© AP Photo/APTN

Did a family emergency, act of God or snooze button prevent you from tuning in to watch the Royal Wedding this morning? Don’t worry, the Associated Press has you covered. The wire service sent 21 photographers to document every last detail of Wills’ and Kate’s big day.

AP picture editors are already picking through the thousands of images AP photographers made, the best of which will be gathered into a commemorative book that will be available next week (technology!) from online on-demand publisher My Publisher. The handshake between Mr. Middleton and the Prince, the exchange of rings, the kiss (!), that rascal Harry’s proud smile—all of these moments can be yours to cherish.

The limited-edition book—limited to what, you ask? As many copies as people are willing to order, we’d wager—will be available in two sizes. Prices for your very own Royal Wedding album have yet to be announced, but we’re pretty sure they’re just going to call it priceless. Well played, AP.

Watch this space: http://www.mypublisher.com/royalwedding

An AP photographer has left his former colleagues at the New Orleans Times-Picayune feeling shocked and betrayed over his failure to report police abuse that he witnessed in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according to a story published yesterday by the Los Angeles Times.

“From his own testimony in a trial last fall against several New Orleans officers, it became clear that [Alex] Brandon withheld much of what he knew about the violent, rogue policing inflicted on some African American residents after the storm,” Los Angeles Times reporter James Rainey wrote in his column called On the Media.

Rainey said that Brandon’s former Times-Picayune colleagues have pressing questions to ask him: Why didn’t he tell them more of what he saw? Is there anything more he needs to tell them about what the New Orleans police did after Katrina? Does he have any regrets?

Brandon joined the AP in 2006, but he was part of the Times-Picayune team that covered the disaster in New Orleans in September 2005. At the time, he allegedly told editors that police had shot suspected looters in a gun battle—the police version of events—when in fact they had fired on flood victims who posed no threat, and who were trying to flee across a bridge from a flooded and lawless section of the city. And Brandon reportedly said nothing to colleagues about his knowledge of another September, 2005 shooting death by police until he testified in court last fall against the police officers involved. It was an excessive force case, and three officers were convicted.

Rainey’s story suggests that Brandon had turned a blind eye to the police brutality because he had embedded himself with a police unit right after Katrina and had become too close to them. One of his former colleagues said “it was like he was a double agent,” while another questioned Brandon’s moral courage, according to Rainey.

John Daniszewski, a senior managing editor for the AP, told Rainey that he couldn’t comment on Brandon’s activities while he was with the Times-Picayune. “And his service since joining the AP has been appropriate in all respects,” Daniszewski added.

AP spokesperson Paul Colford declined a request for further comment. We also asked Brandon for an interview, but Colford responded on his behalf, declining that request, too.

While on assignment for the New York Times in Tunisia, Magnum photographer Moises Saman was attacked by a group of police officers, a post today on the Times’ Lens blog said.

Saman was photographing police as they beat a protester when the officers turned on him. Saman suffered “mild” injuries, the report said.

Earlier this month, European Press Photo Agency stringer Lucas Dolega was killed in Tunisia during protests that led to the dissolution of the government of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Dolega was shot with a tear gas canister at close range and later died of his wounds in a hospital.

Related: Photographer Dies of Injuries In Tunis

Nigerian Photographer Dies in Blast; CPJ Reports 44 Work-Related Journalist Deaths in 2010

The nearly simultaneous publication recently of three photo essays from Afghanistan in three different publications stirred up some partisan debate last week on Michael Shaw’s BagNews Notes blog. Shaw noted that the three award-winning photojournalists who shot the stories – James Nachtwey, published in Time; Tyler Hicks, published in The New York Times; and Louie Palu, published in the Toronto Star-  had all been embedded with helicopter medavac units, and all showed them tending to wounded soldiers.

“Is this pure coincidence?” Shaw wrote, “Or, does it illustrate (too well, in this case) the acumen of the Pentagon in the mediating of war access? Either way, in the aggregate this is a stunning display of American chauvinism given the intimate framing of the war in such a redundantly heroic narrative, all eyes on our warriors as saviors on high.”

Shaw wrote that he didn’t want to “take anything away from the thoroughly accomplished” photographers, only to critique how “big media” has filtered coverage of the war. The New York Times did not respond to our requests for comment; a spokesperson for Time would say only that the publication of the three stories “is pure coincidence. To suggest anything otherwise is completely inaccurate.”

But at least one of the photographers cried foul, and passionately.

