Keeping The Faith: Empty Sky Project
By Steve Simon— Faith is an element of my photography that continues to surface in my work, not only in the stories I choose to pursue, but also in my philosophy and approach to shooting. What happened to me with my project Empty Sky: The Pilgrimage to Ground Zero was an exercise in faith and belief in my work, and a great example of what can happen when you put your work out there. The story dates back to just after 9/11. I decided...
Photographing the White Horses of the Camargue
By Tony Bonanno— I’ve photographed horses for many years– quarter horses on western ranches, grand prix jumpers, rodeo horses and wild roaming Spanish Mustangs, but none have intrigued me more than the White Horses of the Camargue in the South of France. I’d never heard of them until about five years ago when I was leading a photo workshop in Cuba and one of the participants, Jody Willard, a photojournalist from California...
Miyako Koumura: Capturing Japan’s Flowers For Posterity
By Arthur H. Bleich— It’s midnight in a small town west of Tokyo and almost everyone’s asleep except for Miyako Koumura who’s loading her photo equipment into an old, silver-gray Honda Fit (her economical and reliable companion, she calls it), preparing to set out for Chuzenji Lake in Nikko National Park, about a three-hour drive north. By the time she arrives the sky has begun to lighten and, after parking her car,...
It’s Summertime! 25 Cool Tips For Great Photos
By Albert Chi— 1. Avoid wandering aimlessly around looking for good pictures to shoot. Always give yourself a mini-assignment to stay on track. Like, street vendors, kids at play, people at bus stops, interesting doorways, afternoon shadows, and so on. That way, you have a direction in which to go and the challenge of trying to interpret things in your own unique way. 2. Most zoom lenses give you larger apertures at wide-angle...
Our National Parks Odyssey: A New Door Opens
This is the sixth of an ongoing series about Red River Pro Andrew Slaton and his wife Ellen who, along with two dogs, Islay and Skye and Colonel Bubba, the cat, left the comforts of Dallas to hit the road full time in a travel trailer, with the goal of photographing all 59 U. S. National Parks.— By Andrew R. Slaton— The warm, early morning light filters through the cottonwoods. It’s a dreamy way to start our day. We’ve finally arrived...
The Encaustic Photo Artistry of Jill Skupin Burkholder
By Arthur H. Bleich— On the last day of January, 2014, a small, brown package arrived at the home of Jill Skupin Burkholder, a photo/artist who lives in Palenville, NY, a tiny hamlet nestled at the base of the Catskill mountains. Inside the package rested a highly sophisticated HCO ScoutGuard trail camera, capable of capturing night photographs of wildlife and then transmitting them to a remote iPhone for instant viewing. The images...
David Bergman: On the Road with Bon Jovi’s Band
by David Bergman— I’ve had the honor of traveling the world to cover music and sports events for over 25 years, and my most enjoyable gig is when I’m embedded on a tour with a band. I’ve done this with a number of groups so far, including Bon Jovi and Barenaked Ladies and I’m working with with country superstars like Luke Combs now. People frequently ask me what my typical day is like. I’m sure most working professional photographers...
Photos Overlooked For 35 Years–Found!
By Peter E. Randall— Sand and surf. Babes in bikinis and babies in diapers. Muscular teenagers and spry golden agers. Boardwalks and arcades. These were among my subjects in the summer of 1983 at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire’s largest tourist destination, where I set out to document tourists relaxing, playing, and romancing. I like challenges so when a friend gave me a small Olympus XA camera, I thought it would be a fine tool for...
Back to Basics: Using Focus Creatively
By Suzanne D. Williams— You can exert a great deal of creative focus control over your images once you learn how to use some of the basic functions your digital camera offers. First, though, let’s define a few terms that are essential to the process. Photographers who use the term “point of focus” refer to the subject or object in a photograph where they want to draw the most attention. “Focus” itself...
Seeing Differently
By Michael Freeman— One of the first tenets of professional photography is that you have to try harder, always and all the time. There’s almost too much said about this, so I’ll restrict myself to one only, from American photographer William Albert Allard: “You’ve got to push yourself harder. You’ve got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You’ve got to take the tools you have and probe deeper.” Well, maybe I’ll allow...
