Category — Photographers To Know

This month’s “Best Web Video” is actually an entire series — the Genius Of Photography produced by the BBC (site here). If you are trying to figure out how to be a photographer today, I think it’s essential to expose yourself (pun intended) to a bit of the 170 years of our collective history. Consider this 6-part series to be a must watch.

Outside the UK, the Genius Of Photography appears periodically on Ovation (USA), ABC (Australia), Knowledge Network (Canada) and elsewhere. Fortunately for the impatient and impulsive, the entire series has been posted on YouTube in 10 minute installments. To make things easy, I’ve collected all 37 links below.

Enjoy. Learn. Pass it on.
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GANG LIGHT - Part 1: Shooter with crazy red hair, plays with 12 Canon 580 EX II Speedlites and 8-feet of red oak to build a high-powered “ring” light, then fires it with a dozen RadioPoppers in high-speed sync mode at a best-selling Photoshop author.

I shot Ben Willmore on the street in broad daylight today. There were several innocent bystanders watching. The sun was high in the sky and coming in straight over Ben’s shoulders. I centered my favorite lens right on his eye and BANG! I had him in 1/8000 of a second.

Shortly before the “incident”, Ben and I met up in San Luis Obispo on day 3 of Joe McNally’s location lighting workshop at The Lepp Institute. Joe was kind (or crazy) enough to ask me to come down for a quick talk to the 16 students in his workshop about my experiences with RadioPoppers. [Read more →]

As photographers, we are visual creatures. We need to feed that vision by spending a lot of time looking at the works of other photographers. No, I’m not thinking of Flickr. I’m thinking of photography books -  books OF photographs, not books about the how-to of photography.

There are hundreds of photo books published each year (actually thousands if you count the photo books micro-published through Blurb and the rest). Here’s a round-up of titles that have caught my attention over the past year. [Read more →]

It’s Thanksgiving Day in the U.S.  This year, I’m giving thanks for the gift of creativity.

Our world needs creatives and the new ideas they create. Creatives live well beyond the realms of art, music and design. I’m convinced that the greatest thoughts in science, medicine, economics and so on are sparked by bursts of creativity. Many discoveries are made through accidents. For me, the creative part is when someone recognizes the value of the unexpected result. 

So, this year I give thanks for creativity. Whether experienced as small flashes in an otherwise mundane job or lived as a lifestyle, the products of creativity are essential for our future.

Witness The Birth Of A New PixSylated Tradition… The Monthly Best Web Video

A month ago, I wrote about how my spirits were lifted from the abyss of the October meltdown by a web video of a guy named Matt who danced his jig with people from around the world. If you’ve not seen it yet, definitely click here.

For Thanksgiving, I’m offering this video up as a testament to the power of thinking beyond the boundaries of the normal. As a photographer, I have never seen anything like this. It’s live-action, graffiti animation. The images were not created in post-production. They were painted and photographed frame by frame. No powerful message. Just raw creativity. Enjoy!

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

You can learn more about the artist and find links to download hi-res versions of MUTO on BluBlu.org. If you really dig it, click on his link to make a donation. Hey, just go there. It’s an incredibly creative website.

Thanks to Ed Z, who commented on my article about RadioPoppers, I came upon the video in Ed’s blog - which is worth checking out.

The Strobist - David Hobby

I had the great fortune to get a seat last Sunday for David Hobby’s Strobist lighting seminar in Los Angeles. [If you're a student of lighting and just said "Stro-who?", then let me be the first to welcome you to our planet. Check out the Strobist site and we'll see you back here in a couple days.]

