The year was 2019, I had just gotten accepted into the USA Olympic Weightlifting program and had accepted a personal training position at a gym. As a former athlete, it felt as if all my dreams were finally falling into place. Little did I know that my euphoria would be short-lived and just one short month later I would wake up restrained to a hospital bed.
My father Ohno Tsuneya (Oct 9, 1937 – Dec 23, 2017) was born into a peaceful small town in the hilly countryside of Saitama prefecture, a few hours by train from Tokyo.
As any photo enthusiast will tell you (sometimes without you even asking), the benefits of photography go far beyond the ability to capture a moment or immortalize an expression. It goes beyond a mere understanding of color, or composition, or the ability to see the extraordinary hiding inside of an ordinary scene.
Billions of photos are being snapped and shared on the Internet every day. There are more cameras than people in the world nowadays. Photography is something we take for granted; something we can easily do whenever we want. But it wasn’t always like this.
Pinball machines; depending on your age, you might know all about them. Once, considered so evil that New York City banned them. Wasted youths (juvenile delinquents) spent days and nights hanging out in pinball palaces. They were so ubiquitous, “The Who” even made them a central part of their rock opera, “Tommy.”
Renowned photographer Steve McCurry recently sat down with journalist Kate Snow for a drink and to chat about his life and career. This 15-minute segment by NBC Nightly News offers a peek into the mind of the celebrated (and recently controversial) photographer of Afghan Girl fame.
I'm going to start from the beginning. I didn’t have a bad upbringing. My parents worked hard for our family and always provided for me and my sister. They taught us right from wrong, how to be kind, loving and caring. We weren't rich, but we never ever went without.
Google has just announced Google Clips, a new hands-free camera that takes photos for you. Instead of having to pull yourself out of special moments to shoot photos and videos, Clips will capture moments so you can be in them.
Joe McNally is a photographer and a storyteller. The word photography comes from Greek and means to write with light. That, in a nutshell, is what McNally does: he a writes with light, whether it be daylight or Speedlight. And for a student who started out as a writing major and ended up being a photographer, that is just the perfect result.
Finnish photographer Viivi Häkkinen has been working on an unusual photo project that both exhibits beauty and pays homage to death. Forget Me Not is a series of photos showing roadkill memorialized in a way that celebrates the dead animals' lives.
South African photographer Ursula Tocik started her career shooting weddings. In October 2012, Tocik's life and career took an unexpected turn when she suffered two massive strokes that paralyzed the left side of her body.
The doctor looked straight to my mother's eyes. He wanted to break eye contact but he couldn't. There was bad news to deliver first.
Photographer Peter Lik can be described as something of a photo tycoon. There's the unverified claim of one of his photos selling for a record-shattering $6.5 million. He has also reportedly sold over 100,000 prints for a total of over $440 million.
If you're wondering about how Lik's career came about, check out this 12-minute documentary short film that the photographer himself just published.
They say everything in life happens for a reason and while I didn’t hold much faith in that phrase before, I definitely do now. It took a serious life threatening experience to ignite in me a passion for my own photography as part of the healing process and then turn it into a career.
I know in my heart that I have always loved photography, but the way I stumbled into becoming a photographer is anything but a fairy tale -- in fact, it's quite the opposite.
My name is Fernando Krasovitzky, and I'm a nature and landscape photographer based in Miami, Florida. My story is one of tragedy followed by good fortune. It is the story of death giving birth to life and of the power of photography to make it happen.
Canadian photographer and photo-manipulator Renee Robyn has had an unusual career journey -- one that started with a devastating motorcycle crash. After getting knocked off her bike and run over by a vehicle, she spent 5 days in the hospital and the next 6 months learning how to walk again.
Photography turned out to be the one thing she could do all the time during her physical rehab, and during that time Robyn ventured deep into the world of composite photo art.
FrontYardVideo pointed a camera at a caterpillar and captured this beautiful time-lapse video …
YouTube personality Casey Neistat wants to change the way people share their lives on social media. Selfies and self-consciousness get in the way of authentic sharing, he says, so he created a new app called Beme.
It occurred to me last night that 2015 marks my twentieth year as a digital photographer. I suspect that many of you geezers reading this (i.e. those of you over 40) are approaching or have already passed a similar milestone. You’ll probably agree with me that it’s been quite a roller coaster ride, one that my younger readers might not fully appreciate. So like any other two bit amusement of questionable soundness, I feel it’s my responsibility to post the following notice right up front:
YOU MUST BE AT LEAST THIS TALL TO ENTER!
Ever since junior high school, I was the kid with the camera. And many years later, I’m still the guy who shows up to every life event with camera in hand to document the lives of my friends.
I used to carry around a hulking DSLR, but the weight bothers me, and the large size feels too intrusive for the everyday. I don’t want to interrupt life by taking photos, I simply want them to remember the fractions of a second that end up representing curated slices of life.
