Photographer Profiles

In the late 1980s I took on the challenge of shooting the equestrian culture of the American West. I was passionately interested in photographing the men and women who still follow the traditions of Western horsemanship. They all share an almost mystical love of their equine counterparts and the art of riding. Over a 14-year period I seasonally photographed the Western riders and titled the work the Equestrian West.

Mark Alberhasky, for one. Put him in a great situation where he can take very cool photographs and he’ll nail them nine times out of 10. Chances are, though, that won’t be enough. Just because the photos he’s making look good doesn’t mean he won’t be thinking about what he can do to create even better ones. You can attribute that drive to several factors, one of which is his early realization that if he took a straightforward photo of what everyone else was seeing, no matter how good a photo it was, it would be just that: what everyone else was seeing. The goal was to come up with his own ideas and add them to the creative process, and many of Mark’s photos are the result of taking that e

Photographer Dorothea Lange is best noted for the image titled “Migrant Mother”—a haunting portrait that came to symbolize the intense suffering caused by America’s Great Depression. Lange’s body of work contains a stunning collection of images that document some of the most difficult times in our history such as the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and the Japanese American internments camps of World War II.

When Yiming Hu was a freshman in college he rented a camera and fell in love with photography. After he moved from China to the United States he was drawn to landscape and travel photography and learned advanced photo techniques from books, magazines, the Internet, and lots of experience. Today he works as a computer engineering professor at the University of Cincinnati doing research, and as a second career he shoots landscapes and travel subjects in many locations to satisfy his photo appetite. I spoke with him recently about his work.

Years ago I took a photograph of prayer flags at a Buddhist monastery in Bhutan, and as I was shooting the image I wished I could also shoot video to record the movement of the flags and the sound they made as they danced in the wind.

I could hear the predawn call to prayer broadcast from minarets across the city as I climbed the stairs to my hotel’s rooftop. From there I enjoyed a magnificent view of the ancient city of Istanbul. Immediately below me, roughly facing north, was Sultanahmet Square, the city’s historic center, flanked by the Blue Mosque to the left and the Hagia Sophia to the right. Behind and to my right I could see the Sea of Marmara and Asia, while in the distance to the northeast I could see the Strait of Bosphorus. As I stood alone on the rooftop in this city of 14 million people, admiring the view all around, it occurred to me I should get out my camera and take some pictures.

Last year, I decided to take on a challenge focusing on the unique natural beauty associated with wildfires in a Florida scrub ecosystem, one of the most rare ecosystems in the state. Florida is no stranger to wildfires. Nationwide, Florida has the second highest number of wildfires annually. In 2011, it was estimated that 300,000 acres of land was burned due to over 4800 wildfires. My project was centered at Indrio Savannahs Preserve, where a 120-acre wildfire was ignited by lightning in March of 2013.