Pro Techniques

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Jay McCabe  |  May 01, 2006  | 

He figured he'd be one of the last of the holdouts. "When the whole digital revolution started, I thought I'd be the last guy to be shooting digital," David Alan Harvey says. Then along came an offer he didn't want to refuse. "Nikon was working on an ad campaign for their D100, and they asked me if I'd go down to Mexico and shoot with the...

Maria Piscopo  |  Apr 01, 2006  | 

In my workshops I often get asked, "How do you find digital clients?" I think there is a myth surrounding the word "digital." Photography clients are not really "digital" as a category to target in your marketing. Clients are hiring you to create images and, if it is commercial work, buying the use of those images. If it is consumer, wedding...

Jay McCabe  |  Mar 01, 2006  | 

The personal project always finds you. It's never the other way around. We can't remember a pro shooter ever saying anything along the lines of, "I went looking for a labor of love." Maybe it's a subject you've been doing for years and suddenly realize how much you enjoy doing it. Or maybe you decide it's time to bring it to a wider...

Maria Piscopo  |  Feb 01, 2006  | 

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...

Howard Millard  |  Feb 01, 2006  | 

Mysterious, evocative, otherworldly--these are all terms that describe the powerful emotional and visual responses to black and white infrared (IR) photography. For landscapes, this approach yields striking, contrasty images where healthy green foliage, which strongly reflects IR radiation, appears to glow in snowy white tones, while blue skies and water darken dramatically.

Monte Zucker  |  Feb 01, 2006  | 

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...

Maria Piscopo  |  Jan 01, 2006  | 

Judy Host (www.judyhost.com) only started her business 12 years ago but today you can find her working either in the home of a celebrity creating her award-winning portraits or in Africa documenting conditions in Rwanda and Uganda. By the time you read this, she may be in Ghana and Kenya or traveling to Cape Town, South Africa.

Jay McCabe  |  Jan 01, 2006  | 

"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...

Monte Zucker  |  Jan 01, 2006  | 

Paul Aresu
I had worked before with some of the other Explorers. I had even employed and trained one of them. But I had never before experienced the likes of Paul Aresu, a New York-based commercial photographer. His clients are like a who's who of dream customers. Aresu is a freestyler. He shoots just like all the commercial photographers you see in...

David B. Brooks  |  Jan 01, 2006  | 

There's one lens that's part of my 35mm/digital SLR system that I have used longest, continuously now for about 40 years. It is a homemade single-element soft-focus lens inspired by the Rodenstock Imagon lens for large format cameras. There are more images in my library of photographs made with this lens than any other. But why in this modern, high-tech world of...

Howard Millard  |  Nov 01, 2005  | 

Recently, I attended several excellent Photoshop seminars presented by Software-Cinema.com. These were held in a large meeting room of a city hotel with some 200 people in attendance. Photographic images from the presenter's laptop were projected on an enormous screen, with great clarity and color saturation. They must be using a very expensive projector, I assumed. After...

Jay McCabe  |  Nov 01, 2005  | 

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.

Jay McCabe  |  Sep 01, 2005  | 

It starts with the website, which is a key element in wedding photographer John Solano's business. John's goal is to be pre-sold before the client even meets him. "The ideal is that I don't have to show them a picture," John says. "I do that, of course, but the work kind of sells itself, and if they've seen it already, the selling is...

Joe Farace  |  Sep 01, 2005  | 

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...

Stan Trzoniec  |  Jul 01, 2005  | 

Photographers, by nature, love accessories. But sooner or later we all have to face the fact that we can only carry so much equipment. When I go out I go through a mental check list and include the basic equipment that I've outlined in this article. Please keep in mind this is my personal list; vary yours to suit the terrain, subject, and distance covered.

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