September 2009 Archives

David Burnett

David Burnett's Lens On Revolution by Claire O'Neill

This is one of those examples of pictures being worth more than words.

How can words do justice to a photojournalist who has worked in more than 75 countries and covered every presidential election since 1976, the Summer Olympics since 1984, the Vietnam War, Bob Marley, the aftermath of Katrina and, most famously, the Iranian Revolution of 1979?

Claire O'Neill

Michael Nichols

Also go to a video about the making of the photograph.

Jim

Michael Nichols - Biggest, Tallest Tree Photo Ever by Claire O'Neill

National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols is one of the world's foremost wildlife photographers.

But he recently said that he'd happily spend the rest of his life photographing trees.

Of course, the folks over at National Geographic would almost certainly never hear of it.

Nichols' newfound love developed after a serious, yearlong relationship with redwoods.

Claire O'Neill

Henry Harrison

Early Photoshop!

Jim

Henry Harrison - The 19th c. world in living color

He was also an artist, so he adroitly colored all of his slides while he was still on the spot, coming amazingly close to photorealism for the era.

livius

Adobe

Also go to PCMag, PCWorld, Elements Village Thread, & A First Look at Adobe Elements and Premiere by Rik Fairliename.

Jim

Photoshop Elements 8.0

Robert Frank

Also go to the exhibit Robert Frank - The Americans, and Road Show, The journey of Robert Frank's "The Americans", by Anthony Lane.

Jim

America, Captured in a Flash by Holland Cotter

Sadness seems to trickle through the 83 photographs in his classic 1959 book, "The Americans," his disturbed and mournful song-of-the-road portrait of a new homeland and the subject of a 50th-anniversary exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Holland Cotter

Clayton Patterson

Also go to the exhibit L.E.S. Captured.

Jim

Clayton Patterson - The Lower East Side, Before It Boomed by John Strausbaugh

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was capturing the last of the wild, free, outlaw, utopian, visionary spirit of the Lower East Side.

Clayton Patterson

Jason Florio

Jason Florio - My Brother's Keeper by Rosecrans Baldwin

My life as a photographer is based around being in other people's "situations."

This work is my first attempt to confront a subject that I cannot walk away from.

Jason Florio

Ross Hoddinott

Winners of the British Wildlife Photography Awards

bloomautomatic

How To Take Great Close-Up Photos by bloomautomatic

Taking great close-up photos is much easier than you think.

Based on the multitude of blurry detail pictures I've seen on ebay and craigslist, it must be a skill many don't possess.

With these skills I've become that guy at work they come to when someone needs a good picture.

bloomautomatic

Brian Valentine

Beautiful Macro Photography by Brian Valentine

Macro photography is a fascinating hobby for me, it allows me to explore a relatively unknown world full of fascination.

Brian Valentine

Charles Harbutt

Charles Harbutt - Metaphorus

I was born nearsighted, or myopic.

Everything more than a few inches from my face was a blur with little detail.

I did not know there was anything unusual about it.

I thought everyone saw the world that way.

Myopia made every day an adventure.

Wow, was that a bear coming in the front door?

Ah, no, it was just mom in her fur coat.

Charles Harbutt

Loren Williams & Ditmar Schaedel

Also go to Camera Obscura.

Jim

Camera Obscura 2005/1-Inf

The highest bidders in each case receive one after the other a pinhole camera loaded with a piece of unexposed sheet of 5x7 Inch b/w film.

They punch a hole with the enclosed needle and expose their own photograph in turn.

Because of the minimal distance between the two holes the two photos overlap partly, so that a joint picture emerges, created by two people in different parts of the world.

Camera Obscura 2005/1-Inf

Ryan McGinley

Moonmilk: Going underground with Ryan McGinley

'Not that many people know about my work over here,' says Ryan McGinley at the opening of his new show, Moonmilk, in London.

'I think, as an artist, you get so consumed in your own work that you forget what people think about you — especially when it's a country that's so far away'

Ryan McGinley

NSFW

Kevin Cummins

Kevin Cummins: the Manchester photographs by Miranda Sawyer

"I always thought," says Kevin Cummins, in his distinctively light Manc tones, "that Manchester should have a museum of popular culture.

I was going to donate all my memorabilia to it, have a Kevin Cummins room."

Miranda Sawyer

Irving Penn

Also go to Christopher Knight's 'Irving Penn: Small Trades' at J. Paul Getty Museum.

