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photographer with camera and lens

When Composing a Photo, Think About Where the Camera Is

As a photographer, you might be out on the street or at a vantage point in the landscape. You raise the viewfinder to your eye, compose the framing that you envisioned, then click the shutter. You have a picture that was acquired using the technical elements at your creative disposal: focal length, shutter speed, and aperture. But where was the camera?

Long Form Study: Why Photographers Should Repeatedly Revisit a Scene

Ukumehame Beach is a small strip of sand on Maui’s west side. It has all the necessities of a good beach – soft sand, clear waters and a few special features to draw a photographer’s eye. It’s the kind of place that tourists overlook, which makes it all the more attractive to us locals.

I Chose to Document the Final Months of My Grandparents’ Lives

I never set out to make this book nor did I have a plan for the images as I was making them. The photos were a way for me to process what was happening in front of me. This story is about my grandparents, it's about loss, and it's about dementia.

The New Newburgh

When nine photographers from as far away as India, Hong Kong and Croatia descend upon Newburgh along the Hudson River, 60 miles north of New York City, the question asked most by Newburghers and our friends and family was, "why Newburgh?" The short answer is we are documenting a historic town on the cusp of a revival.

Hey Seoul Sistas: On Assignment for the Bachelor Season 18 Episode 4

The first time that I had worked with Disney ABC TV as their official stills photographer was a couple years back when they came to Japan to film for the reality show I Survived a Japanese Game Show. It was a super big production and I'm grateful I got to be a part of that. Although the working hours were somewhere between 12-14+ moving around on foot each day, I couldn’t complain because the entire crew were all fun to work with.

As with lots of the non-news related picture work that I do, it’s typical that I can’t post any pictures up due to contract reasons (or until the story runs) even though the Internet makes it so tempting with just four clicks of a button. One of the assignments that I’m allowed to finally take out of the bag (now that the show is broadcasted) and share with all of you is when Disney ABC TV put me on the plane bound for Seoul, South Korea to shoot all the stills for the filming of The Bachelor Season 18 Episode 4. Although I couldn’t fly first class, they did put me up in a nice little room towards the top at the Millennium Seoul Hilton Hotel, which I was more than fine with. Thanks again Disney and ABC.

The first ever photo, showing a rooftop view, by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

The First Photo: Nicéphore Niépce’s ‘View from the Window at Le Gras’

It has been over half a century since Swiss photo historian Helmut Gernsheim donated the world’s earliest permanent photograph* to the University of Texas for public display in 1963. This article is a look at the story behind Nicéphore Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras, the world's oldest known photograph captured with a camera.

Kodak’s Problem Child

Rochester, New York — The cold hits me as soon as I leave the Amtrak station, stepping into a swirl of snow eddies that etch the low streets in black and white.

The terminal sits just outside the city center. In the short car ride into town, one building stands out to me from all the others. It is an impressive beaux arts landmark with five large letters, glowing in red, resting at the top

The Decisive Moment is Dead. Long Live the Constant Moment

We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson

We exist on a treadmill of forgetting and anticipating. We labor to preserve what we treasure of our past, even while the present shotguns us with a thousand new options, one of which must become our future. One of which we must choose.

In this maelstrom of time it is hard to be calm; to understand what warrants attention, and what can be ignored. This state of tranquility and presence has been the essence of the modern photographic act, best characterized in the popular mind by Cartier-Bresson's concept of the "Decisive Moment."