Editorial

I think, as an industry, photographers talk about inspiration a lot. We are either trying to find it, discover it or attempting to evoke it. I’ve recently found inspiration in the last place I would expect it: in my own work. More than the work, actually, the inspiration is from the subjects. And the inspiration that affected me has nothing to do with photography. Over the last two years, I’ve stumbled into photographing more athletes and fitness enthusiasts, and it has, in great part, inspired me to take better care of myself.

I'm photographer Joe Hendricks, and in this post I'll share some things I learned from trying to get into landscape photography.

Vintage Trouble recently played their biggest gig in front of 115,000 people as the support act of AC/DCs “Rock or Bust” Tour 2015 at the Red Bull Ring in Zeltweg, Austria.

I had the once in a lifetime opportunity to join the band and work with them directly on stage. It was life changing for me and this experience once again showed me that being a concert photographer is the best job in the world!

Ah, “photography”, you loosely defined word that everyone seems to have their own definition of. It’s amazing how polarizing you can be, isn’t it?

And one of your most polarizing aspects seems to be exactly how much retouching is considered reasonable. Purists claim no retouching of any kind is allowed (then they usually reference Ansel Adams, which is quite ironic considering the amount of dodging and burning he brought to the field), while others gladly accept Photoshop as a regular part of their photography tool-belt.

My name is Oliver Ruffus, and recently I had the experience of shooting my very first wedding. I'd like to give back to the photography community by talking about the experience so that first-timers know what to be aware of. A lot of this will be redundant with other sources but hopefully something new will catch someone's eye.

This is the story of how I wrestled with death twice to live for photography. Before I wrote this article, I told a couple of people about it since it means so much to me. Although some didn’t understand how I could talk so openly about this topic, I decided that it’s my duty to generate awareness and help others even if it means that I’m revealing my biggest struggle in front of the world.

A while back, I came across an article about using a super cheap CCTV lens. The results to me looked something like a Voigtlander f/0.95 but for a tiny fraction of the cost. I picked one up off eBay for something like $20 a year or so ago.

Essentially conceived as a New Year’s resolution, I gave myself the challenge of producing one portrait every single day during 2013. I've had a passion for portraiture for some time, and I figured that at the very least, I would create some portraits that I am proud of by attempting this challenge.

This is a short article that's a reminder that every interaction you have is part of a relationship with someone -- potentially a client.

Recently I was looking for a food photographer for a web client. I wanted a local shooter and found one practically next door to the studio. Unfortunately, his online gallery showed text jargon instead of photos. I tried a different browser, but still no luck. I sent a screen capture to the photographer -- after all, if it were my site I would want to know.

The image above may look strangely familiar to you. That’s because it’s a facial average of the leaders of the main political parties in this week’s general election in the UK. If you've been following UK politics, you have probably seen these people many times in the media, leading to an involuntary familiarity with them.

A facial average like the one above is created by digitally altering each person’s face to a matching position and expression, and then morphing them all together to create an average.

Today Flickr launched a number of new improvements to their service. In my mind, the most significant change is that Flickr is introducing the ability for you to bulk download your photos from their site.

I love bugs. I love photographing bugs. I don’t love bugs, however, when I find them lurking in my shower. I also don’t love bugs when I find them lurking in my camera. Yes, I said inside my camera.

I made this photograph a while back for a private client in Phuket, Thailand, who owned a stunning vacation home that she designed herself. She was drawn to my editorial style in my commercial work and she wanted me to take that approach for a series of lifestyle images at her home.

We spoke on the phone to prepare for the shoot, and she threw out the idea of hiring an elephant. I thought she was joking at first but when I realized she wasn’t, I jumped at the opportunity, I mean... how often do you get to have an elephant as a model at your disposal? (More on disposal later).

Editor's note: Elena Shumilova is a mother and photographer based in Russia who became a viral sensation online after sharing her remarkable photos of her children. Just two years after first picking up a camera, her photos were viewed over 60 million times by people around the world. In this article, Shumilova shares how she captures her beautiful and nostalgic pictures.

