Category: Blog News

What advice would you give to established photographers who are “on the fence” about attending a networking event?

To be honest, I’m not sure it’s worth it for established photographers who have a presence in NY already.  It’s expensive and it’s probably more worth their while to put that money towards promos or testing.  I would, however, suggest it for photographers who are trying to break into the scene and meet reps and art buyers.

via Notes From A Rep's Journal.

Carter’s daily ritual included cocaine and other drug use, which would help him cope with his occupation’s horrors. He often confided in his friend Judith Matloff, a war correspondent. She said he would “talk about the guilt of the people he couldn’t save because he photographed them as they were being killed.”

via How Photojournalism Killed Kevin Carter.

“A lot of photographers” is basically referring to professional photographers, who make up a really small percentage of the people uploading photos to Facebook. We tend to think of ourselves as the most important class of photographers, but in the hundreds of millions of photos getting uploaded each day, we’re statistically insignificant. But a lot of these questions are actually being worked on, particularly the metadata stuff.

via VICE United States.

Professional photographers were repelled by the weird, ungainly, often out-of-focus shots that amateurs produced. “Photography as a fad is well nigh on its last legs,” prayed the art photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Other pundits bemoaned “Kodak fiends,” camera obsessives who carried their device everywhere and were apparently so constantly taking pictures that they would space out and miss their trains.

via The Invention of the “Snapshot” Changed the Way We Viewed the World | Smithsonian.

I am interested in ideas. I am not interested in doing the same thing over and over again. The reason I take photographs is to make discoveries for myself. Always trying to piece together the puzzle, that’s where I get my rush. Once I find the answer I am looking for that’s usually it for a project, the excitement and energy is gone. I move onto something else, or away from that subject matter until I can view it with fresh eyes again.

via An interview with Trent Parke – Try Hard Magazine.

Despite Jacobson’s enthusiasm for smartphone photography, he believes that turning these images into physical prints and displaying them in a gallery context was an important step. “It not only verifies smartphone photography but also allows viewers to consider their relationship with the images,” he said.

via Redefining Smartphone Photography – The New Yorker.

Founder and publisher Daniel Power says that as long as they believe they can sell a minimum quantity—a good portion of a 1,000- or 1,500-print run—they don’t ask the photographer to subsidize production costs.

Yet if the house sees potential in a project, “but not enough to pay for everything the artist wants—to make it really big or deluxe,” they will ask the artist to contribute to cover those costs.

via PDNonline.com.

Mobile photography is photography. Though if you say that mobile photography is only photography it’s like saying there’s no difference between driving a car or catching a bus, it’s just transport, right? Yet the actual experiences are vastly different. No one questioned the name “mobile phone” when it was used compared to a fixed line phone.

[…]A generation of professional photographers will appear from the impact of mobile photography, and true professionals will adapt and find ways to work within the new visual environment.

via #LightBoxFF: Oliver Lang’s Crash Course on Adapting to Instagram – LightBox.

the media attention, coverage, and money was and continues to be great. I loved it all. But what’s even cooler is that I have been contacted by people, companies, and organizations that I never expected that I’d be in touch with. Airports, local and abroad, have contacted me with an interest in hiring me to do work for them. Airplane manufacturers and leasing companies have been in touch…

This image truly has created opportunities that I never thought possible.

via fstoppers.com.

Being a commercial photographer is not my goal, nor will it ever will be. I don’t have the training, or the experience to compete with established professionals. I believe I am part of a photography movement that is based on capturing experiences, experiences from a viewpoint of someone that isn’t a traditional commercial or editorial photographer. Clients aren’t providing me with a set shot list, but rather giving me the freedom to capture the moments as I see them from behind my lens, both mobile and DSLR. I see value in the ability to offer a client both tools to suit their needs, access to my audience and vision through my mobile device, as well as the more versatile, larger image size of my DSLR work.

via Scott Rankin’s Portfolio – Blog.

Outstanding! 20,000 people visited my site! Some people even messaged me asking if they could buy a print!… I have not heard anything more. I did not sell anything.

Oh well, at least my other images got exposure…? Not really. As you can see, nearly everyone who visited my site came for the original image, maybe scrolled once or twice through others in that set, then left. The shop page didn’t even make it into the top ten most-visited.

via petapixel.com.

Do you want to know how my pictures I shot before I actually captured a photo that both accurately (and attractively) displayed how happy I was in this moment? 56. I hope you’re judging me, because I am.

via Bustle.

I think that part of this (being a great photographer) is an innate gift. I think that all artists, whatever the medium, have some genetic luck. That gives them the drive for whatever the talent is, painter, writer, musician, photographer. There’s something that’s deep within their soul.

I use to tell photographers that I believe great photographers, artists, whomever have a third eye. Many decades ago I was weaving and doing rugs I remember looking down at my hands and being in wonder of what they were doing. I’d say to myself, just stay out of their way. Get out of the way and let them do what they do. I think the same thing is true with photographers.

When they are really good it’s intuitive. This is what happens when they don’t over think it. That is what Bresson says.

via Karen Mullarkey – An Interview Part Two.

…you’d better understand how to deploy those design skills in a way that helps solve business problems for your clients.

…the select few who are going to thrive in the months and years to come are going to be the ones who can tell a complex story across a range of media in a simple, clear and elegant way.

via AIGA | Apple’s Creative Director Alan Dye on Why Great Design Skills Aren’t Enough.

“It’s always been true, I guess, that the uniqueness of a photogra- pher and the photographer’s voice … is what got people hired, it’s just more true now,” he explains. Davis finds the old idea that a photographer should be an impartial observer of events no longer applies. Instead, he believes the photographers whose work is sought after today “are powerful in what they say [and] in how they take a photograph.

via Picture Editor Mike Davis On Clarity of Voice in Today's Media Landscape.

Visual communication is so much more efficient and fast than verbal communication, it is obvious that one day it will become one of the major means of human­ computer interactions.

via 15 quotes from LDV Vision Summit you might have missed.

“By my fourth year in school, I was shooting every day and every night. I photographed every little thing—all my food, doorways covered in graffiti, and my friends and roommates. I tortured my first boyfriend, Marc, by capturing each moment of our relationship. I was obsessed with documenting my life. So that’s my advice to you: Find something to be obsessed with, and then obsess over it. Don’t compete; find what’s uniquely yours. Take your experience of life and connect that with your knowledge of photographic history. Mix it all together, and create an artistic world that we can enter into.”

via Ryan McGinley’s Advice to Young Photographers | VICE United States.