This article is aimed at folks who don't edit their photos at all. If you aren't editing you're missing a lot of fun. Think of me more as a cheerleader than a teacher. I'll show you simple edits that can be done in a few minutes. We won't be adding non-existent clouds nor making fat people thin. This is just simple stuff. Let's start with this shot.
My father Ohno Tsuneya (Oct 9, 1937 – Dec 23, 2017) was born into a peaceful small town in the hilly countryside of Saitama prefecture, a few hours by train from Tokyo.
It’s undeniable that life is often seen as a kind of race or competition, but I absolutely despise this idea.
Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy!
Finding your photographic style takes time. It's a process. You may even think you found it only to discover that your preferences have changed. That's okay. That's good. It means that you are growing and evolving on your journey.
Commercials don't have to be powerful and emotional works of art, but they are often much more successful if they are. Leica's latest 1-minute ad is just that: an evocative reminder of photography's value to society.
In her ongoing series Reflections 2, photographer Ziqian Liu shows just how creative you can get when you limit your props and subject matter, and master composition instead. Throughout the series, Liu uses only herself, various plant life, the occasional fruit, and a round mirror to craft images that are at once symbolic and striking.
Leading lines in photography are existing lines within the frame of a photograph which the photographer has deliberately aligned/arranged (prior to taking the photo) by adjusting their composition either shifting their body or camera. It should result in lines which “lead” to the subject, increasing the focus of the viewer, allowing for a more enjoyable viewing experience.
I’ve been writing for a while now on this single idea: that photographs transport you, in a sense, to the scene of the photograph; that you therefore react to photographs as if you were there, viscerally; that you react specifically by imagining the world around the photo; and finally that this imaginative reaction, this meaning you make, is of central importance in understanding a photograph.
Underwater photographer Barbara Cole is best known for her beautiful portraits of people—stunning creations that seem to walk the line between photography and painting. But her most recent project, Appearances, explores a different subject: flowers.
Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy!
From time to time, we all get that desire to throw one of our electronics at the wall and/or smash it with a bat. But how many of us ever actually get to do it? For photographer Jaap Vliegenthart, he got to live out this fantasy: crushing some of his old electronics to smithereens and then capturing the aftermath.
If you’ve been following along for any length of time, you might be starting to wonder if the author here even owns a camera, and if so, whether he can work it at all. I can! I really do, and I can! I mean, kinda, anyways.
My story is an interesting one. I worked behind the scenes in the motion picture industry for 15 years. I got my big break at a place called Clairmont Camera repairing cinema lenses.
As any photo enthusiast will tell you (sometimes without you even asking), the benefits of photography go far beyond the ability to capture a moment or immortalize an expression. It goes beyond a mere understanding of color, or composition, or the ability to see the extraordinary hiding inside of an ordinary scene.
Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy!
The pandemic has truly hurt the creative industry. Who knew that a year ago that specializing in portrait photography would hurt my career so badly?
The previous essays in this series have tried to develop some ideas about what happens when people look at photos. The realism, that mass of realistic detail, causes (I claim) a visceral reaction: we feel, we react, we think, a little as if we were transported by the photograph into the scene itself.
After being forced to shelter in place because of the spread of COVID-19, photographer Michael Shainblum found himself in a deep creative rut: he just stopped taking photos. In this 15-minute video, he explains how he pulled himself out of it.
Crash! I tentatively turn my body in the direction of the sound already aware of its cause. There, a few feet away in the rocks, lay one of my cameras, its lens akimbo.
Photography has been with me for as long as I can remember. In my childhood, my father had an old Zorki camera, the Russian Leica II clone, and he had a habit of developing films from our trips in the darkroom. That place with unfamiliar smells and substances had a unique charm for me.
Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy!
2020 was not an easy year. The COVID-19 infested, politically-charged year drove us all a little mad. I started isolating in the first week of March -- I had a cold and really didn’t know what it was, so my family and I all stayed away from our respective jobs.
Brzz, bzzzrrr. The rollers on the vintage Polaroid developer start to suck in the 8×10 Polaroid. Dan Bosman, a Mars Cafe barista of 14 years, and I are chatting just like we always do.
In the previous essay on reading photos, I looked at how things we know, mental baggage we have accumulated besides just memories, affect what we see in a photograph. Things like cultural background, political beliefs, movies we’ve seen, or books we’ve read.
