Photographers

Everyone has an opinion about what's news and what isn't. Even parking enforcement officers. Some Los Angeles news reporters and photographers using city-issued media parking permits are being ticketed by officers who do not believe newsworthy activity is taking place. "I've been cited too many times to count, maybe 10 tickets," said Gary Leonard, a photographer for the Los Angeles Downtown News. One recent ticket — carrying a $53 fine for being in a loading zone on Broadway — was slapped on Leonard's windshield directly above the city's media parking placard.

Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of summer -- and of the summer vacation season. So what are you doing on your summer vacation? We're betting you'll be snapping a few photos. For the second year, The Times Travel section will run a "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" photo issue -- Sept. 23 this year -- featuring reader photos selected from among the dozens and dozens that are submitted. Our photo editors sort through them and will choose about six to eight to run in the print edition and more to run online.

Vinnie Zuffante's black eye has healed, but the details of how he got it remain fresh in the photographer's mind. He claims to have gotten the shiner during a scuffle with an actor who accidentally popped him while tangling with two other photographers. It was the actor's wife who asked him to intervene, said Zuffante, recalling the recent incident. "She comes running over and grabs my jacket and says, 'Stop them! Stop them from fighting!' " Zuffante said.

Willie Robert Middlebrook, a photographer who sought to enlarge public perceptions of the African American community through painterly depictions of its people and places, died Saturday at Brotman Medical Center in Culver City. He was 54. The cause was complications of a stroke suffered last month, said his daughter, Jessica Middlebrook. Middlebrook's death came just a week after the unveiling at the new Expo/Crenshaw Metro station of one of his largest public installations, a series of 24 mosaic panels based on his photographs.

Of all of photography's commercial milieus, fashion is by far the most competitive. The artists at the top of the heap possess an eye for innovation, a boatload of artistic vision and serious technical chops (or, at the very least, the best photo assistants money can buy.) Here's a brief rundown of some of today's most sought-after style shooters. Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott are perhaps the hottest names in fashion photography right now, thanks to their hyper-glossy, digitally bolstered images that often portray women as über-powerful figures.

Haribabu was the doer of odd jobs, a two-bit free-lance photographer who lived in a tiny hut with his parents, borrowed his cameras and film and hardly could have known that the job he took for $5 last month would leave behind the only crucial, physical clues to one of India's most brazen political assassinations. The 21-year-old Haribabu was killed in the process.

They're also something of an endangered species, threatened by the destruction of their professional habitat. Magazines that used to commission such photographers to create in-depth chronicles of social phenomena, cultural conflict and struggle and change within communities have either gone out of print (the most legendary, Life, died as a weekly in 1972 and as a monthly in 2000)

Habibullah owns the last box camera still standing on Kabul's Char-e-Sadart Street. It's a classic: a battered, brightly painted box with a dusty lens at one end and a crude darkroom inside. As recently as a year ago, Habibullah, 42, who uses one name, was one of hundreds of professional photographers who plied their trade with handmade box cameras, sort of slow-motion Polaroids using late 19th century technology.

Almost every day, my in box fattens with e-mails from America's freelance writers -- adding their voices to those I quoted a couple of weeks ago about the devastating downturn in the writing market. In bemoaning the need for speed, the flight from quality and the persistent decrease in pay, it turns out writers have a lot in common with photographers. And graphic artists. And architects. And musicians. And, well, with just about anyone who sees his creative endeavors being commodified or who is exposed to low-cost foreign competition via the Internet.

Tim Hetherington, an award-winning news photographer and co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Restrepo," and Chris Hondros, a veteran war photographer for Getty Images, were killed Wednesday in an explosion in the Libyan city of Misurata, doctors and colleagues reported. At least two other photojournalists were injured in the blast, which was believed to have been caused by a mortar round. The rebel-held city in western Libya has been under attack for several weeks by forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi.

There is a simple plaque near the entrance of the Chateau Marmont hotel that reads: "Helmut Newton: 1920-2004. " The sign commemorates the death of the famous German photographer, who died at age 83 after crashing his car into a wall outside the hotel, but it's also a reminder of Newton's ties to L.A. By the end of his life he spent winters here and shot extensively in and around the Sunset Strip hotel. And throughout his career as a fashion photographer with fans in the art world, he idealized a blond, long-legged, athletic sort of female beauty that could alternately be described as Germanic or Californian.

