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...
Pros Tell How To “Get The Photos Others Can’t ->”
By Michael Freeman— When you know in advance that a situation forbids photography, you first need to have a very good reason to flout authority, and then you need to plan how to shoot surreptitiously. This is the serious end of investigative photojournalism, and while you’re not likely to be facing the same challenges as Hazel Thompson, there are plenty of valuable lessons to be learned from her remarkable shoot of kids locked up in...
Photojournalist With Soul: Carl Juste
by Arthur H. Bleich— Red River Ppaper Pro Carl Juste has a personal intensity that permeates every photograph he makes. His images speak in a way words cannot, making an immediate connection with the viewer. He is a master visual communicator. Juste, 56, was just two years old when his family was forced to flee Haiti to escape political persecution. They settled in Brooklyn, NY, and spent ten years there until they moved to...
Our National Parks Odyssey: The Ultimate Challenge, Part 2
By Andrew Slaton— So here we were in Florida, as March rolled closer to April. News about the Coronavirus sparked fear throughout the country. All of our state and national park reservations were canceled out from under us, and photo jobs were postponed or canceled outright. The world, to most everyone, looked a bit more uncertain. But for us, not too much more uncertain. Let’s be honest here: Our lives for the last four years have...
Our National Parks Odyssey: The Ultimate Challenge, Part 1
By Andrew Slaton— It’s mid-May at American Horse Lake in Oklahoma as I sit down to write. Things are beginning to open back up, but the second wave of a global pandemic still looms as an inevitable possibility. So much has changed. The Sooner state in the spring is awash with color. Newly budding branches green with rebirth. Skies of complex and ever-changing hues of blue, then textured white, then glowing pink and orange. Reflective...
Nina Katchadourian: Photo Artistry at 36,000 Feet
By Arthur H. Bleich— It’s 2011. On a jumbo jet 36,000 feet over the Pacific headed for New Zealand, night has fallen, the cabin lights are dimmed and most of the passengers have dozed off. Nina Katchadourian slips quietly out of her aisle seat, cellphone in hand, and makes her way down the aisle to one of the lavatories. She’s on a mission in conjunction with a project she’s titled “Seat Assignment” and tonight...
A Rock Photographer’s Tribute to Jimi Hendrix
By Baron Wolman— In April 1967, my life changed unexpectedly, and for the better, when I met Jann Wenner—a then twenty-one-year-old freelance writer and student at the University of California, Berkeley. I had been photographing bands for a while in the Bay Area, when Wenner told me of his plans to start a new kind of music periodical. It would become Rolling Stone. He invited me to join him in his endeavor and I immediately agreed,...
12,000 Free “Roadside America” Images
By Albert Chi — Tooling along in a spiffy, rented Cadillac, John Margolies, architectural critic, author and photographer would take off on months-long road trips throughout America along with his Canon FT, a 50mm lens and a trunkfull of ASA 25 Kodachrome film. It was the 1970s and the new interstate highways were about to bypass the venerable old ones where here and there and everywhere roadside signs and kitschy...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
My 70-Year Love Affair With Photography
By Larry Silver– As a boy growing up in the East Bronx, I knew “the photographer” as the guy who took pictures at weddings and Bar Mitzvah’s. My Uncle Herman, the “authority” on all subjects, had never heard of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Stieglitz or Edward Weston. nor, for that matter, had anyone else in my building on Elder Avenue. Yet somehow at the age of 14 I became fascinated by the idea of making pictures...
Our National Parks Odyssey: Into The Winds
This is the fifth 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. This is a continuation of Part 4 which ran in the previous post.— By Andrew Slaton– We meandered down the Gulf Coast chasing blue water and...
Our National Parks Odyssey: One Wild Life
This is the fourth 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 Slaton– There’s an ebb and flow on Soda Lake that sounds remarkably like the ocean. I hear the whoosh…. whoosh…. whoosh outside our...
“Into The Light” Showcases Legendary Musical Artists
By Jérôme Brunet– My love for music began long before I found my way into photography. My mother was a classically trained musician and teacher, and had me playing the cello at age four. I continued on for the next ten years into my teens, but when I first heard the opening riff of Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown” I instantly switched over to the guitar. It wasn’t until high school, when I took a photography class, that my...
What Rembrandt Taught Me About Portrait Lighting
By Joel Grimes– Part of the requirements for receiving a BFA in Photography from the University of Arizona included half a dozen semesters of art history.At the time I felt like this was overkill and was only interested in attending my photo-related classes. In hindsight, one of the greatest influences that shaped my personal vision as a photographer did not come from studying the work of the master photographers, but that of a master...
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