Photo History: Willi Ruge’s Fall to Fame
by Arthur H. Bleich— On a chilly, spring day in 1931, Willi Ruge parachuted out of a, two-seater, single-engine aircraft flying in an overcast sky over Berlin. Seven minutes later he landed amidst some picnic tables and garden chairs with a shattered shinbone— which he stoically ignored. That was 91 years ago and what makes Willi’s jump memorable is that the 39-year-old German photographer carried with him a bulky camera and was...
Movie Backdrop Art Will Blow Your Mind!
By Arthur H. Bleich— They worked in shifts, round-the-clock, painting gigantic images to be draped behind the actors featured in the movies of their day. Each artist was given a section of the backdrop to paint as time was of the essence. When lighted and integrated with the action, you’d swear you were in whatever location they depicted. Which, of course, was the whole idea. After the movie was “in the can,” the canvasses (called...
Levison Wood: Photo Encounters With Strangers
by Levison Wood— I have spent the majority of the last ten years in the wild and on the road, travelling in more than a hundred countries. It has been a time of great and rapid global change, and I have been lucky enough to witness many of these changes at first hand and document them in images that preserve these moments in time. For me, every single picture conjures a memory of an individual, a family or a whole community,...
Our National Parks Odyssey: Renaissance, Part Two
by Andrew Slaton— Part Two of Two. 02/18/22. Our National Parks odyssey has shifted into a different kind of journey. Nearly six years ago we set off on an adventure to travel the country and see/ document all the national parks. Since then, three new parks have been created, two presidential changes, a two-year (and still counting, in some states, at least), raging pandemic. Yet in the midst of all this, we found a new direction. We...
Our National Parks Odyssey: Renaissance, Part One
by Andrew Slaton— Part One of Two. 01/19/22. The light filters through palms and dances seductively along the prickly- looking edges of the Spanish moss. It hangs in a pattern of almost perfect randomness on the ancient oaks above my camp. Florida feels like home. Hell, who am I kidding? So many places feel like home these days, it’s hard to decipher what “home” really means anymore. This June will mark six full years of living as...
Isaac Wright: Stunning Cityscapes From On High
By Arthur H. Bleich— Early 2017 was the start of a tough time for U. S. Army Sgt. Isaac Wright, a paratrooper stationed at Ft. Bragg, NC. An pending divorce and a serious reassessment of his life’s goals prompted him to buy a Nikon D3400 and begin to shoot photographs to get his mind off his problems Wright had enlisted in the Army in 2014 when he was 18, right out of high school and, though things had been going well for two and half...
Kodak’s Coloramas Still Resonate 30 Years Later
By Arthur H. Bleich— Back in the 1950s I used to take the subway from Brooklyn (where I lived) into Manhattan (“The City”) to go to concerts, museums and other attractions and also made frequent trips for art and music lessons and nighttime fun. Parts of my borough were still semi-rural; just a decade earlier, cows grazed nearby my home. As I grew up all the excitement, except for the Brooklyn Dodgers, was across the river. It took...
Your Scanner Invites You to Create Exquisite Images
by Janet Dwyer— Often people who see my exhibition prints are floored by the larger than life detail, then stunned when told my ‘camera’ is a scanner. Scanners create some unique effects due to their myopic vision, wrap around quality of lighting, and moving lens. The lens records and lights the objects from several different points of view as it travels past them. In the early 2000s I connected my first Epson scanner to a computer...
Our National Parks Odyssey: Time Marches On
By Andrew R. Slaton— There was so much sunshine in those days. The abundant and pillowy cumulus clouds were always present, but they seemed to narrowly skirt obstructing the source of all that light for a suspiciously long amount of time. The cold, dark shadows would come eventually. Open country has always had a way of capturing my full imagination—in an all- encompassing way. It wouldn’t matter what manner or shape of landscape; the...
How Two of My Images Grew Into a 55-foot-wide Mural
By Christine Pentecost— Do you ever see something you want to take a photo of, “some day”? Something, maybe, you see all the time and plan to eventually get around to taking pictures of it? A unique lonely tree in an open field? Poppies waving in the breeze? A neat old building? A beautiful mountain range? And then, the unimaginable happens: the tree falls down, the field of poppies get crushed in a hail storm, that neat old building...
