FRANK PERRY/AFP/Getty Images

Zebra Finches perch on an electrique guitar on July 8, 2009 in a aviary in Nantes as part of a creation by French Celeste Boursier-Mougenot named “From Here to Ear.” The project features 40 zebra finches which are let loose in a space rigged with hanging harpsichord strings and coat hangers all connected to an audio system. As the audience enters the space, the birds move and perch on different structures which trigger unique ambient sound patterns.   Aleatoric music is that which leaves an element to chance as Celeste Boursier-Mougenot has here.

John Cage is perhaps the best known composer of such music.  Early in his career he added objects (such as screws seen below) to piano strings to create an unpredictable rattle or damping of sound as it was played and as he delved deeper into chance operations he used elements of randomness by incorporating radio broadcasts into performances and using the ancient Chinese text, I Ching, to guide the cutting and rearrangement of a piece recorded on tape into a pastiche.

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It’s official, the first of thousands of invitations are in the mail! Now it’s our turn to eagerly wait and watch as the photos start rolling in.

While the Flickr members get their selected photographs released and ready for the collection, a few Getty Images’ editors and licensing experts and Flickr employees who know all of the details of the partnership, have set up a group on Flickr to help explain how the collection works.

The collection will be available on www.gettyimages.com beginning in March. In the meantime, check out the Getty Images On Flickr group to see what’s going on.

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There is the age old question of photo journalistic integrity… at what point is an image’s integrity compromised by doctoring and where do the lines of doctoring fall?

Clearly when you manipulate an image in Photoshop after the image has been captured, that is clear doctoring and therefore unethical.   However, what about the question of posing and lighting your subjects in the realm of photo journalism?  Clearly the photographer no longer is an observer but rather a participant  – the effects of playing a more active role in a journalistic setting could pose a number of ethical questions… is the photographer manipulating the story to tell his story?  Is the photographer exploiting the subject?  How far is too far?  …

Yet with the advancement of technology (and therefore the influx of user-generated imagery saturating the market) and the shifts in the photography industry as a whole, how far will we allow the boundaries of creativity and artistry in photo journalism to be pushed?  There are a number of awards in the industry for photo journalists, how does this added factor of competition affect a photo journalist’s need to stand out and how far are we saying they can go?

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Let’s love Paris when it’s Halloweening. The street art artist Troy Henriksen has been invited by Disneyland Paris to celebrate Halloween in a tube station in Paris. Thanks to Jours Tranquilles’ blogger, who took the photos of this live performance the 15th October late in the evening, even the non Parisian commuters can enjoy this visual fantasy. If you want to see more images : http://jourstranquilles.canalblog.com/archives/2008/10/16/index.html

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There is the age old question of photo journalistic integrity… at what point is an image’s integrity compromised by doctoring and where do the lines of doctoring fall?

Clearly when you manipulate an image in Photoshop after the image has been captured, that is clear doctoring and therefore unethical.   However, what about the question of posing and lighting your subjects in the realm of photo journalism?  Clearly the photographer no longer is an observer but rather a participant - the effects of playing a more active role in a journalistic setting could pose a number of ethical questions… is the photographer manipulating the story to tell his story? Is the photographer exploiting the subject? How far is too far? …

Yet with the advancement of technology (and therefore the influx of user-generated imagery saturating the market) and the shifts in the photography industry as a whole, where do the boundaries of creativity and artistry in photo journalism come to play? There are a number of awards in the industry for photo journalists, how does this added factor of competition affect a photo journalist’s need to stand out and how far are we saying they can go?

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I don’t know if it’s because of Britney Spear’s sister or Bristol Palin or what, but lately I have been thinking about the space females enter when they are evolving from girls into women. While young mothers are certainly a hot tabloid topic right now, I am more interested in less extreme examples of this threshold crossing. It can be argued that childhood and adulthood are biological categories, but they are also social constructs that change depending upon their historical context.

During the Industrial Revolution (pre-child labor laws), US children worked in factories, whereas today, a large percentage of college graduates move back home to live with their parents. When does a person become an adult? When does a girl become a woman? I don’t have a definite answer, but no photographer explores this idea better than Kanako Sasaki.

Kanako Sasaki/Getty Images

When I look at her photographs, I am taken to a place where innocence and experience co-exist. In this world, the subject’s age is ambiguous: she is at once child-like and emotionally nuanced, unselfconscious yet provocative:

Kanako Sasaki/Getty Images

They bring to mind Balthus’s infamous paintings of Therese.

Kanako Sasaki/Getty Images

And of course, they are beautiful to behold.

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