Doug Lansky has redesigned the website for Signspotting, his collection of offbeat and funny sign photos from around the globe. For the first time, users can post photos and visitors can rank them. “This is just a lot more fun and gives people a chance to help me pick the best shots each week,” he tells me. “It’s a lot more interactive.” Lansky’s narrated slide show featuring some of his favorite shots recently appeared on World Hum.

Related on World Hum:
* Q&A with Doug Lansky

Yesterday, I noted the riveting story behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning Burma photo. Today, I was chatting with a photographer who told me that many in the news photo biz expected Getty Image’s John Moore to win the breaking news photography Pulitzer for his shots of the Benazir Bhutto assassination in Pakistan in December. 

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Reuters photographer Adrees Latif won the breaking news photography Pulitzer Prize yesterday for his shot of a Japanese videographer killed during anti-government protests in Burma (Myanmar). Today, Reuters has Latif’s account of the how he got the shot. It’s riveting.

Related on World Hum:
* Busking Story Earns Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing
* Dispatch from Burma: Under the Banyan Tree

The New York Times photographer whose story was immortalized in the movie “The Killing Fields” died Sunday. Remarked the Times’ executive editor: “To all of us who have worked as foreign reporters in frightening places, Pran reminds us of a special category of journalistic heroism—the local partner, the stringer, the interpreter, the driver, the fixer, who knows the ropes, who makes your work possible, who often becomes your friend, who may save your life, who shares little of the glory, and who risks so much more than you do.”

Related on World Hum:
* Welcome to Khmer Rouge Land!

I came across this vending machine on Red River Street in Austin, Texas: 

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Okay, so he’s not exactly asleep, but still. And we thought only passengers were raiding airport gift shops for sudoku books. World Hum contributor Abbie Kozolchyk shot this recently somewhere over Belize:

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A photographer caught children in Hong Kong making radish dim sum—well, at least one of them was working on it—in preparation for Chinese New Year celebrations. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city, Disneyland officials are boldly re-branding the year of the rat, which begins next month. In an effort to appeal to local traditions, the Wall Street Journal reports, “Disney is suiting up Mickey and Minnie in special red Chinese New Year outfits, and declaring 2008 the Year of the Mouse.” The Main Street parade features a dragon dance and an appearance by none other than the god of wealth. (No, not Robert Iger.)

Reports the San Francisco Chronicle: Fields’s “photographic essays from far-flung places appeared in magazines such as Life, Look and National Geographic and helped to transform photojournalism.” He was 87.

The same full moon causing astronomical tides in recent days—I’ve seen exposed sections of San Diego beaches I’ve never seen before—made a great backdrop for this photo of a single-engine plane over Denver.

Photo: AP.

Thomas Swick recently flipped through a new, photo-filled coffee table book from National Geographic called “Journeys of a Lifetime.” He couldn’t get past the language in the title. One can photograph a place, he notes, but one can’t photograph the essence of a journey, because a journey mixes the internal and the external. 

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Two recent stories on Paris and Washington D.C. after dark are a good reminder that taking in cityscapes by night can yield an entirely different travel experience than tromping around at mid-day. A Washington Post article and slide show on the patchwork system used to illuminate the monuments lining the National Mall nicely conveys the city’s nocturnal alter-ego, while a New York Times piece on ascending the Eiffel Tower at night actually made me want to brave the interminable line to try it. 

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Howard W. French’s slide show and essay on Shanghai’s old quarters, which we recently posted about, isn’t the only piece in Sunday’s New York Times travel section worthy of note. The “Photography Issue” features several sharp audio slide shows, including Jehad Nga’s look at the Silk Road and Heidi Schumann’s tale of following in Ernest Shackleton’s wake in Antarctica, as well as a compelling essay by Richard B. Woodward about the intertwined history of photography and travel.

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