Interviews

Michael Zhang

Interviews with Five Renowned NYC Street Photographers

Here are five interesting interview excerpts with renowned street photographers. They're from Everybody Street, a documentary on NYC street photographers that recently finished raising funds through Kickstarter. The video above features Bruce Gilden.

Michael Zhang

Interview with John Sypal of Tokyo Camera Style

John Sypal is the photographer behind Tokyo Camera Style, the "Sartorialist of the camera world".

PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

John Sypal: I had a very typical middle class and middle American childhood. A semester followed by a year abroad at a university in Japan led me to the place I am today, namely a suburb just outside of Tokyo. I’ve been interested in photography since high school and upon studying and living in Japan have been enjoying the photographic scene of Tokyo and the people who make it all possible. In 2008 I was taking part in a weeklong photography festival and asked a guy if I could take a picture of his camera. And since there were lots of people around with film cameras at this event I asked a few more. I had just seen my first tumblr a week earlier, and so after getting a few more pictures Tokyo Camera Style was born.

Michael Zhang

Interview with Ryan McGinnis of The Big Storm Picture

Ryan McGinnis is a photographer and storm chaser. You can visit his website here.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Ryan McGinnis: I am a storm chaser and photographer who lives in Nebraska; I have no formal training in photography outside of all the books I've read and the thousands of rolls of film I've blown through (and terabytes of drives I've filled up) over the years. I've had a life-long love affair with the weather; from as young as I can remember, I've been fascinated with storms and for most of my childhood I dreamed of one day chasing tornadoes. Living in this part of the country makes storm chasing less of a chore than if I had to drive here from, say, Virginia, but storm chasing here still requires lots of driving -- on average around 600 miles per chase. These days I tend to storm chase around 15,000 miles a year, mostly in May and June. In 2008 and 2009 I was fortunate enough to get to tag along with and photographically document Project Vortex 2, a $12M science mission to learn how tornadoes tick, which was probably one of the best freelance investments of time and money I've ever made.

When I'm not shooting storms, my favorite subjects are candids and urban panoramas.

Michael Zhang

Interview with Haje Jan Kamps of Triggertrap

Editor's note: This is the second interview we've done with Haje. The first was back in 2010 regarding his blog Photocritic.org

Haje Jan Kamps is the entrepreneur behind the Triggertrap and the blogger behind Photocritic.org.

PetaPixel: Can you tell quickly describe the Triggertrap for people who haven't heard of it yet?

Haje Jan Kamps: Triggertrap is an universal camera trigger. It's "universal", because it's designed to connect just about any trigger source to nearly any camera. Right now, we're supporting more than a hundred camera models, but we're adding new cameras to our Supported Cameras list all the time.

The device has a sound and light sensor built in, and it can do linear and non-linear time-lapses. I'm most excited about the auxiliary port, though, which enables users to connect nearly anything they want to the device. One reader suggested connecting it to the final buzzer they use at basketball games, to take a photo of the state of play just when the buzzer sounds -- what a great idea!

Michael Zhang

Interview with Oleg Gutsol of 500px

Oleg Gutsol is the co-founder and technical director of photo-sharing service 500px.

PetaPixel: Can you tell me a little about yourself and your background?

Oleg Gutsol: Ian and I met during our university years at Ryerson, around 2004. He was in business and finance program and I was in computer science. We both liked photography, travel and motorcycles, so there were some common points of interest. I think we both shared a passion for working on something meaningful, and although then we were not working together, we both were exploring opportunities to start our own business.

Michael Zhang

Interview with Jonathan Blaustein of “The Value of a Dollar”

Jonathan Blaustein is the photographer behind the project "The Value of a Dollar", which went viral on the Internet in 2010 and then was subsequently acquired by the State of New Mexico and the Library of Congress. Visit his website here.

PetaPixel: Could you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Jonathan Blaustein: I'm a photographer, writer, and professor based in Taos, New Mexico, originally from New Jersey (who isn't?). In addition to my career as a photographer, I'm also a correspondent for the photo industry blog A Photo Editor. My family and I live in a little horse pasture at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, far from everywhere. I'm pretty fortunate, as Northern New Mexico has a really vibrant photography scene, and of course our light is legendary. As far as my background goes, I first studied History and Economics at Duke University, but returned to school to study photography, and I have an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. I've been a practicing artist for the last 15 years, and my work has been exhibited in galleries, alternative spaces and museums around the United States.

