Ted McLaren, Photo/Multimedia Coordinator with the St. Pete Times, notifed me of their photo blog All Eyes | Reporting with a camera. It’s a good mix of posts from staff and wire photographers.

Half A Tank is a summer-long quest to find images and stories of people whose lives have been altered by a flattened economy. Starting from home in the D.C. suburbs, Theresa Vargas and Michael Williamson are traveling around the country to experience how people are coping, struggling, even flourishing as we all reconsider how we live. Please share your reactions and experiences in the comment sections that follow each post.

via Half a Tank: Along Recession Road - A Multimedia Blog About Americans Adapting to the Recession.

Lens is the photojournalism blog of The New York Times, presenting the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it also seeks to highlight the best work of other newspapers, magazines and news and picture agencies; in print, in books, in galleries, in museums and on the Web. And it will draw on The Times’s own pictorial archive, numbering in the millions of images and going back to the early 20th century.

via Photojournalism - Photography, Video and Visual Journalism Archives - Lens Blog - NYTimes.com.

Need some help with your writing skills? Check out Fifty Writing Tools: Quick List by Roy Peter Clark.

Collective Vision | Photoblog for the Austin American-Statesman.

I thought this Q&A by John Saponara of Too Much Chocolate with Joel Meyerowitz was highly interesting. Especially the segment below about everything in the frame being in ‘play.’

While working on the streets of New York with the Leica I began to see that the slowness of color film and therefore the depth of space it rendered, was forcing me to slow down and make photographs from further back than I had before. This slight adjustment of space and time produced a new kind of image for me, one that emptied the center of the frame of its nominal subject, “the hook” that I had previously built my photographs on, and instead opened the frame to multiple, more fragmentary, simultaneous events. This gave me a new sense of the street as a place where everything was important; the buildings near and far; the movement of people; the basic street furnishings of light poles, phone booths, hydrants, trees, signs, store windows, all of it cohering in a way that broke open the form of my earlier work. I called these new, non-hierarchical pictures, “field photographs,” because everything in the frame was now in play, and the more complex and open-ended I could make the image the more interesting it became to me. I felt I was testing the descriptive limits of the photograph by asking; how much dissonance can a photograph contain and still be readable? Can interesting pictures be made without depending on a central event to hold it together? What does color mean in a photograph?

via toomuchchocolate.org

The photo staff of the State-Journal Register have started a photoblog. In a welcome post Photography Editor Rich Saal said the photo blog is:

. . . a journal about photography by the photo staff of The State Journal-Register. It’s a place where you’ll find the photographers at the newspaper discussing specific photographs and photography in general. As the name implies, we’re inviting you to join us behind the camera’s shutter curtain, so to speak, to hear the story about a certain picture, why it was selected for publication in the newspaper, or to show you some pictures that were not chosen for the print edition. And we’ll occasionally share some of the technical aspects of a photo for those who are interested in taking your own pictures.

via Behind the Curtain.

“IF I had taken the picture that yesterday won the $25,000 National Photographic Portrait Prize, I would have deleted it from my digital camera.”

Look at the finalists in our gallery and tell us below who you think took the best portrait?

via The Daily Telegraph.

“New York is a city of Characters. On the subway and in its streets, from the intensity of Midtown to the intimacy of neighborhood blocks…”

One in 8 Million is a new weekly photo column on NYTimes.com

PBS.org’s MediaShift has nice feature article about Alan Taylor and The Big Picture photoblog he started for Boston.com that has become an internet phenomenon (I can’t seem keep posting about it).

As newspapers struggle to figure out how to tell their stories online, many make the mistake of transfering print rules to the web. This results in the small photos and low-quality videos that frustrate so many users.

The Big Picture has created a way to display powerful images in a user-friendly manner.

Thanks to Megan Taylor for writing the piece and to Simon Owens for pointing it out to me.