Thomas Hawk is a San Francisco-based photographer and popular photography blogger. Visit his website here.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Thomas Hawk: I grew up down in Southern California. Went to college in Santa Barbara and then moved up to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1990 after college. I took a photography class in high school at Glendale Community College in Los Angeles, but other than that course am entirely self taught. I’m married and a father to four beautiful children.
I’ve been around photography pretty much my entire life. I was the editor-in-chief of my high school yearbook and editor-in-chief of my college yearbook and later college newspaper, so back in the film days I pretty much had constant access to the darkroom that came with these jobs. I’ve spent a lot of hours in the darkroom. Read more…
You don’t get to 200,000 followers without earning a few perks. A couple of months ago, we reported that a number of Instagram power users had been flown out to the US Open in New York as part of various companies’ marketing campaigns. Free trips and freebies like that one are becoming more and more common for Instagrammers with large followings. Read more…
Angelo Sgambati is a fashion photographer based in Sydney. He has been a photographer for three seasons of the TV show America’s Next Top Model. Visit his website here.
PP: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
AS: I’m about to turn 28. I was born in Italy before my family moved to Australia when I was 5. I currently live in Sydney, Australia, but I have spent the last 2 years working around the world in England, Greece, Jamaica, Macau, Canada and Papua Guinea. Read more…
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…
Back in March, we wrote about photographer Bob Carey‘s Tutu Project, which consists of self-portraits Carey created while wearing only a pink tutu. The project started out as a fun image made for a non-profit ballet organization, but soon transformed into something much more after Carey’s wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. The folks over at PocketWizard recently interviewed Carey, creating the touching short film above that offers a behind-the-scenes look at how the project came about (warning: you might want to have some Kleenex nearby). 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…
The New York Times has a fascinating interview with Li Zhensheng, a photojournalist who worked at a local newspaper in China during the Cultural Revolution. In addition to the “positive” propaganda photos he shot for his paper, he also captured “negative” photos that he kept hidden until decades later.
Most events I went to there were positive pictures and negative pictures. Some slogans were actually not all that positive but as long the crowd’s mouths were open and fists pumping air — that looks positive in the photographs. And I’d leave some film for “negative,” “useless” pictures. We were given film each month according to a ratio: for every picture published, we earned eight frames. I would process all my own film. And I did all my own enlargements.
[...] I knew I had lots of “negative” frames, so I would quickly dry them and clip them off, to not let other people see them. The only fear I had was the others would complain that I was wasting public resources, shooting pictures that the newspaper couldn’t use — and I would leave the positive ones hanging to dry.
I would put the “negative” negatives into brown envelopes in a secret compartment in my desk. In the spring of 1968, I sensed that I would be [searched] soon, I took batches of the negatives home every day after work. I sawed a hole in the parquet floor at home under desk and hid them there.
Li says he spent a week sawing the hole in his floorboards slowly, bit by bit, while his wife kept watch at their window. His secret photo collection is now one of the best records we have of what actually occurred in China decades ago.
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…
Mike Lerner is a freelance photographer who has worked with some of the music industries hottest stars. He is currently Justin Bieber’s official concert photographer. Visit his website here.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Mike Lerner: I’m 27 years old and based out of Brooklyn, NY. I was born and raised on Long Island. I have been photographing professionally for about 2 years now, but started my interest in photography roughly 5 years ago. Read more…
