Photographer Chip Litherland initially thought mobile photography was a threat to photojournalism and a platform for visual gluttony and selfies. But once he started tinkering with Instagram, he fell in love with the medium and began making artistic, saturated double exposures that advanced his vision. Chip explains how he uses his iPhone alongside his DSLRs when on assignment and how it has changed his photography.
I an effort to bring more professionals into the S system, Leica Camera has gotten aggressive with a new S-System Trade Up discount program. Launched as a component of their "100 Years of Leica Photography" centennial, Leica Camera is granting a $5000 credit towards the purchase of a new Leica S (Typ 006) digital medium format camera for customers trading in any SLR camera or medium format camera (film or digital).
Polaroid enthusiasts who have long missed Type 55, that unique black and white 4x5 emulsion famous for providing a usable negative along with a positive print, may soon be in luck. The film may return to production but it depends on the likelihood of New55 project, a four year effort aimed at resurrecting it, having success as a Kickstarter campaign with a funding goal of $400,000.
Donna Von Bruening’s studio was thriving: bookings of more than 50 weddings a year, a full time studio manager, associate photographers and a new studio space but she lacked one thing — quality of life. Ten years after starting her studio in Savannah, Georgia, she faced the common small business dilemma of having to turn down work due to scheduling. So she expanded and grew her business only to realize that she regretted it and missed the quality of life she had with a smaller studio.
Atlanta-based Jennifer Schwartz, creator of Crusade for Art, wants to help fine art photographers build and grow their audience. To that end, Schwartz, whose bicoastal Crusade for Collecting bus tour was profiled in September, has launched the Crusade Engagement Grant. The award is a $10,000 prize aimed at assisting a photographer or photo collective in building and engaging an audience.
Polish photographer Emil Stankiewicz’s has created a unique, handmade Talbotype camera nicknamed Idlozi, which means “window to your heritage soul.” Each unique image captured by the wooden camera starts as a paper negative which is then rephotographed with the same box camera to yield a positive print. The camera also known as a “street camera” or “á la minute camera” are inspired by Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype, the British inventor who was able to create a paper negative from which positive prints could be contact printed.
Fine art photographer George Tice is a master craftsman of the medium and the documentary "George Tice: Seeing Beyond the Moment" explores his rise from family portraitist to accomplished artist and educator. The film, which is available on IMDB in its entirety, was successfully funded through director Bruce Wodder's Newstreetfilms via a Kickstarter campaign. It is an evocative look at the American landscape through the lens of one of the 20th Century's greatest photographers.
Black bear bile, rhino horns, shark fins and other endangered wildlife and their illicit trade account for more than $10 billion annually. For the past ten years, documentary photographer Patrick Brown has explored this story, shooting from the jungles of Cambodia to the markets of Guangzhou. The work is now collected in the book “Trading to Extinction,” published by Dewi Llewis and released to coincide with this week’s global summit on illegal wildlife trade hosted in London.
Shooting speeding boats at dusk from a chase boat with a camera on a stabilizer is the norm for Richard Steinberger, a maritime photographer based out of Denver, Colorado. For a recent advertising campaign with Boston Whaler boats, Steinberger worked in tandem with a video production unit and shared the challenges of working on location, keeping the cameras dry and coming away with compelling advertising imagery.
Boston Magazine’s May 2013 cover image by photographer Mitchell Feinberg depicted running shoes from Boston marathoners shaped into a heart. It was a fitting, smartly conceived statement to a city recuperating from the terror of the finish line marathon bomb attacks. To promote the upcoming Bath Half Marathon 2014, Bath Magazine in the UK printed a cover image almost identical to the Boston edition, sparking an internet controversy.
Some four thousand custom tintype portraits, countless Polaroids and more than 30 gallery shows but after four years in business, Photobooth San Francisco is closing its doors at the end of March 2014. One of the few commercial studios selling custom hand-made tintypes, Photo Booth, located on Valencia Street, has been a favorite and easy place to have a one-of-a-kind metal portrait made.
