Technically, it brings home the reality of handing off the tapes to someone else to edit and color correct and compress well (or not). I’ve learned a lot in the past 2 years.

The Wall Street Journal has some amazing photography coming out of Haiti but it only appears online. Dominic Nahr, Julie Platner and Jason Henry have three excellent galleries. Really interesting to see these three photographers vision of the same world event. But why haven’t these images appeared in print editions of the WSJ?

I believe everything I read and see in the papers too….

The story of three American astronauts talk about their adventures in space. Check out the multiple camera view. Listen to the very well written questions and see the interesting stories they elicit.

This is a doc that’s well shot, well scored, well paced and well plotted with good graphics and even a message of hope at the end and a call to action.

Go see it.

Here’s the opening….very clever credits too.

Also, digest it in HD at Apple Trailers site.

The close of Look3 last night left many images, people and conversations lodged in my psyche. The 7 hour ride home today left me with some time to digest. A few of the things that I burped up included these pleasant memories:

• Martin Parr’s talk about photography, creativity and innovation
• Gilles Peress and the concept of Ambiguity
• Philip Toledano for his 3 bodies of work sketched in quick and entertaining succession
• Simon Bruty’s talk about luck and preparation and sports. Sports? uh-huh.
• Yolando Cuomo Studio’s Paper Cinema. Leave it to a pair of book designers to create one of the most creative multimedia events of the week.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the BURN Magazine grant to to Emerging Photographer Alejandro Chaskielberg for his project The High Tide. Wow, work that is truly fresh and exciting gets rewarded? My hope is renewed, if just for a little while. Thanks, David.

For the grand finale, I was looking forward to the “Works”, multimedia pieces “showcasing some of the most current photography projects.”

The evening program included three wonderful and stimulating projects:

• Ragner Axelsson’s Last Days of the Arctic.
• Chen Chi Cheng’s Escape from North Korea
• Tim Hetherington’s three screen nightmare, Sleeping Soldiers

These ranged from a simple, straightforward but extremely well crafted visual story with music and sounds to a very sophisticated narrative that left me breathless to a mind blowing seemingly breathing, living multimedia triptych that was like a very bad nightmare–but in the best way.

As for most of the rest of the multimedia last night, the only image that came to my mind was Play Them Off Keyboard Cat. And the sooner the better.

My second big take-away from the festival was about storytelling. “Storytelling” is the buzz word for everyone these past few years but it seems that only people from the United Kingdom really seem to comprehend what it means, at least at Look3 this past week.

As my colleague Jessica explained it to me on the long drive home, Americans pretty much think they themselves are the story, that anything they say or do or happens to cross the very shallow threshold of their attention span is interesting to someone else.

Perhaps it’s because it’s illegal to say to someone of any age: “That is boring” or “You are not the winner,” that American’s think that anything that pops into their mind is as fascinating to everyone else as it is to them. It is not. You are not the star of the show. Play Them Off.

Photographers so often think that because they’re talented image makers, they’re going to be equally good at things like writing and voicing narration. There are legions of talented and award winning people who are very good at those things. You are not. Play ‘dem Off .

Telling a story and engaging an audience that is not your family or friends does not include taking a pile of your very excellent images and dropping them onto a stolen pop song and expecting them to have any cohesion or power. They do not.

Contrary to your belief, your belly button is not the most interesting thing onstage. Look, I love you already and your images can tell me a story. But you have to work at communication else, Play YOU Off.