the genre of conservation photography” as a “legitimate and highly relevant pedagogical enterprise.”
The study orients to the educational potential of photographs, recommends visual literacy training for teachers and suggests strategies for the discursive use of photographs in environmental education. Conservation photographers offer models for increased eco-visual-scientific literacy, superb resources for student engagement and new paths for community-based ecological education and research.
Our thanks to Bruce for continuing his research highlighting the important work being done by documentary, conservation photographers and contributing to our field!
Support Blue Earth At Think Tank Photo
Need a new camera bag? The folks at Think Tank Photo have generously offered to help support Blue Earth! Using the link above, 10% of the proceeds from all purchases at their store will go to help support Blue Earth’s mission to assist documentary photographers working to educate the public about critical issues.
Think Tank Photo is a group of designers and professional photographers focused on studying how photographers work, and developing inventive new carrying solutions to meet their needs. By focusing on “speed” and “accessibility,” we prepare photographers to Be Ready “Before The Moment,” allowing them to document those historic moments that reflect their personal visions and artistic talents. For some companies, it is only about the product. For us, it is more: It is about supporting photographers doing their job. If we can design products that help photographers travel easier, take pictures faster, and organize their gear more efficiently, then we will have accomplished something beyond the bags themselves.
If you are looking for some new gear for that upcoming expedition, check out Think Tank Photo and support Blue Earth!
Letter From Eastern Congo
I recently returned from seven weeks of fieldwork in South-Kivu Province in Eastern Congo, which borders Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania. Since I started my Cameras without Borders: Photography for Healing and Peace project in Africa I had looked for an opportunity to work in the eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This chance presented itself when I met Pastor Aembe, President of the Great Lakes Foundation, who invited me to Eastern Congo to contribute to their group’s peace building efforts. We met in November 2010 while I lectured at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, as part of a three-month project in Uganda and Kenya.
Since the beginning of the Rwandan genocide in the early 1990s the neighboring parts of Congo have been in constant turmoil and states of war with terrible consequences for the local population and environment. Travel and photography permits are required, and a continual monitoring of the security situation is necessary while working in rural areas of South-Kivu Province.
Read more on the Blue Earth blog...
Shooting From The Heart: Photography That Makes A Difference
Need some help creating your own photographic project? Download a free PDF copy of Blue Earth's highly regarded handbook for photographers developing documentary projects, Shooting From The Heart: Photography That Makes A Difference. This handbook contains several articles by experienced photographers offering advice on a variety of topics from grassroots fundraising and finding an audience to creating narratives that make an impression.
Through its educational efforts and active engagement in the professional community, Blue Earth strives to move forward the agenda of all documentary photographers and photojournalists.
This book is designed to help photographers to implement a documentary photographic project. It is written by experienced members of the board of Blue Earth and other volunteers with special and relevant expertise. The contents of this book roughly parallel the sequence of steps required to successfully create and complete a documentary project.
Also included are sample applications for project sponsorship by successful Blue Earth photographers along with detailed budgets and work plans. We encourage you to download a free PDF version of Shooting From The Heart and have a copy to keep as your own!
Gary Braasch, This Is Climate Change
Many of the 50,000 passengers passing through Reagan National airport in Washington DC daily will now see a different kind of advertisement in the concourse: a new public education initiative has installed a photographic billboard of ongoing climate change today.
This Is Climate Change, an educational project of the Del Mar Global Trust, put up the first of a series of large backlighted photographs yesterday, featuring my time series view of the shrinking Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska. As part ofWorld View of Global Warming, I rephotographed an 1894 image in 2008 to show the visible effect of global warming on the glacier near Juneau.
Read more on the Blue Earth blog...
Photography Store
Blue Earth has launched our new photography store! Great photography books, software, digital storage, and much more - any product sold at Amazon - and all at great prices for our friends and supporters. Help Blue Earth and our project photographers while shopping for your everyday photography supplies.