Talking Pictures

Dr. Alan Sloyer, traveling with his son in Kochi, India, somewhat reluctantly agreed to a sunset cruise. “It wasn’t really my thing,” Dr. Sloyer says, but when sunset turned startlingly dramatic it became very much his thing: a passion for photographing memorable travel moments.

Nope, editorial and advertising photographer Jody Dole doesn’t go down to the dump to look for subject matter. He’s more a flea market and tag sale type, and it was at the former that he met a picker who had, in Dole’s words, “really interesting junk—and an eye for interesting things.” Which is why Dole stops by at the guy’s place now and then, or vice versa, and an interesting thing or two changes hands.

As he neared the end of the process of making prints for an exhibition of his large- and medium-format photography, Geoffrey Roberts was ready to spread the word about the upcoming event. “I was in the darkroom once or twice a week for eight or nine months leading up to the show,” he says, “and to promote it I took pictures in the darkroom and posted them to Flickr, Facebook, Instagram—basically everywhere.”

When the rain stopped, Shawn Clover was on the pedestrian bridge over the street at the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, waiting for someone interesting to come by. He ended up photographing 14 interesting people, one frame for each. This is the image he chose to post to Flickr.

The kinds of commercial images Ann Elliott Cutting is likely to be called on to create for her clients are interpretive, fanciful, or elaborate illustrations of ideas and concepts. Or, in some cases, they’re all of those adjectives combined into one image. In other words, “create” is exactly the right word for what she does.

Green Spring Gardens in Alexandria, Virginia, is a favorite place for photography for Cindy Dyer, who specializes in botanical subjects, and it was there that two years ago she was featured in an exhibition of 88 of her photos. A visitor to that exhibit, who happened to be the wife of an art director for the U.S. Postal Service, saw her work and mentioned Cindy to her husband, who happened to be looking for specific subject images to license for stamps. Cindy submitted 20 photographs of ferns, from which the Postal Service selected five for First Class Forever Stamps, which are currently available for purchase online at the USPS website.