Michael Zhang

Behind the Scenes with Samsung NX Lens Engineers

Here's a neat behind-the-scenes video by Samsung featuring short interviews with the developers and engineers behind its NX lenses. One of the things I found interesting was how the engineers are constantly working to overcome the prejudice that Korean-made lenses are inferior to those crafted in Japan or Germany. The video also briefly shows a Samsung 300mm f2.8 XF ED lens -- a lens that doesn't officially exist.

Michael Zhang

Interview with Microstock Photographer Yuri Arcurs

Yuri Arcurs -- AKA the "King of Microstock" -- is the best selling microstock photographer in the world, selling over 2,000 images a day and 2 million a year. Visit his website here.

PetaPixel: Could you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Yuri Arcurs: I was born in 1976 in Aarhus, Denmark, where I still live with my fiance, Cecilie, and our dog, Maff. As a child I spent some years in the U.S. but I returned to Denmark and joined the army, and later on I continued with my studies in Psychology at Aarhus Univerity. These days I feel like I’m not doing much else besides stock photography, but when I do have time for other things I really enjoy a good work-out. I have always been a very active person, which was probably one of the reasons I joined the army when I was younger, but right now I try to focus all of my energy on stock. So, unfortunately, marathons and the likes will have to wait!

Michael Zhang

Putting Faces to the Names Found on Photoshop’s Splash Screen

Every time you launch Photoshop, you're greeted momentarily with a splash screen showing a cloud of names that give credit to the people who have worked on the program. This "Behind the Splash Screen" video introduces you to some of the people whose names are found there, and provides some background on how Photoshop CS5 was developed (as well as the huge challenges they faced).

Michael Zhang

Interview with David Gallagher of lightningfield

David Gallagher was one of the earliest photobloggers with his (now defunct) website lightningfield.com. He is currently an editor at the New York Times.

PetaPixel: Could you tell me a little about yourself?

David Gallagher: I was born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with my wife Fiona. I've been involved with journalism and the Internet since I got out of college. Now I work at The New York Times, where I'm an editor dealing with tech news.

Michael Zhang

Interview with Heather Champ

Heather Champ is cofounder of Fertile Medium, an online community consultancy. She was formerly the Director of Community at Flickr and the co-founder of JPG Magazine, which she started with her husband Derek Powazek. Visit her website here.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us about yourself and your background?

Heather Champ: Living in San Francisco, I’m roughly 2,439 miles and worlds away from Ottawa, the city of my birth. There’s very little of my accent left, though there will be a moment when I can see the wheels turning in someone’s brain and that follows with “are you Canadian?” I have a studio fine arts degree and have hopped and skipped my way through a variety of careers that have built upon that creative foundation.

Michael Zhang

BBC Series from 1983 Featuring Masters of Photography

In 1983 the BBC aired a series called "Master Photographers" in which they interviewed some of the biggest names in photography at the time, including Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The series can't be found anywhere on DVD, but luckily many of the episodes have been uploaded to YouTube. If you're at all interested in learning how historical greats worked and thought, this is a video series you have to bookmark and chew through.

Michael Zhang

Interview with Haje Jan Kamps of Photocritic.org

Haje Jan Kamps is the blogger behind Photocritic.org

PP: Can you tell us about yourself and your background?

HJK: Sure thing. I was born in the Netherlands, and moved to Norway when I was about 5 or so. I started taking photos when I was about 14, but the art of photography didn't really click with me until I got my paws on my first digital camera - a Casio SX-2000, I think it was.

When I was doing research into my first digital camera, I was apalked by how little info there was about them in Norwegian - and decided to rectify that by starting a website. Not long after, it was bought off me, and it changed name to digitalkamera.no - now akam.no. It was sn exciting time to be writing about digital photography, and I guess I was writing about photography as much as I was taking photos, right from the start.

Michael Zhang

Interview with Udi Tirosh of DIYPhotography.net

Udi Tirosh is the blogger behind DIYPhotography.net and the creator of the Bokeh Masters Kit.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us about yourself and your background?