Every career has a reality TV show nowadays, from chefs to pawn brokers, but what about photographers? When I was asked to be the resident photographer on History Asia’s first home grown reality show about photography, Photo Face-Off, I jumped at the chance.

The show is regional only, filming in Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Indonesia. It was described to me as Iron Chef meets Amazing Race. The show has essentially made photography a sport and being a competitive dude I love this idea.

My friend Matthew Simmons and I did recently did a photo shoot with an amazing little girl named Desi Robinson. After sending Renee, Desi's mother, the finished images and talking to her a few days after, something really hit me.

Renee thanked me for asking Desi to do a shoot with Matthew and I, because she had "come so far" since having that experience. After hearing this, I wanted to explore this idea a little more.

A change in the law will allow photographers to pay rent on their homes and studios with ‘exposure’ instead of money. They will also be able to buy coffee, shampoo, and other essentials by mentioning to the checkout assistant that they did a big job last week for nothing and are hoping it will bring them some paying clients.

Yesterday I shared the before-and-after photos above. The image on the left was taken on the 22nd April, 2009, almost exactly six years and one week before the image on the right. They show the same street in Bhaktapur, one of Nepal's most historic cities, before and after last Saturday's earthquake.

I was in Nepal exactly six years and three days before the earthquake that devastated the country on Saturday.

Back then, I was photographing for a magazine feature and had spent much of the day in Bhaktapur, a beautiful and ancient city in the Kathmandu Valley.

Note: This article is written for commercial photographers, not consumer photographers. A consumer shooter has a different list of challenges, and since I am not a consumer photographer, I won’t be addressing them.

Well it has certainly been a hectic week. Two proposals, a shoot, designing and writing -- and that was only Monday, heh.

It reminded me of how many channels I have, and I wonder if it may be possible to actually have too many. Can one have too many things one does? Possibly. Perhaps. Probably.

Warning: This post contains graphic photos and descriptions of a serious injury.

As a wedding photographer, there are so many different parts of the day we temporarily pause in being a photographer and magically transform into a seamstress, a planner, a mediator, a therapist and any number of other jobs. We are the only vendor outside of videographers who are with our clients all day.

It’s one of the parts of my career that I love -- no wedding day is ever the same and I get “re-charged” from the people families I meet. Because of this, I've always (in the past) considered myself more then a “photographer,” but rather someone who's there to help in any way I can (while still doing my jobs) should the need arise.

I didn’t really get into photography until my son was born. Like most new parents, one of the first things I did was go out and buy a camera so I could document every minute. As I started taking more pictures, my vision expanded and I began to start looking at things differently.

This year will mark forty years since the invention of the first functioning digital camera, and despite it being a measly 0.01 megapixels, it heralded a new age of digital photography and with it came a death cry for film.

Prompted by this incredibly dull article published recently by the BBC, I decided to ask some fellow photographers what reasons they had for still shooting the so-called "outdated" technology. Here’s the list of what they told me...

After 27 years of shooting daily photo assignments I had found myself at a crossroads in my photojournalism career. At that point I had spent 20 years as a staff photographer at The Boston Herald and 7 years as the Photo Editor of the Lowell Sun. But creatively I felt as if I was in a rut or shooting on autopilot.

It’s reported that over 208,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook EVERY MINUTE. “That’s so Tumblr” is an actual phrase used to identify images that would get noticed and go viral.

Lightroom 6 (AKA Lightroom CC) was just announced. I’ve been eagerly waiting for this release, pretty much from the moment Lightroom 5 was announced. And I have to be honest: I’m sad.

Yes, software updates make me disappointed. Here’s what’s up.

On Saturday, April 11, 2015, I stood on Valencia Street in San Francisco for 12 hours and offered free portraits to anyone that passed by. I'll share a little about what the experience was like.

