An elephant driver goes for a swim. Photo courtesy of Cesare Naldi/National Geographic

The National Geographic Society is one of the world’s leading non-profit scientific and educational organizations in the world, whose general purpose is to get people to care more about their planet. And in its annual International Photography Contest, the NGS gathers some of the most stunning portraits from all over the world.

The National Geographic Magazine has been home to some of the most outstanding photojournalism in the world for almost a century, and in its open photography contest, amateur and professional photographers alike have a chance to show their own images. This year’s round is a collection of thousands of images from all over the world, with the winners earning a chance to have a spread in the magazine, along with a brand new LEICA D-LUX 4 camera kit.

This year’s competition is already closed, but you can see a slideshow of the best entries and vote for your favorites, as well as view past winners, play puzzles or download wallpapers, all at the NGS website.

As we’re getting very near the close of this year and our first decade of the new millennium, I’m looking ahead to our goals for the next one.  But really more to the point, I’ve been looking over how much I’ve had the good fortune to learn as the host of my show now named Advancing Your Photography.

As a side note, you have no idea how hard it is to edit some of our interviews down to the short segments that we publish. I’m there with each guest, soaking in perhaps an hour or two of data and need to whittle it down to about 10 minutes or less. In addition, I’ve had several conversations with each guest, often a tour of their studio and their work and come away with a healthy plate of material to noodle on.

I keep pondering how to bring more of this information to you, and even more importantly, ways we can leverage what we already have out there. This has brought me to the realization that we need to start a new photography school for Advancing Your Photography— from whatever level, onto the next and the next…

From my own experience at the San Francisco Art Institute (BTW, never did graduate from) and my talk with Annie Leibovitz about this last year, I’d say offhand that these are the essential ingredients of a photography school:

1.    Instructors who know their business and can speak from experience and who can pass along, technical, compositional and even philosophical information that opens students’ eyes and help them to advance.
2.    Being exposed to the work of other students—as with sports, you learn by watching how others do it, along with a healthy competition built into the process. Annie talked about her experiences in the darkroom where her photos were in the wash along with other students, for everyone to see, and you naturally wanted them to be good.
3.    Being critiqued. This is can be a sweet and sour proposition as not all critiquing is positive (meaning effective in helping one advance) by a long shot.  I believe that opinions should be left out of it—including “nice shot” “wow” or “that’s just terrible” and my favorite “WHY did you take that photograph?” (with a condescending tone flavored into it.)  Critiques that cause you to look at your process and how you might improve your images are valuable.
4.   Along with 1. above, constantly being exposed to other accomplished artists and learning from them.
5.   Add to that the somewhat intangible quality of gaining a professional attitude, which hopefully is nurtured in the process of the above.

And of course, added to all the above, taking a boatload of photographs to develop your own style and voice.

I’m sure I left out many other factors, but the above boils down to:
1.    Learning from other accomplished photographers (instructors, guests and students alike.)
2.    Effective critiquing.
3.    Easy access to the knowledge-base of the school as well as to its members.
4.    An environment that both educates and inspires and opens up communication.
5.    Mix in some healthy competition in the form of contests.

This is the direction we’ll be going with in the new year and the new decade with ADVANCING YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY. I’ll roll out the specifics of how we will accomplish these points, but for now our general plan is to create an online learning center (as well as real world seminars, photowalks, etc) that incorporates the above.

I would love to hear from you how this strikes you, if you’d like to participate and how you would like to advance your photography.  And may I say happy Thanksgiving to you and yours…

At left is the witness’s drawing; Bolivian law prohibits revealing the identity of the suspect, so media outlets covered his face with the sketch, right.

Reason #381 why you should always have your camera with you: earlier this year Bolivian police issued a statement asking people to come forward who might have seen a murder suspect. Soon a woman emerged saying she had an image of the man they were looking for. Of course, that image was all in her head.

Rafael Vargas, a Bolivian taxi driver, was killed in an apparent drug-related hit in March, leaving police officials baffled. So they asked locals to step forward with any information. One neighbor bravely answered the call and supplied police with her own rendering of what the suspect looked like.

The witness’s hand-drawn memory of the man (above left) is being called the worst photo-fit/suspect sketch to ever actually be used in a criminal man-hunt. People say the drawing looks like the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, and more like a child’s doodle than an important piece of forensic evidence. The video of a newsman presenting the image on television, complete with intense music and close-ups, has even become a hit on YouTube.

Still, despite all the laughter the drawing has elicited, it actually ended up being helpful and led to the suspect’s capture. And the drawing has lived on in media broadcasts, because Bolivian laws restrict news organizations from revealing the identity of the suspect. Instead of his real face they use the sketch (above right).

So while the artist-witness should be commended for stepping forward and helping solve a crime, those without her uncanny photographic memory would be better off using an actual camera.

