David Levene: Haiti's Saut D'Eau

Photograph © David Levene/The Guardian -All Rights Reserved
Every year, thousands of Haitian pilgrims converge into the basin of Saut D'Eau's sacred waterfall to pray. They throw their clothes into the cascading waterfall where the faithful believe the Virgin Mary (known as Erzulie in Haitian Voodoo), appeared in the 1800s.

Haitian Voodoo was created by African slaves merged their ancestral religious traditions with Roman Catholic practices, allowing them to continue observing their ancient beliefs under the scrutiny of the French colonialists. Today, many move freely between the two beliefs.

Being in London, I gleefully peruse all the British newspapers (which stand head and shoulders above ours in terms of candid and more substantial coverage...I know, I just can't help myself), and I was glad to have seen the Spiritual cleansing in Haiti feature, a SoundSlides with photographs by David Levene on The Guardian newspaper's website.

I'm surprised that it has no intro frames with titles and no credits, but the image sequencing and the accompanying ambient audio manage to pull it together. It certainly needs some "tarting up" as they say here, but otherwise it's an interesting feature.

Jeffrey A. Davis: Lumen Production

Photograph © Jeffrey A. Davis -All Rights Reserved
Jeff Davis works through the Lumen Production Company as documentary photographer, filmmaker, producer and advocate. His imagery has appeared in newspapers, magazines, websites, calendars, museums, festivals and galleries. He also works as executive producer for "Art Wolfe's Travels To The Edge", a 26-part TV series for Public Television. He works with Phil Borges' Bridges To Understanding project, and The Tibetan Nun Project, among other worthwhile endeavors and ventures.

Out of his many projects and galleries which are all terrific, I liked Path of Promise best, as it involves photographs of Tibetan nuns as they live and worship at various nunneries in Dharmasala, India. While participating myself in Phil Borges' Bridges To Understanding program in Dharmasala in 2005, I visited one of these nunneries, and was struck by the nuns' dedication and hospitality.

Here's Jeff Davis' Lumen Production

Lightroom, MediaStorm and SoundSlides?

Photograph © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
I'll be blogging from London, England for about two weeks.

Here's a post by travel & outdoor photographer Michael Clark for the O'Reilly Digital Media blog which I can't agree with more.

The gist of the article is that with photojournalism rapidly evolving, and the growing necessity of integrating still photography into multimedia, and since Lightroom is currently the leading tool for photographers to work with their images, Michael's opinion (and Bob Sacha's as well) is that it would be an enormous advantage to have SoundSlides integrated into Lightroom as a plug in or in some other manner.

Yes, and yes.

I've already written on the imperative of photographers and photojournalists being multimedia narrators here, and this article simply reinforces my multimedia evangelism.