Use Textures To Transform Your Photos Into Fine Art
By Nitsa Malik– The fastest way to add a new dimension to a picture is to open your photo editor and insert an additional layer which contains texture on top of your original photo. Textures are usually a photograph or a scan of another image, such as peeling paint, distressed or scratched surface and even vintage paper. These textures can be added on top of your own photo and merged with it by changing the blend modes and opacity...
Pricey Cameras Don’t Make Better Photos
By Albert Chi— Some years ago while getting a routine checkup at my dentist’s office, he turned to me and said: “I want to learn photography. How important is the equipment you buy?” He knew I was a professional photographer but was not expecting the answer I gave him, which was, “Not that important.” “That’s not what I hear,” he huffed. “All my friends have spent thousands on photo gear and they tell me that without making a...
Make Spectacular Reflection-Free Framed Prints
By Al Warfield– After you’ve gone to the effort of taking the perfect shot, making the perfect print, and choosing the perfect frame, why spoil your image by framing it under glass where a myriad of reflections will wreck its beauty? It’s easy to eliminate reflections on framed prints made with Red River Matte and Fine Art Matte papers; you’ll also have the added advantage of displaying an image as large as the frame size instead of a...
Print Greeting and Note Cards for Profit. Part 2
by Christine Pentecost— Receiving a card in the mail will always eclipse one sent electronically—not only because it shows the recipient you really spent some time picking it out just for them, but also that you wanted to write a personal note of your own and not rely on some clever or flowery language that was written to cover all bases. Your thoughts really do count. Now let’s go into what customers like to buy when it comes to...
New Photo Project Book Really Delivers!
By Albert Chi— Despite its quirky title, this new photo book by Chris Gatcum will introduce you to a plethora of projects, allowing you to achieve creative mastery of the digital photography medium…stuff you’ve always wanted to do but never quite figured out how. The subtitle of the book is “52 weekly projects to make you a better photographer” but don’t mistake this for the usual run-of-the-mill book of its kind; it’s way better. The...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Sloooooow Down For More Creative Images
By Albert Chi— Most photographers dread shooting when poor light levels require slow shutter speeds for proper exposure. Chances are pictures will end up blurred due to camera shake, subject motion, or both. And to compensate, you can only up the ISO so much before running into noise and artifacts. Here are some ways to make slow shutter speeds work for you. In fact, even when you have enough light to use faster speeds, shooting with...
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...
White Pocket: Millions-of-years-old Fantasy World
By Will Keener and Ron Wolfe— White Pocket is photographer’s dreamland; a remote, other-worldly experience in the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument in Arizona that looks like chef whipped up a colorful concoction from chunks of multi-colored fudge. Writers tend to wax poetic in describing White Pocket, seeing visions of gum drops, ice cream cones, dragon’s eyes, and other objects in this altered version of what was once an ancient...
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...
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...
Here comes the sun…and Solarcan’s ready to grab it!
By Albert Chi— Many strange-looking cameras have been produced but Solarcan may be the weirdest, yet. And, certainly, what it’s made to do gives it a leg up on all the others. Basically, it’s a pinhole camera with a twist (curved to be more exact), made to record the transit of the Sun, for a day, a week, a month—even a year or more. The image it produces shows how, as the seasons change, the sun takes a different path across the sky...
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,...
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...
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...
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