Long gone are the days in which being a travel photographer simply meant you shot photography for a certain travel magazine or newspaper. The world isn't that simple anymore, and the level of competition in the photography world has never been higher. But still, I'm fairly sure there are more “travel photographers” on the planet now than there ever were -- just check your Instagram feeds.

So, if travel photography as a traditional career is dying, than how are these people making their money? Well, I wish I could give you the answer to that question, but I can't. These days, everyone has a different method of money-making. All I can do is tell you my story, and how I manage to keep from sleeping under a bridge every night -- though barely.

She stands in the front of the church; her face carefully set into a pleasant expression, her breathing slow. The knuckles of her right hand, however, are white with rage as she clutches her camera.

In my early teenage years I loved nothing more than gaming and going to LAN parties every weekend. Unreal Tournament, Battlefield 1942 and Counter-Strike were my favorites back then. Although I also liked strategy games like Warcraft 3, I spent most of my time playing Counter-Strike with my friends till early in the morning.

I'm not much of a gamer anymore besides an occasional SNES night, but recently a crazy thought crossed my mind. If street photography were a game, it would definitely be a first-person shooter.

I’m always on the lookout for potential subjects. Approaching them is something that I’ve actually gotten better at, despite the video evidence below to the contrary. When I was in college working for Student Media I hated talking to people to get caption information after I photographed them. Approaching a person before the photograph was even harder.

As I became more confident in my ability it became easier, but it was still difficult for me. When I decided I wanted to be a full time photographer, I knew I needed to do my best to remove the apprehension of talking to people I didn’t know about photographing them. I knew that working assignments would mean talking to people I’ve never met a lot.

Please allow me to introduce myself: I'm Pat Pope and I'm addicted to reading negative comments and abuse hurled at me on the Internet. For the sake of my own sanity, this is me going cold turkey.

Last week I made the mistake of writing one of those open letters you hear about. I wrote it in response to a request from Garbage's management company that they'd like my permission to use a photo that I took and I own in a book they intend to publish and sell for money. But they'd like to not pay me.

Well now, it seems my little guide to common photographic expressions hit a chord with a few people. It’s great that people appreciated it and I received some awesome comments. So I decided to put my thinking cap back on and come up with some more definitions. As before, it’s just a bit of fun and I’m in the firing line, just as much as the next guy.

The photography and music worlds are at odds in a dispute between a music photographer and a popular band. Photographer Pat Pope was miffed by a request from the band to include his photos in an upcoming book without any payment, while the band Garbage argues that they've already paid Pope for his work, and that they were simply giving him a chance to have his work represented in the publication.

In August I hired ImageRights International, a reputable copyright enforcement agency, to assume the routine handling of commercial infringements of my professional work. There are a lot. Starting in September 2014, companies began receiving letters from ImageRights’ partner law firms seeking to resolve these infringements on my behalf.

Yesterday was my wedding day.

It wasn’t a very big wedding. We’d actually been planning to get married in August, but after we found out I was pregnant (yay!), a very simple fact was staring us right in the face -- I needed insurance. Now.

Plus, I’d be about 8 months pregnant in August, and call me crazy but I kind of want to be able to dance my butt off at our wedding, and 8 months pregnant does not qualify me for the kind of dancing I’ve been preparing for.

We often get too set in our ways and our conversation remains in the same context, which can blind us to seeing the pitfalls we create for ourselves. In general, using other photographers’ aesthetics, judgements, and sensibilities should make us think twice, thrice, … Yet, in the rush of creating the next “noticeable” image on the Web, we use presets, filters, brushes, and a whole lot of them without thinking twice.

(The Roosevelt quote above is one of my all time favorites. I have a couple of copies of it and one is on the wall next to my cluttered, USB encrusted desk.)

Ahhh… the world of the artist. A place where we can nurture our ideas and share our bountiful creativity to others who will accept it into their lives with open arms, and smiles of gratitude.

Or… not.

