Pro Photo Daily

01/21/2020

How to Photograph This Year's Most Astonishing Natural Wonders

For landscape and nature photographers, there’s a long list of natural occurrences happening in 2020 worth traveling for, notes Outside, which features a primer on shooting everything from wildflowers in Crested Butte, Colorado (there’s a wildflower festival from July 10 to 19, featuring wildflower-specific photography classes), to Yosemite National Park’s famous Firefall, which occurs in late February, when snow conditions and clear skies make Horsetail Falls glow red, giving the illusion that it’s on fire.

Use these tips to make sure you get the shot this year

01/16/2020

America was a different country five years ago. In 2015, PPD profiled photojournalist Mark Peterson as he was covering a nascent presidential campaign that featured GOP primary candidates Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul. At that point Donald Trump was not even on the radar. A year later, he was elected president. Meanwhile, that same year, 2016, Peterson photographed a rally in New York City led by far-right political pundit Gavin McInnes protesting Sharia law. "I wondered, why is there a rally in New York about Sharia law? What's happening here?" says Peterson. His resulting project on white nationalism shows, as New York magazine recently put it, "the threat of domestic terrorism can't be ignored."
https://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/26117/what-were-reading-mark-peterson-looks-at-white-n.html

01/16/2020

Connect 2020: The Palm Springs Photo Festival | WORKSHOP PROGRAM

You can now register for the workshop program at the 2020 Palm Springs Photo Festival (May 3 to 8). In most cases, the maximum number of students in a workshop is 16. Among the workshops this year: “Erwin Olaf: The Power of Imagination”; “Cheryl Walsh: Photographing People Underwater”; “Keith Carter: The Poetry of Perception—Finding Your Voice”; “Sandro Miller: Lighting Like a Master”; “Thomas Holm: The Fine Art Nude in the Landscape”; and “Todd Hido: Nocturnal Narratives: The Night Suburban & Desert Landscape.”

Note: Included in your workshop fee are daily registration for full workshop days, any model fees, transportation costs and a delicious boxed-lunch for each full day of your workshop. Lunches are not included for workshops taking place at the Hyatt Palm Springs.

01/16/2020

Welcome to the "Roaring 20s." The 2020s, that is. Stock giant Shutterstock has released its ninth annual Creative Trends Report, which identifies "global and local trends that will influence design aesthetics and visual culture" in the year ahead. Based on data collected from billions of searches for images, footage, and music content by Shutterstock customers around the world, this year's report singles out three major creative trends peaking now: a yearning for "Roaring 20s" lavishness; a fascination with occulture and magic; and a taste for bright blooms. Also on the rise: "Cannabiz," "Minimalist Black," and "Wildlife."
https://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/26151/insight-shutterstock-creative-trends-report-point.html

01/14/2020

The Real Stories Behind Those Viral Australian Bush Fire Photos

Last week we spotlighted photographs documenting Australia’s bushfire crisis. Now Elle magazine speaks with five female photojournalists who have been “battling flames and ash and fire tornados on the ground” to capture images of the fires: Michaela Skovranova (National Geographic); Kate Geraghty (Sydney Morning Herald); Jessica Hromas (The Guardian); Cassie Trotter (Getty Images); and freelancer Tracey Nearmy, who says, “The scale and magnitude of the crisis is overwhelming and covering it requires strategy and planning.”

Five female photographers on documenting the crisis from the frontlines.

01/13/2020

In the future, will we see stars? Last year, photographer and filmmaker Asif Islam of Asif Photography set out to capture an 8K timelapse that would show the impact of light pollution. So he traveled from one end of the spectrum, so to speak, to the other, traveling from the bright lights of Los Angeles to the Great Basin Desert of the western U.S., one of the least light-polluted places on Earth. The result is the timelapse "Where are the Stars?" We feature it today, along "Ancestral Nights," a new timelapse from the filmmakers behind the Skyglow Project, which aims to fight light pollution.
https://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/26052/spotlight-brilliant-timelapses-underscore-the-pro.html

01/10/2020

Nikon Unveils the D780: A 'New Kind of DSLR' with 'Mirrorless Tech'

Nikon calls its newly unveiled D780 “a new kind of DSLR.” The camera, notes PetaPixel, has the task of replacing the company’s most popular full-frame DSLR ever, the D750, and it aims to do so by combining the soul of the Z6 mirrorless camera with the body of the D750. The D780 features a 24.5-megapixel backside-illuminated (BSI) full-frame FX-format CMOS sensor powered by an EXPEED 6 image processor (up from EXPEED 4 in the D750). The processing engine is the same as that found in the Z6 and Z7 full-frame mirrorless cameras, providing faster speed, lower energy usage, and improved low-light performance.

