In November of last year, Coty Tarr traveled to Lake Placid in Upstate New York to document the US Bobsled team as they practiced and prepared for upcoming competitions. Coty, as per usual, has not only photographed these incredible athletes and the work that goes into this level of training, but he's done so gorgeously.
From 1920-1956, Ernst Leitz II was the head of Leica Camera, but perhaps his most impressive achievement took place from 1933-1939 when Leitz and his family rescued hundreds of Jews by smuggling them out of Nazi Germany.
Layoffs of photo staff continue at one of the world's largest news companies.
Two things you can't get enough of: Benedict Cumberbatch and Dan Winters. Cumberbatch stars in The Imitation Game - opening next week - as Alan Turing.
What’s wrong with our industry that we are so quick to belittle formal education? Whenever the topic of an art degree arises, there’s an angry mob that amasses, collectively chanting how “useless” a degree is in photography and that the best school to learn from is the University of Hard Knocks.
If you're looking for a great movie this weekend - and you don't want to fight the crowds to see Interstellar - check out Time Zero, a film about the last days of Polaroid, the people who loved it and the few who set out to save it. It's truly a beautiful documentary that will make you fall in love with instant film all over again.
Photographer Jimmy Nelson is facing backlash over his portrayal of some indigenous people in his book, Before They Pass Away. The book (which is stunning to look at) portrays tribes and cultures supposedly untouched by the modern world.
We’re sitting on the precipice of game-changing year for photographers. 2015 is going to be the year of medium-format. Ricoh (formally Pentax) dropped a bomb this year with a sub-$9,000 medium format camera. There are even rumors about Sony and Mamiya teaming up for a medium format rangefinder of some kind.
Philip Lee Harvey recently went to Ethiopia for Lonely Planet to photograph the world's most inaccessible church... 2,500 feet up and carved into the side of a mountain. The view from the top? Nothing short of spectacular.
Sure it's easy to put off watching a video that isn't under five minutes long. Sometimes you just have to make an exception, and the weekend is the perfect time to do it. In this video, David Brommer talks about not only the rules of composition, but the theory behind the rules we all know and how they relate to our way of seeing.
Jeremy Cowart is obviously an incredibly talented photographer. But it's not his skill as a photographer, he says, that gets him the best work - it's his story. In this video from CreativeLive, Jeremy discusses a meeting with an art director at a huge ad agency.
Dirty backgrounds are something that most of us have had to deal with at some point. Sometimes, all we need to do is clean the background. Other times, it's actually better to do a full background replacement. The full replacement can be as subtle as eliminating shadows and sensor dust or something as drastic as changing the background color.
After hitting it out of the park a few months ago with the brilliant "Eye-Opening" commercial, Canon Austraila releases another one. "To the Ends of the Earth" features Canon Master Krystle Wright doing what she does best - creating breathtaking action photos in epic places.
Broncolor has announced two new products at Photokina - a compact, portable flash system called, "Siros" and an HMI called the "F1600." The Siros looks to be a direct competitor with the Profoto D1s while the F1600 looks to add to Broncolor's existing line of continuous, high-output lights. Siros will come as two power configurations - 400 and 800 Ws.
Last year, Fstoppers interviewed photographer, and possibly one of the nicest people on the planet, Coty Tarr. Last week, Coty got not only his first cover ever, but THE cover for anyone that photographs anything remotely athletic - Sports Illustrated.
In the last few years, advances in technology have allowed for filmmakers to do some pretty amazing things. With the accessibility of cameras like the Go-Pro, the gap between amateur and pro is narrowing. Enter award-winning wildlife filmmaker John Downer and his quest to push the remarkable.
This is the second part of The Ultimate Guide to Composition. Part One can be found here.
Now that we’ve covered some of the more common rules/guidelines that are present in photography and painting, let’s move on to some of the more abstract concepts and theories including framing devices and the ways that our brain organizes how we see.
Note: This is Part One. For Part Two: Beyond the Basics, click here.
