duckrabbit - we produce photofilms » environment

For your viewing pleasure: The Big Caption

Adam Westbrook — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 12:14:00 +0000

As you’ve probably read over the last week, we’re big fans of photo-blogs like the New York Times’ Lens blog, which showcase some of the best photography from around the world each and every day.

Alongside Lens, there’s also the Big Picture, run by the Boston Globe. Again, it shows big images every day from somewhere on the planet.

It’s now got it’s own spin-off, in the rather hilarious The Big Caption. Each day, someone takes the Globe’s Big Picture, and sticks an off the wall Big Caption all over it, to create a new piece of art altogether. The man behind it, Ian Collins clearly has a good grasp of graphic design and typography, as well as a great sense of humour making this concept a brilliant cheer-me-up to stick in your Google Reader, not to mention being occasionally profound.

MUSTAFA OZER/AFP/Getty Images)

ADAM WESTBROOK

duckrabbit:

These are great, but I think there is a real issue about the copyright of these images. I don’t think it will be very long before the lawyers at Getty send The Big Caption a Big Bill!

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Boston Big Picture vs BP

David White, photographer — Mon, 24 May 2010 19:25:47 +0000

I tried to think of something clever to put here. Pointless.

LOOK.

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raw beauty – Iceland’s volcano

Ciara — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 07:21:53 +0000

Sometimes you have to just sit back and marvel at the power of Mother Nature.

These photos by Icelandic photographer Ragnar Th. Sigurdsson of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano – currently causing so much misery for air passengers, airlines and not forgetting fruit, veg and flower growers in many developing countries – are quite incredible. First seen on the New York Times Lens blog.

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Why Context Matters

duckrabbit — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:14:36 +0000

Answers to the following questions will not be found here or here:

Who are these villagers?

What are their lives like?

How do they know how to strip an elephant?

What use is made of its bones, meat etc?

Why are they ’starved of meat’?

What makes the elephant a valuable commodity?

What is the relationship of man to beast in this region?

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WOW WOW WOW

duckrabbit — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:57:29 +0000

Watch this video featuring National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen … really do!

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An illuminated view of climate change in Bangladesh

Adam Westbrook — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:57:54 +0000

Yesterday in London I decided to get wonderfully lost. I had some hours to kill and so I started walking along the river not really caring where I ended up.

Where I ended up was the small but popular gallery beneath the OXO Tower, only 10 minutes from where I started. The building used to be a cold meat warehouse apparently, and a scene from the new Sherlock Holmes film is set there.

Today it’s the home of an exhibition by Photojournalist Peter Caton.

Peter’s produced a series of startling images from Bangladesh, what is fast becoming the frontline of climate change. His portraits of the people living with rising waters are rich in colour and powerful. What stands out is how Peter takes his pictures.

The British born photographer lugs a mobile lighting kit with him to produce a studio finish to his images. Who does that?

You can see the result of this in the picture above – it almost looks mocked up, but then you realise it isn’t in a studio at all; for me it meant the message of Peter’s images snuck in beneath the radar and made me think differently. A few too many of them follow the hackneyed tradition of having poor people stare like puppies into the camera. But a few – like the one above – remind us these people have dignity despite their terrifying situation.

If you’re in London I recommend you give the exhibition half an hour of your time. And of course Duckrabbit have returned from a reporting trip in Bangladesh too so expect more great photojournalism & multimedia from a story which really, really needs to be told.

ADAMWESTBROOK

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Sometimes it takes just one picture…

Adam Westbrook — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:16:35 +0000

…to show you the importance of stepping back, and slowing down.

…and sometimes we don’t even need a human being to take it.

ADAM WESTBROOK

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Tsunami – five years on

Ciara — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:23:26 +0000

It’s hard to believe that Saturday will mark five years since the devastating south Asian Tsunami which claimed some 300,000 lives. To mark this anniversary – hardly one to celebrate – DFID, the department for international development, dispatched Panos photographer Abbie Trayler Smith to show how British money has helped rebuild shattered lives in Banda Aceh, one of the many impoverished communities hit, and this audio slideshow is the result. It’s great that government comms people – as well as some NGOs – are starting to recognise the power of using multimedia to tell genuine stories.

CIARA LEEMING

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‘Kenya hasn’t seen a drop of rain for several years.’

duckrabbit — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:27:27 +0000

If you have no knowledge about East Africa you might actually believe a statement like the one written above presumably by the photographer Stephano de Luigi on the VII website.

I’m wracking my brains to imagine how he (or someone else) could have got it so wrong, and how no-one else has spotted it? Of course it rains on large parts of Kenya. Kenya has a rainy season but there’s not been enough of it and in some places the rain didn’t come at all. That’s something altogether different from the notion that Kenya hasn’t seen any rain at all for several years.

The photos themselves are powerful but leave me cold. Perhaps that’s because I’ve lived in this part of the world and I just find that on the whole photographers struggle to represent these people. Maybe that’s a failing of photography as a medium more than any comment on the photographers themselves. Most media is shallow but its just that it grates more when you see shallow work on serious subjects. Again that’s not really the fault of the photographer who is working on a very limited budget with time constraints.

This is made worse when the accompanying text is both inaccurate and poor.

These people deserve better, don’t they?

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Oxfam and the Guardian launches interactive documentary on Bangladesh

duckrabbit — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:09:10 +0000

Its brilliant that Oxfam have put so much effort into creating an online documentary about the effects of climate change on the people of Bangladesh.

On the upside Oxfam used a local media team who were on the scene when cyclone Aila hit. Respect. There’s also a clear way of responding by sending a message to the team who are traveling to Copenhagen on the UK’s behalf to negotiate a deal. I think it’s really important that charities give people some way to respond other than putting their hands in their pockets. Sure that’s one way of helping but it’s more important that people are engaged in these issues, that they aren’t given the sense that charitable giving can lead to any kind of widespread meaningful solution to the serious problems of inequality in this world.

On the downside there’s no way that I can embed any of the stories on duckrabbit or A Developing Story, limiting the ability of the documentary to travel around the web. This is surely a mistake if Oxfam are serious about getting the message out (and clearly they are). I’m not talking about dumping videos on youtube, but offering a fully embeddable feature that people can host on their blogs and websites. Human Rights Watch have already started to experiment with this, to great effect.

I know for a fact that when we embed a video on duckrabbit many more people watch it then if we just pop up a link to a video on an external website. Generally though, to get on duckrabbit or a similar website, the quality of the content needs to be decent, and up till now that has been the major problem for NGOs, their communications are often more of a turn off than a turn on.

All in a ll huge respect to Oxfam for this innovative work.

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