Udi Tirosh: I started photographing when I was in high school, and like lots of amateurs photographers I did photowalks, studio sessions and all the family events. At some point, I started DIYPhotography for the fun of it and thought of myself as a high-tech guy who photographs and has a site. DIYP has evolved beyond my expectations and for a long while I changed the order of my self definition to blogger who also takes pictures. Today, I am finding that I am slowly gaining photography as being first.

Michael Zhang

Interview with Trey Ratcliff

Trey Ratcliff is the renown photographer behind the travel photography blog Stuck in Customs and a pioneer in HDR photography. He has written a popular tutorial on HDR photography, and answers your questions on Twitter as @TreyRatcliff.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Trey Ratcliff: Even though my educational background is in all the hard sciences of Computer Science and Math, I really tend to get much more of a thrill out of the artistic side of my life. Rather than bore you with all the little bits of my life, I'll just keep it simple and say I love struggling with innovative art and pushing it in new directions.

If you really want to know more, I keep one of those "About Me" pages with enough info to satisfy 90% of stalkers.

Michael Zhang

Interview with Thom Hogan

Thom Hogan is the writer and photographer behind bythom.com, a website that provides extensive information about Nikon gear. He has written over 30 books on computers and photography.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Thom Hogan: I’ve always had a weird half-and-half personality: half science/technology, half art. To some degree, that may have been what led me into an undergraduate degree in telecommunications (filmmaking and television production). It let me play with technology and art simultaneously ;~). But I’ve always taken a circuitous route to where I’m going. I went from architecture to music to filmmaking to television to statistics to management to Silicon Valley, with stops at many magazines along the way. The only thing that was constant was that I wrote about what I was doing and what I knew, I taught it to others, and I often photographed alongside that writing. When I dumped my high tech career in the 90’s to run Backpacker magazine, it was the start of emphasizing just those two constants: writing and photography. When I decided to leave Backpacker and Rodale, it happened to coincide with the mass migration from film to digital in photography, and my long tech career, which included designing some early digital cameras, suddenly came back into play.

Michael Zhang

Interview with Brenda Priddy

Brenda Priddy is one of the world's preeminent automotive "spy" photographers, whose work has appeared in many of the top automative publications and websites. Visit her company website and Facebook page.

PetaPixel: Could you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Brenda Priddy: 18 years ago this month I was a part-time photographer (weddings / small commercial), bookkeeper at a jewelry store and mommy to 2 young toddlers. Then, in July of 1992, I spotted an early (1994) Mustang prototype and the rest is history. I originally took the photo just to show my husband, but it soon it ended up on the cover of Automobile Magazine (November 1992)!

Michael Zhang

Interview with Zoriah Miller

Zoriah Miller, commonly known as Zoriah, is an award-winning photojournalist and war photographer whose work has been featured in some of the world's most prestigious galleries, museums, and publications. Check out his website, blog, one-on-one photojournalism workshops, and Wikipedia article.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Zoriah Miller: I began photography when I was 15 years old and within the first year of shooting I won a national award and was pretty into the idea of becoming a photojournalist. Three years later I was shooting abroad and had all of my equipment stolen...well, actually I had everything stolen and ended up having to spend some time in a homeless shelter until I could get money and documents to get out of the country...but that is another story. The point was that my camera and lenses were gone and I pretty much gave up. I graduated college, moved to New York, was in the music industry for six years, gave that up to go abroad and study disaster management and humanitarian aid to developing countries, hated that and then picked up a used camera and a plane ticket and have been shooting ever since then.

Michael Zhang

Interview with Brian Auer of Epic Edits

Brian Auer is the blogger behind the photography blogs EpicEdits and FeelingNegative.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us about yourself and your background?

Brian Auer: 28 years old, one wife, two kids, and no super powers that I know of. Grew up in southern California, moved to north Idaho around age 12 and finished growing up. Went to college and grad school at the University of Idaho, took my first job in New Jersey, switched jobs, and now I'm in San Diego. All in all, my background is relatively unexciting. Now I have the office day job and all of my free time is spent with my family and/or working on my photography hobby.