Recently, the more I study my photographs, the more I feel that bokeh is cheating me out of a more substantial image. I really like photographs with a lot of visual complexity -- well presented, not chaotic, but a clear arrangement of multiple elements.
In the previous essay, I made an argument that photographs (and things that are like photographs) metaphorically transport us into the scene of the photo. We react, body and mind, a little bit as if we were actually present.
So, you make photographs? Or take them, or something like that? I’m going to guess here that you probably hope people will like them, or see something in them that’s interesting. You’re interested in how people see photographs, how people make sense of photos. Me too.
Let me ask you a question. Is this photo real or fake? This might be a difficult question because the answer depends on what you define as real or fake.
The ability for individual photographers to have any kind of cultural impact feels diminished and diluted when you consider just how many are working towards the goal of producing meaningful work.
I recently watched a video on YouTube by the very popular landscape photographer Thomas Heaton. The video was titled "AI editing will ruin photography as we know it" where Thomas discusses a new photo editing program soon to be released by Skylum: Luminar AI.
Having spent a good portion of my life standing in the dark, dodging, burning, and spotting my prints, I doubt I will ever go back to analog in any meaningful way. I saw this negative and scanned it because these are two people who I was once very close too. I don't know either of them now. As I was looking at the scan, I remembered that day. I was in love with her and he was my best friend.
While teaching a recent workshop, I joked that street photography was the only genre where people would buy $3,000 worth of cameras and lenses and then deliberately use them to make out of focus, grainy, imperfect images. This led to a pretty interesting discussion about the merits to imperfection.
Pinball machines; depending on your age, you might know all about them. Once, considered so evil that New York City banned them. Wasted youths (juvenile delinquents) spent days and nights hanging out in pinball palaces. They were so ubiquitous, “The Who” even made them a central part of their rock opera, “Tommy.”
As the majority of camera manufacturers move away from the SLR type cameras and start producing mirrorless systems, one company continues to hold on to the past. Pentax has now in multiple statements confirmed that it will not be producing a mirrorless camera and will continue to develop SLR cameras.
Consider this: think like a painter. Painting is basically an additive process: the painter adds paint to a canvas. Photography is basically subtractive: the photographer, through careful composition and cropping (or cloning in the digital darkroom), subtracts unwanted or distracting elements from a scene to create a vision -- or impression -- of a scene.
Discussing what makes a “photographic” photograph can seem like a bit of a tautology, but I think that my understanding of what I’m trying to achieve with my photographs has been helped by this idea.
It's funny how deceiving a photograph can be. I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking that this roller skater has turned his head to check out the girl on her phone as he skates past her. Without any context, that does appear to be the story here.
One of the most hotly debated questions for landscape photographers is how to answer the age-old question, “Where did you shoot that?” While the question is simple enough, whether to answer (and how to answer) is an internal question many shooters contend with in the age of Instagram.
There are many different reasons that photographers love photography. Almost always any individual photographer’s interest is a mixture of multiple aspects.
When Sony released the a7R III all the way back in 2017, most people speculated what this release could mean for the a7S series of cameras. Many of us were anticipating a mark III for the S series to be announced, and potentially even released not long after the update to the R model.
One of the byproducts of the new-wave approach to street photography, which champions anonymity, mystery, and a cinematic aesthetic, is that there is an absolute abundance of images featuring silhouetted figures and shadow play. These are the kind of images I started off creating, and there are some fantastic artists who have utilized this style over the years, my favorite of these being Fan Ho, one of the classic progenitors of this style.
If you haven’t heard about this following situation, then you might just lose your temper now.
I have sometimes been critical when landscape photographers combine two or more photos not taken at the same time to make one great photo -- adding northern lights or beautiful skies to a photo that did not have them, for example -- and then making people believe it was something that really happened.
There is an excellent quote regarding practice attributed to legendary martial artist Bruce Lee that I think provides a great framework for many pursuits but also highlights one of my earliest struggles with ideas around “style” in photography: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
There seems to be a trend in current photography goals to achieve a “look” to one's work. I feel this is a short-sighted goal, and that a consistent aesthetic is more the result of careful curation of a large body of work, rather than something that ought to be deliberately achieved.
There are so many factors to potentially juggle for any given street/documentary situation that eye contact for me tends to fall a bit to chance -- if it happens it happens and if it doesn’t it doesn’t. It is rarely something I feel makes or breaks an image, but more frequently I’ve been thinking about what specific function working to achieve (or deliberately avoid) eye contact could offer to my photographs.
Whenever I travel for photography, there’s a real sense of anticipation for the scenarios I might face, the feeling that the next great moment is just around the corner. As a street and documentary photographer, my intention when traveling is not to see “the sights”, or to eat the foods, or to hear the music -- instead, it is specifically to meet the people and see what aspects of myself exist in foreign situations.
Sometimes you know about two things in completely different parts of your brain, and then one day, for no reason, you put them together and your head explodes — a cascade of understandings like the last scene in “Usual Suspects”. After 40 years of taking pictures, that happened to me. One idea changed me overnight. And if you have a camera it will change you, too.
The battle is on. The forces of truth against forces of deception. With visual AI making it easier to fake visual content, its credibility is at stake. And with it, the income of thousands upon thousands of people worldwide who depend on the credibility of visuals to thrive: newspapers, magazines, photographers, newswires, webcasters, television news, videographers, journalists, and photo agencies, among many others.
I did my first advertising assignment in the year 2000. I still remember how excited I was when I, a few months later, walked out of a bookstore on Chestnut Street in San Francisco with several magazines with my pictures in them.
I've noticed that a commonly used compliment for street photographs is to describe them as "timeless." My interpretation of this is that it is used to mean that there are characteristics of the image which in some way transcend the boundaries of the context it was made in and can exist almost in its own context, its own space.
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.
My name is Adam Marsh, and I'm a Melbourne-based event photographer. I recently wrote an article titled "Adobe, This is Why Photographers Are Hating on You,” and it seems to have been incredibly divisive. There was a huge amount of feedback and engagement on this topic in the wider global photography community.
Well-curated portfolios can be some of the most powerful tools available to a photographer looking to efficiently communicate what they’re about to potential clients and customers. The classic portfolio is a physical book of prints, maybe 10-20 total, often accompanied by a declaration of intent in writing or in person if being showcased at an actual critique session.