To say that a ticket to the Stobist workshop is a hot item is an understatement. Two days x 50 seats = 100 happy photogs. 24 hours = more time than it took for both seminars to sell out. If you’re among the legions who wished they could attend a Strobist workshop, then let me ease your pain (or pour salt on your wounds) by sharing some of the highlights of the day. [Read on, I promise you'll also find links to sources of info on virtually every concept presented during the seminar.] [Read more →]

Vincent Laforet, the energetic New York photographer who recently published an insightful treatise on the state of editorial photography (’The Cloud Is Falling’ covered here), has launched a blog. Vincent is just about to head to China to cover the Olympics for Newsweek and promises daily posts. Be sure the peruse the left column of Vincent’s blog. It’s a virtual treasure-trove of other great blogs and photographer’s sites. I’m certain that Vincent will prove himself to be as good a blogger as he is a shooter… which means that we are all in for great insights and commentary on a regular basis.

This post last updated: August 3, 2008.

Back in the middle of photography’s dark ages, during the formative years of my youth (circa 1968), listening to shortwave radio was a keen fascination. When I visited my cousin’s house, at night, we would tune in to stations from around the world on his shortwave set. We laughed as the path opened for us to discover exotic languages and music. Other than scrounging up an old receiver and some wire for an antenna, there was no cost to riding the airwaves.

Today, I think the blogosphere is at a similar state of evolution. For only the cost of access to the Internet, I can tune in to the thoughts of photographers (and other colorful thinkers) far and wide. Likewise, the cost of starting and running a blog can be minimal. Consider that WordPress, the most widely-used blog software, is a free download and that thousands of blogs, including some of the most highly-visited sites (like Strobist), are hosted for free on Blogger. [Read more →]

If Joe McNally were a cartoon character, I think he’d be the Tasmanian Devil (although I’m sure that some days ol’ Joe feels like he’s Wile E. Coyote). Why the Tasmanian Devil? He never slows down. Between shooting, blogging and teaching, Joe’s the photographic equivalent of a whirling dervish. Fortunately for the legions that follow in his dust trail, Joe has also been carving out time to write his next book The Hot Shoe Diaries - Creative Applications of Small Flashes.

Good news. You can pre-order it now on Amazon. For those who waited to order Joe’s first book, The Moment It Clicks, and could not get it until the second printing, you know that you’ll want to pre-order your copy of The Hot Shoe Diaries. So, do it now. We’ll wait for you to come back. If all goes as planned in the McNally household and at New Riders Press, you’ll have it in hand by Christmas.

And for the four of you who have been reading PixSylated for a while, the answer to your other question is “Yes”. I’ll pimp The Hot Shoe Diaries just like its big brother. Click here if you’d like to get a close look at Joe’s first book and read my original post on ‘Pimping Your McNally’.

For frequent McNally installments and more details on The Hot Shoe Diaries, keep an eye on Joe’s blog.

[And thanks to The Man himself for giving this cub reporter the go ahead to run with the story before he made the big announcement.]

It’s great when a pro shooter will let you peak into his camera bag. It’s even better when he’ll unpack the dang thing and explain all the contents… on the web.

John Harrington is an energetic, editorial shooter based in Washington DC. I’ve read and highly recommend his book, Best Business Practices for Photographers. I heard him speak at Photoshop World in Vegas last fall and at ASMP Strictly Business 2 in Los Angeles this winter. If you get a chance to meet or listen to John, consider it a must-do.

To get a sense of the diverse environments in which John must shoot, spend some time on his portfolio site. Then think about all the gear you’d have to have to face so many different challenges.

Now click over to John’s Assignment Construct. Of particular interest are the 30+ short videos in which he unpacks and discusses the various gear kits that he takes on assignments. There’s so much to watch. Perhaps the best place to start is with John’s intro to the videos. [Read more →]

Jay Maisel has announced three new workshop dates for 2008. Definitely not for the feint of heart - emotionally or financially. The nine attendees at each session “should expect five solid days (from 9:00am to 10:00pm) of shooting, discussing, eating, and breathing photography with Jay at this home”. The cost $5,000. To go to Jay’s site, click here. To download the PDF brochure, click here.

Need more Maisel?

Here’s the ASMP interview with Jay.

Get the “colorful” podcast of Jay with Greg Gorman, Seth Resnick and George Jardine.

Here’s an interview at Photo Insider.