Inspiration

Much has been written about the concept of the "decisive moment", a notion popularized (posthumously, for the most part) by legendary candid photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

What makes a great hobby? Most people don’t have to ask themselves this, they just naturally gravitate to activities they enjoy and make time for them–but I’ve had to think about this for years. It’s an important question, particularly when your time is being pulled in multiple directions!

Last year, PetaPixel wrote about photographer Ryan Kojima who built a DIY medium format camera using the CCD sensor from an Epson flatbed scanner. The DIY scanner camera captures massive, detailed 514-megapixel photos. Kojima built his first scanner camera a decade ago, although he recently upgraded it to deliver even better performance.

The camera is a reasonably recent image-creation tool; compared to millennia of paintings, drawings, carvings, and illustrations, we have only a few hundred years of photographs and photographic development. What photography offers compared to those ancient arts is (relative) immediacy and accuracy.

A groom helplessly chasing after his bride's veil on a windy day has won the International Wedding Photographer of the Year 2022 contest.

For anyone who isn’t interested in this wonderful art form we call photography, it might seem pretty straightforward: using a camera to capture an image. However, as many of us know, photography is so much more, once you go beyond the surface level.

A promotional campaign has used a photographer's gigapixel images to hide an X containing a code that could win you a cruise.

A noted landscape photographer has donated his entire life's work to the public domain, entrusting it to History Colorado.

Photography is a competitive industry in which professional photographers are competing against anyone with an iPhone, which means pretty much everyone. How do you convince a client to pay you for your work when they can get something that’s ‘good enough’ from someone else for free?

The social aspects of social media, the propagation aspects of propaganda, and the “logos” aspects of dialogue all depend on one thing: communication. A photograph can be a very powerful medium for communication, using visual symbols to represent what a photographer saw, or created, containing in part or in whole their message.

Photography or any other creative pursuit requires us to be consistently creative, which means we need to tap into a reliable source of inspiration.

Sunglasses on and looking up toward the disco light, a young Ukrainian woman is captured lost in a moment enjoying New Year's Eve near Kyiv.

When first starting my photography like many people, young and naïve, I immediately googled "how to be a paid photographer" almost immediately I found a job opening for a local school and sports photography business. I had been dreaming of being a successful artist my entire life and here was my chance!

A photographer teamed up with a drone company to create an incredible FPV shot following a Team USA Olympic diver as she splashes into a pool.

The 2023 Chinese New Year Celebration film titled "Through the Five Passes" was shot entirely through the lens of an iPhone 14 Pro and shows the incredible heights that can be reached with a camera that fits in a pocket.

Every photographer tries to develop a personal look to their images, and that is no better shown than by asking a group of them to apply their style to the same photo.

One of the gorgeous niches of nighttime landscape imaging is aurora photography, which shows the dazzling natural light shows seen in the sky when charged particles from the Sun ripple across Earth's magnetic field.

Charlotte, North Carolina, is nicknamed the Queen City, after Queen Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte from Frankfurt, Germany in July 1992. That was not just the year but also the month that the Bank of America (BofA) building was completed. The 871ft (265m) skyscraper is the tallest building in the Southern United States outside of Atlanta or Texas, with its “royal” crown on the top.

Are you an artist who struggles with releasing your work to the world because it's not yet perfect? It's a common problem many creatives grapple with, but learning to let go of your idea of perfection can actually allow you to move closer toward it.

One vital data point that you may not have considered when you started off on your photography journey is that success might not come down to how good of a photographer you are. The most successful photographers aren’t always the best photographers and the best photographers don’t necessarily get the work. This begs the question: is it more important to be a good photographer or a businessperson?

It begins in a specific place, and on a specific date: a country auction. March 26th. While I’m holding up a camera and looking for my one daily photograph, an Amish man swings the mirror he’s offering up to the highest bidder and briefly —for no more than a second— shows me… myself. And there it was: suddenly, I was Narcissus on the plains.