Every one of us, in some way, has had our lives impacted by George Eastman. Founding Eastman Kodak in 1888, he set out to change how people photographed. He began by creating the first roll of film in 1884 - a departure from the traditional method of using glass plates and a sink. One year later, he put that roll of film into the first Eastman camera.
Liquify gets a bad rap. Its misuse accounts for a pretty alarming number of Photoshop disasters. And although it is easy to learn, it does take a great deal of time and energy to master. Luckily, Aaron Nace over at Phlearn is here to help.
Opening Photoshop for the first time can be pretty overwhelming. But whether you're new, relatively new or looking for a good refresher on the basics, Aaron Nace at Phlearn has assembled a can't-miss, three-part series on the need-to-know elements of Photoshop.
Lynsey Addario is an amazing photographer and an inspiring human being; she's a photojournalist who is literally changing the world. Be warned, parts of this video are graphic.
Last week, we featured an interview with the awesomely talented retoucher and photographer Marina Dean-Francis. This week, she's shared a video with Fstoppers showing her retouching on a hair and beauty image. Although the video has been sped up tremendously, it's not hard to see that there aren't many quick tricks in play here.
One of the most versatile and powerful secrets of Photoshop is the luminance mask. Similar to a channel mask that allows you to select very precise parts of your image based on color, the luminance mask allows you to select parts of your image based on tonal range.
After spending a fair amount of time looking through the best images that the Fstoppers community has to offer, it's pretty easy to see what sets them apart. Not only are the shots themselves exceptional, but the post processing is world class (Julia Kuzmenko McKim and Michael Woloszynowicz, Photoshop extraordinaires, hold a few of our top spots).
thinkTank's ongoing series, "About A Photo," is a tremendous peek into the process of some amazing photographers. The series has the featured photographer narrate the story of one of their images. In this episode, William Albert Allard speaks about his photograph of a cowboy named Stan and why he doesn't take a photo of someone - but into them.
Last month, Ryan McGinley gave the commencement speech at Parsons in New York. Ryan McGinley (NSFW), if you're not familiar, is one of the youngest photographers to ever be exhibited at the Whitney Museum, was named Photographer of the Year in 2003 by American Photo Magazine, is the former photo editor of Vice Magazine and has been featured in public collections at the Guggenheim Museum.
Warning, this video may give you a little bit of vertigo. Stijn Van Hulle posted this BTS video of him photographing rock climbers in Freyr, Belgium.
Have you ever wanted to take photographs like Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus or Martin Schoeller? Don't have time to put in all that pesky hard work to learn masterful control of lighting and post-processing? Soon, you may be able to have images just like theirs! Well, sort of.
In this episode of National Geographic Live! Peter Essick talks about the journey of creating his new book, The Ansel Adams Wilderness, and what it's like to pay tribute to (and follow in the tripod holes of) perhaps the greatest nature photographer to walk the planet.
What does nostalgia for broken things say about us? Over the last year or so, we’ve undoubtedly seen an exponential increase of the intentional “glitch” used in visual arts. The glitch – defined as a short-term fault in a system – has gained tremendous popularity as a visual style.
It's easy to dismiss the amount of difficulty involved in location shoots. A few years ago, Joey Lawrence (JoeyL) shot a personal project of portraits in Ethiopia. Whether traveling by van, boat or Indiana Jones plane, it's great to have the opportunity to see how hard the literal journey was on the way to the figurative photographic destination.
About a month ago, I traveled to Southeast Asia to put THE ULTIMATE, PORTABLE TRAVEL PACK (shortened name, rights still reserved) to the test. Several people asked for a follow-up. How did this tiny, travel kit work out? …Did I even get any pictures I liked?
In this episode of National Geographic Live! Martin Schoeller travels to a very remote part of the Brazilian Amazon, deep inside the largest section of protected rainforest in the world. Schoeller photographs the Kayapo tribe as they are traditionally as well as documents how they are coping with the changes that have been brought on by the modern world.
At 60,000 years old, the Australian Aboriginal culture is the oldest, longest-running culture on Earth. Amy Toensing photographed them for National Geographic, lending her intimately deep sense of storytelling to the sad and tragic history of their culture and the bond they share with their land.