Jim

Irving Penn

Robert Frank

Also go to the Met exhibit, Robert Frank - The Americans (Opens 9/23), Anthony Lane's Road Show, The journey of Robert Frank's "The Americans", and to Robert Frank.

Jim

Robert Frank's America

In 1959, the Swiss-born Robert Frank published a modest book of black and white photographs.

His pictures were made during several road trips across America in the 1950s and show common people in ordinary situations.

They were dismissed at the time, not only for their "muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness," but because they were perceived as a bitter indictment of American society.

TheDailyBeast.com

Ujin Lee & Tom Edwards

Ujin Lee & Tom Edwards - Dust

Richard Barnes

Richard Barnes - Murmur

Archives Canada

Patrick Elie

Normandy 1944 - Then and Now by Patrick Elie

Brenda Ann Kenneally

Brenda Ann Kenneally

Mark Lutz

Great advice!

Jim

5 Tips for a Faster Post Processing Workflow by Mark Lutz

Any battle scared wedding photographer worth his salt will tell you to get it right in camera but we'll go a bit further than that.

Mark Lutz

Bob Johnson

Bob posts a useful tip every Monday.

Jim

Shooting Raw Doesn't Necessarily Mean You Should Be Lazy by Bob Johnson

Some photographers have adopted the position that they don't really need to worry about camera settings when shooting raw format.

The argument goes that they can always fix it later in Photoshop.

While it is true that many camera settings become at most defaults for later raw conversion, the fundaments still count as much as always.

Bob Johnson

Allen Murabayshi

Also go to Copyright, Protect Your Photographs, and Copyright Notices with Photoshop Elements.

Jim

Electronic Copyright Registration for Photographers by Allen Murabayshi

Each time you take a photo, that image is copyrighted.

Assuming that you can prove that you took a specific photo, then misuse of that photo could lead to monetary compensation.

But the truth is that most intellectual property lawyers won't touch your case unless the image has been registered with the US Copyright Office.

Allen Murabayshi

Sally Mann

Also go to Sally Mann.

Jim

Photographer Sally Mann's best shoot by Andrew Pulver

This was a project my husband Larry and I talked about for six years, maybe eight.

The further I got into it, the more exciting it became.

Every new picture opened the door to another, which doesn't happen often.

I knew I was done when I had explored every inch of Larry's body: feet, arms, hands, legs, butt, back, head.

Sally Mann

Mariana Cook

Also go to Princeton University Press and Mariana Cook.

Jim

Mariana Cook - Mathematicians: An Outer View of the Inner World

Online Lighting Diagram Creator

Online Lighting Diagram Creator

Amy Stein

Amy Stein - Movin' On Up by Paul Clamp

As a gallery owner, one of the questions I get asked most often is how I choose the artists I exhibit and represent.

It is difficult to provide a concise answer, since it differs case-to-case, so instead I will offer an example of the process by which work by a specific artist [Amy Stein] made its way onto the walls of ClampArt.

Paul Clamp

Noah Charney

Noah Charney - My ant could paint that!

As it happens, insects are Modernists.

Their work is suffused with abstraction, pattern, and process.

They favor bold, all-over compositions that emphasize the physicality of their materials: the rich colors of soil and leaves, the intricate interior structure of wood, the texture of sand and stone.

Roger White

Walter Rockhill & Delbert Rockhill

old dogs photos, lost and found by Colleen Steffen

I've always loved and accumulated old photographs, but one day about 10 years ago I looked around my house and suddenly found all those long-dead babies and brides and wearers of extraordinary hats rather depressing. . . But I noticed that the dogs — frequent subjects of those black and white images, on purpose and not — seemed somehow to remain alive.

Colleen Steffen

Doria McDuell

Ray Carrington III - Teacher Pushes Students to See Houston with Different Eyes by Heather Murphy

Carrington's students write about the people and moments they uncover in the school's backyard; a mother combing her daughter's hair; a boy offering a first kiss; boarded-up homes and fancy new condos.

Heather Murphy

Jack Hubbard

Also go to Stanford's Open Source Camera Project by Michael Zhang and Canon Hacker's Development Kit.

Jim

Open-source camera could revolutionize digital photography by David Orenstein

Stanford photo scientists are out to reinvent digital photography with the introduction of an open-source digital camera, which will give programmers around the world the chance to create software that will teach cameras new tricks.

