What I’m doing right now is editing the May shooting, from both China and Myanmar. After the Yunnan Spring workshop in Shuhe, near Lijiang, I drove down to Dali for some days (more writing than shooting), then on to Kunming to catch the flight to Yangon. The reason was to join the team for the [...]
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I’m writing this in Shanghai, at the start of another trip to China, which will be followed by a week in Myanmar, shooting on a new group book with 20 other photographers. One of the reasons I’m here in this city is for some work on the Chinese version of LIFE magazine. Yes, absolutely...
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A couple of months ago I wrote about shooting in square format, once upon a time compulsory thanks to Rolleiflex and Hasselblad, but now that digitally there are no square sensors, the only way to achieve it is by cropping. Given that back then there were more times when people cropped in order to...
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I was just writing a script for a new video series I’m doing on photography, about format. Or to be strictly accurate, aspect ratio. There was a time when most of us shot just 35mm film, and there was no choice of aspect ratio. It was 3:2, or 2:3 if you turned the...
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The Prix Pictet at the Saatchi Gallery
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The annual Prix Pictet was announced on October the 9th, and the exhibition of the dozen shortlisted entries is now on show at London’s Saatchi Gallery. The theme this year is Power, following on from the earlier Water, Earth and Growth, and it has rapidly become a major...
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I was interviewing photographer Stuart Freedman recently (see Featured Photographers) and when we came to the bit about how he got started, he stressed that much of his learning came “through looking at other photographers’ work and trying to find my own style. I used to go to bed every night with a couple...
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I finally got round to watching a film that had been on my list – The Cave of Forgotten Dreams by German director Werner Herzog. I missed it on release, as I was away, so just now took out the DVD. Apart from the reviews, and apart from liking Herzog’s other films, especially the...
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Case History of a Classic Profile Photo Essay
Magazine picture stories using photographs evolved during the 1930s, first in Europe, and then in the United States. Once editors understood that sequenced photographs on a double-page spread could tell a story in a different way from words alone, it became a particular way of communicating in...
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There’s a new exhibition at the Shanghai Museum near the corner of People’s Square, close to where I’m staying this month, and it features a wonderful collection of Chinese scroll paintings. These are executed in brush and ink, some coloured, some monochrome. Prominent among them are what are called Shan shui (literally ‘Mountain-Water’) paintings,...
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One of the underlying themes in all the OCA photography courses is developing a photographic eye and a photographic way of thinking. The emphasis is firmly on this, and as a result, the technical aspects of photography and digital processing are treated as support for making imagery, not as ends in themselves. Maybe this...
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Over on the Techniques page I look at new developments in HDR processing, and note that the new and improved ways of doing this offer a greater choice of different result than ever before. The extreme ‘HDR look’ is still there if you want it, but it’s also possible to avoid it while being...
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