Aaron Feinberg is an award-winning fine art landscape photographer. Visit his website here.
PetaPixel: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?
Aaron Feinberg: Well… I grew up on Long Island, NY. Spent summers at camp in upstate NY and was introduced to hiking and mountains that way. There was always a sense of achievement after reaching the peaks and taking in the view. That stuck with me through college, as I would head up there with friends while attending University of Albany for Atmospheric Science (Meteorology). After graduating, I headed out to UT to spend time ski-bumming and enjoying the amazing snow that UT has to offer. Throughout college I had a point-and-shoot digital with me that I would experiment with and explore. However, while out in UT I started to shoot my friends with my new one, a Canon A610, they encouraged me to pursue my hobby. With that I purchased a Canon 20D and 17-85 in March of ’06. You could say the rest is history. Read more…
Nick Ut is the Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photojournalist who shot the iconic Vietnam War photo that most people refer to as “Napalm Girl”.
PetaPixel: Can you tell me a little about what your childhood was like?
Nick Ut: I had a big family in Vietnam. My father was a farmer. My mother was busy — there were ten brothers and one sister. Big family, but some of them died in the war. My brother was an AP photographer. He worked as a CBS cameraman in 1960. In 1964, he joined the AP, and worked there for almost two years. He was killed in 1965 doing an AP assignment. Read more…
Tom Anderson is a photography enthusiast and the former President of MySpace. You can find him online on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter. Check out his Burning Man photographs here.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Tom Anderson: Well most of you probably know me as the first friend from MySpace. I was a founder and President. It sold in 2005 and I left the company completely in early 2009. The MySpace first friend tends to overshadow all the things I was or will be…
I’ve lived many lives, so to speak. At one time I was in a band (both as a singer and guitar player) and that was all I did every day. If you knew me in college, you would have assumed I was going to be an egghead professor. I was a very serious scholar. I’ve always been attracted to creative things. Just before my photography obsession began I was having a lot of fun learning about architectural design, but photography has taken over and kind of pulled me away from that. Read more…
Benjamin Von Wong is a photographer based in Montreal, Canada. Visit his website here.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?
Benjamin Von Wong: Hah, where to begin. I’m a 25-year-old Chinese Canadian who’s been to thirteen different schools in three different countries, in three different languages. I grew up in a loving family that believed that experiencing the world was a must, had the opportunity to try all sorts of things, from playing violin for 10 years, to getting a black belt in taekwondo, to graduating from Mining Engineering in 2008. I pick up hobbies sporadically, from parkour to bartending, painting to paintball. Photography is one of the more recent hobbies that I picked up that happened to stick just a little longer! Read more…
Steward Magazine has published a fascinating interview with photographer Anton Kusters, who spent two years documenting a yakuza gang in Tokyo, capturing highly intimate glimpses into what life is like in the criminal underworld. When asked what he felt like when the project was just starting out, Kusters states,
I was extremely nervous. Since they are gangsters, I thought I should be very careful, in case I shot something I wasn’t supposed to see. But this actually upset the gang. They saw my nervousness as disrespectful. I remember one time early on this guy pulled me aside and said, “You are here to take pictures. Act like a professional.” It turned out they respected me if I was really aggressive about getting a certain shot. To not take photos was a sign of weakness.
As his surname suggests, Kusters is not from Japan (he’s from Belgium). It took 10 months of negotiations before he and his brother were given an unprecedented access into the closed world of Japanese organized crime. Read more…
Ever wonder why Leica lenses cost so much? Among the many reasons are two big ones: the lenses are all handmade, and are produced in very small batches. Joe Minihane of Humans Invent has a great interview with Leica’s Director of Product Management, Stefan Daniel, who shares some interesting facts about how their manufacturing process works:
First of all, we do our production in batches, not in serial production. So, we do batches of 50 or 100 lenses and that requires a lot of work by hand. You cannot automate production of a single lens element, or the lacquering of the rim of a lens for only 50 lenses. It doesn’t make any sense. So we use hand work because it’s more efficient. Also, in doing it by hand, our skilled people know exactly what they’re doing and they can assure perfect quality. Doing it by machine, you have to do control checks afterwards and maybe that’s not getting the result that everybody wants.
Something else you might not know is that material used in lens production is also a bottleneck. The special glass that’s melted for Leica lenses is only supplied once or twice a year, limiting the number of lenses that can be assembled.
Legendary American portrait photographer Gregory Heisler was recently invited to give a talk to the American Society of Media Photographers in Oregon. Prior to the lecture, Stumptown Visuals caught up with him to ask him for some words of wisdom. What resulted was this 8-minute gem that contains a good deal of advice you can apply to your own portraiture. Read more…
Bruce Davidson is an American photographer who’s well known for his photographs of Harlem, New York City decades ago. In the video above, he sits down and talks to Leica about his life and work:
Renowned photojournalist and Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson has been acclaimed for over half a century for his searing images of street gangs, circus performers and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, all captured with a remarkable directness, truth and power that transcends the concept of style. Here, in his own words, are Bruce Davidson’s forthcoming, charming, and revealing insights into who he is, what he’s done, and where he’s going.
Mexican photojournalist Julian Cardona has lived in Ciudad Juarez since 1960 and began documenting the city in the early 1990s as a photojournalist for the local newspaper, El Diario. He says he’s seen Juarez shift from an idyllic postcard-worthy border town to the city known as the homicide capital of the world. Read more…
Today’s dose of inspiration comes in the form of two videos for the price of one. Both videos feature well-known and well-respected photographer and photojournalist Steve McCurry — the man behind the unforgettable Afghan Girl photo that graced the cover of NatGeo — but each offer a different sort of insight into his world. Read more…
