If you’re a freelance photographer, running a successful small business is crucial. Just ask Melissa Lyttle, photojournalist and freelance photographer. As the former president of NPPA and a full-time freelancer since 2014, Melissa has made it her missio
Hear about Melissa’s multiple income streams, stories of how one opportunity led to a big break and get insights into how you can avoid common photo business mistakes.
There’s more than meets the eye in these photos of daily life in Poland, taken between 1944 and 1989. A disturbing new book draws together images taken by the secret police to explore photography as a tool of power.
We all know that as photographers, creating your best work is paramount. But learning how to curate and showcase it effectively is what will help you book exciting jobs, secure contracts and take your career to the next level. Recently we spoke with phot
Recently we spoke with photo editors Sarah Jacobs and Tracey Woods to learn about their personal journeys and how freelancers can catch the eye of photo editors. Even with a wide range of professional experience—the two have worked for an impressive list of publications: Business Insider, Universal Music, ONE37pm, iHeartRadio, The Luupe and Essence Communications—themes emerged.
A few months ago, the photographer Deana Lawson and her family were driving to an art opening in the Inglewood neighborhood of Los Angeles when Lawson spotted a garage sale out of the corner of her eye. She wanted to pull over, but her 19-year-old son was tired, and he balked. The family passed the sale again on their way back home, and this time, Lawson insisted. When she met an elderly woman tending to the sale, she knew immediately that she wanted to photograph her.
This Friday, May 7th at 12pm ET, freelance photographer and photojournalist Melissa Lyttle is joining us for a free webinar all about how to run a successful photo business. With decades of freelance experience, Melissa is adamant about one thing: she’s a
This Friday, May 7th at 12pm ET, freelance photographer and photojournalist Melissa Lyttle is joining us for a free webinar all about how to run a successful photo business. With decades of freelance experience, Melissa is adamant about one thing: she’s a business owner first and photographer second.
Some creators and artists of all kinds will continue to offer their content for free, as they have done for millenniums. But unlike the last 50 years, it will be a choice rather than an obligation.
The next web is where content, where ever it might originate, will be compensated for. A place where if you want to build and sustain traffic, you will have to incentivize your content producers. But also a place where it will no longer be against the “internet principle” to charge for content.
On Friday, April 30th at 12pm ET, we’re teaming up with National Geographic photographer, filmmaker, writer and explorer Ami Vitale. Ami will take us on an odyssey, sharing powerful stories about pushing boundaries and how she’s used her photography to ma
On Friday, April 30th at 12pm ET, we’re teaming up with National Geographic photographer, filmmaker, writer and explorer Ami Vitale. Ami will take us on an odyssey, sharing powerful stories about pushing boundaries and how she’s used her photography to make an impact.
Every year, Earth Day offers a time for photographers around the world to highlight the importance and beauty of nature and wildlife. Images have the power to show the impact we leave on our planet in an instant. To celebrate this year’s unique Earth Day,
To celebrate this year’s unique Earth Day, we reached out to some of our members asking them to share photos that represent the true nature of Earth Day; a sense of wonder, adventure and protection for our planet. Below, you’ll hear stories of incredible animals, captivating destinations, environmental activism and more.
Photographers accounted for some of the hardest-hit professionals amid the coronavirus pandemic. During an incredibly challenging year both professionally and personally, many took the time to learn new skills and focus on personal projects. Now, in 2021
Today, we’re thrilled to release 45 Places to Find Photography Jobs in 2021, made in partnership with our friends over at Feature Shoot. We’re highlighting 45 places around the world where opportunities await. Browse job boards with full-time listings, websites for part-time gigs and social media groups specially curated for creatives. Uncover unknown creative networking platforms and sign up for newsletters design specifically for freelancers looking for work.
For centuries, across specialties, women photographers have shown great mastery and passion for the art and study of photography. The global community of women imagemakers is also often an inspiring force for good. From sharing supportive messages on Twit
In honor of Women’s History Month, we connected with a few PhotoShelter members who we’re proud to work with. These seven women photographers are offering their thoughts on representation in the photo industry and introducing us to the peers they admire most.
