I wanted to create a dramatic portrait series of “arctic explorers” that appeared to be taken outside in a blizzard. The concept for this shoot was something I’ve been mulling over for quite awhile, but never had the proper platform to pull it off.
When I was a kid, my school had an end of the year event all students were expected to participate in. They called it "Field and Track Day," which was a fancy way of saying, "Okay kids, we've got to kill a mandatory school day, so we're going to ship you all out to a local park, make you run around in the hot May sun for about 6 hours until you feel like passing out or puking, or both, and then send you home. Have fun!"
Jacob A. Riis arrived in New York in 1870. As the economy slowed, the Danish American photographer found himself among the many other immigrants in the area whose daily life consisted of joblessness, hunger, homelessness, and thoughts of suicide. So when he finally found work as a police reporter in 1877, he made it his mission to reveal the crime and poverty of New York City's East Side slum district to the world.
Battle hardened photographers will tell you that theirs used to be an elite profession, difficult to do, hard to enter, and accorded the proper respect. Now that everyone and their grandmother has a super computer/camera in their pocket or purse or on their face (read: Google Glass), it seems like everybody is sharing their filtered masterpieces with the entire world.
For his most recent album Immunity, musician Jon Hopkins wanted to create visuals that would match the colors he sees in his mind when he's composing his music. The thing was, he would rather they not be computer generated -- his music is organic, he wanted the visuals to match.
School portraits don't often make the news for causing controversy, but that's exactly what the class photo above has been doing over in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada. Parents of the boy seen on the right side of the frame were unhappy after receiving the photo and finding that their son had been set apart from his classmates and teacher due to the fact that he uses a wheelchair.
At last year's Fall Photography at the Summit, the folks at the Summit Series of Workshops got a chance to sit down and speak with legendary photojournalist Bill Eppridge. They asked him about "the importance of the still image," and Eppridge responded by sharing the wise views on photography he has spent a lifetime acquiring.
How should I describe the Leica X Vario? It's as if Leica engineers met at the cafeteria and decided Fuji wasn’t kicking their a** hard enough with the X100/X100s. “Hey, let’s challenge the Fuji XE-1 with a new camera. We will up the ante this time… let’s be double the price of Fuji, AND we will not have interchangeable lens!” Guffaws exploded across the cafeteria as the engineers outlined more specifications to make life living hell for the Leica sales team.
