Upon the question “is photography art?” I have to say that no, it isn’t. It is a discipline that can be mastered by passionate people in order to produce art, but it is not art by itself. Paraphrasing Mr. Harold Feinstein’s fine words on the very same topic, we can have a beautifully crafted paintbrush and make some hideous stuff with it. Also someone painting a house can do an excellent job with a rough brush due to the applied technique.
Another example that I like to give to my students is that anyone can use a pen, but a very few will write compelling novels or poems with them. And my favorite example, anyone can learn to use a camera just as anyone can learn how to drive, the meaningful thing is what we do with our camera. …
Film photography came to my life after knowing several of the nuts and bolts of digital photography, at least at a serious level. When I was a kid I remember going with my parents to the lab and waiting for a couple of days in order to actually see the photos. I also remember their warnings (mostly yellings) about being careful of not leaving any fingerprint in the photos, so I always handled them with extreme care.
Even when living in the digital imagery age, film photography can still give us a lot of valuable experiences. …
Beyond making authors’ work recognizable, style is one of the most valuable assets any photographer can build. From a very personal standpoint, I think of style as a whole world which can be seen from a diverse range of perspectives. As a photography educator, it is beautiful to see how style starts to develop on my students. From the curatorial side of the game, it is extremely satisfying to see a photograph and say “that shot looks somewhat familiar, it reminds me of…” and yup, the name that I’m thinking of is sometimes the correct one. …
Photography is extremely seductive for a lot of people around the world, it can be practiced at a professional level or as a very strong hobby. One of the biggest interests of all people who approach photography is to learn how to use a camera in manual mode. This feature empowers anyone to create extremely creative images beyond the “perfect” modes the camera figures out when shooting in Auto or Program. In photography, everything is about capturing light and today we are going to talk about one of the most complex features there is in exposure, Aperture.
Why Aperture is So Difficult to Understand? …
I’ve been cooking this idea since a long time ago; well, not that long honestly. It all started in 2017 when I studied a brief yet dense course on Curation imparted by An Paenhuysen. Here I learned among several curation related stuff about the existence of a term, the White Cube.
There has been some serious of deep thinking around the philosophy of the White Cube as a social scenario or a cultural product. But today I won’t dig deep into that, and I just want to talk about one thing. …
If we see photography as the most objective act of our human desire for making “ourselves known” and treasure memories to behold, then the Polaroid camera deserves a special place in its history. This day we want to talk a little about the history of Polaroid in photography.
On its Founder
Photography will always owe its existence to restless inventors and chemists who strongly persevere to reach their goals. The person behind the great invention that brought photography to a genuine state of immediacy was Edwin H. Land. Land decided to leave Harvard University at the age of 17 to focus on scientific research linked to the application of polarizing light filters. …
I’ve generously talked about composition in the past, and there is a reason why. This is because I truly believe that composition is where the soul of any photograph resides. Learning how to expose with a camera is just as meritorious as learning how to drive or even to write. Anyone can take photographs, but not all photographs are meaningful.
Composition is a huge asset in photography, and there has been a lot said about rules and even recipes about composition. But there is something that goes beyond rules and universal laws, and we are talking about composition skills.
After a huge debate, we have concluded that there are three fundamental and key skills when it comes to “the act of composing”. These skills should concern every photographer, no matter the years of experience. They can (and should) be developed in order to get closer to that desired goal of being a photographer that is able to create meaningful and compelling photographs. And of course, I’m talking about those images have the power of sticking in people’s mind for long periods of time, and in some cases, forever. …
As an academic I always enjoy learning from reliable sources and what I consider to be authorities in a field. I’ve given my life to photography, my greatest passion and love, so basically I always connect stuff with photography. Learning about photography is one of the most pleasant things for me, and after 10 years of walking with my camera, there is a lot still left for me to know.
Among many other institutions, collectives and photographers, Magnum Photos has been a huge source of inspiration and knowledge for me. Approaching the end of 2018, they decided to launch a new platform that could be a sustainability experiment or not. …
As long as photographers keep in mind that cameras are just the tools they use to capture light the way they want it to be, we can give a lot of credit to those tools at some point. Photography has been evolving since its appearance with to inclusion of faster and more portable artifacts.
Long story short, after photography was born thanks to some hard work of people like Daguerre, Niépce and Fox Talbot, it became a viable thing for the masses. First there were large cameras that relied on wet plates, then large view cameras (also known as large format cameras), then things shrunk a bit and the medium format appeared and after that the “teeny-tiny” 35mm. …
Within the commercial world of photography, there are a bunch of different niches in which any photographer could develop their career; and Stock Photography is perhaps the easiest market to get access to, but is also a very crowded place to be. Being aware of trends, and being able to deliver unique and fresh work will always be your best card to play if you want to become a successful Stock Photographer. Basically, Stock Photography is the supply of photographs under a specific usage license for a vast array of purposes from magazines and billboards to social media posts.
Stock photography has been around since the 1920’s, and it has been slowly evolving since its early beginnings when H. Armstrong Roberts made a bunch of people signed model releases allowing him to make profit from that image’s future reproductions. Almost a hundred years after that, stock photography is making a whole different approach in terms of how photographers gain benefits with their images even when they are offered for free. …
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