Agrandir le plan

This small town, rather run down, sits by the Mekong at its widest spot. It is famous for its freshwater dolphins, which number less than 75 in that spot today from hundreds before. The Irrawaddy dolphins are recognizable by their bulging forehead and squashed nose, and rather whale-like appearance. They’re the pugs of the dolphin family, less conventionally handsome than their bottle-nosed cousins. Though the dolphins are no longer poached, at least not in this part of the Mekong, because locals found out they could make better money from ecotourism, the animals still suffer from accidental deaths in fishermen’s nets and from the ecological damage wrought by dams and industrial pollution further upstream. (Hello, China.)

Catching the dolphins on film comes down to luck since it is impossible to anticipate where they will break the water. By the time you hear the distinctive sound of one of them pushing water out of its blowhole and you turn around, all you catch in circles in the water. And in any case, these dolphins tend not to jump out of the water for fun and play with tourists’ boat as you might have seen bottle-nosed dolphins do. These trips to the surface are utilitarian. They come up, they breathe, they go under. The spectacle is rather in the majesty of the Mekong at sunset and in sitting quietly in a boat, slowly realizing that you are surrounded by discrete, beautiful animals. Anyways, this is what I saw.

Please bear in mind I’m standing at the front of a moving boat with only a digital zoom, hence the shaking. The buzzing is the camera’s microphone picking up the sound of the tape rolling: I really need better equipment.

… minus the Schubert soundtrack of course. (The audio track from the original recording was unusable.)

These gibbons are endangered. As is much wildlife in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Here’s the reason why:

These photos of deforestation (most likely clearing the way for one of the Vietnamese-owned industrial coffee plantations that have been sprouting up in the area) were taken the same day, March 8 2009, maybe 20 kms away from the gibbons. Since the animals were singing, I’m assuming they were a male and a female, but sexually mature females of this species are all blonde, so maybe juveniles. In any case, they were most likely at least partly domesticated because this tree is right outside a guesthouse on the outskirts of the village of Paksong. The gibbons weren’t scared by humans watching or the sounds of the road nearby, nor did they seem unfazed by the lack of trees in this relatively ‘urbanized’ part of the plateau.

As the daughter of a freelance writer, I early on understood that content is worth money and businesses who ask writers and photographers to work for free are hogs. Every time you give up content, you bring down the rates for thousands of freelancers whose livelihood depends on people understanding there’s a monetary value attached to writing and photography. Pick one cause you believe in, my mom once told me, and write for them for free; the rest of them can open their wallets or ask someone else. Then I started writing myself, and I got it even more. But I also jumped on the citizen-journalism bandwagon, which is pretty much the same thing. In fact, it’s the one thing that’s always bothered me about it: we’re asking people to give up material that, especially in breaking news situations, could be worth thousands to them, exploiting the fact that they may not be familiar with media and rights.

But what’s the difference between Schmap’s query and my putting the photo on Flickr, geotagged for everyone to see when they look up Montreal? Maybe it’s that I’m getting a service in exchange from Flickr: they host my photos. I could, I guess, get a service from Schmap if I was visiting any of the cities they cover. Maybe, I’d feel more comfortable if Schmap was an open-source, non-profit, good-doing kind of an enterprise, but it sounds too commercial for me to willingly get robbed of my picture. I have till Sunday to give an answer. What do you think?

In the meantime, my vacation snapshot — which frankly isn’t worth a blog post — will get “wide exposure” right here.

Photographer friends, do me a favor. Which of the two framings above works best? I know it’s not grand art, but I’m unsure without an editor.

But enough with the commiserating. Here’s a post to put us all in a better mood since Murdoch got its claws into Dow Jones. … Funny, I just naturally used “its” when referring to Murdoch. Lapsus calami.

So speaking of flying and of poor journalistic ethics, I found these when scouring the Internets for design ideas for the new site. You have to appreciate the high standards at the Daily Planet. Here’s misrepresenting yourself to get a story. (Note the great headline writing skills.)

Here’s pulling a Judith Miller and “becoming the news.”

Add to that announcing that you’re going to have a scoop but not publishing it just yet. Fantastic business sense.

The full-page headline always gets people’s attention.

And finally, for those copy editors out there.

(I’d give credit to the site I found these on, but I honestly can’t remember where it was.)