Pro Techniques

There's something about a good black and white image that makes it jump off the page. It should be simple, direct, and hit you right between the eyes. It stands on its own. It doesn't even need color to make it stand out. It has a full range of tones from a true, deep black all the way to a clear white...with detail throughout.

What kind of...

As photo businesses go, David Alan Wolters (www.DavidAlanWolters.com) started out as many of our readers--a 12-year-old kid with a camera trying to find a place for himself in the world. Again, like many of us, Wolters went on to work on the high school yearbook as a photographer. Raised in the small town of Spring...

How do you translate an idea into an image? Or convert words into a photograph? How can a picture create a sense of fear and is this fear something we are born with? Perfect pitch... How might you define this phenomenon with your camera? Or hypergraphia, the compulsive need to write?

These were among the puzzles that confronted Cary Wolinsky for his story on...

"With the alternative processes, you can see someone's hand at work. It's a very personal way of creating a photograph."

Most of us are finding more of everything thanks to digital imaging technology, but for some photographers, the essentials are getting scarce. Jill Enfield, for example, for whom it's not a question of cameras--she uses...

The difference is not always skill. Success as a pro shooter takes talent, but, as Rosanne Pennella says, "there are many excellent photographers who cannot make a name for themselves because they cannot figure out how to market themselves and project mastery of their careers."

Eleven years ago Rosanne was an attorney whose first love was not the law.

My favorite scene in the film Lawrence of Arabia is when Peter O'Toole, as Lawrence, looks out onto the desert landscape and watches a rider riding slowly toward him. It turns out to be Omar Sharif but the encounter is made more dramatic by the widescreen format.

There are a lot of ways to make panoramic images, including cropping standard...

"If you define your creativity by what the market wants, you're dead before you start."

When James Balog traveled to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in January, he knew there was little chance of his photographs being picked up by newspapers or magazines. The tsunami, which struck the region on December 26, had been well covered by the media. But as a photographer...