Tomorrow, in many markets in the United States—and later in the week in other markets—Public Broadcasting will air "National Geographic Magazine's Top 10 Photos of the Year." You can see JPEGs of the ten pictures here.
Here are some excerpts from the official write-up:
In 2009, National Geographic’s photographers took more than one million images from which only 1,000 could be published in the magazine. From 1,000, these 10 were singled out for lasting significance.
National Geographic magazine's Top 10 Photos of the Year presents a countdown to the magazine’s best image from 2009, chosen by National Geographic magazine editor in chief Chris Johns from his list of the 10 best photographs published in the magazine last year. The photos cover a broad range of subject matter, from unexplored caves and endangered freshwater dolphins to the global food crisis and vanishing cultures.
[...]
The top 10 images were taken by:
Kevin Schafer, who struggled with the murky, tannic waters of the Amazon River for his first National Geographic magazine assignment.
Fritz Hoffman, who dangled from a cable over the raging Nu River in China as villagers crossed on a zip line to take animals to market on the other side.
Amy Toensing, who, documenting the drought in Southwestern Australia, describes how her picture came together almost by accident as she followed a family through the parched landscape of what had once been a thriving farm.
Stephen Alvarez, who explains how he illuminates pitch-black underground caves to expose them in a way that has truly never been seen before.
Martin Schoeller, who typically shoots portraits of celebrities like Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie, photographed the Hadza, a vanishing culture in Tanzania. He shipped a complete studio to the African bush with lights and generators to capture this series of intimate, searing portraits.
Randy Olson, who used a computer to control an underwater camera trained on a grizzly bear in Kamchatka, Russia.
John Stanmeyer, who usually covers wars, international conflict and social injustice, traveled to nine countries for a story about the global food crisis.
James Nachtwey, who has a similar beat to Stanmeyer’s, spent several months in Indonesia covering the many faces of Islam in a nation that is home to more Muslims than anywhere else in the world.
Len Jenshel and Diane Cook, a husband-and-wife photographer team, battled time and weather to make a photograph of a rooftop garden on Chicago’s City Hall.
Michael “Nick” Nichols, National Geographic magazine’s editor at large, was ranked No. 1 of the top 10 with his photograph of a giant redwood tree. He talks vividly on camera about how it took nearly a year to complete the photograph and how it almost drove him to the brink. Using gyroscopes, dollies and computers, Nichols and his team made a seamless top-to-bottom photograph of a 300-foot redwood tree, the first in history.
Sounds interesting—I'm going to try to catch it. If you've never seen Nick Nichols' redwood picture from the October, 2009 issue...well, you still won't, because even the fold-out in the magazine was but a small representation, and a JPEG or a TV image are going to be even more inadequate. But it's a remarkable project and one that I imagine is going to be well worth hearing about.
Check your local listings for scheduling in your area.
Mike
(Thanks to Dan Carnagey)
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Featured Comment by emptyspaces: "The redwood photo was reproduced three stories high and hung on a downtown building here in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a month—quite a nice way to view it. I count myself as lucky. It's impressive work, and an amazing print as well."
Featured Comment by Helcio J. Tagliolatto: "Two notes on the dolphin image:
1. That tea colored water is not from the Amazon River, but from Rio Negro (Black River);
2. The real color of those botos are not pale gray...but always pale red or pink. The pale gray are the very common 'gray botos,' a different shaped dolphin, more akin to ocean dolphins.
Anyone who have ever photographed those red botos in Rio Negro knows that the NG photo is a very hard image to make.
Am I the only one offending by the gross blue "fringe" "substitution" etc., at the top of the tree in Nichols' image? I truly appreciate the incredible effort to capture the redwood, however, even I could have moderated that ugliness in post. Please tell me it's just a web artifact.
Posted by: Paul | Saturday, 06 March 2010 at 04:36 PM
Does National Geographic claim that
the 1000 published are the best of
the 1,000,000 taken? Of course not.
