Each month, the PRC exhibits a photographer’s work online as a part of Northeast Exposure Online. May’s featured photographer was Jo Sittenfeld, an MFA candidate at RISD. I was particularly interested in Jo’s photographs of children at Killooleet, a small traditional, coed camp located in my home state of Vermont, where she has worked for nine summers.
Check it out here.
In our May photo annual, PDN published 46 Reasons To Love Photography Now, a highly opinionated list of inspiring artists, innovations, idiosyncracies and current trends compiled by PDN’s editors. And we asked you to send us the things that inspire you about photography today. Readers have told us- in prose and even verse—about the timeless joys that still excite them about this business.
Check it out here.
Speaking of China, and explosions– here are some images from a Chinese wedding that took place during last week’s terrible earthquake in Sichuan Province. Unbelievable how the scene changes so quickly, and how the photographer keeps documenting. Terrifying.
Check it out here.
With its official launch Wednesday, National Geographic Assignment will represent the following photographers: William Albert Allard, Stephen Alvarez, Ira Block, John Burcham, Jimmy Chin, Jodi Cobb, Pablo Corral Vega, Bruce Dale, David Doubilet, Annie Griffiths Belt, Justin Guariglia, Bill Hatcher, Beverly Joubert, Tim Laman, David Liittschwager, Michael Melford, Michael Nichols, Paul Nicklen, Michael O’Brien, Randy Olson, Jim Richardson, Joel Sartore, Brian Skerry, Steve Winter, Gordon Wiltsie, Alison Wright and Mike Yamashita.
Check it out here.
My wife noticed a huge plume of smoke rising above O-Town today and I decided to chase it down. It was a controlled burn near the lake and it took forever to get there. When I arrived, there were a ton of cars and people lined up to see what it was all about. I don’t have any idea who put this sign up but I thought it was hilarious.
Check it out here.
Last year about this time David Griffin, National Geographic’s director of photography, and Elizabeth Krist, a senior photo editor, walked into my office and asked if I had any ideas on how we could photograph Stonehenge in a way that would be new and different. It was a natural question. David was already thinking about high-dynamic-range photography, and I’m the digital-tech guy at the magazine. I had an idea, but it came with a catch—I wanted to be the photographer, anything to get out of the office and into the field.
My idea started with a hand-built camera that had caught my interest at Photokina two years earlier—a panoramic film camera that had been adapted for digital use by Dr. Kurt Gilde in Germany. The camera can make a digital image that’s 49×90 millimeters wide using a sliding adapter mounted with a Phase One P45 digital back; three images stitched together result in a file with over 100 megapixels of resolution. I wanted to use this technology to capture three unique exposures at different times of the day and night, then stitch them into a continuous panoramic that showed Stonehenge over the course of time. Coincidentally the panoramic would fit perfectly on a magazine gatefold—three pages of a spread where one page folds in as a flap.
Check it out here. Via Rob Galbraith
If you’re not festivaled out, you’re going to want to head down to Charlottesville in June, because Look3 seems almost like a photographer’s utopian festival dream. From the 12th to the 14th, all of Charlottesville will be taken over by photography; even the trees (Flip Nicklin’s undersea whale images will be suspended high in the trees along Charlottesville’s outdoor pedestrian mall).
Check it out here.
Simon Norfolk’s presentation was very smooth, this guy has a mind you don’t want to meet in a darkened alley. How this guy gets access to the places he does is a miracle. He basically makes you want to give up photography because the rigor of his ideas sucks all the oxygen out of the room faster than a fuel-air explosion. I think we all felt our innards leaving our mouths at the end
Check it out here.
For the past 18 months, Lia Halloran has taken her skateboard and wandered the city late at night, looking for the strangest, darkest skate spots she can find. Sometimes alone and sometimes with a photographer, Halloran spends nights haunting the L.A. riverbed, evading the cops in Bronson Canyon or lurking in East L.A. parking lots. She’ll hop fences or crawl through holes to get into a closed park.
Though she’s a bit of a rebel and a daredevil, these outings aren’t just for the kicks of finding a forbidden or foreboding spot to grind. Halloran, who has an MFA in painting and printing from Yale, is a fast-rising local artist, and herDark Skate series combines many of her passions — skateboarding, physics and light. The pieces are half-painting, half-picture — the latter taken in the dead of night, when Halloran attaches a bike light to her wrist or head and skates while photographer Meredyth Wilson captures the action with time-lapse photography. Halloran doesn’t show up in the pictures, but her skate lines do, looking like a light saber cutting through the dark, urban backgrounds.