Nikon today unveiled the D780, calling it "a new kind of DSLR." It's a camera that has the tall task of replacing the company's most popular full-frame

01/08/2020

The details are all there in his notebooks: Sixty-three years ago, on the evening of Jan. 10, 1957, Harold Edgerton set a 4,000-volt electronic flash of his own design to the right of a small, shallow pool of milk in his "Strobe Lab" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Edgerton, often called the father of high-speed photography, then released a drop of milk from a funnel 8 inches above the pool, which reflected a bright red background. An image of the drop that Edgerton made would later be called one of the 100 most influential pictures ever taken. Now, three decades after Edgerton's death, his pioneering work has been collected in the book "Harold Edgerton: Seeing the Unseen."
https://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/26072/books-how-harold-edgerton-saw-the-unseen.html

01/08/2020

Canon Unveils the 1D X Mark III, Its New Ultimate DSLR

Canon has announced the 1D X Mark III, the company’s new flagship DSLR and successor to the 1D X Mark II , which was announced in early 2016. The camera features a 20.1-megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor with a newly designed High Detail Low-Pass Filter and Canon’s DIGIC X image processor, notes PetaPixel. The ISO range is now 100 to 102400 (up from 100-51200 in the Mark II) and is expandable to 50-819200. The autofocus system is a new 191-point optical viewfinder AF system (with 155 cross-type points) that uses Deep Learning Technology to track a subject’s head and face. DP Review says the big, double-grip DSLR functions as a highly capable mirrorless camera in Live View mode.

Canon today announced the new 1D X Mark III, the company's new flagship DSLR and successor to the 1D X Mark II that was announced back in early 2016.

01/08/2020

Unmissable Night Sky Events in 2020

An important part of photographing astonishing sights in the night sky is planning ahead of time, notes Fstoppers, which features a helpful video from astrophotographer Alyn Wallace listing the unmissable night-sky events for the year ahead, from meteor showers to super moons and eclipses. He also tells you the hemisphere in which these events will be visible.

A large part of photographing specific events is planning. Obviously, being in the right place at the right time is the key to successfully photographing an event that occurs only at particular places and times, but you can only plan when you know something is going to happen. Alyn Wallace has put t...

01/08/2020

John Baldessari, Who Gave Conceptual Art a Dose of Wit, Is Dead at 88

John Baldessari, the influential conceptual artist who helped transform Los Angeles into a global art capital through his witty image-making and decades of teaching there, died on Jan. 2 at his home in Venice, CA, notes The New York Times. He was 88. Baldessari started as a semiabstract painter in the 1950s but grew disenchanted with his own handiwork — in 1970 he cremated his paintings at a San Diego funeral home — and later embraced a wide range of mediums, including videos and photography.

Through his hybrid works and teaching, he helped build the Los Angeles art scene, mentoring a who’s who of contemporary artists.

01/07/2020

Over the past 10 years, action cams have changed the game when it comes to sports videos: The small, wearable cameras have given athletes and filmmakers the ability to capture amazing tricks with unique angles, noted the Vimeo blog in a recent post, which we highlight today, along with other filmmaking tutorials from around the internet. You'll also learn how to shoot an interview with two people at once, how to do a perfect gimbal handoff, how to get pro-quality video with a mobile device, and more.
https://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/26091/how-to-capture-winter-sports-with-an-action-cam.html

01/06/2020

Norm Diamond happened upon Doug's Gym by accident. A retired Dallas physician, Diamond was walking down Commerce Street in the city when he saw a beautifully dilapidated two-story building and a 1950s-era gold-and-black sign for the establishment. Perhaps it was merely aesthetics that drew him inside: Diamond, who has studied photography with Cig Harvey and other artists, decided to document the gym, with its peeling paint and sagging floors. But the images he ended up making, now collected in a book, are more than skin deep: The project, Diamond notes, allowed him to face loss, something he hadn't been able to do as a doctor.
https://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/26043/books-documenting-an-old-school-gym-and-facing-m.html

01/06/2020

In photos: Bushfires rage through Australia

Deadly bush fires are burning across Australia, exacerbated by strong winds and a record-breaking heat wave as the country experiences one of its worst droughts in decades, notes CNN, which features a portfolio of news service photographs that capture the disaster. Among the most memorable images: A photo of A kangaroo rushing past a burning house in Lake Conjola, Australia, on December 31, taken by Matthew Abbott (The New York Times/Redux). The fires threaten Australia’s way of life, adds CNN.

Deadly bushfires are burning across Australia, exacerbated by strong winds and a record-breaking heat wave as the country experiences one of its worst droughts in decades.

01/03/2020

A new month, year and decade loom. But before jumping into the fray of 2020, you can catch up on some reading from the past month. Find out why 2019 was a great year for film photographers, and explore the seven cameras that revolutionized photography; learn how to use social media to its fullest in 2020, and how to collect photo books; read about how the superrich took over the museum world, and how a "great wealth transfer" will affect art; study the history of film at MoMA, and more.
https://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/26065/what-were-reading-a-month-of-insight-opinion-an.html

01/02/2020

It's the end of an era. And it's time to look back at what we saw over the past ten years. "I was struck by the amount of devastation and pain the world has endured: the Haiti earthquake, the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, Benghazi, Ebola, the constant school shootings in the United States, the Las Vegas massacre," notes Bernadette Tuazon, CNN Digital's Director of Photography, in a roundup of memorable photos of the decade, one of several we feature today. On the other hand, adds Tuazon, there were moments of courage and inspiration.
https://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/26058/what-were-reading-looking-back-at-the-photos-of.html

01/02/2020

Agency Photographer of Year 2019: Felipe Dana

The picture editors of The Guardian have selected Associated Press photojournalist Felipe Dana as the newspaper's agency photographer of the year. “Dana’s work in 2019 has taken him all over the world, covering big news stories like the elections in Spain, conflict in Syria, the crisis in Hong Kong, and to Rwanda, Greenland and Algeria to focus on environmental stories,” notes The Guardian. “[I]t was an intense year to be a news photographer but that’s also when our job becomes most important,” says Dana.