And and how are the 10 'best'
chosen? I find the whole exercise
stupid,pointless and non productive.
Posted by: paul logins | Saturday, 06 March 2010 at 04:54 PM
"I find the whole exercise stupid,pointless and non productive."
paul,
Maybe they'll let you look through the whole million. I'd rather not, myself.
Mike
I think you can probably safely consider the show to be "the stories behind ten good pictures." Although the redwood picture really is a remarkable story. In any event, maybe wait till you see what they have to say before you judge?
Posted by: Mike Johnston | Saturday, 06 March 2010 at 05:13 PM
I'd be hard pressed to choose something like "Top Ten" out of the multitude of excellent photographs I saw in last year's editions of NatGeo, and, frankly said, I wonder by which criteria these ten pictures were selected.
Looks like an over-simplification to me.
Carsten
Posted by: Carsten Bockermann | Saturday, 06 March 2010 at 05:28 PM
"photographed the Hadza, a vanishing culture in Tanzania [...] capture this series of intimate, searing portraits."
Where is the culture in these photographs? This is typical fashionable nonsense. Going to Tanzania to do an ersatz of Avedon, and claiming he captured a culture!? The series of portraits brings nothing (I mean besides a hefty check to Schoeller), they could be done anywhere. Enough! The NG needs a new editor, and to refresh his pool of photographers.
Posted by: Ze Kropotkin | Saturday, 06 March 2010 at 05:38 PM
This was shown here in Australia a few weeks ago, and was very interesting seeing how these great shots were captured. Highly recommended.
Posted by: Alan | Saturday, 06 March 2010 at 05:41 PM
Must be something wrong with me. The only one even remotely interesting is the brown bear in the river shot. Although the tree is an amazing piece of dedicated work. Ah well...
Posted by: RobG | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 12:57 AM
I've seen at least a couple of pictures taken with "phones" that need to be on this list... they made it in most other lists ;-(
Then again, NG is all about photography !!!
Posted by: sam | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 01:44 AM
I think I've never been so non-plussed by a photo collection of a big magazine such as NG. Very few of these pictures (the one in the cave, the kids in Australia?..) have really moved me beyond their technical complexity...
Posted by: Oronet Commander | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 03:14 AM
I'd vote for the bear shot.
Posted by: Patrick Dodds | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 05:06 AM
The Murray-Darling Basin's in "Southwestern Australia"? Whoa. Did the magnetic poles flip?
Wait - "Southwestern Australia"? Did the sandgropers and croweaters team up? Gah! We're doomed!
Posted by: Lithos | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 07:25 AM
Of the ten on the web page, most were...ordinary, not extraordinary and certainly not "best of the year". One wonders just what they had in mind.
Posted by: Richard | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 07:27 AM
Wow. Tough crowd here. Did NatGeo steal from some of you?
I just got a subscription this year. And it's the same magazine I read as a kid (my father has always had a sub). Same articles written the same way. Same photos.
Complaining about NatGeo is like complaining about the sun coming up every morning.
Take it for what it is. Learn a bit (but not too much). And enjoy the photos. Is life this hard?
Posted by: Paddy C | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 08:05 AM
I was in Vero Beach Florida in January and was sad to learn that the copy of that Nichols photo was not currently on display at the local art museum.
I enjoyed all these photos and don't see how or why anyone could be critical of the choices?
Choices...
Posted by: charlie | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 11:43 AM
Scratch that,
It was a James Balog image, not Nichols. Same only different.
http://www.vbmuseum.org/index.cfm?method=Collections_detl&ID=147
Posted by: charlie | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 11:51 AM
I like the redwood photo. The borders reflect the process used to make the image -- they show that it is a mosaic, which I think is a welcome form of honesty. The fringing is presumably due to the fact that the panels in the mosaic were taken at different times or from slightly different angles. It's not a frikken' fashion shot!
Does the commentor above think that fill-frame prints that show sprocket edges or frame numbers or the edge of a filed carrier should be "cleaned up in post"?