My photography journey started a little differently from most because I was going into it with a handicap right off the bat. It was always a thought that I may not be able to make this work, and that I'd fail miserably, and nobody wants that. From birth, I’ve had a disability that you’d think would make me the last person to get into photography: I’m legally blind.
Photographer Steve Axford lives in the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales, Australia, where he has spent a considerable amount of time exploring the rainforest with his camera in hand. Among his favorite subjects are Australian fungi, which come in countless shapes, sizes, colors, and textures -- diversity that Axford captures in his photos.
This is the story of how I wrestled with death twice to live for photography. Before I wrote this article, I told a couple of people about it since it means so much to me. Although some didn’t understand how I could talk so openly about this topic, I decided that it’s my duty to generate awareness and help others even if it means that I’m revealing my biggest struggle in front of the world.
I was in kindergarten when this photo was taken.
It was the night of my first ballet recital. First and last, actually. I decided I didn’t have the patience for ballet, nor ballet for me. The photo was taken right before we headed out the door to a ballet performance on par with a train wreck.
Photography is an analytic art form. We aim our lenses to specific parts of the world around us to pick a frame because, in our analysis, that particular frame presents the photograph we wish to take. We can certainly raise the camera, lower the camera, rotate it, pitch it, yaw it, aim at a different part and end up photographing something different.
You should realize that there are infinite number of photographs you can take from where you are now. How then do we aim the camera to “that particular frame” to photograph?
Photographer and Lightroom expert Jeff Hirsch created this 1-minute photo essay titled "Moments in Time" about the ephemeral nature of our daily lives, and the task of capturing fleeting moments with your camera as a photographer. It's a combination of 99 words and 550 photos in 60 seconds.
Warning: This project contains graphic photographs of childbirth that may be disturbing to some viewers.
After photographer Christian Berthelot's son was born through a caesarian section procedure, an obstetrician at the hospital asked Berthelot if he wanted to shoot a series of photos showing her work in the operating room -- a strange and graphic view that most people never see. Berthelot immediately agreed.
For the past 10 years, 27-year-old Xyza Cruz Bacani has been working as a domestic worker for a wealthy Chinese family in Hong Kong. On her days off, she brings her camera onto her city's sidewalks and captures impressive street photos.
Yesterday, Bacani's life took a dramatic turn: she was announced as a recipient of the 2015 Human Rights Fellowship by the Magnum Foundation, a prestigious scholarship that will give her the opportunity to study in an intensive, six-week-long program at New York University in NYC.
How does your daily schedule compare to the 24-hour routines of some of the most famous creative individuals throughout …
When you’ve captured as many photographs as renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz has, it’s not exactly a simple task to pick and choose your best work. Shooting for over four decades for the likes of Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, her collection of work is as vast as it is rich.
And so, when it came time to create her latest book, rather than selecting just a few dozen of her photographs, she decided to step it up... a lot. Her latest book is a $2,500, 476-page visual journey through every single step of Leibovitz career.
Paris-based artist Sébastien Del Grosso combines his talents as an illustrator and photographer to create incredibly creative self-portraits. Taking on an almost cartoon-like aesthetic, the series is titled “L’esquisse d’une vie,” translating to “The Sketch of a Life.”
A woman in Toronto may have saved her own life in early April by recording her own mini-stroke on video as it happened. The 'stroke selfie,' as it has been dubbed by some, helped doctors who had dismissed her symptoms previously properly diagnose her the next day, saving her from what might have been a much more serious attack.
August 19th, 1944 was the beginning of The Liberation of Paris, the six-day battle between the Parisian-led French Resistance and German forces. Occupied and governed by Nazi Germany since June of 1940, it was on this day that the Parisians decided to strike back against the German garrison.
Right Before I Die is a tearjerker. It's a heartbreaking photo series by Andrew George that strikes at the very core of most people's deepest fear, insofar as it is a series about death, but also manages to inspire, because it is about people who are staring down the great unknown with incredible acceptance and serenity.
Who knew a dipperful of seawater contained so much life? Well, photographer David Liittschwager, that's who, because in 2006 he captured this eye-opening photograph for National Geographic.
“While there’s life, there’s hope.” That was the original motto of a magazine that for more than 100 years documented …
We’ve seen some really creative time-lapse videos that take stock of a year or more in someone’s life. They …
“Don’t forget, Eric: there is a story in your backyard.” This is the advice David Alan Harvey gave me while reviewing my portfolio of travel images during a 2011 Magnum Photos Workshop I attended in Toronto.
In early July 2013, Sports Illustrated writer Richard Deitsch posed an interesting question to his tens of thousands of followers on Twitter: "How many of you have a photograph of the single best moment of your life?" The photographs that people shared in response were powerful and emotional.
During a recent engagement shoot at Wissahickon Creek in Pennsylvania, photographer Ken Beerger had the genre of his images unexpectedly change from love and romance to danger and documentary. In the end, Beerger captured some intense photographs, a young boy's life was saved, and one of his subjects is now being called a hero.