Pro Techniques

“I’ve done the calculations time and again,” Gomez says, “and I couldn’t run my own site for anywhere near the cost.”

The photographic career of Jody Gomez started off simply enough, as a spectator parent when her son began riding steers. Frustrated by the poor quality of the pictures snapped and sold by another parent, Gomez began taking her own...

Paul Aresu
I had worked before with some of the other Explorers. I had even employed and trained one of them. But I had never before experienced the likes of Paul Aresu, a New York-based commercial photographer. His clients are like a who's who of dream customers. Aresu is a freestyler. He shoots just like all the commercial photographers you see in...

Albert Watson's powerful vision bridges the worlds of darkroom and digital. With more than 250 Vogue covers to his credit, three award-winning books, more than 650 commercials and music videos, he is a reigning master of both stunning black and white and cutting-edge color. His advertising clients include Chanel, Levi's, Gap, and Revlon, and his editorial work ranges...

After a while, showing wasn’t enough. Telling became the point.

And because Chris Heisey knows his Civil War, he has a lot to tell in his photographs.

Chris has been photographing Civil War battlefields for almost 20 years, and at the start he took straightforward record shots. “I’m self-taught,” he says, “and...

One of my favorite books as a child was Eric in the Land of the Insects, written by the Dutch author Godfried Bomans. In this humorous fantasy, 9-year-old Eric enters the landscape painting that hangs on his wall and discovers a world of man-sized wasps, bees, butterflies, and other insects that are stunningly similar to the world of humans. Once photography became a part of my life my world was populated with grasshoppers, spiders, snails, flies, dragonflies, and butterflies—Eric’s world.

Mirroring photos has always been one of my favorite techniques, and it is a relatively easy way to come up with some fun and creative images. Mirroring images consists of duplicating part of a photograph and flipping it around in different ways to create a mirrored effect. I use all kinds of subjects for these creations and I am constantly looking for things that would produce...

As mentioned in the previous tutorials, the impact and success of a studio portrait is often the combined result of lighting, composition, body language, lens choice, camera angle, clothing, color, texture, and even luck. Armed with a few portrait techniques, however, your work will improve dramatically. There are many portrait-making methods that can help you develop your own...