The Visual Student

This is the first of a three part series on how you can plan, design, build and maintain a successful photojournalism portfolio website. Part 1 focuses on planning your website

LightBox

In 2006, Chien-Chi Chang—who throughout his career had exclusively shot 35mm format film—embraced a new photographic pursuit, to work with a medium format 6×7 rangefinder and began his ongoing project, Home. For the series, Chang purposefully shoots a single frame of his subject to build 9 frame contact sheets—chronologies that record his personal life as a travelogue and visual diary. Chang describes the series as “a documentation of my life with an effort to make every frame count.”

LensRentals.com –

The takeaway pont, though, is for many wide-aperture primes, stopping down slightly, just to f/2.0 or so, will dramatically increase resolution. For others, stopping down makes little difference, especially in the center of the image. Like everything else in photography, the more you know about the specific lens you are shooting with, the better you can use it.

Duncan Davidson:

On Twitter this evening, I talked a little bit about how to handle twenty bajillion photographs and stay afloat. My thinking on this has been shifting quite a bit over the last year and has been greatly influenced by conversations with others about the shoeboxes (or filing cabinets if we were a bit more sophisticated) we used to keep our archives in. Those thoughts aren’t yet complete and I’m not ready to write the big treatise on how my workflow really works, but I’m far enough along to at least give a sneaky peek on one aspect of it.

New York Times Magazine:

Barry isn’t particularly interested in the writer’s craft. She’s more interested in where ideas come from — and her goal is to help people tap into what she considers to be an innate creativity.

Kaushal Parikh:

These are just personal adaptations I have made with the x100 to help my style of shooting in the streets of Mumbai.

The Online Photographer:

For those who haven’t been force-fed this bit of dubious dogma, “Expose to the right” is a rule that asserts that to get the best quality in your digital photographs, you should push your exposure as far to the high side (the right side of the histogram) as you can without clipping the highlights.

Zack Arias:

I’m currently in the process of updating and printing a new portfolio and I thought I would take a moment half day to talk about the process.

My dear friend, Marc, has said of editing, “It’s like lining up your children and deciding which ones you’re going to shoot.” That quote isn’t going to end up on the front of a greeting card anytime soon but it does get to the heart of the matter. Andy Lee rephrased it to, “…deciding which ones you love more.” Either way, the process can suck but it is a process you need to go through on a regular basis. At least twice a year. Minimum.

the image, deconstructed:

I’m also looking for layers, which is a reason why I prefer
using a 35mm f1.4 rather than a 400mm lens. I want more
information, not less. I want more intimacy, not less.