“It just makes me angry. [Shaw has] taken one photo out of an entire essay, and used it to suit his argument. What he’s saying is important, but he misused my photo” to say it, Palu says.

Contrary to what Shaw wrote in his original post (which Shaw has since amended), The Star didn’t hire Palu to shoot the story. He says he took the medevac embed last fall as part of his Alexia Grant project to document the social, cultural, and political fabric of the Kandahar region. The Star picked up his story-which included more than medevac pictures–afterwards. Part of Palu’s motive for taking that embed, he says, was to get access to civilians. And the medevac embed was one small part of a six-month trip to Afghanistan.

“I’m not defending the military or Pentagon,” he says. “Obviously, the images [Shaw selected] are good publicity [for the US military,] but I’m showing a lot more than heroic medics. I’ve shown civilians people ripped apart, and soldiers missing their legs, with no medics tending them”

In other words, he says, he’s made a lot of photographs of military and civilian casualties that don’t make the military look good at all. But photojournalists covering the war just can’t seem to win, he says. “If we cover just dead bodies and dead soldiers, we get criticized…We’re finally showing casualties, and getting criticized for showing casualties because we’re showing medics saving them.”

The Star‘s Foreign Editor, Colin MacKenzie, said Shaw’s blog post “takes us back to the beginning of the embed debate, at the dawn of time. Yeah, you’re covering your team, in effect. Implicit with the embed is, you’re with your guys, and that’s the price you pay for access.

“The images are implicitly rah rah because you are rescuing people. If it was the only coverage that The Times and Time magazine and The Star were doing, it [Shaw's criticism] might be a fair accusation. But none of the organizations have confined our coverage to rah rah embed stuff.”

After PDN contacted Shaw about Palu’s comments, Shaw added a note to his post clarifying when Palu shot the images, but he told PDN via email, “I’m less concerned about HOW they got there than THAT they ARE there and what effect they have, once there, on the public mind and the behavior of the citizenry.”  The blog is concerned with published images and the messages they convey, he says; film critics don’t interview  movie stars before writing reviews, and he doesn’t  interview photographers.  “That’s not to say that I don’t also have a lot of opinions about the powers that be and how corporate media, the military and the government are extraordinarily sophisticated about visual messaging (by commission AND omission) in the shaping of public opinion. I do, I don’t hide it and I don’t apologize for it. “

He notes that he’s familiar with Palu’s work, and knows him as “someone who has no qualms about speaking truth to power.” But he’s concerned with the military’s control of news. “It’s the frustration over the military’s media control and censorship, combined with big media’s recent attraction to uncomplicated ‘personal interest’-type pieces.… that, I believe, has produced such a strong and confirming response to my post from shooters and citizens alike.”

Shaw adds, “I’d go so far as say that, if only a fraction of Louie’s work from Afghanistan had been published flat out (especially his earlier work from the South), and we didn’t have the media filter to contend with, the US would probably have withdrawn several years ago.”

--David Walker
(images, top to bottom: © JAMES NACHTWEY FOR TIME; © TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES; © LOUIE PALU/ZUMA PRESS; )

©Mail on Sunday/ZUMApress

In mid-December we postulated that this Morry Gash AP photo of Lebron James unleashing a tomahawk jam while Dwayne Wade soars underneath like an airplane might be the best sports photo of 2010.

Now, The Wall Street Journal is weighing in with its list of the five top sports images of 2010 and along with including Gash’s photo it includes commentary from the photographers on the stories behind the shots.

According to photographer Mark Pain, who captured the comical shot of Tiger Woods driving the ball right into his lens, the Cigar Guy in the image who become an Internet cult figure, was nearly edited out of the picture.

“The ball came straight toward me, hit the camera in the lens, bounced onto my chest and landed between my feet,” said Mark Pain, a Mail on Sunday photographer. “One of the loveliest things about the photo is the expression of the spectators. It’s, like, ‘Wow, that guy’s gonna get hit!’” As for Cigar Guy? He was almost cropped out. “He very nearly didn’t get his moment of fame,” he said.

Last week TIME magazine called Brazilian photographer Mauricio Lima “Wire Photographer of the Year.” This is the first year TIME has singled out a wire photographer for recognition.

A former sports photographer, the Sao Paulo-based Lima joined AFP ten years ago and has worked in Latin America and the Middle East, among other places.