Punk mainstay Mike Watt was out late playing a show at the local ballet school the night before, but early on a Saturday, the bassist best known for his work with seminal indie acts fIREHOSE and the Minutemen is in San Pedro's port waters, in his kayak, a palm-sized digital camera strapped around his neck. He got a late start today - 8 a.m., not 6. So he paddles hard for the harbor entrance, barely stopping for the sea lions that dive and bob. He does, however, pause to consider the pelicans.

The line for a free breakfast snaked around Glide United Memorial Methodist Church. Police busted two men in a restaurant doorway. Panhandlers provided a neighborhood soundtrack. It was Sunday morning in the Tenderloin, and Mark Ellinger had pictures to take. Clutching a camera in his meaty right hand, cigarette poking out between his fingers, the photographer marveled at the carved stone lintel of the Marathon Hotel. He gestured toward the building that once housed famed madam Tessie Wall's last "parlor house.

Harun Mehmedinovic remembers the hungry wild dogs clawing through the snow, trying to get to frozen bodies of victims of the siege of Sarajevo. He was 10 years old. The Bosnian war was in its second year. Less than 15 years later, the war was over, and Mehmedinovic had graduated from UCLA film school and earned a master's degree from the American Film Institute, where he wrote and directed his thesis film, "In the Name of the Son. " The 25-minute short helped the young filmmaker become the first student in AFI's history to win both its top directing prizes, the Franklin J. Schaffner Fellow Award and the Richard P. Rogers Spirit of Excellence Award.

On a steep slope, above a retaining wall with scrawled warnings ("Stay off, Stay out, Private Property"), Colin Rich begins to unpack black bags full of cameras and gear. The warnings confirm that this is where he wants to be. The secluded Echo Park hillside offers a sweeping view of downtown Los Angeles. Over the next three hours, he will take a sequence of nearly 1,000 images, studying the scene and adjusting his camera as the sun falls and the city lights emerge. PHOTOS: Los Angeles, one frame at a time Rich, a cinematographer and time-lapse filmmaker, has spent many nights in the last year photographing the city from out-of-the-way locations such as this.

Over the last 41 years, film historian and author Marc Wanamaker had acquired some 200,000 photographs chronicling the history of film production in North America from 1909 until the present day. Many of these photographs are one of a kind. Eventually, he sold the photos to Cecilia DeMille Presley, granddaughter of filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille. Then last month, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences received more than 70,000 of those photographs from Presley. FOR THE RECORD: Movie photos: In the April 23 Calendar section, the Classic Hollywood column said that Marc Wanamaker's Bison Archives had donated more than 70,000 photographs chronicling the history of film production in North America to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

French news photographers launched a petition drive in support of 10 of their colleagues who have been targeted in a manslaughter probe after the death of Princess Diana in a Paris car crash. A group of about 40 photographers urged members of the media to sign an appeal urging French judicial and administrative authorities to let them do their job.

Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn was charged Friday with battery and vandalism in connection with an attack on a photographer near Brentwood Country Mart last fall, officials said. Penn, 49, faces up to 18 months in jail if convicted of the misdemeanor charges stemming from the run-in Oct. 12. The charges were filed by the Los Angeles city attorney's office. "We are alleging he kicked a photographer, and we are also accusing him of breaking the photographer's camera," said Frank Mateljan, a spokesman for the office.

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai suggested Thursday that a speeded-up departure of Western troops is the only way to prevent a recurrence of "painful experiences" such as the sight of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead insurgents. In a statement issued by the Afghan presidential palace 24 hours after the Los Angeles Times published photos showing U.S. troops with the remains of suicide bombers and mugging for the camera, Karzai called the behavior depicted "inhumane and provocative.

From the White House to the American Embassy in Kabul, American officials rushed to distance themselves from the actions of U.S. soldiers who posed for photographs next to corpses and body parts of Afghan insurgents. Two photos of incidents from a 2010 deployment were published Wednesday by the Los Angeles Times. In one, the hand of a corpse is propped on the shoulder of a paratrooper. In another, the disembodied legs of a suicide bomber are displayed by grinning soldiers and Afghan police.