Category: Blog News

When I’m not shooting, I will spend entire days organizing receipts and invoicing, returning emails/phone calls for future jobs, planning the next promo, printing new pages for the portfolio, updating the website… the list is truly endless. And then it repeats itself. I’m still learning to cope with the fact that I will never feel completely caught-up and there will never be an end to the non-shooting work that a photographer has to manage.

via » 10 minutes with Cody Pickens this is the what.

Describing his approach to his projects, Webb said he doesn’t do much in-depth research in advance. “I’ll read some fiction to get a taste of the place, and maybe read some guidebooks,” he said. “I bring books with me, and read them while I’m there. I want my visual knowledge of place to grow at same rate as my intellectual knowledge.” The danger of knowing too much before he goes, he says, is that it primes him to make images that represent aspects of the place, according to what he’s read, at the expense of what he might experience.

via PDN Pulse » Look 3 Report: Alex Webb on His Creative Process, Kodachrome, and Magnum.

There is a difference between being a good photographer and being a successful photographer who runs a great business. I know lots of amazing photographers who are broke. The difficult thing about the photography business is you have to apply yourself just as hard to both the photography and business aspects. If you’re painfully dedicated to just one, that still doesn’t guarantee you anything. Now, if you are truly dedicated to both, then you’re very likely to succeed as long as you’re smart about what it is you’re doing.

via Steve Giralt | Photo Talk Is Cheap.

we have not even started to assess what digital photography could do once we stop treating it as a slightly improved version of analog photography. Digital photography essentially is not well understood at all. Our thinking of digital photography conforms to our thinking of analog photography, even though in actuality the inherent properties of the two often are very different.

via .

I think the biggest technical hurdle with film these days has nothing to do with cameras, lenses, or workflow – it seems to be that all too often the quality of the screenplay (or more to the point the quality of the story / storytelling.) It is after all about STORY and HOW WELL you tell it.

via Thoughts on 3D, 4K+ and Prometheus « Vincent Laforet’s Blog.

If you are finding it hard to get work as a photographer, there’s no reason why an agent can do any better, we can usually open a few doors but we’re not miracle workers.

via Live Ask an Agent/Do you need clients to get an Agent? – LPA.

Robert King, a photojournalist for the Polaris photo agency, says that he, “had never seen anything like it.” At forty-five, King is hardly a beginner. He started out in Sarajevo, and any photographer will tell you that the Yugoslav wars were no cakewalk. He also covered the conflict in Chechnya, a “dirty” war, like all the rest. But nothing could prepare him for the things he saw in Syria. He had to overcome his emotions to bear witness to them: “If you let your tears blur your lens, you’re useless.”

via La Lettre de la Photographie.

“The more times I see something, the more confident I feel about showing it in the gallery.”

–Brian Clamp

via PDN.

There’s a lot of talk how making photographs has become so much harder given the state of things, given there are cameras everywhere. But then, if you are complaining about that – doesn’t that show the limitations of your own creativity? What can you photograph when every picture has already been taken? Well – isn’t it liberating to know that every photograph has been taking already, so now you can really take your photographs?

via Conscientious Extended.

once we start censoring images with this kind of significance and visually infantilizing our citizenry, especially in this increasingly image-driven culture, I think we’re lost. Perceptually lost. And I don’t care if we’re talking about the left doing it, the right doing it, or the White House doing it (which they’ve done over and over).

via BagNews.

I honestly believe photography is 75 percent chance, and 25 percent skill

–Stanley Greene

via PDN Pulse » Look3 Report.

I came away impressed by the potential of this approach to smartly extend the definition of photography away from the flat surface of the wall and into the open air of the space in between.

via DLK COLLECTION: Sigrid Viir @Winkleman.

Photographers wonder why their images are weak and more often than not it is because they have overlooked the most basic yet complex issue of composition.

via 1000 Words Photography Magazine Blog.

Running a business isn’t all about the money. And it shouldn’t be. As an entrepreneur, you should be passionate about what you do, be motivated to help others, and have a desire to make the world a better place.

But none of that can happen if you can’t keep yourself “in business.”

The best business advice I ever received and what I did about it via Graphic Design Blender | Freelance Design Blog.

Three strong forces surround us all, a declining economic model, a culture of free exchange and an expanding circle of image-makers…

via Susan Meiselas Interview | burn magazine.

Once you accept that all that free money from the middle of last decade is never coming back, you are left with two visions of newspapers’ future: diminution or re-invention. In the Post’s case, if you believe it can only be as good as it used to be by becoming as rich as it used to be, then you believe it will remain diminished, forever stuck doing less with less.

If, on the other hand, you imagine a Post that returns to, or even improves on, its best work, then by definition you are imagining it can somehow do more with less. This problem is not financial—it is foundational. It requires asking anew what good journalism looks like, in a world where the Internet exists.

Clay Shirky, via CJR.

Nowadays everything is accessible immediately. I can look at everything. I can look at everything which is being made right now and I can look at everything that has ever been made. The reason why critical writing and thinking is important is because otherwise all of this stuff will just float around, in the air. There is no more context. Things just become superficial and disconnected. People lose that connection between which is being made right now and which has ever been made. And they can’t realize that it totally comes from there!

via ╳FRIDAY MORNING COFFEE.

QUESTION: Why bother yourself about the archaic world of long-forgotten photographers when there is so much happening that is now? Why concern yourself with images that are so passé when there’s a new aesthetic that supplants those banal images of the chemical days? Why study outdated ideas when the world has moved on and left them in the fossil bin next to the dinosaur teeth?

via LensWork Daily.