Editorial

On July 20th, my username got stolen from me on Instagram. Since then, I exchanged a number of emails with Facebook Advertiser Support, talking to a real person, but that has lead nowhere so far.

The Wellcome Trust is the world’s second largest charitable trust with an endowment of approximately £23.2 billion (~$30 billion). For the past 20 years, it has produced a photo contest called the Wellcome Image Awards, and this year, it rebranded the contest as the Wellcome Photography Prize.

The Lofoten archipelago is one of the most photographed regions in Norway. Its images have flooded social media in the last couple of years -- certainly both you and I have seen them. And at some point, both you and I have been dreaming of visiting either Lofoten or other places we have seen in the form of breathtaking imagery.

Inevitably a time will come around when a budding photographer decides to start "taking this seriously," "discouraging image theft," and (my personal favorite), "gaining exposure." And they do this, of course, with a watermark.

It's 7:30 in the morning in Winnipeg and my wife awakens me to share the news that she has just gotten the job she has always wanted in Toronto. It has been six months since we had first planned our move to Toronto. All of the sudden, we were moving across the country in 3 weeks. This just got real.

For the past several years my photography website called Squarespace home. Among online, fully-contained, content management systems, it is hard to go wrong with Squarespace. Offering domain registration and hosting, plus well-crafted templates, Squarespace makes it easy to create a professional looking website.

Here's a warning to all the photographers out there: caffeine and complicated camera repairs do not mix well. I found out the hard way and killed my $2,400 Sony RX1 full frame compact camera.

It has been bugging me for a while now: there is just something that is missing from photography. From my personal work to the majority of photographers out there. I’m talking about the photos on your feeds, be it personal to commercial. It has been bugging me and I finally found out what it is: what is missing from photography is stories.

Sometimes we put things off so many times that the act of delaying that thing becomes automatic. “I’ll get to that thing tomorrow”, and tomorrow comes, tomorrow goes, and that thing never gets taken care of. I fell into that trap, and the thing that kept being put off was taking portraits of my parents.

As a photographer and YouTuber, I review equipment and photography related gear on my channel. There are occasions when certain items receive less than positive reviews and, in most circumstances, the company in question operates in a very professional manner. Unfortunately, this isn’t true in every case and after I reviewed the Hasselblad H6D 100c, Hasselblad weren’t too happy with me.

One of my least favorite shots from Sani lodge now serves as a constant reminder of poor practice to me. This subject was one of many subjects collected by Tropical Herping working on a photographic field manual of Herps in Ecuador. This parrot snake (Leptophis ahaetulla) was played with.

The current boom of female-first initiatives is transforming the creative industry, providing opportunities for women to find mentorship, addressing discrepancies in pay, and helping women rally together to drive new policies and practices.

When Getty Images set up its contributor agreement with Flickr in 2008 to allow Flickr users to sell their photos, I enabled the feature. While not a professional photographer, I had been approached a couple of times in the past about licensing some of my shots and thought the opportunity to sell through Getty Images could formalize this process.

Jeff Mermelstein’s photographic practice of making presumably private text conversations public by photographing people’s phones while they are texting and then posting the results on Instagram has made a splash recently. Of course the highlight that ran in Business Insider was framed as a question in a PetaPixel article: is Mermelstein’s practice ethically sound?

With this article, I don’t want to ruin someone’s life and business or stop them from pursuing their passion, dreams, or whatever they’re after. But I do want to speak about this subject, as my frustrations with unprofessional wedding insiders have been slowly building up in the last few months.

This week Business Insider ran a story that covered images taken by a street photographer of people’s private phone messages. That photographer was the highly respected Jeff Mermelstein, someone who has a long list of celebrated work.

This is the story and all the messy details of how I lost my photography business' 8-year-old website at Bludomain, a hosting service "for the creative professional."

Right now is the best time ever to be a photographer, so why all the long faces?

I found an image that I don't want to see. Too familiar, and so, too hurtful. But as the Internet meme jokes, "What has been seen can't be unseen." In that context, such images are considered shocking, graphic, violent. The image I refer to, however, is far removed from any of these labels. But for me, there it is, that Punctum that Barthes spoke of. As I write, Google Chrome suggests the correct spelling is 'puncture' -- how appropriate.

Just this past week, the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs approved amendments to EU’s Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which includes the infamous Article 13.

For about a year and a half, every time I opened my fridge I saw my last remaining 10 exposure pack of Fuji FP 100C instant film, and every time I opened said fridge I was reluctant to take it out and shoot it. I did not want to waste my last remaining packfilm but I knew I shouldn’t wait too long, because eventually the chemistry inside the film would dry. And since the film expired in late 2007, I was running out of time.

Through his most famous character’s lips, Arthur Conan Doyle once lamented “There is nothing new under the sun.” But he was wrong. Because I recently saw a photograph that was so utterly unique and awe-inspiring that it instantly froze the Lucky Charms-laden spoon that had been traveling toward my waiting craw. I’d just seen my first milk bath portrait, and never again would I be the same.

My mom was a florist. She used to say you can always tell a florist by their thumb. Each floral stalk must be cut prior to refrigeration and cut again when incorporated into a design, so if the inside of the thumb is rough and slightly discolored, with tiny slices lining the soft padding, like a hundred tiny paper cuts, you’re talking to a florist.

As a kid who grew up with a shelf filled with yellow spines, I can attest to the rhythm and general predictability of a National Geographic cover. With few exceptions (most notably those holographic covers from the 1980s), cover photography from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s followed a familiar pattern of a faraway place, strange creature, or “exotic” face in saturated color.

February 2017. For a midwesterner like my father, this was prime time to get away. So Jon decided to acquire two tickets aboard a cruise from San José, Costa Rica to the Panama Canal. His original plan was to treat my mother to a bit of mid-winter warmth and sunshine. When she wasn't able to go, he offered the spare to me.

Growth. Real, personal, soul-fulfilling, butterflies in the belly-inducing growth. That’s the key to my happiness; my personal metric for success. It doesn’t matter what I achieve or how much of it I attained. I define myself as successful simply in the process of progress.

For a photographer with so many memorable quips to his name, Garry Winogrand didn't leave much of a paper trail. The four books he made during his lifetime (five if you count the 1976 Grossmont College booklet) consist almost exclusively of pictures. Although they also include some great essays, none are by Winogrand. Nor did he write for any outside books or sources.

Having spent thousands of hours on Flickr over the past 15 years or so, on a personal level I’ve become fairly invested in the site. To date I’ve published over 140,000 of my photographs there. I publish 40 or so new photos there every single day. It’s the primary archive of my photography work on the Internet.

Seven years ago I decided to buy a camera to capture my climbing adventures. Little did I know how it would change my life. Not only did it make the climbing even more enjoyable, it also taught me all the important aspects of photography.

My name is Patrick Keenan, and I'm a photojournalist in Australia. I have been using Ektachrome 100ASA underwater in my Nikonos cameras and SB-105 flash since the 1970s and was disappointed to see production end in 2012 because of the digital revolution.

My eyes are filled with tears because of the smoke. The plastic particles in the air are irritating my lungs. I'm climbing this mountain with my two friends.