Seemingly overnight, NFTs became the hottest acronym on social media and in headlines. On Thursday, a single JPG file created by Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, sold in an online auction for $69.3 million. It was the first digital-only art sale for auction house Christie’s, meaning there was no physical copy involved.
Growing up in Ufa, the capital of the republic of Bashkortostan, Russia, Gulnara Samoilova fell in love with photography at the age of 15, and quickly discovered it was a…
Featuring the work of 100 contemporary artists from 31 countries pushing the boundaries of street photography in new and exciting directions, Women Street Photographers introduces expansive, experimental, and non-traditional approaches to a genre historically defined by the work of men. Bringing together women of all ages, races, ethnicities, creeds, and sexualities, Samoilova is on a mission to offer the kinds of opportunities and support she wished she had throughout her career.
Photography has long been a medium used to drive social and cultural change. The impact of documentary photography is immeasurable as both new and historic images play a role in how we see and interact with the world around us. As society has shifted in t
We sat down with Polly Irungu, the founder of Black Women Photographers, and talented independent photographers Dee Dwyer and Alexis Hunley to discuss the stories behind some of their powerful images, how the photo industry can better support Black photographers and more.
A new exhibition at PDNB Gallery explores how photographers working in the 1970s transformed not only the language of photography, but invented new ways of seeing the world.
Despite its long-standing marginalization, photography underwent a radical shift in the 1970s, catapulting it into the realm of fine art. Under John Szarkowski’s direction, the Museum of Modern Art staged a series of seminal exhibitions and wrote the landmark 1973 book, Looking at Photography, which reframed conventional notions of the relationship between photography and art. Recognizing that photography was not invented to serve a specific purpose, Szarkowski understood that its inherent plasticity of purpose made it the perfect medium for use by artists from all walks of life.
Last year, multimedia journalist, digital editor and self-taught photographer Polly Irungu took the photo industry by storm. As a Digital Content Editor at New York Public Radio (WYNC), she knows the power of promotion. So, when she masterfully used socia
Join us this Friday, February 19th, at 12PM ET as we talk with Polly and two incredibly talented independent photographers from the BWP community, Dee Dwyer and Alexis Hunley, about the social effects of photography and what Black photographers need from the photo industry. Sign up here.
In fact, I had expressed my surprise about the Trump team being so inept at visuals many times on Twitter. Having thought about this for a few days, though, I now think I had had it all wrong. Or rather, what I had commented on was not an ineptitude to produce visuals per se. It was the ineptitude (or unwillingness) to produce the kinds of pictures we expected to see.
Corky Lee often described his life’s work as “photographing Asian Pacific Americans.” It was a simple passion that could take him anywhere. For nearly fifty years, New Yorkers never knew where they might run into Lee and his camera: a museum gala or a tenants’ rights meeting, construction sites or local laundries, youth basketball games or poetry readings, community fairs, concerts, or protests. Most often, it was somewhere along Mott Street, in the heart of Manhattan’s Chinatown, where his photographs of everyday life helped generations of Chinese Americans see themselves as part of a larger community. Lee died on Wednesday, at the age of seventy-three, of complications from covid-19.
Among the many extraordinary challenges posed by 2020 were a few that were peculiar to photographers. When the pandemic hit, journalists who write for a living could conduct much of their reporting remotely, by phone or over Zoom, but photographers documenting the ravages of covid-19 had to go to the action—or at least within six feet of it. Philip Montgomery was the first photographer to venture out on assignment for The New Yorker when the virus overtook New York City in March. Donning an N95 mask and food-service gloves, he caught scenes of the city just as it was shuddering to a halt: customers eating a final meal in restaurants about to close their doors; anxious shoppers pushing carts past barren grocery shelves; eerily empty subway cars and airport halls; health-care workers in hazmat suits. At the time, such images looked brand-new, like dispatches from an alien world. Even the careful spacing-out of pedestrians on the city’s normally busy streets was a visual shock, an arrangement that, as Adam Gopnik wrote in an essay accompanying the images, seemed to “contradict the very concept of the city.”
