My first African experience began at age 17 when I won the 1974 Kodak/Scholastic National Photography scholarship which included a studies program to Kenya and Tanzania. For a teenager, it was an eye-opening revelation. Back then I was working an illegible night shift cooking burgers at Jack in the Box while going to high school. It was a tough gig but it made a new Nikon lens possible every couple of weeks.
I had the opportunity to photograph the newest dormitory on the Florida International University campus a couple of nights ago and I thought I would share a little insight on the process of lighting such a large structure.
Being so close to the release of the 2013 Arizona State University Football campaign, I wanted to take an opportunity on to talk about an image that I created many years ago while still a student at ASU. When many people ask me where I believe I crossed the line from hobbyist to professional, I tell them of this campaign, and actually place the beginning on a single image. The fact that the image still lives on my website is a testament to how much I enjoy it and how much it means to me. It is …
I got a chance to photograph for Warped Tour this year, and wanted to share about my experiences and takeaways with you. I was actually quite lucky to get the job. It started off with an email to the media director of Warped Tour, followed by having to fill out this media request form. From there, I just had to wait a few days for them to verify everything, check out my portfolio, and get a confirmation email literally 12 hours before the show started.
Photographer Dave Hill has launched the world's first Instagram TV show, a science fiction series called Desert Friends. Created as "a side project with some friends," the show comes in short 15 second episodes and is about three friends who "are warped to a distant galaxy and need to get home."
Yesterday we shared an amazing time-lapse music video spanning 24-hours on a Parisian rooftop. While the video did, in fact, make my jaw "drop" (there's a pun coming), it got me thinking about one of the most amazing music videos I've ever seen: "Drop" by The Pharcyde.
Creative, imagination-filled wedding photographs are starting to become quite trendy -- at least online. Earlier this year, we shared viral photos of bridal parties running for their lives from a T-Rex and from Star Wars Imperial Walkers.
Every once in a while someone gets really, really creative and it makes our jaws drop. Such is the case with UK pop artist Dan Black's timelapse music video for his song called "Hearts." …
Arto Saari is one of professional skateboarding's legends, but Saari has another passion as well: photography. In the video above, Oakley takes us behind the scenes on Saari's first skateboarding trip where he was hired specifically to take photos of people doing gnarly tricks, instead of performing them himself.
Flip through photographer Michael Jackson's "A Child's Landscape" series, and you'll find what appear to be vintage photographs of rocky coastlines that were captured with some old photographic process over a century ago. The images are actually modern photographs captured quite recently in Jackson's studio using rocks in a fish tank.
I started getting into photography when I was in my mid-to-late teens. I bought a 35mm Minolta XG7 at a local yard sale during my freshman year, and around the same time I took a 3 week summer darkroom course at a local community college. I got really in to it, but when I finally finished high school I went straight into the workforce. I jumped around various manual labor and retail jobs until I was 21. This is when I got married, and shortly thereafter I began considering the distant …
When my wife Sara and I finally decided to start planning our wedding (after a crazy Muppet Proposal proposal that seemed to tickle quite a few people's fancy) one thing that became very important to us was what to do with our wedding portraits/photography.
I've got a few days before my big summer vacation, so I thought I'd hammer out an incredibly impractical display technology!
I did my first surreal photoshoot with a model this past weekend. Here's a breakdown of the process from start to finish.
Avoid all the signs that it’s a hard time for photojournalists. Four years later your determination may pay off in a reduced job market.
Creating time-slices (better known as the bullet time effect) where you freeze a moment in time and move around your subject is an expensive thing. It's expensive mainly because it requires that you have several cameras at your disposal.
For his project titled "Iridient," Zurich, Switzerland-based photographer Fabian Oefner shot a series of beautiful high-speed photographs showing colorful soap bubbles bursting and disappearing into a cloud of tiny droplets.
