Inspiration

Let’s not waste any time. What is the most important element in someone’s photography style? The quick answer is repetition.

In the summer of 2017, I received an invitation from my CEO at Barclays India, Uma Krishnan, who was interested in collecting some of my award-winning photography work. In order to avoid giving away my photographs for free, I asked her to contribute some amount towards her favorite social cause, and this is how the idea for Create4Cause was born.

“I can’t shoot street photography where I live. My city is just so boring. I need to travel more to explore exotic places to be able to shoot more.” Those are sentiments I had some time ago about my photography. In this video and article, I would like to challenge these views by looking at one of the world’s most famous and successful documentary photographers. Let’s talk about Martin Parr.

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.

I love a photography challenge and there’s nothing more challenging than shooting a church wedding ceremony. Forget everything else that happens during the course of a wedding day, the ceremony is the grand occasion. The awesome moments that your couple have been waiting for happen here, so you need to be ready.

It was my younger years. I had just published work from the Sudanese Civil War, and the Editor-in-Chief of Germany's GEO magazine, wrote that “Per-Andre risks life and limb for a good shot." Basically, I presume he meant I was a young fool, who took on assignments very few in their clear mind would consider.

It’s the fifth in a string of beautiful days, in a place a world away from our daily life back home. The sky is wide and blue. The air is thick with scents of food we’ve yet to try, and a language we don’t understand. But friendly smiles allow us to navigate our way through this country that is settling into our hearts.

As a celebrity portrait photographer and street artist, I am used to being quick when it come to the execution of photography.

French photographer Hadrien Picard was recently put to the test by his friends at Red Bull. In one of their recent "Pressure Shot" episodes, Red Bull challenged Picard to capture a full photo essay with BMX star Matthias Dandois. The catch? He had to capture the whole thing in a single roll of 36 exposures.

Photographer, filmmaker, and YouTube superstar Peter McKinnon is better known for his video work these days, but he recently took a step back to share a simple photo "hack" that can yield more dramatic portraits in a matter of seconds.

Street photographers are not known for their reserve. We are happy to give advice on gear, framing and technique. But I believe the best photographers are those who also seek advice and look to learn from others. That said, not all advice is equal, and some ideas are outdated, narrow minded, or just plan wrong.

I think that one of the hardest elements to incorporate in a street photograph is humor. Unlike other themes in street photography, I think that naturally occurring “funny” scenes are harder to stumble across, as they often involve a lot of interpretation and may involve playing with elements in the composition rather than being able to rely on finding a scene that is funny “as it is.”

Apple has officially crowned the winners of its "Shot on iPhone" Night Mode photo contest, choosing six photos out of "thousands of submissions" that were all taken with the iPhone 11/Pro/Pro Max' newfound low-light photography mode.

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.

We had exactly one last take to get this right. “Hold...hold...okay go!” We all held our breath as our motorized graham crackers moved toward each other, hoping the last twelve hours weren’t a complete waste.

The World Press Photo Foundation has revealed the finalists of one of the most coveted awards in photojournalism. Picking from 73,996 photos submitted by over 4,200 photographers from 125 countries, the judges have identified six images that will go toe to toe for the title of World Press Photo of the Year, 2020.

Wet plate photography master Markus Hofstaetter—a frequent guest author on PetaPixel—recently embarked on another photography experiment. Using pebbles of sandarac resin, he made his own Renaissance-era varnish for his finished wet plates.

YouTuber Jordy of Cinecom.net recently put together a list of DIY filmmaking and photography hacks that are proving to be quite popular. In just under 7 minutes, he covers 9 hacks, all of which use cardboard to make the magic happen.

When I’m not working on animated films like “How To Train Your Dragon”, I spend my free time photographing architecture. These are my passion projects. It is the creative outlet that stretches my brain in a totally different way then when I’m working on animated films.

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.