Up close and personal with a playful Leopard Seal in Antarctica. Photo by Paul Nicklen.

Paul Nicklen is used to getting the tough shots. Born and raised in one of the only non-Inuit families in a small Arctic village in Northern Canada, he cut his teeth amid frozen tundras and slippery ice floes, and now he’s one of the most daring members of National Geographic’s team of photographers.

In his latest book, Polar Obsession, Nicklen details his journeys among the wildlife of the poles, which includes stunning shots of walruses, whales, polar bears, narwhals and leopard seals. In a recently released video accompanying his amazing photograph above, Nicklen describes an incredible four-day encounter with a 13-foot long leopard seal.

When first spotted, this particular seal was one of the biggest Nicklen had ever seen. Leopard seals are very playful creatures but are commonly perceived as aggressive and ferocious, a view Nicklen wants to change. So he decided to jump into the frigid water to get a closer look, only to have the giant ocean predator swim up to him, drop a penguin from her mouth and grab his head and camera in her jaws. Luckily, she released him and swam off to get him a present: food.

“I think she realised I was a useless predator in her ocean, probably going to starve to death,” says Paul in the video. “I think she became quite panicked and started trying to feed me weak penguins, then dead penguins, then she started showing me how to eat the penguins and pushed them into my camera which I think she thought was my mouth.”

In the end, Nicklen found the encounter to be an eye-opening experience. “I had a top predator take care of me and nurture me,” he said. “It’s the most amazing experience as a National Geographic photographer I’ve ever had.”

To see Nicklen tell his own story, check out this video from National Geographic.

Christensen hopes to show the effects of climate change through photos like the one above.

As a veteran supermodel, Helena Christensen knows she doesn’t have to do much more than just sit back and look pretty. Still, she wants to make a difference. The celebrity model traveled to Peru recently, armed with a camera and a team of volunteers from Oxfam, to document the particularly devastating effects of climate change upon the country’s people.

When Oxfam International, an organization dedicated to finding lasting solutions to poverty and injustice, announced its project, Christensen, whose mother is Peruvian, was happy to jump aboard. She traveled to the South American country to see the effects of global warming first hand, and she came back with a series of photographs documenting lives on the verge of drought and famine.

“Whole communities are losing their main source of income,” she said, referring to a severe lack of water which would force people to move into big cities. “These cultures will disappear,” she said. “And it’s really sad, because it’s such a special part of South America.”

An exhibition of Christensen’s work is currently on display at London’s Proud Gallery, just days before an important series of climate talks in Copenhagen. Christensen hopes her photos of impoverished rural farmers, children and Quechua people of the Peruvian hillsides will encourage politicians to take a tougher stance against greenhouse gas emissions.

To read more about Christensen’s trek through Peru, and to see a collection of images she captured of the people there, check out this cool slideshow.

Alex Rodriguez in the dugout. Photo courtesy of Jamie Cohen.

Watch the video

In the latest episode of Marc Silber’s Photography Show, I travel to the Big Apple to interview famed sports photographer Jamie Cohen. Her work in the world of athletics includes calendars for NYC sports teams like the New York Rangers, the New York Knicks and a number of drivers for NASCAR. Most notably she has worked for Fox Sports over the last seven years, photographing some of the world’s biggest stars like Alex Rodriguez (above).

During the interview, Jamie offers some essential tips for those of us just beginning portrait photography as well as those who are seasoned veterans. For example, to capture unique images of iconic faces, Jamie has developed a number of tricks and techniques. One thing she likes to do is shoot her subjects “in between poses.” She’ll ask them to fix their shirt or adjust their hair, and as they break from a pose she manages to capture a more intimate, candid expression.

To see the entire interview, including some cool stories and behind-the-scenes footage of sports stars, as well as Jamie’s indispensable advice on capturing incredible portraits, check out the latest photography show episode.

X-ray and infrared light peer through celestial dust to reveal the core of our galaxy.

A new image pulled from three high-powered telescopes offers a never-before-seen view of the insides of our Milky Way Galaxy.

The Hubble and Spitzer telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have joined forces to bring us an incredible image that reaches way beyond the capabilities of the human eye. The image was unveiled by NASA yesterday to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, marking 400 years after Galileo first looked towards the stars with his telescope.

All three observatories had a hand in the image by looking at different parts of the light spectrum: the Chandra X-Ray Observatory satellite focused on the x-ray light (the blue and purple aspects in the final photo), the Spitzer telescope looked at the infrared light (the redness) and the Hubble telescope looked at near infrared light, which is closest to the visible part of the color spectrum (yellow). All three part were combined in the final, multi-wavelength image seen above.

