Photographer Profiles

I got the idea for this how-to story from something the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Hume Kennerly said to me: “Believe me, the challenge of photography is not going to France for the first time and photographing the Eiffel Tower. The challenge is really seeing and then photographing the stuff that’s familiar and ordinary, stuff we see all the time but never really observe or give much attention.”

Alamby Leung is known to millions of photo enthusiasts as the girl who used to be a background character on the YouTube channel DigitalRev TV. We caught up with her recently and asked her how life is after leaving that popular show. 

Harold Davis came to iPhone photography about seven years ago by the usual route: “I’d been hearing about it,” he says, “and I needed a phone. I got the phone, and then it was, Okay, now let’s see what the camera can do.” What’s happened after that may or may not be considered usual.

Ray Metzker was an extraordinary photographer whose work is in the collections of dozens of art institutions. During his photographic career he had more than 50 one-person museum exhibitions and was the recipient of two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships. His photographs are in museum and art institution collections all over the world. When he died last week on October 9, 2014 his hometown newspaper, The Inquirer (Philadelphia), wrote that, “Ray K. Metzker, 83, (was) widely considered one of the nation's greatest photographers.”

If you want to make photographs with impact, it’s important that they tell a story, and “speak” to the viewer. No matter how beautiful an image appears, if it doesn’t provoke an emotional response, you haven’t quite finished the job.

For those of you who have never worked in medium format, trust me, there is a difference you can see and feel. It’s no wonder that photographers such as Douglas Sonders choose a medium format camera system over a DSLR for the bulk of their work. And in Sonders’s case, his workhorse camera system is Phase One.

Natural History
When Steve Gottlieb took this picture in 1985 he’d been practicing law for 10 years. Photography was his hobby, and his hometown, Washington, D.C., was his favorite subject.