This trip has been waiting in the wings ever since I made my first successful daguerreotype in the redwoods two years ago. I actually planned on going as early as August this year, but one project after another kept getting in the way, and for months I kept pushing it back by a couple of weeks.
This year, as photographers, we've been challenged to look at more ordinary subjects closer to home in pursuit of continuing our photography. 2020 has pushed us to find creative potential in the more everyday and mundane, perhaps duping us in the process that these subjects are in fact worthy of our attention.
Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy!
Toward the end of November, I went back to one of my favorite places in the desert. A spot out in the middle of nowhere, with the nearest significant human population well over an hour drive away.
When I look back on 2020 in 5 or 10 years, I don't think I'll remember it as the year when a pandemic brought the photo industry to an economic standstill. I don't think I'll remember the CIPA numbers, or the R5 overheating debacle, or any of the virtual product launches. I'll remember 2020 as a year that helped us rediscovered the importance of photography.
If there’s a challenge in selecting the best images from a day’s shoot, then that challenge is amplified when it comes to actively curating a huge body of work into something coherent and presentable.
Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy!
Now and then, it just so happens that I find a show or movie that visually amazes me. I was blown away by the colors of Grand Hotel Budapest and by the cinematography of Birdman. The hit Netflix series The Queen's Gambit is one of those surprises that I have discovered recently.
I've always found northern harriers to be a raptor species that stood out from most others. Their hunting method provides ample opportunity for creative photography as they glide over gorgeous marshes and grasslands searching for food. On this particular evening, I visited a new grassland in the middle of New Jersey that I had not visited previously to see if I could capture some photos of these beautiful birds.
This is the third essay in this series, and it begins a smaller sequence of notes running over the ways we as viewers make sense of pictures. We spend, I think, too much time thinking about what happens before and during the making of a picture, but not enough on what happens when someone actually looks at it. For most of us, for most pictures, surely this is the most interesting time?
We were several weeks into the lockdown. My optimistic attitude told me that it was the perfect time to write a book. Commercial shoots canceled, personal engagements canceled, nothing but time at home for the foreseeable future. How hard could it be?
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.
Yes, 2020 was a crazy year, and National Geographic, the most respected magazine for photography, has compiled its unique glimpse of this year. The January 2021 issue, which is also The Year in Pictures for 2020, is divided into four segments: the year that tested us, the year that isolated us, the year that empowered us, and the year that hope endured.
Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy!
I can’t remember the first crack I photographed. But I remember the huge crack in the plaster on the outside of my apartment building in San Rafael after college.
Shutterstock Editorial has just revealed the photographs that documented the historical moments that dominated 2020, a very different year from any other. The year started normally with red-carpet shows like Oscars and then veered off dramatically to pandemic and protests and is winding up with hope as news of vaccines emerges.
What many photographers aspire to do is to be able to tell a story with their images -- to create pictures that make the viewer keep looking as they dig deeper and deeper into layers of the photograph.
Have you ever wondered what alternates of iconic photos looked like? Iconic Licensing has acquired thousands of previously unseen contact sheets from some of the most celebrated photographers of modern times, including Terry O’Neill, Norman Parkinson, and Ted Williams.
The Army versus Navy college football game has been taking place since 1890 and annually since 1930. Photographer James Quantz Jr. was given the opportunity to capture Navy's specialty uniform as part of its 175-year celebration of the Naval Academy's tradition.
It happens to the best of us... and in 2020 it happens all the time: creative block. Whether it's a lack of inspiration, a lack of motivation, a lack of free time, or some combination of all three, we've all hit that wall where it feels like every one of our ideas is stale, everyone else is better or more prolific than us, and there's no real reason to keep trying.
Just Pictures was definitely more than Just Pictures. All of the photographers were artists of color, and most of the subjects were Black.
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.
There are many genres of photography, which I believe is what makes photography such a unique hobby or profession. The camera simply becomes a tool that facilitates a personal interaction with the wide range of variables in our culture.
This photo is Untitled (1977) by photographer Jerry Uelsmann -- it was my key inspiration. It took one curvy shaded line to make the rock alive and sexy. This was on the wall in my living room when I was 14 and I looked at it for countless hours.
Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy!
