Pro Techniques

Photo Arts group members live in the Palm Springs, Redlands, and Joshua Tree areas of California, and we are very informal with no officers or rules at monthly meetings. We exchange critiques and chat about photography in many of its myriad forms. We also eat well.

Some members are experts in Photoshop and related programs, some are infrared fans, a few favor black and white, and...

“I can trace my roots in photography back to when I was a student at the Ontario College of Art (Toronto),” Andrew Eccles recalls. “But there was one problem: back then, I found it intimidating to approach people with the camera, so I avoided photographing them.

“Then I came to New York and started studying magazines such as Rolling Stone, and, through a...

I’ve shamelessly borrowed the title of E.B. White’s classic 1949 essay, and I’ve done it because my first views of Lindsay Silverman’s High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos of New York made me think of White, wandering the city, constantly re-examining its continuing spectacle in the hope that he could put it on paper.

Lindsay’s...

The original reason for tripods was very simple. Exposures were so long that there was no alternative: no one could hold a camera still for many minutes at a time. The same remained true even when exposures dropped to a few minutes, and then to a few seconds. To this day, therefore, most people think of long exposures as the only reason for using a tripod. But there is a lot more to it than this.

The Yale University Art Gallery and Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library announced the joint acquisition of the Lee Friedlander Archive and 2000 of the photographer’s master prints. With this acquisition, the Yale University Art Gallery becomes the largest holder of Friedlander’s work by any museum, and the Beinecke Library becomes home to the preliminary work and...

The first time I met Sam Gray was probably about 1975. I was a young photographer attending one of my first Maine state conferences and Gray was one of the program speakers. I can still remember how elegant and beautiful his images were. I also remember how he struck me as a quintessential southern gentleman. He was soft spoken yet exuded confidence. You couldn’t help but admire the...

Digital technology has revolutionized photography. So much has changed. The terminology is different, the ability to make our images perfect after the fact is a new concept, and the instant gratification of seeing our photos in a microsecond allows us to correct our mistakes on the fly. At the same time, the digital world is fraught with challenges, and photographers have never had to deal with...