Archives For Photography

Why Hire a Pro Photographer?

May 24, 2013 — Leave a comment

Unless you actually were busy shooting or live under a rock you might of heard that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer thinks we don’t need pro photographers anymore.

Best comeback in defense of all pro’s:

If we don’t need pro photographers because everyone has a camera on their phone then we obviously don’t need professional chefs anymore because of the infinite availability of bowls and spoons.

Top reasons you need a pro:

  • It takes about 10 years of training to really know how to shoot and light many different kinds of products and subjects.
  • Pro’s actually use very expensive lighting and know how to shape it. (If you don’t know what that means you already are using the wrong person…)
  • Pro’s have a vast arsenal of lens and cameras to make sure the image is the right image for the project. Believe it or not the “everything in focus look” the iPhone provides are really bad for most advertising shots. Why? There is no separation of subject and background.
  • Pros don’t teach themselves on the Internet. Most learned via the Master & Pupil method in the actual world:  which means they assisted for years with seasoned pros who taught them their craft.
  • Pros know how to manipulate the way you look at an image. Which means they can bring attentions to what needs to be noticed and diminish the background visual noise.
  • Pro’s know how the language of photography can be used to help you get your message out clearly.
  • Pro’s know how to take a drawing of an idea and make it a reality.
  • Pro’s understand conceptually how a photograph communicates your ideas best. It is with this knowledge that a pro can help you separate your company from the pack.
In Business, How To
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Will current technology replace pro photographers?

May 24, 2013 — Leave a comment

A very interesting article about how current technology will eliminate the working methods of the individual pro photographer and change the game again. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer thinks we don’t need pro photographers anymore but she missed the point. It’s not that there are so many humans with camera’s – it’s the ability to place cameras everywhere we need, to get every viewpoint recorded, that now changes the game in a big way. Clayton Cubitt has decided we can forget about the Decisive Moment because we now live in the Constant Moment.

 

With the iPhone 5 camera module currently estimated to cost about $10/unit, and dropping like a rock with the inexorability of Moore’s Law, we can see how even an individual photographer might deploy hundreds of these micro-networked cameras for less than it costs to buy one current professional DSLR.

What might a photographer do with a grid of networked cameras like this, with their phone as the “viewfinder?” A street photographer could deploy them all over a neighborhood of interest, catching weeks worth of decisive moments to choose from at leisure.

A photojournalist could embed them all across a war zone, on both sides of the battle, to achieve a level of reality and objectivity never seen before. A sports photographer could blanket the stadium and capture every angle, for the entire game, even from each player’s perspective.

Clayton Cubitt  via The Decisive Moment is Dead. Long Live the Constant Moment.

In Documentary, Equipment, How To, Photography , ,
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Best Photographer in Amsterdam Series: Viviane Sassen

May 21, 2013 — Leave a comment

Viviane Sassen is a fashion photographer who lives in Amsterdam but her heart beats for Africa. What I like about her work is how she somehow weaves the personal & fashion with street & high art. It’s  always what she does not show you that makes you want more.  See her series Ultra-Violet and her Sketch Book

 

via the artists web site

In Books, Documentary, Photography , , ,
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Arne Svenson’s Photographs Create Privacy Uproar

May 20, 2013 — Leave a comment

The New York Post ran this article claiming residents of a Tribeca apartment building are furious over being secretly photographed by artist Arne Svenson whose exhibition now runs at Julie Saul Gallery. The images are actually pretty good and in no way show any faces but how would you feel being photographed secretly day in and day out?

 

via Julie Saul Gallery

Arne Svenson’s Photographs Create Privacy Uproar

In Art, Exhibitions, Photography , , ,
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Books: Planetfal New Solar System Visions by Michael Benson

May 16, 2013 — Leave a comment

Benson works hard on NASA  images by combining multiple images and adding color.

“The process of creating full-color images from black-and-white raw frames—and mosaic composites in which many such images are stitched together—can be quite complicated,” Benson writes. “In order for a full-color image to be created, the spacecraft needs to have taken at minimum two, but preferably three, individual photographs of a given subject, with each exposed through a different filter… ideally, those filters are red, green, and blue, in which case a composite color image can usually be created without too much trouble. But in practice, such spacecraft as the Cassini Orbiter or the Mars Exploration Rovers … have many different filters, which they use to record wavelengths of light well outside of the relatively narrow red, green and blue (RGB) zone of the electromagnetic spectrum that human eyes can see.”

 

In Books, Photography , , , ,
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