Although it’s tempting to believe that anyone and everyone is a potential customer for your photography, your actual target customer base is much more limited. Finding customers who are likely to buy your photos without spending exorbitantly to acquire them is the key to any successful marketing campaign.
New York City-based portrait photographer Drew Gurian followed a textbook path to learning the ropes. While in college, he interned for Joe McNally and Danny Clinch – two photographers known in part for their incredible photos of creatives like dancers, musicians, and the like. After college, Drew spent five years traversing the globe as McNally’s first assistant before peeling off to carve his own path.
Blaine Harrington began his career in photography in the 1970s after a brief stint racing motocross. His connections to the racing world led to assignments covering races around the country and in Europe – piquing his curiosity about travel.
Prior to the advent of social media and smartphones, and on the cusp of the shift to digital photography, the world witnessed September 11, 2001. Visually captured in a way that no single event had been documented before, 9/11 has been seared into our collective consciousness.
On August 6, 1945, the U.S. detonated the world’s first wartime nuclear bomb over Hiroshima. An estimated 70,000 people died that day with another 70,000 perishing within four months from injury and radiation poisoning. On the ground, photojournalist Yoshito Matsushige miraculously survived unharmed despite living 1.7 miles from ground zero. Over the course of 10 hours, he could only bring himself to take 7 photos.
The past few decades have been unkind to photo magazines. Many industry stalwarts have gone defunct, while others have moved to online editions only. Ironically, many photographers still believe in the photographic print, even though they might contend that the vast majority of image consumption happens on mobile devices.
At some point during the history of the influencer, the ring light became an accessory de rigueur, fueled by the availability of cheap Chinese-made devices. The original ring light was invented for dentistry by Lester A. Dine in 1952 because of its ability to cast an even light with diffuse shadows in a confined space. An ideal solution for photographing teeth and gums.
In April 2021, photographers Carmen Chan, Emiliano Granado, and Jared Soares launched F**k Gatekeeping, a “professional photographic knowledge base” composed of a website and Instagram account to share their business experience with other photographers.
While overall hate crime dipped in 2020, hate crime against Asians increased dramatically in a number of cities around the country. That trend has unfortunately continued into the early parts of 2021, most visibly manifesting itself with the killing of 8 people (six of whom were Asian) in Atlanta on March 16, 2021.
News outlets and social media accounts have been overrun with old photos that have been animated with MyHeritage’s “Deep Nostalgia” feature, an AI-based deep learning algorithm licensed from Israeli-based D-ID.
A few weeks ago, veteran photojournalist Kenneth Jarecke announced the creation of The Curious Society, a membership-based, quarterly print publication for contemporary photojournalism.
Deadline reports that MGM has acquired the rights for the Johnny Depp drama “Minamata” – chronicling W. Eugene Smith’s last photo essay on the horrific mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan.
Last week, in the span of slightly over 19 hours, news broke that the Whitney Museum had 1) acquired images from a charity print sale by Black photographers to mount a show entitled Collective Actions: Artist Interventions in a Time of Change, 2) offered the photographers a lifetime pass to the museum for their unsanctioned participation, and 3) canceled the show following a tweetstorm of outrage over the exploitative move.
When HBO’s Lovecraft Country premiered last weekend, sci-fi and photo nerds reveled at the detailed homage to several photos taken by the legendary photographer, director and author Gordon Parks. While best known for “American Gothic,” much of Parks’ work throughout his lifetime touched upon the U.S.’ ignominious, racist past – work that has entered the contemporary consciousness through pop culture appropriation.
As fears of coronavirus (COVID-19) balloon in the U.S., many freelance photographers have begun to contend with the economic impact of event cancellations and social distancing policies. Freelancers are accustomed to seasonal slowdowns or the occasional cancellation, but the uncertainty around the breadth and duration of this outbreak has resulted in anxiety, frustration, and anger.
