Photographer Profiles

He stands in about 3 feet of roiling surf, wetsuit jersey glistening from repeated dunkings. The sky above Oahu’s North Shore is deep blue. Undertow currents grasp his legs—eroding sand beneath his swim fins—as water rushes seaward to build the next huge wave. He holds his bulky waterproof camera housing tightly, faces west toward the setting sun and checks the long tether attached to his wrist. He turns his head to watch the wave rise ever higher—a towering blue-green monster that’s starting to curl, white spume blowing off its top. He braces himself as best he can against the forces raging around him, points the camera toward the golden Hawaiian sunset, and waits as tons of water begins to curl over him, forming a tube. At what he hopes is the right instant, he fires off several shots and prepares to be pounded and rag-dolled by the massive wave.

“Whether the client is advertising a travel destination or a product, such as clothing or sports apparel, I strive to set up the shoot with talent that’s the best fit for the ad,” lifestyle photographer Dennis Welsh proclaims. “That’s what makes the shot and the client’s message believable. That’s what sells it to potential customers. For instance, if I’m shooting for a ski company or a ski resort, I want to find skiers who can easily do what I want them to do. That conveys a sense of truth and honesty. If you start with skiers who are not convincing, you start with a deficit. In that case, you have to do the best you can with what you’ve got. If I’ve got great talent and a great location, a lot of things are already working in my favor.”

A phone call from a friend woke Chris Fulcher at his home in Newtown, Connecticut, around 10:30am on December 14th last year. “I’d slept late and didn’t know what was going on,” Chris says. “My buddy told me to check the news, and then I rushed to the school because my 6-year-old cousin goes to that school.”

Mark Katzman has been shooting professionally for over 25 years. Originally, he studied filmmaking at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In college, and for a short while thereafter, he found he could earn money by taking pictures of baseball teams.

Philippe Halsman, in his book Halsman on the Creation of Photographic Ideas, talked about an ad he’d shot, where he had to show a car making a splash as it was driving through a water-filled trough. But rather than give it the traditional treatment of the day, he sought to make a real splash with the picture, so he lit it differently. Shooting at dusk, he positioned flashbulbs so they hit the “wings,” as he called them, from each side. Like Halsman, photographers specializing in automotive are finding ways of introducing unusual and unique twists to make the shot stand out. Peter Dawson is one such automotive photographer who takes a particularly keen interest in dealing with challenges outdoors, on location.

“I started in my father’s darkroom, retouching negatives at 5 years old,” recalls New York City-based photographer Paul Aresu. “My father was a wedding photographer, with 10 studios and maybe 50 photographers working under him.” In his late teens, Aresu was already shooting weddings for his dad. “It grew from there.” He achieved a BFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts and went on to assist Pete Turner and Tom Arma for several years. “I learned a lot about the business from them.”