Here’s a short inspirational video featuring Canadian photographer Jeff Wall in which he talks about his method of allowing his eyes to do “photography” first before using his camera.

(via Xataka Foto)

A great way to get inspired is to listen to other people who are serious about photography talk about their work and things they’ve learned. Here’s a short video in which photographer Daniel Milnor talks about capturing stories through film photography. After getting into the “fast lane” by switching to digital, Milnor hit a wall and rediscovered his passion for photography by going back to shooting film with Leica rangefinders.

Here’s a neat little behind-the-scenes video in which Michael Ivins, the official photographer of the Boston Red Sox, talks about his experiences with shooting baseball. He offers some good tips that apply to other sports as well (e.g. try and anticipate).

(via Fstoppers)

Argentinian photographer Irina Werning’s “Back to the Future” series of photographs features people reenacting photographs of themselves taken decades ago, and has made Werning a well-known photographer after going viral on the Internet over the past year.

I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it’s imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today… A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future. [#]

NPR created the behind-the-scenes video above in which Werning talks about her interesting project.

Back to the Future (via Fstoppers)

There’s a well known photography joke that goes, “If you saw a man drowning and you could either save him or photograph the event, which lens would you use?” While it’s certainly morbid and pretty absurd, there’s plenty of examples of photographers having a “shoot first” mentality in a time of crisis. The rally racing photographer seen in this video provides one such example.

Here’s a terrific 20-minute video that features Henri Cartier-Bresson — the father of modern photojournalism — talking about his views on photography and a selection of his amazing photographs. It’s both educational and inspiring.

The decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.

– Henri Cartier-Bresson

If only there was one of these videos for every famous historical photographer!

(via DigitalRev)

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.
Read more…

Here’s an interesting snippet from an article published today by David Pogue of the New York Times that describes a trick one photographer uses to overcome the megapixel myth:

A few years back, one of his clients, a stock-photo company, rejected his submissions because they didn’t meet the company’s minimum-resolution requirements. All photos had to be, for example, 10 megapixels or higher.

Tom knew that his five-megapixel photos (or whatever they were) would print perfectly well; he knew that the megapixel myth was at play. But he couldn’t convince the stock agency that its megapixel requirement was based on mythology.

So he took a photo file from a buddy who owned a fancy high-end Canon SLR, pasted in his low-res photo, and dragged it out bigger, so that it filled the full area of the higher-resolution photo. (Why did he start with his buddy’s file? So that the metadata—the invisible information about the photographic settings embedded in every digital photo—would indicate to the stock agency that the picture was taken with that high-end camera.)

Not only was the stock agency fooled, but to this day, many of its customers have used Tom’s phony high-megapixel photos in professional publications. They’ve all been delighted by the quality.

It would be interesting to find out how widespread this kind of fakery is in the photo industry.

Image credit: exif data by jbylund

You’ve probably heard people say that you shouldn’t try to get a cheap photographer for wedding photography. Here’s a good example of why.

Can you point out all the things this wedding photographer is doing wrong? Leave a comment and we’ll get a running list going here.
Read more…

Here’s a short 5-minute news segment on Ruth Gruber and her work as a photojournalist during the Holocaust. Currently 100 years old, Gruber was an eyewitness to much of the history most of us have only read about in books.

We cannot forget what human beings can do to other human beings.

A documentary on her life called “Ahead of Time” begins airing tonight on Showtime.

(via The Online Photographer)