Steve Meltzer

Sharpness in photographs has long been a topic of debate among photographers. Once it was about the sharpness of film and formats, but today it’s about things like sensor size and shooting Raw vs. JPEG files. I find these discussions pretty quickly become esoteric and pixel picky. I prefer a hands-on approach to improving sharpness in photos and that’s what these tips are all about. 

The decisive moment had decisively passed and I missed another great shot: While framing and reframing my zoom lens the scene changed, the sun slid behind a cloud, and people in the shot moved. I finally realized I was missing shots because I had too much gear. 

On September 9, 2019, legendary photographer Robert Frank died at the age of 94. At the heart of Frank's photographic legacy was his groundbreaking book "The Americans." As one critic wrote about that seminal book: "(it) changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. It remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century."

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.”