Photographer Profiles

Street photographer Omar Z Robles has spent the past two years photographing ballet dancers among what he refers to as the urban landscapes of New York. Thanks to a grant from the Bessie Foundation, he recently traveled to Cuba—a country with a long tradition of dance—and the images he captured are amazing.

Margot Cheel is an award-winning aerial photographer whose work has been exhibited in New England, South Florida and Ontario Canada. Cheel’s photos have also appeared in numerous publications, calendars and environmental presentations. She recently published a hard cover photography book of her coastal images of Cape Cod entitled “Sea & Sand from the Sky: Aerial Photography”.

Cheel received her Bachelor of Arts from Middlebury College, Vermont, and worked in production at WGBH-TV in Boston. She is also the co-founder the Twin Willows Arts and Craft Center in Ontario, Canada. After more than three decades as a creative arts teacher, she launched an aerial photography business that merged her love of the arts with her passion for flying. 

Capturing the fleeting moments of a wave's journey to dissipation, award-winning photographer Ray Collins feels much more at home in saltwater with his camera than on land. Photographing the relationship between water and light is what inspires him.

French photographer Aurelien Buttin has traveled the world, from Europe and Asia to the ruins of Chichen Itza in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. He recently made a road trip across California with some friends, and did some really nice photography along the way.

In a business that thrives on intensely refined specialties, Newport, Rhode Island-based shooter Matthew Cohen has managed to find success in what has to be one of the ultimate photographic niches: nautical adventure photography. Cohen is one of a handful of photographers worldwide who earns much of his living adventuring on the high seas and capturing those exploits with his camera.

“A mobile device can display still images and video, and it can broadcast audio,” Sciorio says. “The creation point for all three of those is my camera: it shoots stills, video and records audio. So why was I using only one-third of the tools I had? Why was I trying to sell only one kind of product?”

I got the idea for this how-to story from something the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Hume Kennerly said to me: “Believe me, the challenge of photography is not going to France for the first time and photographing the Eiffel Tower. The challenge is really seeing and then photographing the stuff that’s familiar and ordinary, stuff we see all the time but never really observe or give much attention.”