TikTok, the video-based social media app, usually conjures visions of teens mimicking the latest dance craze, but it’s probably better described as short attention span YouTube. In 2017, ByteDance, the Chinese-owned parent company of TikTok, acquired the Musical.ly app, which had gained a toehold with an under-18 demographic by becoming a replacement for the comedy-oriented Vine app along with a burgeoning lip-synching community.
Photo Twitter collectively chuckled at the announced availability of Canada Goose’s Photojournalist Jacket. With editorial day rates hovering below $300/assignment, actual photojournalists were unlikely to be purchasing such a luxury item – even if it was inexpensive by Canada Goose standards.
On December 19, 2019, Flickr (and SmugMug) CEO Don MacAskill posted a letter entitled “The world’s most-beloved, money-losing business needs your help.” MacAskill described how SmugMug saved Flickr from an imminent demise at the hands of Verizon, and how the company needed the photo community to step up to staunch the money-losing operation.
As bushfires consume nearly 20 million acres in Australia, killing 24 people and an estimated one billion animals, it seems somewhat trivial to contemplate which image will end up defining and representing this apocalyptic event – especially considering the dry season will continue for a few more months. The scope of the fires has been difficult to comprehend, and indeed, the world largely ignored the first two months of the conflagration.
Unlike most types of photography, photojournalism abides a more stringent set of ethical guidelines because truth is paramount to accurate reporting. Many newspapers enforce their own ethical journalism guidelines, which tend to focus on retouching and the use of photo illustration techniques (e.g. compositing, timelapse, panoramic, etc).
Adobe recently announced that it would both discontinue downloads of older versions of Creative Cloud apps (which includes Lightroom and Photoshop), and revoke the license for older software. Further, Adobe tweeted that consumers “may face potential claims of infringement by third parties.”
A group of boys in Baraboo, WI assembled for a junior prom photo and posed with a Nazi salute. One of the boys posted the image to Twitter with the caption “We even got the black kid to throw it up.” In the midst of public outrage, it was revealed that a professional photographer not only took the image but directed them to “wave goodbye.”
If there’s a fundamental flaw with product reviews, it’s the typically short duration that reviewers have with the item before hitting a publishing deadline or needing to return the product to the manufacturer. With rapid product refreshes, the lifetime of any particular product can be short, which can often render longer evaluations as impractical.
I’ve read The Onion headlines and McSweeney’s pieces that have knocked me off my chair. I can still remember staying up late during high school to watch Saturday Night Live sketches like “Change Bank,” or Dave Chapelle’s Killing Me Softly on HBO. I’m a person who can appreciate good humor and satire.
Eye-rolls, shrugs, and barbs greeted the $120,000 Grand Prize winner of Dubai’s HIPA Photography Prize. Malaysian photographer Edwin Ong’s photo of a partially blind Vietnamese woman carrying her baby was derided for representing yet another “poverty porn” contest winner before it was suggested that the image was staged by photographer Ab Rashid.
In covering the terrorist attack on a Nairobi hotel that killed at least 21 people by Shahab extremists, The New York Times decided to publish an image of a bullet-riddled body taken by Khalil Senosi. Photo Twitter was outraged, and Poynter wrote about the “hard choice” the NYT made regarding the selection.
I'm Allen Murabayashi, the co-founder of PhotoShelter. We recently launched our Guide to Photo Contests 2019, an annual look at contests around the world that we think are worth your consideration. Here's an excerpt from this year’s guide that looks at the sometimes controversial world of contests.
22-year-old professional drone racing pilot Johnny Schaer has built a strong social media following on Instagram and YouTube with visually stunning video capture from his custom built drones.
In the U.S. and most industrialized nations, we have a collective infatuation with technology but a poor understanding of its effects – both intended and unintended. We love asking Siri to play our favorite song, but don’t fully consider the privacy implications of allowing the device to persistently listen to us.
Scoring a national magazine cover shoot to prove the greatness of a phone’s camera has become part of the standard PR playbook for manufacturers. TIME featured photos taken by Luisa Dörr using an iPhone for a September 2017 cover story entitled “Firsts” about women changing the world.