Nikon's update to its flagship D4 DSLR will be on view today through Friday at the International Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. A new image processing engine and better autofocus highlight the improvements to come from the full frame HD-DSLR. There are scant details beyond yesterday's press release.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert Capa, the iconic war photographer and Magnum Photos co-founder whose life, documented in the autobiography Slightly Out of Focus, is the stuff of legend. Capa's centenary has brought with it a number of undiscovered treasures from his life including his only surviving audio interview from October 1947 but also a rich collection of slide film taken on assignment from 1938 until his death in 1954.
The swirly bokeh of fast lenses designed by Joseph Petzval in the mid-19th century is no longer solely available to fine art photographers using view cameras. In July, we profiled a Kickstarter campaign by Lomography to fund the creation of a brass Petzval for Nikon and Canon mounts. Now, a new campaign is hoping to fund the production of an F3.8 120mm lens for medium format cameras with a Pentacon Six and Hasselblad compatible mount.
There are photo books and then there are photo books that you go back to repeatedly over time. Peter Turnley's new self-published collection "French Kiss: A Love Letter to Paris" is one such publication that begs to be savored. A monochromatic study of Paris captured over 40 years on the streets, the 138-image hardcover is an homage to the romance of the City of Lights captured with a reverence for the aesthetics of famous French street photography.
Cheryl Dunn’s visceral documentary of New York street photographers “Everybody Street” is now available for rental or purchase online via Vimeo. The 90-minute film debuted in April at Toronto’s HotDocs International Documentary Film Festival, traveled to several international festivals and continues to be screened. Featured photographers include Boogie, Bruce Davidson, Bruce Gilden, Elliott Erwitt, Jamel Shabazz, Jill Freedman, Mary Ellen Mark and Joel Meyerowitz among others.
Philadelphia-based photographic artist Isa Leshko turned her camera onto aging farm animals, horses and dogs to create a powerful study of mortality and aging. The body of work, captured with medium format film, is currently exhibited at the Corden Potts gallery in San Francisco and was inspired by the caregiving process she underwent with her parents.
Think Tank and MindShift recently released a number of notable new travel products for photographers including the rotation180 backpack, 2nd Brain laptop collection and PowerHouse organizers. Designed by photographers for photographers, their gear excels in functionality and durability. They are currently offering rebates on Rolling Camera Bags and Urban Disguise Shoulder Bags. Here are the details.
Like any truly talented artist, rock musician Lou Reed, who passed on Sunday at 71, worked in more genres than simply songwriting. Inspired by his close friend pop artist Andy Warhol, Reed explored landscape photography, often working with a digital camera converted for infrared. This body of work, known as “Romanticism,” was shown in 2009 at the Adamson Gallery in Washington, DC.
Ideal for mounting Leica X- and M-system cameras, Leica's new 24/38 ball heads and new carbon tripod provide the same high-quality precision engineering typical of the storied German brand. Well suited for travel and location work, the 2.6-pound carbon fiber tripod when matched with one of the ball heads extends to five feet high and collapse to 1.7 feet when packed.
The portfolio review is likened to speed dating for good reason — you often have only 20 minutes to make a lasting impression. Whether you are having a one-on-one chat in a prospective client’s office or meeting at a photo festival round robin with several reviewers, here’s some advice for how to succeed… and, hopefully, put yourself in contention for future visual opportunities. As the saying goes, “you never have a second chance to make a first impression.”
Designed by Apple's Jony Ive and designer Marc Newson, Leica's one-of-a-kind M for RED will be auctioned off at Southeby’s on November 23rd 2013 to raise money for The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The hallmark of Ive design is on display with the rounded anodized aluminum outer shell and machined aluminum body. The camera has s a full-format CMOS sensor, high performance processor and new Leica APO-Summicron M 50mm f/2 ASPH lens.
The eighth annual Nordic Light International Festival of Photograph was held back in April in Kristiansund, Norway and the lineup of speakers featured some of photography’s finest imagemakers. Sponsored by Leica, Epson and Nokia with the slogan “Meet the Legends,” Nordic Light is an impressive annual festival run by the Nordic Light International Centre of Photography. The NL YouTube and Vimeo channels feature several of the entire presentations including Steve McCurry, Chris Rainer, Jacob Aue Sobel, Maria Pirilä, Dan Young and many more.