Back in June, I was lucky enough to partner with a Boston-based nonprofit, Shooting Touch, to travel to Rwanda and document the participants in their "Basketball Health Corps" initiative. They use the sport of basketball and their partnerships with health administrators to teach children valuable skills and preventative treatments when it comes to HIV/AIDS, malaria, and daily health.

Peter Fordham was a British photographer best-known for his music work in the 1970s. If you own a copy of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, his second solo album, you’ll be familiar with his work. Fordham was the photographer who took the picture of Lennon, sat at his white piano with a pair of headphones on, at Lennon’s Tittenhurst Park home where the 1971 album was recorded. It’s a classic of rock music photography, Lennon singing into a hard black mic set against a stark white room, and was included as a fold-out poster in the album.

Product design is the notion of transforming an idea into a tangible object that has a purpose. Solving problems with products is what I like to do -- it's how I try to give something back to the world. Adaptalux is something I created recently to give photographers a portable macro studio wherever they go.

We photographers do love our catch-phrases, but what do they all mean? Here’s my not-so-serious and very tongue-in-cheek rundown of some of the more commonly used terms and their meanings. And yes, I’m as guilty as the next guy:

I was in kindergarten when this photo was taken.

It was the night of my first ballet recital. First and last, actually. I decided I didn’t have the patience for ballet, nor ballet for me. The photo was taken right before we headed out the door to a ballet performance on par with a train wreck.

Why do we make photographs? Why do we desire to make photographs so much that we can think of little else? For me it is simply because I have to make photographs. It is part of my DNA, and I love looking at other peoples' images as well. Galleries are like spiritual sanctuaries of visual goodness. When I visit people I am endlessly fascinated by the images on their walls.

The first one I ever saw was "Chicks Who Click." It was years ago and the photography industry was predominantly male. I didn't think too much of it, but wondered (aloud at times) the wisdom of not only creating a gender based photography group, but giving it a cutesy name like "Chicks Who Click."

By naming it that, I felt they had downplayed the seriousness and professionalism of their chosen profession. They seemed to have devalued themselves from "professional photographers" to, well... "Chicks Who Click."

Well known photographer and blogger Scott Kelby recently pointed to the 18-55mm kit lens as a reason why beginners find it difficult to take good shots -- it is neither wide nor long enough to create visual impact, he wrote. I'd like to respectfully disagree.

It's precisely because the 18-55mm kit lens is cheap and common that I relish the challenge of capturing great images with it. I just love the “You shot that with a kit lens?” wide-eyed reaction when people realize how learning to read the scene and lighting makes more difference than splurging on an expensive lens upgrade.

Photography is an analytic art form. We aim our lenses to specific parts of the world around us to pick a frame because, in our analysis, that particular frame presents the photograph we wish to take. We can certainly raise the camera, lower the camera, rotate it, pitch it, yaw it, aim at a different part and end up photographing something different.

You should realize that there are infinite number of photographs you can take from where you are now. How then do we aim the camera to “that particular frame” to photograph?

Photography is one of the most popular hobbies on the planet, but you’d never know it by reading most photography blogs, podcasts, books, and tutorials. It’s treated as a profession, where the goal is making money, buying more expensive gear or getting your prints into galleries around the world. You’re being enticed to “Go Pro,” and that’s just not realistic for the vast majority of photographers. Most photographers could benefit from going amateur.

Wedding photography, much like the entire business of weddings, is highly influenced by the ebb and flow of trends. They come, they go, and they’re cyclical. When I plunged into the business in early 2012, I committed myself to research the industry: what works, what’s popular, and what sells? I quickly discovered that there’s a common, predictable, and heavily relied upon set of post-processing trends in wedding photography.

See this house? It languished on the Orlando, Florida, market for 224 days. It’s no wonder; with a photo like that who would want to come see it? A new realtor took over -- one who understands the importance of professional photography for his listings.

I was hired to photograph the home on February 28 and delivered the images the next day. On March 10 he told me a buyer had made an offer. To put it another way, after almost 8 months on the market, the home was under contract within 8 days after I took new photos.