Talking Pictures

Heading home on New Year’s Day after dropping off a family friend at the bus station, Peter Baumgarten runs into a blinding snowstorm. “Whiteout conditions,” he says, “almost impossible to see 10 feet in front of me, trying to make out car tracks to follow, but they’re completely covered.” After about 20 minutes of anxious struggle through blinding snow, he’s had enough, and he pulls over near a little park in the small town he and his wife, Christianna, are trying to drive through. With a sigh of relief, he lets the stress dissipate.

Most of the photographers were set up at the front of the pool for the 100-meter butterfly final, but Jeff Cable decided to try for a different view of Michael Phelps in that event. You wouldn’t know it from the photo, but he was actually 20 rows up in the seats on the opposite side of the starting block.

They are the Royal Canadian Air Force Snowbirds aerobatic team, and Lindsay Silverman photographed them at the annual Memorial Day air show held at Jones Beach, New York.

I’d been looking for a nature photo—a grabber with a story behind it. I found it on the cover of The Killing Lessons, a compelling, disturbing crime novel I was reading. The photo had obviously been manipulated to serve the novel’s plot, so in addition to a likely story behind the image, there’s a story ahead of it as well.

Bill Hatcher was near the park entrance when a wildfire forced the closing of Tioga Pass road into Yosemite National Park last summer. “The fire was threatening to cross the road into Yosemite,” he says, “and helicopters and tankers were being sent out on kind of a bombing run to cut the fire off.”

Because her intent is to get the absolute best image in-camera, Lindsey Thorne is “pretty exact when it comes to lighting and posing.” When she describes her studio, the scene of almost all her boudoir sessions, as “modest and simple,” she’s citing an advantage. “I love shooting in a smaller room because I have so much control over the light.”

The scene is often just the starting point of a Deborah Sandidge photograph. “It’s visualization,” she says. “I’m looking at a scene and imagining what’s going to happen over time.” What was going to happen at the San Antonio, Texas, River Walk was the continuing passage of the water taxis. Sandidge knew they were the key to an expressive, dramatic photograph, one that would get as close as possible to picturing the passage of time.