Magnum photographer Steve McCurry is one of the heavyweights in National Geographic's stable of assignment photographers with more than 13 books to his credit. "Untold: The Stories Behind the Photographs" by Phaidon Press is not a visual feast for the coffee table but an insightful, autobiographic look at 14 of McCurry's select images including the famous Afghani Girl. “Untold: The Stories Behind the Photographs” explores McCurry’s archive including handwritten notes and records and his personal mementos and ephemera from travels abroad.
The phrase “go big or go home” seems to take on a special significance with photographer Dennis Manarchy. Obsessed with the concept of scale and the possibilities of working with massive negatives to create portrait images more than two stories high, he and his team have created a 35-foot view camera, the world’s largest film camera. The project, nicknamed “Butterflies and Buffalo”, aims to use the traveling view camera as a conduit for documenting more than 50 of the unique cultures in America.
Photographic educator Dirk Fletcher decided his summer Modern Alternative Photographic Practices class would try and test the Holga camera and boldly send one where no Holga had gone before — space. To get a shot of the earth’s stratosphere, Fletcher and his students created a four Holga box unit to float by balloon into the lower stratosphere and capture an aerial of earth.
Ten thousand miles, ten cities on a coast to coast ramble in a 1977 vintage VW bus all for the sake of promoting photographic art. From April to June of this year, gallerist Jennifer Schwartz was behind the wheel of her microbus on a two-fold mission: to promote photographers and create collectors. Working with five photographers in each city on the tour, she orchestrated pop-up events and curbside photo exhibits designed to educate and engage communities regarding photographic art and the value of starting a collection.
If you are a photographer with children, then you may want to consider sharing photography with them via the Bigshot camera. Founded in 2011 by Kimera LLC, the Bigshot is a build-it-yourself kit camera designed as an educational tool illustrating the science and engineering behind digital imagemaking. After building the camera, you take pictures using a wheel-like lens system that offers a standard view, wide angle and stereo prism view.
Photography is the perfect counterpart to road travel. On a mission that seems to blend aspects of Ken Kesey, Robert Frank and Matthew Brady, fine art photographer Anton Orlov is traveling across the United States in a school bus doing wet plate collodion photography. You might’ve seen his Kickstarter video in 2011 that involved retrofitting a school bus into a mobile darkroom nicknamed “The Photo Palace.”
Imagine never having the keepsake of a photograph as a memento of your family. This is a common reality for many in rural areas and third world countries and Portland-based photographer Joni Kabana aims to do something about it. She founded “Prints for Prints: A Global Rally for the Printed Photograph,” a non-profit that auctions photographic prints to raise money so that people in rural areas can have their own family portraits.
There are many great photography books out there but this is a list of five of my all-time favorites, the ones routinely jockeying for space on my nightstand even though I’ve read or pawed through them numerous times. Each is a continual source of inspiration and provides welcome insight into the thought-process behind successful imagemaking at the highest level.
Since 2008, The Impossible Project has kept the Polaroid flame alive with their line of instant films. Today, in the Apple app store, they've released version 1.2 of an iPhone app designed to integrate mobile photography with analog instant film. The features allow for instant digitization and photo sharing for your Polaroid prints as well as a way of making Polaroid prints from iPhone captures with their soon-to-be-released Instant Lab.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has relayed back images of the Earth and moon from 900 million miles away. The images, taken in a series of photos on July 19th as Saturn was backlit by the sun, portray the blue planet as a diminutive blip in a vast dark solar system.
Imagine a colorful self-setting rubber that you can keep in your camera bag and bust out at any time to repair on-the-job cracks, breaks and tears. Sugru is such a product, a moldable Play-Doh-like synthetic that can also be shaped into custom camera grips, monopod and tripod mounts and can add color and texture to existing buttons on your DSLR.
Not since Matthew Brady’s work documenting the Civil War has the tintype photographic process been used on the battlefield. Staff sergeant Ed Drew, an aerial gunner in the California Air National Guard, brought tintype back to the theater of war to photograph his fellow soldiers during his deployment from April to June in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.