David Orenstein

Jon Canfield

Mounting Canvas Prints; Gallerie Wrap Makes It A Snap by Jon Canfield

In a previous Output Options column I wrote about how to mount canvas prints on stretcher bars . . . While it isn't difficult, it can be time-consuming to get everything just right with no wrinkles or creases.

Well, things have gotten much easier with Hahnemühle's Gallerie Wrap.

Jon Canfield

Richard Misrach

Also go to Richard Misrach.

Questions and Answers: Richard Misrach by Andrea Bakacs

I usually found that if I had a preconceived idea for a project it wouldn't amount to much.

Discovery—an aggressive receptivity, if you will—of what is in the landscape provides the inspiration for new ideas.

Richard Misrach

Alfred Stieglitz

Also go to Alfred Stieglitz.

Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe Archive

The Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe Archive contains thousands of letters and hundreds of photographs in addition to a collection of literary manuscripts, scrapbooks, ephemera, fine art, and realia, primarily dating between 1880 and 1980, which document the lives and careers of the photographer/publisher/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz and the painter Georgia O'Keeffe.

Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Shigeru Watanabe

Bird Brain - Is art criticism so easy that a pigeon can do it? by Morgan Meis

I've always been suspicious of the birds.

Maybe it's because they are always spying on us from above.

The ancients understood that the birds were in cahoots with powerful forces.

They poked about in bird entrails trying to find messages from the heavens, omens from hell.

They wondered whom the birds were working for.

Poor Prometheus was punished for the simple and humane act of giving fire to mankind.

It is no accident that he was punished with the torture of an eagle eternally feasting on his liver.

The birds will always sell us out for a pittance.

Morgan Meis

Julius Neubronner

Also go to Aerial Photography.

Jim

Julius Neubronner - Bird's-Eye Views by Greg Ross

In 1903, German apothecary Julius Neubronner combined his two hobbies, pigeon fancying and amateur photography, into an innovative new undertaking.

He fit a 75-gram camera to a pigeon's breast and released it 60 miles from its cote.

The bird flew home along a predictable route, and a pneumatic mechanism snapped an aerial picture.

Greg Ross

Markley Boyer & Robert Clark

Before New York by Peter Miller

Of all the visitors to New York City in recent years, one of the most surprising was a beaver named José.

No one knows exactly where he came from. Speculation is he swam down the Bronx River from suburban Westchester County to the north.

He just showed up one wintry morning in 2007 on a riverbank in the Bronx Zoo, where he gnawed down a few willow trees and built a lodge.

Peter Miller

Teru Kuwayama

Ask a Pro: How to Shoot (and Not Get Shot) In a War Zone by Teru Kuwayama

In places like Iraq and Afghanistan, you will encounter an unimaginable variety of dirt, dust, sand and, in the rare event of rain, mud that falls from the sky.

These abrasive, corrosive, gear-choking forces are probably more destructive than any known insurgent militia, and they will eat you and your expensive toys alive.

Zipties, ziplock bags, crazy glue and plastic packing tape will help you patch it together.

Teru Kuwayama

Photometadata.org

Photometadata.org

PhotoBook Creator

Also go to a review PhotoBook Creator Puts It All Together and Make a Book.

Jim

PhotoBook Creator

Amherst Media

Corrective Techniques by Bill Hurter

More than good lighting, posing, and composition techniques, the successful portrait photographer knows how to deal with the irregularities of the human face.

All of the great portrait photographers know that their success lies in being able to make ordinary people look absolutely extraordinary.

Bill Hurter

Lorenzo Agius

Lorenzo Agius: Totally exposed

For Agius, the most important thing is to make the shoot real.

If it's been jokey and fun you can see it.

It translates into the final images.

The Independent

IBM and Science

Also go to IBM eyes molecule 'anatomy' for future computers.

Jim

Microscopes zoom in on molecules at last by MacGregor Campbell

The researchers measured the repulsive force the probe encountered at each point, and from this they could construct a "force map" of the molecule.

The level of detail available depends on the size of the probe: the smaller the tip, the better the picture.

MacGregor Campbell

Peter Phun

Also go to Peter Phun.

Jim

Eight Lessons My College Photography Instructor Never Taught Me by Peter Phun

The irony is that while a school's "rep" is a product of marketing, few art schools incorporate any marketing or other business courses in their curriculum.

That's ridiculous — because in today's market, learning how to sell your work is as important as learning how to create it.

Peter Phun