As you can see, the final image is an astounding panorama of the center of our universe, and is one of the most detailed pictures of the Milky Way Galaxy ever produced. To get the full effect of the photograph, select schools and planetariums around the country will display giant six-foot-by-three-foot prints of the image.

To see more amazing images of space, check out this montage of shots captured from the Hubble telescope.

A snapshot of Ashton Kutcher’s entry in the Nikon Film Festival

Twitter users may be able to microblog their thoughts at less than 140 characters, but can they put all that on film? In a new short film contest from camera-maker Nikon, budding filmmakers are challenged to submit their own videos of 140 seconds or less, with the winner receiving $100,000.

With the theme of “A Day through Your Lens,” the Nikon Film Festival was christened by actor Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s reigning king and Nikon advertising star, who posted his own video, a two minute short film documenting his trip to Africa earlier this year.

The festival also has some other big name celebrities, both from Hollywood and the photography world. Guest judges for the top prizes include the developer of the “Best Camera” iPhone app (and good friend of Silber Studios) Chase Jarvis, YouTube star iJustine, and actor Rainn Wilson, better known as Dwight Schrute from NBC’s The Office. The stars will be sharing their own videos shot with a Nikon D-SLR camera, then judge all submissions.

The festival itself is a promotion for Nikon’s D5000 camera as well as an effort by the brand to merge current social media with innovative products. Nikon wants users to have an outlet to show their personal views to the world, an idea that folks like Rainn Wilson are getting behind.

“As an actor and avid writer, I applaud Nikon’s creation of this Festival to advance the accessibility of thought-sharing and self expression to aspiring filmmakers and photographers,” said Wilson. “I think this is a unique way for people to initiate dialogue on topics they care about, while gaining exposure for their work. I’m excited to check out the videos people submit and will be tweeting throughout the Festival.”

To read up on the contest rules, or to view some of the early entries including submissions from Jarvis, Wilson and Ashton Kutcher, check out the Nikon Festival website.

Migrant worker, April 10th, 2005. Photo by Lu Guang

Though China may be a growing superpower in the world economy, not everyone is happy about the side effects unleashed in the country’s wake. In a new collection of photographs, the spotlight is put on the dark and dirty side of China’s rise to the top, and the effect is devastating.

Photographer Lu Guang’s documentary project, “Pollution in China,” is a horrifying look at some of the worst living and working conditions on the planet. Included are pictures of rivers and reservoirs choked with trash, young children huddling in the cold covered in soot, cities built around coal plants and buried in thick ash, and sewage pipes discharging filth into the great Yangtze River. It’s enough to make the viewer feel dirty, no matter how far away they are from the continent.

This intensity was recognized by a panel of international judges last month. “Pollution in China” took first place, and the $30,000 prize, at the 30th annual awards ceremony for the W. Eugene Memorial Fund in New York City.

This is not the first foray into social documentary for Guang. As a factory worker who had to fight hard to start his own photo studio, Guang has first-hand knowledge of the horrors of being on the underprivileged side of an industrializing nation. This would become the focus of his work, as he sought to further explore “social phenomena and people living at the bottom of society.”

For photographers and artists like Lu Guang, the depiction of these kinds of people helps make sure they are not simply forgotten in China’s rush to the top. To see more from Guang’s amazing, heartbreaking photo-essay, check out this extensive online collection from ChinaHush.

“The Ramones” by Ian Dickson (1977). Photo: Ian Dickson

In a new exhibition of rock and roll photography in New York City, the focus falls not on the rock stars, but on the photographers.

The Brooklyn Museum’s “Who Shot Rock N Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present” offers up almost 200 photographs from over 100 of the most influential music photographers of the last half-century. The collection includes everything from simple black-and-white images to colorful, multi-paneled spreads of singers, rappers, guitarists and showmen.

The exhibit itself is split up into  six sections: rare behind-the-scenes snapshots; iconic musicians like Elvis and Bruce Springsteen at the beginning of their careers; images that capture the energy of live performances, like Jimi Hendrix playing alongside Wilson Pickett, or Johnny Cash giving the finger at San Quentin; pictures of die-hard fans and massive crowds; intimate portraits of artists like LL Cool J; and conceptualized images from album covers, where musician and photographer work together to create art.

According to curator Gail Buckland, who is also the author of a companion book by the same name that was published last month, photography has been an essential component of the evolution of music in the past century. “This is only the beginning of the conversation about the importance of images in rock and roll,” she said.

“The images have been like the step-children of its cultural history, and I wanted them to be part of the pantheon,” Buckland said.

So whether you’re a fan of rock’n'roll or you just want to learn more about the bloodlines that run between photography and the last 50 years of popular music, pick up the book or check out the exhibit. The photographs are on display at the Brooklyn Museum through January 31st, then make their way to Memphis, Tenn., Worcester, Mass., Akron, Ohio and Columbia, S.C.