Perhaps the secret of great photography lies in that ability to be simultaneously in the moment physically and removed from it by the camera. If that sounds coldly dispassionate, then I’m not describing it right, because war photographers are the most emotionally alert people I know. As these images will show, it is their ability to capture humanity in the most inhuman circumstances that makes them the best at their craft.
via Time.com – LightBox.
Winners of the third Hearst 8 X 10 Photography Biennial, an international competition that recognizes the work of eight up-and-coming artists whose vision will shape the future of the creative media landscape
Laura Morton, California
Michael Massaia, New Jersey
Jordan Baumgarten, Pennslyvania
Karen Miranda, New York
Tomasz Lazar, Poland
Al Palmer, U.K.
Kiana Hayeri, Canada
Caleb Cole, Massachusetts
I think the key factor is a growing realisation that online ads are not going to pay the bills. Online ad revenue growth at most publishers has slowed to a trickle. What many interpreted as a blip is now an established pattern over several years. As a result, many publishers are revisiting strategic plans and concluding that they have no hope of building exclusively ad-funded online businesses. Paywalls and content revenues are the obvious alternative.
a fundamental rule of online subscriptions: there is zero correlation between value and price. There are lots of incredibly expensive stock-tipping newsletters which have a negative value: you’d be much better off if you didn’t subscribe to any of them at all. And of course there’s an almost infinite amount of wonderfully valuable content available online for free, starting with Wikipedia and moving on through
Photographer James Hodgins of Sudbury, Ontario has come up with a creative visual solution for a perennial marketing challenge: Convincing clients who think they can shoot their own photography that they will get better results if they hire a professional photographer.“People are visual. When you start talking lights, they tune you out,” Hodgins says. One day it dawned on him to invite a client to tag along on a shoot with her own camera. “I said, ‘You take the picture you would have taken, and then I’ll take mine the way I would.”And that’s how his Crappy vs. Snappy showcase was born. He dedicates a page on his Web site to side-by-side comparisons of his pictures and clients’ pictures, mostly of mining and industrial subjects.
via PDN Pulse.
A good photograph is a good photograph in such a way that the process itself might be an integral part of it, but it’s not the focal point. In other words, the moment you can almost separate out the image from the process – just like you’d think about Hipstamatic as picture plus filter – you’re in trouble: Suddenly, the process itself becomes part of what is being evaluated. But who cares whether it took you three days to make a picture or whether you got that great picture seeing something and then snapping it very quickly?
I don’t make big plans because they run a high risk of failure. Instead, I make small plans and let them grow. So I have no big plans but about a zillion small ones. I am very curious to see how far they will grow.
–Barara Pocek
via MULL IT OVER.
Over the years he had simplified the technical part of photography to suit his unobtrusive shooting style and still create a technically perfect photograph. For instance, he judged the light by eye, although he carried a small light meter in his pants pocket. Since he mostly shot in shaded areas he set his F stop at 5.6 or 8 and shutter speed at 1/60th to 1/125th of a second, so he could quickly pay attention to his subject matter. He made it clear that, “technique is not so important to me, but people and their activities are”. He said, “Think about the photograph before and after, but not during. The secret is to take your time but also to be very quick”.
I believe content drives success, that along with perseverance and passion. I can’t stress that enough. I did not self publish as I believe partnering with a good publisher will yield much better success in distribution, promotion and credibility. Self published books or vanity presses don’t achieve much for a first time author. I see them as a waste of time and money which would be better spent making pictures that a publisher will want.
When I was 16 years old and in high school, all my friends were in bands. I could never sing (I’m beyond horrible) or play any instruments, so instead I became the photographer. I would help them build press kits and band profiles for their websites, experimenting along the way and learning everything I could about the technical side of photography.
Those early images slowly built a portfolio of portraits, and to make a long story short: this slowly translated into the entertainment and advertising style work I do now.
There are so many wonderful photographs in the world and so many wonderful photographs in my life, whether they are on the gallery walls or they are home on my own walls, so I’ve learned not to be too greedy about it. You have to let things go sometimes and it’s OK because you can replace it with something else and love just as much.
via Howard Greenberg Talks to Elizabeth Avedon | Le Journal de la Photographie.
I knew that photographs had always been altered and manipulated, but I didn’t really know how prevalent it was and how much a part of the history of the medium it was,” Fineman said.
“When I learned about photography at university, this kind of thing was hardly ever discussed,”
via Huffington Post.
The Justice Department told the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in its filing today that it upholds an individuals’ 1st, 4th, and 14th Amendment rights to peacefully photograph police as they are performing their official duties in a public place, and that their rights have been violated when police seize such recordings without a warrant or due process.
…only the second time Justice has issued such a statement in support of photographing and reporting on police as they perform their job in public.
via NPPA.
The majority of time it just had the photographer/illustrators name with no estimated cost written on them. And usage? To an Art Director, what’s that- “I want such and such to shoot this so who cares how it is going to be used. I want to win an award.” The estimate was usually a quote over the phone and rarely in writing. The purchased props never came back to the agency but damn that art director looked good in those new cowboy boots!
Personally, I love the obsessive nature of a purely visual tool like Instagram. Photography is so pervasive, so powerful in our culture. We spend our lives, not only surrounded by images, but now taking pictures and posting them. It’s fascinating, really. It’s the one art form that everybody is capable of performing flawlessly.
Eventually, the police arrived. I was fortunate that the responding officers were well educated on First Amendment laws and did not try to stop me from taking pictures.
The incident raised a number of ethical questions. I’ve been castigated by a number of anonymous internet commenters who have said that I should have somehow physically intervened between the two. Their criticism counters what actual law enforcement officers have told me — that physically intervening would have likely only made the situation worse, endangering me, and further endangering Maggie.
via Photographer as Witness: A Portrait of Domestic Violence – LightBox.
He considered himself not a news photographer but a photographic illustrator, and like the work of the painter Norman Rockwell, whom he claimed as an influence, his signature images from the 1940s through the 1950s and into the 1960s, many in the fierce hues of increasingly popular color film that emulated the emergent Technicolor palate of American movies, helped define — visually, anyway — an era.
via NYTimes.com.
It’s good to talk about photojournalistic ethics. But I think in the big list of ethical problems that journalism has to deal with, how photos are post-processed should be near the very bottom. Ultimately, it’s not really an ethical question at all — it’s an aesthetic question. And talking about aesthetic questions is good, but applying professional ethics-style thinking to them is maybe not so much. I think it tends to end in people conflating “tacky” with “false.”
via 1/125.