In April of this year, I travelled to the Indonesian capital of Jakarta for the first time. I was excited to visit this new city and start to photograph in one of the world’s most underreported emerging economies. I had read stories about the city’s challenges with water and flooding, which is why I wanted to photograph there and continue my work on environmental issues in developing nations. I wasn’t prepared for the shocking scenes that I was to witness in my time in the city.
I have sat staring at the computer monitor for the last hour and words refused to appear on the screen. Even in times of stress I can write out a quick blog, but the current situation with Aaron Hernandez has proved tough.
It’s fun to print big, but when a client recently asked me to create an image more than four stories tall I have to admit it was really outside of my usual perspective.
Were you able to capture photographs of the supermoon this past weekend? Photographer Alessandro Della Bella did. On Saturday, he set up his camera near a mountain in Switzerland and captured breathtaking photographs of the moon rising above a mountain peak in the horizon.
Check out this colorful photo mosaic created by photographer Bela Borsodi for the cover of the album "Terrain" by VLP (you can find a larger version here). Would you believe us if we told you that it's actually a single photograph? …
Younger photographers may not understand it, or even feel the same way, but for photographers of my generation, your studio was not just a place to take photographs -- it was a reflection of you. It told the world who you were. If you didn't have one, then you weren't really a photographer!
Here's a short and sweet video in which underwater photographer and filmmaker Tom Campbell tells of an experience he had photographing a whale shark, the world's largest fish.
This past weekend, hundreds of protestors clashed with riot police in the area surrounding the Maracana football stadium in Rio de Janiero. Their main gripe was the fact that the country is spending so much on hosting the 2014 World Cup despite many of the country's public services still lacking in funding.
I wanted to create a dramatic portrait series of “arctic explorers” that appeared to be taken outside in a blizzard. The concept for this shoot was something I’ve been mulling over for quite awhile, but never had the proper platform to pull it off.
With the NBA Conference playoffs nearing completion and the Spurs already a lock for the Finals, I got a call from Brad Smith, the Director of Photography at Sports Illustrated, asking if I could quickly get to San Antonio.
The know-how to properly shoot day-to-night or night-to-day when you're capturing a time-lapse can add a special something to your final product, but the task may seem daunting at first. That's why photographer Preston Kanak has put together this comprehensive and easy-to-follow tutorial that discusses three approaches to shooting the perfect day-to-night time-lapse.
Having made it through over 30 years as a commercial photographer and photography teacher, I find it daunting, at this stage in my life and my career, to feel the need to seek advice and assurance from professional peers. But participating in the New England Portfolio Reviews this past weekend turned out to be one of the best things I’ve done for my creative self in a very long time.
Taking pictures on an offshore oil rig is serious business. For starters, due to the risk of flammable gas coming up the oil well, normal electronics are banned outside the living quarters. Smartphones are strictly forbidden and regular cameras require "hot work permits" be opened prior to use.
Want to photograph or film a humpback whale underwater? Try listening for its "song." The video above, uploaded by YouTube user westh2o, shows a surprise underwater encounter he and a group of divers had with a large humpback whale back in October 2011 (the actual encounter is at 3m20s).
My friend Gustaf Drevin and I are the Editor and Creative Director (respectively) of Medicor, the student union magazine of the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet. Long before we even got involved with the publication, we had dreamed up this ‘fantasy’ issue where we would have a huge cover story featuring Hans Rosling, the founder of Gapminder and one of TIME's 100 most influential people in 2012.
Photographer Jeff Cable has come a long way from his first few gigs shooting Bar and Bat Mitzvahs in San Francisco. Mostly sports-related, his résumé now includes images from the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, a stint as the official Team USA Hockey photographer during the 2010 games in Vancouver and the Team USA Water Polo photographer during the 2012 games in London.
Remember that crazy rooftopping photograph captured by photographer Joe McNally from the top of the tallest building in the world? The video above is an interesting 4.5-minute-long behind-the-scenes look at how McNally ascended the tower and held a photo shoot at the very top.
