Joe Farace

While National Photography Month may be the entire month of May, Camera Day is celebrated on June 29th. That day is also the 126th anniversary of the birth of James Van Der Zee, the African-American photographer of the Harlem Renaissance that occurred during the 1920s and ’30s. It’s also a day when photographers of all ages and abilities should venture forth into the world to capture all the beauty that surrounds us. Follow the examples set by the four photographers who are featured in this month’s column and I’m sure they’ll serve as great sources of inspiration for your images.

“With all of our running and all of our cunning, if we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.”—Jimmy Buffett

This issue will be on newsstands around the 12th day of the New Year and subscribers should see it a few days earlier, so it’s time to roll out my 2010 web plans, starting with my blog. It will become inactive or as Dennis Lehane put it “gone...

During a portrait session and perhaps to a lesser extent when shooting a wedding, you can control the lighting, background, and subject. During a portrait session, I try to manage everything from the subject’s pose, clothing, and makeup and the resulting photographs tend to be as much a portrait of me as they are of my subject. What often emerges from that control is a style, which is not something I’m conscious about when photographing, but the truth is that over time we all develop a signature way of shooting. The danger is that we keep shooting that same way or different versions of the same shot for the rest of our lives. Any style you develop must grow and change as you learn. Otherwise, what’s the point? As we continue to shoot and learn from experience, and reading magazines like Shutterbug, we start to tweak and improve those results until what emerges is truly a personal style.

Making photographs for a model's portfolio involves much more than just using the proper posing and lighting techniques and includes all of the less glamorous and business-oriented aspects of creating these kinds of images. The...