According to TIME, Lima’s photos from Afghanistan stood out among “the millions of images” coming through the wires this year. It was Lima’s first trip to Afghanistan, during which time he spent a month embedded with Marines in Helmand Province, and another month working on his own while based in Kabul.

Lima told TIME that his goal in Afghanistan was “to document the lives of ordinary people in this extraordinary situation,” which he accomplished by creating “parallel stories, the ones behind the headlines.”

In a gallery of Lima’s images posted on TIME.com, TIME photo editor Phil Bicker commended Lima on his pastel color palette, which Bicker said was perfect for the “dry, dusty landscape and ancient culture” of Afghanistan. Lima noted that “capturing real colors and lights” in his images and using “very little post production” were keys to his work.

To read more about Lima’s work and see a gallery of his images visit:

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2039390,00.html

One interesting aspect of publishing “PDN Photo of the Day,” our photography blog, is seeing which photographs and photographic subjects attract the largest number of readers. Often our readers enjoy photographs that we find interesting and beautiful, then share the posts with friends, and the audience for a particular entry grows exponentially. Other times a post we’re particularly excited about receives a more modest response for one reason or another.

As the year drew to a close, we decided to get in touch with the editors of four photography blogs published by major newspapers to see which of their posts were the most-viewed this year. (more…)

The ad sales and newsstand success of a September issue is so important to a fashion magazine’s bottom line that media watchers and the fashion press were breathlessly reporting who would be featured on the covers of the big fashion issues back in July.

Last week the Audit Circulations Rapid Report announced which fashion magazines scored well in single copy sales; the results were reported by Women’s Wear Daily Memo Pad.

Harper’s Bazaar, featuring a Mark Seliger photo of actress Jennifer Aniston, had its best-selling issue in seven years, with 255,000 copies sold on the newsstand. Vogue, which showed actress Halle Berry photographed by Mario Testino, sold 5.5 percent fewer copies than it did in September 2009. Berry is only the second woman of color to appear on Vogue‘s fall-fashion issue. (The first was Naomi Campbell, who appeared on the September 1989 issue.)

The September issue of W, the first redesigned issue since editor-in-chief Stefano Tonchi was hired this spring to reposition the struggling magazine, sold only 30,000 copies on the newsstand; that’s a 14 percent decline over its September 2009 issue. W‘s gatefold cover featured eight young actresses including Kat Dennings, Jessica Chastain and Greta Gerwig (We know what you’re thinking: Who?)  wearing all-black outfits. They were photographed against a gray background by Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin.

More insights into Tonchi’s planning for W‘s September will be available on the W Web site tonight.   “Fashion on Film,” the magazine’s online online festival of fashion-related videos, will kick off with a ten-minute mini documentary called “The Remaking of W.” According to Women’s Wear Daily, the documentary, shot mostly in the W offices, includes an interview with Tonchi in which he discusses his plans to refocus the magazine on style and culture.

It should be noted that cover photos alone don’t sell issues. It’s possible more people wanted to read “937 New Looks” in Bazaar than wanted to read “726 Pages of Sumptuous Fall Fashion At Every Price” in Vogue. (A question for Tonchi: Are you getting pressured to put more numerals on the cover?)

Related Story:

Quon Out as W Creative Director

According to a report released last month by The Nielsen Company, which owns PDN, global ad spending in the first half of 2010 was up over the same period in 2009. The report did not factor in internet spending.

“The U.S. market, which faced six straight quarters of declines in ad spending, has seen a turnaround in 2010,” the report said.

After a dismal 2009, the automotive sector showed a 27% increase in spending in 2010, and auto insurance companies spent 23% more on advertising. Those gains helped increase total ad spend in the U.S. more than 3% since last year.

Print media spending was up in several categories. Local newspapers were up slightly, but national newspapers showed a nearly 11% increase. National Sunday supplements climbed 22%, and national magazines gained more than 2%.

Outdoor advertising grew 1.5%, the report said.

More: Global Ad Spending Shows Signs of Growth

In a memo sent to U.S. News & World Report staff this past Friday, editor Brian Kelly, and president William D. Holiber announced that the organization would stop printing monthly magazines and focus on digital publishing.

The gradual move away from print began in 2008. First the magazine reduced frequency from weekly to biweekly issues. Then a few months later it became a monthly.

U.S. News will still print a handful of special issues each year, like its college and hospital rankings issues, which will be distributed on newsstands and through other means.

According to reports the memo stated that no layoffs would result from the decision.

Via: New York Times and Media Life Magazine