Posted by: Semilog | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 02:27 PM
Haven't read NG in a long time and if that really is their 1o best I won't be buying it soon.
Seriously disappointing.
Posted by: Nathan deGargoyle | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 04:34 PM
When I looked at the top ten after reading Mike's post, I too had a ho-hum response. Surely there have been more worthy photographs in the past year; however,I just watched the broadcast and have been reminded that some pictures don't stand alone, they should be seen in the context of a story and I think that is what influenced Chris Johns to make his choices.
Tom
Posted by: Tom | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 08:37 PM
Late to the party on this one. "Deep Southern Caves" gives me the willies ! I'm only mildly claustrophic: I don't think twice about elevators & small rooms, or even narrow passageways underground like those found at the typical tourist caverns. But (probably like most people) when my movement is restricted to a great degree, that's an anxiety-provoking situation. And looking at that picture, reading the caption, and thinking about doing that myself is the stuff of a really bad dream.
I've only recently started watching "Planet Earth" and was pleasantly surprised by the "Diaries" clips that follow each episode, detailing how certain shots were filmed. They all demonstrate impressive feats of dedication, but the worst by far for me was the spelunking one where the crew was underground for well over a week, through tight spaces and at the end, somewhere where it would literally take over a day to get out.
Posted by: Dennis | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 09:17 PM
NG hasn't changed...it's the rest of the world that has. When I was growing up, only NG had the resources and people and talent to get these stories and photographs; today, it's within the realm of possibility for many more people.
Posted by: Poagao | Sunday, 07 March 2010 at 09:51 PM
Maybe we can take these selected photos as good photos selected among many good photos of NG rather than the top ten.
Actually, it is very difficult to establish a well accepted criteria to judge which photo is better or the best. '_^
Posted by: Frank | Monday, 08 March 2010 at 12:11 AM
When I looked at the NG magazine, I wondered why these nuts took thousands of shots of the tree to make a fourteen inch print in the magazine. Now that I know they made a three-story tall print, I also know they're not nuts.
Posted by: Keith B. | Monday, 08 March 2010 at 02:55 AM
I loved the magazine and their photos.
But I am not sure about these ten. Too small and out of context. Really nothing of interest. The photos do not carry the story. The story is needed and as the photo fail to carry them by itself, it is not good photos.
But I like the magazine and their photos. I wonder why.
Posted by: Dennis Ng | Monday, 08 March 2010 at 07:13 AM
Even after a recount I still failed to make it on to my top ten list of photographers. It was then that I decided to turn my back on lists. I'm still bitter about it; it's one of my top ten disappointments.
http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-lists-are-pretty-silly.html
Posted by: Sean | Monday, 08 March 2010 at 12:10 PM
The caving picture confused me -- it appears to me that the guy pictured is doing it the hard way. He should simply move towards the photographer, where there is much more room!
(Maybe he's not trying to move the direction I think he is?)
I must agree to finding a lot of them pretty ordinary.
I suspect the tree picture isn't getting fair play in the size presented online, and I'm a sucker for technical complexity, so that's fair enough.
I kinda liked the family on their dried-up farm, though I see how people could think of it as too pat, hard to take for spontaneous.
The bear was an interesting view, though I didn't really like the photo that much.
I think my least favorite was the people at the Egyptian subsidized bread stall.
Posted by: David Dyer-Bennet | Monday, 08 March 2010 at 01:59 PM
I do like the cave shot--but then I was a caver. I've been in those kind of tight spots a few times. Moving like that is exhausting--a few yards and you're pretty shattered. What the photo fails to convey is how little you can see.
Torches and headlamps generally don't light up the space like the flash the photographer has used. You just kind of see a small area where your head is pointing, with very little peripheral vision. I remember helping take photos underground and setting off flash units around a chamber--in the few milliseconds of the flash the whole chamber is lit up and your eyes try to drag in the scale of the space that your headlamp has miserably failed to do justice to.
Gavin
Posted by: Gavin McLelland | Monday, 08 March 2010 at 05:23 PM