As PhotoMedia enters its 23rd year of publication, we can’t help but reflect on the wide variety of events and developments there have been to cover along the way, including the rise of digital photography, global terrorist threats, political and celebrity scandals, natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake, and now, unfortunately, the still-unfolding man-made disaster in the form of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

It seems timely that this issue focuses on the subject of nature and landscape, allowing us to feature a photographer who has made it his mission to expose mankind’s not-so-kind treatment of the environment and the planetary damage caused by our collective deeds.

In June 2007, I was invited to join a group of seven professional photographers on a trip to Alaska to photograph grizzly bears in the wild, which resulted in a feature story in our Fall 2007 issue...

Tamron has developed a 70-300mm f/4-5.6 zoom lens featuring image stabilization, M/A focusing and an ultrasonic AF drive.

The ultrasonic silent drive (USD) AF motor has full-time manual focus override, allowing for faster and more accurate focusing. Vibration-compensation image stabilization further helps to compensate for...

Nikon has released the AF-S Nikkor 200-400mm f/4G ED VR II super telephoto lens with a constant maximum aperture of f/4, vibration reduction, a nano-crystal coat and optimized AF modes. With updated image stabilization technology specially engineered for super zoom lenses, this new lens is optimal for still and HD videography. The nano-crystal coat helps reduce ghosting and light flares. Three focus modes are...

Louie Psihoyos of Boulder, Colo., won a 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary for "The Cove," a film about efforts to save thousands of dolphins from being brutally slaughtered every year in Taiji, Japan. The film also spotlighted the region's practice of serving dolphin meat tainted with mercury to schoolchildren.

In April, the Frans Lanting Studio included three of Frans Lanting's images in the gala international Green Auction by Christie's auction house in New York City.

The auction, held on the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, donated proceeds to conservation organizations, including Conservation International, Oceana and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Chosen images included "Water Lilies, Botswana 1989," "Tortoises at Dawn, Galapagos Islands 1984," and "Twilight of the Giants, Botswana 1989."

In an attempt to prevent Google from unfairly copying, scanning and displaying copyrighted images, the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and other trade groups have filed a class action lawsuit against the search-engine company.

For the past five years, Google has been uploading millions of books and other publications containing copyrighted images and displaying them to the public as part of the Google Library Project — all allegedly without adhering to the rights of the authors.

Military footage showing U.S. soldiers shooting Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, has been released on an "anti-secret" website, Wikileaks.org. The previously unseen and restricted video has now been viewed by more than 2 million people.

Recorded on July 12, 2007, and published on Wikileaks this April, the video was taken from inside an American helicopter during what the military described as an attack between U.S. and Iraqi rebels. The footage shows the two men among a crowd of Iraqis as they are shot by the helicopter's guns, and then again as several wounded people from...

Photographer Annie Leibovitz has been liberated once again from an impending loss of her collection of images and real estate assets after securing a new deal with Colony Capital LLC, a private real estate investment and advisory firm.

Under the new agreement, which was signed in April, Colony is now the sole creditor of Leibovitz's assets. Additionally, Colony has repaid Leibovitz's outstanding loan of $24 million from the New York-based Art Capital Group, which the photographer failed to pay in September 2009.

Although Leibovitz will retain control of the rights to her collection of more than 100,000 images, Colony will now help her balance her debts through traveling exhibitions of her prints and books, as well as other methods of revenue generation. This is Colony's second celebrity client. In May 2008, Colony purchased a loan with a face value of about $23.5 million on Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch.

This year's Pulitzer Prize-winning photographic works included a series documenting the coming-of-age of a Denver teenager who enlisted in the Iraq War during the height of the insurgency.

Craig F. Walker, a photographer for The Denver Post, won the Feature Photography prize for a series telling the story of a young soldier's life from enlistment to homecoming. Walker began the project in 2007.Other finalists for this year's prizes can be seen at pulitzer.org.

The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) held a forum in April to discuss the future of copyright law.The forum, called "Copyright and the New Economy," discussed how the rights-managed business model functions in today's world of easily copied media and how to search for creative ways of fairly selling media services.

The original copyright laws were written in the 1960s, when there were only a few parties that were at risk of violating copyright terms. Today, digital storage makes it possible for virtually anyone to violate copyright.