Kah-Wai Lin: Fine Arts Landscape Images
by Arthur H. Bleich— Five years ago, Dr. Kah-Wai-Lin, 38, changed the course of his life dramatically. After graduating from high school in Malaysia, he spent six years in the Ukraine getting his MD and another five in Sweden earning a PhD in medical science. When Princeton University offered him a position as a research scientist, he snapped it up; it would appear all the stars had finally aligned. Except that… AB: In 2016 you...
Documenting Maine’s Penobscot River Wilderness. Part 2
By Zac Durant— The first half of my trip was leisurely paced down the West Branch of the Penobscot and I had time to enjoy and photograph much of the river’s wildlife including an industrious beaver who simply ignored me, an inquisitive moose, and low flying eagles that soared by. And then there was the peculiar jack rabbit who paddled out in the shallows and hopped onto a protruding rock. As I approached, he seemed unconcerned by my...
Documenting Maine’s Penobscot River Wilderness. Part 1
By Zac Durant— The fierce intensity of the wind had carried my canoe out to the middle of the huge lake, where white caps were threatening to capsize it. If it were to succumb to the turbulent waters, I would not be in a very favorable situation. The water was cold, and I was at least a half-mile from shore. While I’m a capable swimmer, I didn’t like those odds very much… It all began in August, 2020 after I’d done a...
46 Photogs + 3 Years = 10,000 Images of NH
By Peter E. Randall— How many photographers does it take to document life in New Hampshire? According to the New Hampshire Society of Photographic Artists (NHSPA), the number is forty-six. At least that is how many professionals and advanced amateurs participated in a unique three-year shoot which will result in a full color hardbound book and exhibits in eight New Hampshire institutions. The book, New Hampshire Now, A Photographic...
Nikola Olic: Dominates Tall Buildings With A Single Lens!
By Albert Chi— Nikola Olic is a lover of photography– a quintessential “amateur” in the classical sense of the word. He’s free to exercise his artistic vision any way he chooses without restraints of time or client demands. “I was born and raised in Belgrade, Serbia,” says Olic, now 47, “and came to the U.S. at 17 as an exchange student to study computer science and engineering.” He was assigned to the University of Texas, Arlington...
Baron Wolman, Iconic Rock Photographer, Dies at 83
By Tony Bonanno— Baron Wolman died peacefully on November 2, 2020 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 83. I feel privileged to have been able to call him a good friend for almost two decades. Baron was Rolling Stone magazine’s first photographer and actually had a major role in getting the unique rock music magazine of the Hippie generation off the ground. Although his iconic images are well known, and many of you who are reading...
How Photography Helped Save My Life
By Michael Blanchard— I was arrested in February 2010 in Maine for drunk driving while attempting to drive to Boston to talk to my wife and try to repair the damage from our constant fights. I was the COO at a company in Maine and my wife was living in the city. She was my whole world, and I was losing her. With no other support system I fell apart, with only vodka to hold me together. When I was arrested a second time, in March, for...
Our National Parks Odyssey: Heading In A New Direction
By Andrew Slaton— A cloudless, blue sky is excellent for just about everything except making dramatic photos. That’s what I had all summer in Wyoming. But it didn’t much matter to me. Low hanging scrub cedars dominate the immediate landscape. Concrete, ground up by time and pressure surrounds me. We are parked in a sparsely occupied, old RV park near the banks of Lake Whitney, in the Texas Hill Country. The weather is a lovely...
Dawn Wilson: Bears, Eagles, Foxes…and More
By Arthur H. Bleich— Always interested in the outdoors, it was probably preordained that Dawn Wilson, 49, would eventually settle in Colorado and become a renowned wildlife photographer. Growing up in New Jersey, her active and creative life in high school continued through her college and post-graduate years. From an early age she developed a love for the outdoors and wildlife, seriously considering becoming a veterinarian before...
Ghana: An African Portrait Revisited
By Peter E. Randall— Photographing and producing a book on Ghana was not on my mind when I first visited the West African country in 1984 as a United Nations consultant. I was hired to document an improved method of smoking fish, a vital task in a country with little access to refrigeration to preserve the catch. In 1958, Ghana was the first sub-saharan country to become independent. In 1963, President Kwame Nkrumah invited master...
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