Bill Pekala, head of Nikon Professional Services, came to the US Open at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, New York, last August to run the NPS operation at the matches. Sports events can be the ultimate proving ground for camera gear, and one of NPS’s primary roles is providing their member professional photographers with the assurance of dedicated on-site support.
Last year, as a freshman, Amanda Haycook found herself taking pictures of buildings. “It wasn’t a conscious decision at first,” she says, “it was just like my eye kept going there.” Not so with others on the streets: “Living in New York I noticed that people don’t look up, and I just started noticing things that people weren’t paying attention to.”
“You can’t shoot the same thing all the time,” Sammuel Lopez-Licea says in response to our comment about the variety of subjects he chooses for his photos. The choosing is pretty much the easy part: many things catch his eye. What’s equally creative and most interesting to him is deciding how he wants to depict those interests—how he’ll use composition, framing, motion, light, and color, or how he’ll take color away in post-processing.
I’ve shamelessly borrowed the title of E.B. White’s classic 1949 essay, and I’ve done it because my first views of Lindsay Silverman’s High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos of New York made me think of White, wandering the city, constantly re-examining its continuing spectacle in the hope that he could put it on paper.
He figured he'd be one of the last of the holdouts. "When the whole digital revolution started, I thought I'd be the last guy to be shooting digital," David Alan Harvey says. Then along came an offer he didn't want to refuse. "Nikon was working on an ad campaign for their D100, and they asked me if I'd go down to Mexico and shoot with the...
"How do you get a handle on telling the story of life on earth in images? It took tons of research to master the material."
For his most recent book, Life: A Journey Through Time, Frans Lanting traveled, researched, and photographed for over six years, but when you consider that his goal was to document the story of life on earth, it seems a reasonable amount...
"None of my sample albums have family formal shots. I intentionally leave them out because they're not what I specialize in."
"A lot of it comes down to your client's expectations before the wedding," Mike Colon says of his relationship to the bride and groom. "You have to talk about what they're really expecting, what...
The personal project always finds you. It's never the other way around. We can't remember a pro shooter ever saying anything along the lines of, "I went looking for a labor of love." Maybe it's a subject you've been doing for years and suddenly realize how much you enjoy doing it. Or maybe you decide it's time to bring it to a wider...
"I built my name and reputation on safety and doing things legally, with permission."
Location is everything, and Peter B. Kaplan built his career on getting to places others couldn't...or wouldn't. Although there are images taken from blimps, balloons, and helicopters, the majority of his photographs are taken from rooftops, scaffolds, antenna...
"Another photographer will say, `I don't know anything about figure skating,' and I'll tell him, `Well, here's what's going to happen; here's what to watch for.'"
Funny how things work out sometimes.
Dave Black majored in commercial graphics design and studio drawing at Southern Illinois...