In the 1930s, a small group of California photographers challenged the painterly, soft-focus Pictorialist style of the day. They argued that photography could only advance as an art if its practitioners exploited characteristics inherent to the camera’s mechanical nature. This small association of innovators created Group f/64, named after the camera aperture which produces great depth of...

Our Picture This! assignment for this month was “Shadows and Form,” images where the shadow plays an important role in the composition and point of view of the photographer. Shadows can redefine form, create volume and space, and can both echo and abstract form. Readers responded with images of landscapes, architecture, and even portraiture. In all cases the play of light and dark, of...

Our Picture This! assignment this month was “Leading Lines: Into Infinity.” We called for images that brought the viewer’s eye into the frame with various compositional techniques, including leading lines, S-curves, and parallel lines that seem to meet at infinity, or vanishing points. Readers responded with a host of architectural, urban, natural, and highway images, all of...

The imaging industry mourns the untimely passing of Lawrence R. White on February 5, 2010 at the age of 54, after bravely battling esophageal cancer. A Photo Science graduate of RIT, Larry was a QA and R&D engineer for Visual Graphic Systems before joining the staff of Modern Photography in 1978, where he served as lab director for over a decade. During his long tenure, he was instrumental in...