thoughts

The recent collapsing of the Azure Window in Malta finally motivated me to take my keyboard and tell you the story behind the picture above.

Abstract photography seems to be an elusive subject, hard to nail down to a single definition. This may be due to the abstract nature of the idea of “abstraction” and perpetuating misconceptions about abstract photography.

These days there's a lot of talk about "fake news" on the Internet, and Facebook recently announced the introduction of fact checkers. Is that a good thing? I feel ambivalent about it, and I'll explain why.

One of the often recurring discussions among professional photographers is whether or not we should ever work for free. I’ve been known to rail against those who do and against clients who request free pictures... so why did I recently waive my own rule?

Moving down the aisles that are carved between each row of seats, the line slowly edges on. A choir of no more than three people -- woman and two men -- expel their voices gently and slowly, serenading the churchgoers as they inch forward toward the pulpit where they receive their bread and wine.

A lot can be said in a single photo. As the old cliché says, “a picture is worth 1,000 words.” Certain famous images have had some impact in shaping the public perception of an event, such as Nick Ut’s “Napalm Girl” photo, which ran in many newspapers and changed how people thought about the Vietnam War.

As a professional photo retoucher, I owe Adobe most of my life. Without them, I would honestly not be where I am today, being able to do what I love every single day! Over the years, it has also gone through a multitude of changes, and since my life is tied directly to Photoshop, I pay very close attention to them.

A man I know as Jay reaches into his car to try to force his engine to kick over, leaning deeply into the door as if the weight of the world is upon him in this moment. Each detail, as frivolous as the last, lends itself to the mystery of the frame.

The New York Times just reported an incredible story of how a 23-year old recent college graduate created a fake news story about fraudulent Clinton votes in Ohio and netted $22,000 on a fake news website from ads.

Hi, everyone. My name is Giannis Papapostolou, and I’m an amateur photographer based in Greece. Photography is a big part of my life. However, about a year ago, I had an accident.

Burhan Ozbilici’s stunning photo of a gunman moments after assassinating the Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov spread like wildfire over social media. While many within the photojournalism community quickly declared the image as the “photo of the year,” and worth of top prizes, one voice offered dissent.

Who thinks wedding photography has become a bit predictable this year? Boring, even? Sure, the first time you see a teeny tiny couple lost in a massive landscape, it's impressive. Or a backlit couple in profile. Or a couple shot through loads of out of focus lights. Or hand in hand, silhouetted, between fairy lights, having just stepped over a prism and climbing a mountain (because that’s what happens on a wedding day).

Photographer couple Benjamin Lowy and Marvi Lacar created this inspiring short film with Sony about how Lowy's vision of the world as a conflict photographer changed after he entered the world of fatherhood.

The kind of photography I do begins as a moment of theft. Finding the scene, finding your angle, and stealing the moment for yourself. Some photographers are creators. They build a scene, a still life, or arrange their models and angle their lights and create an image from nothing. I’m not one of those photographers. I’m a thief.

"Yet to an obsessive his obsession always seems to be of the nature of things and so is not recognized by what it is." Those words, written by art critic John Berger in his book Ways of Seeing, annotate one part of his understanding of the history of oil paintings: it’s obsessive tendencies toward showmanship of what one has, and the relationship between property and art.

Since elementary school, I've been told that things had to match. If I wore Sean John pants, then I had to wear a Sean John shirt. If I wore anything Nike, then I had to have the matching shoes to correspond. This was a mindset that I held throughout most of my life.

I feel that there's a word missing from our vocabulary, and this essay is the culmination of an effort to find such a word, to define it usefully, and to work through some of what it might mean.

A dark reality exists within photography that few photographers are willing to discuss and many refuse to even recognize. In the name of purity, we tend to see photography as a medium that couldn’t -- shouldn’t be able to -- do harm.

Here's an inspiring video in which renowned adventure photographer Cory Richards discusses why he believes vulnerability is the key to making great art.