Tyler-Shields-Luminance
Tyler Shields speaks at Luminance. Photo by Michael Treola.

The Instigators, Luminance Session Seven

Gary Morgan, CEO and co-founder of Splash News--which was bought by Corbis last year--opened "the instigators" session on day two of Luminance. He spoke about the change that celebrities have brought to news photography. News used to be about issues, it's now firmly about people, he said. He used the recent photos of Prince Harry in Las Vegas as an example. He pointed out that the photos that were sold to TMZ, then later sold to Splash are awful photos, in that they are shot poorly with a phone camera. But the photos made the top headlines and were well paid for because they were the first images to break news. It doesn't matter what kind of camera you have, it matters if you have a picture and you get it out first and fast. This is what is driving the entertainment news market now, he said. The democratization of media creates…

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Peter Yang Luminance
Peter Yang speaks at Luminance. Photo by Michael Treola.

Luminance Session Four: The Light Tamers

The first day of Luminance ended with presentations from three very different photographers. Their presentations were accompanied by strong visuals from their portfolios. We've included links to their work below, we highly recommend taking a look. Barbara Davidson opened the session showing her Pulitzer Prize winning work "Caught in the Crossfire." This body of work, shot over three years, shows the perils of gang violence in Los Angeles. Just because it wasn't a traditional breaking news story, she thought it was an important story to cover and she decided to take it on as a long-term documentary project. Davidson believes gang violence is one of the social ills affecting the inner cities of our country. "We don't only have to go to Afghanistan and Iraq to cover injustices," she says. These injustices are happening here in our backyards, she says. "It's easy for us to ignore it in our own country because…

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Alan Taylor Luminance
Alan Taylor speaks at Luminance. Photo by Michael Treola.

Luminance Session Three: Packaging Media

Eileen Gittins, CEO and founder of Blurb, a digital book publisher, spoke about the 21st century book: what is it now and what might it become? She spoke about how print provides a different experience than digital. Books have physical mass and this may make people feel that they matter more, she says. When she makes the decision between a physical or a digital book she thinks about whether it is something she wants to keep or something she wants to consume. But that's not to say she doesn't see the value in digital. What we used to think of as a book is changing before our very eyes, she says. To help explain this phenomenon, she used an analogy: before there was TV there was radio and when TV first came out it was a lot like radio on TV. Over time TV developed into a new medium entirely. This is…

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Donald Pettit Luminance
Dr. Donald Pettit speaks at Luminance. Photo by Michael Treola.

Luminance Session Two: Photography’s New Frontiers

Cory West, engineering manager for Facebook photos started off the second morning session with a discussion about social photography. Some time back he was interested in the relationship between memory and quality of life. After coming across various articles about the way that we remember things (it turns out that as a result of having instant access to information, we've begun to optimize our memories by not remembering facts in order to better remember how to FIND facts), he decided to do a social experiment with his photos. He photographed 7,000 photos at 27 different social events and posted 950 curated shots on Facebook. He received 880 incidents of participation on 400 of the 950 posted photos. What he found surprising was that 55 percent of the activity was from people he didn't know. When he looked at the data, the numbers did make sense, as he had many more friends of…

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Mashable SGS

Mashable Hosts Social Good Summit 2012

The Social Good Summit is a three-day conference where big ideas meet new media to create innovative solutions. At the summit, innovative technologists, influential minds and passionate activists will come together with one shared goal: to unlock the potential of new media and technology to make the world a better place, and then translate that potential into action. This year’s Social Good Summit will be more engaging than ever. People from around the world, in both the developed and the developing world, will unite in person and online to participate in The Global Conversation – the world’s largest conversation on how technology can grow communities and improve life for all of us as we move toward being a networked society. The Social Good Summit in New York City takes place September 22 – 24, 2012. On September 24 it will go to China and Kenya. Buy tickets to the September 22-24 event…

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