The picture desk has chosen Associated Press photojournalist Felipe Dana as its agency photographer of the year. We take a closer look at his work

12/31/2019

About 5.6 million. That, notes The New York Times, is how many images the newspaper's editors look through to find the images that perfectly distill a year's worth of news into a single collection. Today we feature The Times's roundup of powerful images from 2019, along with collections from The Atlantic, which rounds up the top news service photos from the year, as well as year-in-reviews from National Geographic, Time, The New Yorker, and more.
https://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/26037/what-were-reading-pictures-of-the-year-selection.html

12/31/2019

Nat Geo Photog's Rare Animal Photos Lost in Airport Luggage Theft

Photographer Joel Sartore, founder of the National Geographic project The Photo Ark, has suffered a devastating loss and is asking the public for help, notes PetaPixel: His luggage was stolen at the airport in Bali, and among the items lost were three hard drives containing three weeks of photos and videos Sartore shot in Indonesia of some of the world’s rarest animals. At Instagram, Sartore ask for any information pertaining to the hard drives. Sartore’s aims to photograph all species living in zoos and wildlife sanctuaries around the globe for The Photo Ark.

Photographer Joel Sartore, founder of the National Geographic project The Photo Ark, has suffered a devastating loss and is asking the public for help. He

12/31/2019

2019 : The year of the face - Kaptur

“It’s been ten years since Instagram launched and not long after, the selfie. It has taken the same amount of time for visual recognition to understand how to read our faces. If anything, 2019 has been the year where faces have taken center stage of visual tech, for good and bad.” So writes photo and technology entrepreneur Paul Melcher in an informed looked back at a year in which facial recognition and AI-created faces made news.

If anything, our faces have been the center of attention of the visual tech in 2019. Here's why this might not be a good thing :

12/30/2019

Peter Lindbergh. Jill Freedman. Robert Frank. Those were some of the notables in photography who died in 2019. Today we remember them, along with others whose passings we reported at Pro Photo Daily over the past year, including Marc Hauser, Karl Lagerfeld, Terry O'Neill, D.A. Pennebaker, John Shearer, Doreen Spooner, Orlando Suero, Jim Dunne, Walter Chandoha, Michael Putland, Michael Wolf, Ida Wyman, Steve Hiett, Peter B. Kaplan, Guy Webster and Virginia Zabriskie.
https://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/26031/the-year-that-was-notable-deaths-in-2019.html

12/30/2019

Lucy Kumara Moore: How the 2010s Changed Photography Forever

“In the decade that followed Instagram’s launch, it has transformed the way we see ourselves and the way we communicate,” notes AnOther contributor Lucy Kumara Moore. The app “has influenced photographic practice more widely," Moore adds, singling out the work of LGBQ artists including Ren Hang, women artists such as Collier Schorr, Laia Abril, Harley Weir and Carmen Winant, and others. “Instagram arguably forged the ‘attention economy’ that now dominates our culture,” writes Moore.

Director of Claire de Rouen and AnOthermag.com columnist Lucy Kumara Moore reflects on the past decade in the world of photography

12/27/2019

"When you look at them in the eyes, it's like your brother." That was how Belgian photojournalist Alain Schroeder described the experience of being near orangutans in Sumatra, Indonesia in late 2018 and early 2019, as he documented efforts to aid the critically endangered animals. The result was a profoundly moving series about a species that shares 96 percent of its DNA with humans. One of Schroeder's images -- showing a three-month-old orangutan being operated on by an esteemed Swiss orthopedic surgeon -- took top prize in the American Photography Open 2019 contest. We revisit Schroeder's winning work today as we we continue looking back at Pro Photo Daily highlights from 2019.
https://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/26019/the-year-that-was-a-selection-of-ppd-highlights-f.html

12/27/2019

The Ten Most Stunning Photography Books of 2019

This year saw the release of extraordinary photography books, spanning fashion, portraiture, documentary and retrospective, and AnOther has picked ten of favorites. Making the list: Lost and Found by Bruce Gilden, a collection of images of New York City in the 1970s (seeour closeup); Provincetown by Joel Meyerowitz, a look at an inclusive seaside town on Cape Cod; and Busy Living by Coco Capitán, a comprehensive photo book featuring the photographer’s last six years of work.

2019 saw the release of myriad extraordinary photography books, spanning fashion, portraiture, documentary and retrospective – here are ten of our favourites