So you wake up one morning and think, you know, what I'd really like to do is start my own photography workshop.
You or me, we hit the snooze button and see what we come up with after 10 more minutes of sleep. But not Steve Gottlieb. A commercial photographer with three books to his credit, Steve had been thinking about workshops. He had a close friend who...
Mark Alberhasky, for one. Put him in a great situation where he can take very cool photographs and he’ll nail them nine times out of 10. Chances are, though, that won’t be enough. Just because the photos he’s making look good doesn’t mean he won’t be thinking about what he can do to create even better ones. You can attribute that drive to several factors, one of which is his early realization that if he took a straightforward photo of what everyone else was seeing, no matter how good a photo it was, it would be just that: what everyone else was seeing. The goal was to come up with his own ideas and add them to the creative process, and many of Mark’s photos are the result of taking that e
“Photography is always a bit random in the UK because the weather is so changeable,” Martin Turner says. When he and his friends arrived late in the afternoon at the Weston-super-Mare seaside resort in North Somerset, they were greeted by “absolute, gorgeous sunshine.” Which lasted about 45 minutes. “All of a sudden the sky went black,” Turner says, “and we had to stand underneath the pier whilst it chucked down rain for quite a while.” Then the clouds broke, and at about 8:00 in the evening he was able to capture this sunset image.
Well, it’s really only one city—New York—but the assignment called for Jon Ortner to capture images so different in spirit and approach that he might as well have been in two very different cities.
There was not only a dual nature to the job itself but also something of a split personality to the building Jon was hired by developer J.D. Carlisle to photograph. Located between 29th and 30th Streets on Sixth Avenue, the 54-story structure in fact has two names and natures: from the street to the 25th floor it’s the Eventi Hotel; at the 26th floor it becomes the Beatrice and rental apartments.
The camera Michael carries might be his Leica M6, loaded with either Ilford XP-2 or Kodak BW400CN chromogenic film and fitted with either a 35mm f/2 or 50mm f/2 Summicron lens; or his Fuji X10 point-and-shoot with its zoom lens set for the equivalent of 50mm; or his Nikon D200 or D700 with the manual 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor lens he got with his F3 back when he was in college.
Not long ago I caught up with Timothy Schenck, a New York-based professional photographer who specializes in the architectural stories of projects he considers will someday have historical and lasting cultural significance.