ProPhoto has an interesting article on how verbal consent may not be sufficient for model releases in at least 9 states. This is not relevant for editorial photography (the category which most academic photography exists in), but may be applicable to some readers of this blog.
Info - Useful information: April 2006 Archives
Scott North sends me this link to the Japan Times website for a movie about "Japan's Helen Keller"
SHIMONOSEKI, Yamaguchi Pref. (Kyodo) Independent movie distributor Sumio Yamamoto has long been irritated by what he sees as the film industry's excessive concentration in Tokyo....So the 52-year-old Shimonoseki native finally decided to take a chance by making his own film, a story about the turbulent life of a 74-year-old deaf and blind woman in Yamaguchi Prefecture struggling to achieve equal rights for people with visual and hearing disabilities.
The movie -- "Have You Ever Heard of Japan's Helen Keller?" -- was completed recently after months of planning by filmmakers and fundraising by residents of this harbor city. It is Japan's first movie on the life of a deaf and blind person.
The film is directed by Setsuo Nakayama, 68, and stars Ayako Kobayashi, who played the heroine in the popular TV drama "Oshin."
Communications in the field is always a problem. GSM is the cellular technology that is used in most of the world. In the USA, Cingular and T-Mobile are the only providers with GSM networks. If you travel a lot, this list of GSM phone frequencies can come in handy: http://www.celluloco.com/products/customer/pages.php?pageid=18 (died due to link rot) or here: http://global.yesasia.com/help/topic.aspx?topicId=1164&lang=en or http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/gsm/gsm-list.html. If link rot kills them all, there's always google (updated 2006.04.17)
I have a T-Mobile Motorola v-330 which is quad-band, so it works pretty much anywhere except Japan. One reason I like T-mobile is that they will unlock your phone after 6-months of usage, which means you can pick up a local SIM card and use that during your travels rather than burning up roaming minutes. And I think T-Mobile has great customer service.
In Japan, the cheapest is to get a pre-paid cellular. However, they're getting much harder to find than in the past -- and you have to show some proof of ID. I'm not sure if they'll take foreign passports as proof.
Continue reading Fieldnotes: GSM phone frequencies.
National Geographic is up to their usual tricks, running a contest that deprives all entrants of any rights to their own photographs:
By submitting a photograph for consideration... you grant to National Geographic Society and its subsidiaries and licensees (the "NGS") a royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual license to display, distribute and reproduce the Photograph, in whole or in part, in any medium now existing or subsequently developed for editorial purposes without further review or participation from you.
For more info about other photo (and poetry) scams, see my previous blog entry on this topic.
Continue reading Info: National Geographic photo contest scam.
Here's various do-it-yourself photo video production equipment tips from Make Magazine:
There's been a noticeable absence of quality journal articles on the topic of sexuality in Japan. This has now been partially filled by the publication of a special issue (#12, January 2006) of the online journal Intersections: Gender, History, and Culture in the Asian Context. From the table of contents:
Continue reading Info: Special journal on Japanese sexuality.