I've been living out of my car and driving all over the country to create new work. This past Sunday, I stopped near Nashville, Tennessee to see my friend and fellow photographer Marissa Bolen. While there, we collaborated to put together a photo shoot -- a shoot that involved a homemade dam, water, milk, and girls covered with flour.
Time-lapse photographer Rob Whitworth (we've featured his work a number of times in the past) has released a beautiful new time-lapse video that offers a look into the Chinese city of Shanghai.
I have driven through San Francisco many times for business and pleasure, and have always been intrigued by how its energy constantly changes depending on the time of day. Glimpses of tall structures casting shadows, observing lighting and framing scenarios, and colorful people performing urban rituals often seen from my periphery had an affect on me.
Given the recent leaps Magic Lantern has been making regarding mind-blowing RAW video capabilities for both old and new Canon cameras, there are probably a lot of Canon owners out there who are thinking of giving the custom firmware a try for the first time.
There's something to be said about lens manufacturing. You could even go so far as to say it, in itself, is an art form, with the hands of skilled and methodical workers ever-so-delicately assembling the glass we use to take photos.
Raspberry Pi's new Camera Module is starting to hit store shelves, and we're starting to see some interesting photo experiments being done with the simple programmable camera kit.
In April of 1970 I was near Phu Tai, Vietnam in the 173rd Airborne Brigade Admin Compound. We were pissed off at taking Viet Cong sniper fire from the mountain above us several nights in a row. The guy would stand up from behind a rock and blow off a clip from his AK47 on full-auto. The sniper was shooting at such a high angle that most of his rounds came through the sheet metal roofs of our hooches. We decided to use a "heavy" response the next time(s) the sniper hit us.
We've featured quite a few "bullet time" projects in the past that involve freezing time using rigs of tens or hundreds of cameras, but have you ever seen the technique done with pinhole cameras? That's what you'll see in the music video shown above. It's for the song "Wasting My Young Years" by London Grammar.
Hey everyone! I’m really excited to share a personal story with you all. This past weekend I asked my partner to marry me. After weeks of planning, the time had come to decide how I was going to capture the moment.
Want to experience what it's like to shoot a live concert? Montreal, Canada-based concert photographer Pierre Bourgault wants to show you. When he recently had the opportunity to photograph a performance by the band Dead To Me, Bourgault decided to strap a Gopro camera to the top of his DSLR. The video above is what resulted.
The announcement of the PhaseOne IQ2 series introduced a clear functionality based stratification of the IQ line up of digital backs. The PhaseOne IQ280 still reigns supreme providing the highest resolution single capture of the bunch. The bigger and more interesting changes however, are within the IQ260 “series” of backs. Now there are two different versions of a 60MP full-frame medium format digital sensor; both of these two versions offer their own vastly different “skill sets” for …
Lately I’ve been looking for ways to photograph people besides just my friends and family. I was super inspired after reading photographer Peter Waterman's account of photographing 80 people in 1 day. I’m a hobbyist just looking to improve my skills and have fun. I like to get the best bang for the buck with my equipment purchases and keep my gear budget contained.
Here's a question I get asked about 15 times a week: “How can I get the dust out of my lens?” The right answer is you don’t. All lenses have dust in them and it doesn’t affect the images at all 99% of the time. Even if you clean it all out, it will be back after you use the lens a few times.
Earlier this week, Sony announced its new Xperia ZR waterproof smartphone that can double as an everyday underwater camera. After we reported on the story, we were contacted by reader Jeffery Richt, who shot the marketing photographs for Sony. The video above is a behind-the-scenes video showing how the underwater shoot went down.
A trendy project in the photo world these days is collecting portraits of people of different ages. Photographers have photographed people of ages 0 through 100 based on location and gender, and some are doing the same project with short video portraits.
Patriots Day. This Massachusetts holiday celebrates the battles of Lexington and Concord, which were the first battles of the American Revolutionary War in 1775. The day always begins with battle re-enactments. Then the Red Sox play an 11AM game, and during and after the game there is the running of the Boston Marathon, a race that first ran in 1897.