Sell Your Images At Art Fairs
By Christine Pentecost— I thought long and hard before I did my first art show. I was afraid to give it a try, afraid of failure, afraid of not being good enough. To actually set up a display and sell face to face was a daunting thought. But when an friend contacted me one day and said she couldn’t do a local show and would I like to have her spot, it took about five seconds to say “yes”! I was excited about it, but very apprehensive....
American Manga Artist: Jean-Paul Deshong
By Arthur H. Bleich— In Japan, Jean-Paul Deshong is a Mangaka, an artist who creates comics or graphic novels– an art form long revered in that country. Top manga artists there make high six-figure incomes and are superstars of the art world. Deshong, an American comic book artist, decided a few years ago to write and illustrate Sons of Fate, a novel set in Japan’s Tokugawa period of isolation from the West that lasted more than two...
Think Inside the Box For Dramatic Flower Photos
By Christine Pentecost– I’ve always been intrigued by photos of flowers on pure black backgrounds, so last summer, I decided to do some black box photography, using an abundance of mountain wildflowers blooming around our Montana homestead as subjects. I began by making a box that had four sides: right, left, top and back (no front or bottom) that was 24” high by 15” wide by 17” in depth, using black foam core. The two pieces that...
Take the High Road for Breathtaking Images!
By Albert Chi– There’s a fantastic photo adventure awaiting you, requiring only a vehicle, your camera and some minimal planning for a most exciting trip. And chances are, it’s probably close to where you live and relatively inexpensive to get to so you can take the whole family along. Okay, what’s the catch? There isn’t any. Geotab, a Canadian firm that tracks truck locations has just built a set of coordinates representing...
Lotte Jacobi’s America
By Arthur H. Bleich– Gary Samson was an aspiring 25-year-old photographer in 1976 when he first met Lotte Jacobi in New Hampshire. She was 80 and a successful German portrait photographer from Berlin who had emigrated to New York City in 1935, narrowly escaping Adolf Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. Samson was working for the University of New Hampshire as a filmmaker who had been assigned to do a documentary movie about her and...
Favorite Photo Places: An Amazing Wildlife Refuge
By Ron Wolfe and Will Keener– You get to the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, south of Socorro, NM, at least a half an hour before sunrise. You position yourself with back to the wind, so the birds will fly over you; your back to the rising sun, even better. In the near dawn, you hear a cacophony of clicks and low calls from the Sandhill Cranes and the higher-pitched squawking of the Snow Geese on the water. Your camera is...
Pictar Pro Makes Smartphone Cameras Smarter
By Arthur H. Bleich– Inside every smartphone camera beats a heart that yearns to be a DSLR. The features are there but, like Sleeping Beauty, they need a few digital kisses to awaken them. Pictar Pro does that and more. Through an integrated software app, it will add of dozens of options that can be accessed with external controls, just like a “real” camera. It doesn’t just make your phone feel like a DSLR (or...
A Great Read: “Photographers On Photography”
By Henry Carroll– Let’s consider the visionaries, the groundbreakers, the original thinkers – those influential figures from past and present who pushed photography forward and continue to do so today. How did they – how do they – approach their craft and what matters most? Here we have a selection of quotations, photographs and interviews that offer telling insights into the minds of masters. Serving as brief introductions to the big...
Acquire Great Art on a Shoestring Budget
By Anna Andersen– When Erik Culver graduated with a BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008, he went home with hundreds of photographs, paintings, drawings, and prints and almost all of it went into storage. Ten years later, while his art still collects dust, he’s helping students find better homes for their work. Culver and his co-founder, Alok Marwaha, launched ArtStartArt to sell student artwork through monthly flash...
Custom Software That Really Struts Its Stuff
By Arthur H. Bleich– I remember buying an all-in-one tool years ago that promised to do everything. It did…kinda. But it did none of them really well. When you need to make a task quick and easy, there’s nothing like using a dedicated tool. Lucis Pro by Microtechnics and Restore by Vivid-Pix are one-trick ponies, but what they do, they do very, very well. And both come in various Mac and Win configurations. Lucis Pro first...
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