Check it out here.
Sam Cherry sits in the living room of his Fairfax District home, staring at a photograph of Charles Bukowski on the toilet. “Wow, look at that!” Cherry laughs at the look on the writer’s face — one that suggests Buk is struggling through a rather troublesome bowel movement. “He’s really pushing!” A longtime friend of Bukowski’s, Cherry took the bathroom shot, which was never published, as well as countless others that were. In fact, if you’ve ever seen a shot of Bukowski and considered it iconic, it was probably Cherry’s. But Cherry didn’t just photograph Buk — legend has it the writer’s tough-guy literary persona was largely bolstered by Cherry’s true-life hard-luck tales.
“Oh, I have no doubt about that,” Cherry says. “He always used to tell me, ‘Sam, I killed 10 men.’ But he was a sweet guy. I don’t think he ever intentionally hurt a soul in his life.”
Cherry, on the other hand: “I was born tough.”
Check it out here.
I had to share this article as it sums up my feelings towards the raft of “Photojournalists” that have appeared over the last few years.
Check it out here.
Sometimes you only have a split second to take a famous photograph. One of my favorite stories that Michael shared with me about his father was when Ansel made perhaps his most famous photograph Moonrise, Hernandez, NM. This photograph is the highest sold at auction to date having sold at at Sotheby’s for $609,600 in 2006.
According to Michael, Ansel saw this wonderful scene and pulled the car over to take the photograph (Michael was with him). Ansel then put his glass plate into his camera to make his exposure. Before Ansel even had time to pull the plate out and shoot a second exposure on the reverse side, the moment was lost. A one shot opportunity.
Check it out here.
So in checking on where they are photographers can look to find themselves in one of two existing modes or conditions. One condition might be what we call the Expansion Mode.
Check it out here.
PDN welcomes you to another year in pictures. This year, the judges for PDN’s Photo Annual had the opportunity to choose from a vast array of entries from all over the world. The following pages showcase work from a diverse range of photographic talent, both new and seasoned.
Check it out here.
I’m pretty much addicted to photography. Methods, gear, news, you name it. It really is kinda scary. To keep my addiction in check when I’m not shooting or shopping, I need a steady flow of photo content to keep the shakes and withdrawl symptoms from popping up so I put together a list of what i consider to be some of the best photo-related content out there. Read on for more photo link porn than you can shake a stick at including 25 blogs, 20 AMAZING photographers, and some other fun stuff that will make those days you feel stuck at your desk wishing you were shooting go a bit smoother…
Check it out here.
Wedding photographers far and wide completed PDN’s recent income survey, providing a snapshot of how much they earn on average, how hard they work, and how efficiently they run their businesses. In all, 1,098 wedding photographers responded, ranging from those who shoot just a few weddings per year to several who shoot well over 100. The majority (88 percent) were from the US. Six percent were from Canada, and the rest were from various countries around the world.
Check it out here.
The web has allowed a whole new range of collaborative photography projects to flourish. Artists teaming up are obviously nothing new, but the ease and instant gratification afforded by the Internet makes for free-flowing ideas around the world to congeal into one artistic idea. Some of these collaborations have found a way to focus on one thing that’s universal and immutable: time. Our locations, cultures, and languages are all different, but it’s always going to be 10:15 a.m. somewhere. With that in mind, Ten:15 wants you to send in a picture of whatever you happen to be doing at 10:15 a.m., no matter where you are in the world.
Check it out here.
This is one of my favorite photos and one that I get most compliments on. I shot it in Trafalgar Square. Unusually I didn’t take this photo on a Leica. I was using a Canon film SLR. The Leica was in repair.
Check it out here.
The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives contains ten never-before-published photographs illustrating the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. These photographs, taken by an unknown Japanese photographer, were found in 1945 among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside Hiroshima by U.S. serviceman Robert L. Capp, who was attached to the occupation forces. Unlike most photos of the Hiroshima bombing, these dramatically convey the human as well as material destruction unleashed by the atomic bomb. Mr. Capp donated them to the Hoover Archives in 1998 with the provision that they not be reproduced until 2008. Three of these photographs are reproduced in Atomic Tragedy with the permission of the Capp family. Now that the restriction is no longer in force, the entire set is available below.
Check it out here.
Here are some images from the Burley series Disappearance of Darkness, which documents the final year of the Kodak Canada facility in Toronto. This facility, which was made up of 18 buildings on a 5 hectare site, had a one hundred year history of producing photographic films and papers. It was sold in 2006 and demolished in the summer of 2007.
Check it out here.