Pro Techniques

Lise Gagné is a stock photographer from Quebec City, Canada. An exclusive contributor with istockphoto.com since her first photo submission in 2003, she is a superstar on the popular microstock website.

Lise’s story is one of passion, persistence, ingenuity, and timing. As a graphic designer she often used photography in her work. One day, when searching for an image she needed for a project, she came across istockphoto.com and was immediately attracted to the idea of creating images for the then emerging market of RF (Royalty Free) images.

Who: Robert Beck, staff photographer for Sports Illustrated.
What: Infrared (IR) photography.
When: “The editors give me some leeway,” Robert says, “but I’m not going to be using it for a decisive putt.”
Where: Golf courses all over the world.
Why: Although the job calls for capture of the peak moment, the turning point, the key play, the tense concentration, the moment when the athlete’s body language gives it all away, there’s always the professional and personal challenge to do something different.
How: With a Nikon D700 modified for infrared photography.

Mobile, Alabama-based photographer Laura Cantrell says, “Mothers trust me to capture and preserve the magic in childhood.” Her photography business in Mobile was inherited from her father who sent his 17-year-old daughter on her first assignment to photograph a train wreck with a 4x5 Speed Graphic. By assisting her dad at weddings and shooting portraits she learned lighting, posing, and how to please clients.

Ron Magill is a trained zoologist and the communications director of the Miami-Dade Zoological Park and Gardens—Zoo Miami for short—and if you think that gives him an advantage when it comes to taking outstanding wildlife images, you’re right. But don’t turn the page. What’s needed to get a share of the wildlife “Wow!” factor is technique, access, and information that’s available to all. You will also need dedication and persistence. Above all, be sure to pack your patience along with your camera and lenses.

Often people will ask me, “How do you get that great color in your photos?” I appreciate the compliment, but it’s usually followed by, “You must do a lot of retouching.” Actually I don’t. I will do a little color enhancement, but how color looks in my images has to do partly with how I set certain camera controls, how I control or use lighting in the scene, and how I compose the photograph.

“My dad won a Nikon FM at a company-sponsored event when I was 12, and, the moment he handed the camera over to me, it was love at first sight,” Nels Akerlund recalls. Six months later, he’d built a darkroom in his basement and that love affair with photography has not abated. It carried him through the Rochester Institute of Technology, an internship with a White House photographer in the Reagan administration, and assignments for the National Geographic Society, The New York Times, and photo shoots worldwide. He shares this passion with his wife Anna, who is also his business partner and fellow shooter. Aside from weddings, Akerlund shoots architecture, food, small products, and of course portraits in his studio and on location. He and his wife operate a spacious, two-story, 2000-square-foot studio behind their home in Rockford, Illinois.

In early February I went to Cuba for 10 days of photography. Long before I left I knew what I wanted to accomplish. I’d been to Cuba 10 years before, so I knew the basics of what I’d see and what I could expect. This time I narrowed down what I wanted to photograph. I wanted to shoot mostly in the old section of Havana and in the city of Trinidad. People would be my main subjects—people on the streets, in their homes, going about their lives. In Old Havana I wanted to work in the late afternoon and early evening; in Trinidad I wanted to capture people against colorful backgrounds. On this trip there wouldn’t be open country where I’d be shooting landscapes or people working in the fields; there’d be no wide-open spaces, no photos of tobacco fields or expanses of sugar cane.