Pro Techniques

Actor Richard Gere is best known for his roles in over 40 films, but few may be aware he is also an avid photographer and collector. Taking pictures on his many trips to India was always more of a personal project, until photography book and exhibition designer Elizabeth Avedon happened to notice a 3-foot stack of beautiful 8x10 photos in his loft. “A lot of these photographs I didn’t show anyone because it was such a private experience for me,” Gere recalls. “I had no interest in sharing them.” Fortunately, Avedon was able to convince him they needed to be seen, and these and other photos have been exhibited around the world and published in his book, Pilgrim.

A phone call from a friend woke Chris Fulcher at his home in Newtown, Connecticut, around 10:30am on December 14th last year. “I’d slept late and didn’t know what was going on,” Chris says. “My buddy told me to check the news, and then I rushed to the school because my 6-year-old cousin goes to that school.”

I live near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and have been photographing the canal and the neighborhood for over two decades, but it was only in the fall of 2009 that my photographs had the prospect of becoming a historical record, due to the imminent prospect of development and a long-term cleanup. Either way, the area was going to change dramatically. The photographs I produced have won awards, been featured in exhibitions, and 17 of the images have been acquired by the Brooklyn Historical Society for their permanent collection.

Philippe Halsman, in his book Halsman on the Creation of Photographic Ideas, talked about an ad he’d shot, where he had to show a car making a splash as it was driving through a water-filled trough. But rather than give it the traditional treatment of the day, he sought to make a real splash with the picture, so he lit it differently. Shooting at dusk, he positioned flashbulbs so they hit the “wings,” as he called them, from each side. Like Halsman, photographers specializing in automotive are finding ways of introducing unusual and unique twists to make the shot stand out. Peter Dawson is one such automotive photographer who takes a particularly keen interest in dealing with challenges outdoors, on location.

After 30 years of making a living as a professional photographer I reached another milestone this past July—I traveled with my 17-year-old son Justin around the entire state of Oregon, our goal being to create an in-depth documentary of this beautiful state. We had never before traveled together solely as a photo team. This trip served as another milestone for me—it would be my first photo trip with my new Canon digital camera, having finally said goodbye to my beloved manual Nikon SLRs and Fujichrome slide film.