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Photographer Spotlight

Where photographers who shoot in black and white come to learn, share and grow

  • A Photo Story: A Feud, a Friendship, and a Clock

    A Photo Story: A Feud, a Friendship, and a Clock

    Ty Nelson picked up a camera because he loved wrestling, and started shooting the action the way most beginners do. What he found instead, over years of showing up to a banquet hall in Joliet, was something closer to a long running story he was quietly documenting one show at a time. This is the…

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  • Photographer Spotlight: Damian Ward

    Photographer Spotlight: Damian Ward

    Damian Ward is drawn to woodland and solitary trees, especially in winter when the branches are bare, in a landscape he describes as beautiful but not dramatic. He shoots almost entirely with vintage manual focus lenses, sets his camera to black and white before he ever presses the shutter, and rarely touches a RAW file.…

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  • What the Gap Between Your Favorites and Theirs Actually Means

    What the Gap Between Your Favorites and Theirs Actually Means

    You know the feeling. The photograph you spent real effort and real feeling on gets a quiet response, while something you almost did not post becomes the one everyone reacts to. Here is what that gap is actually telling you, and when it is worth listening to.

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  • The Invisible Bar Ruining Your Next Photograph

    The Invisible Bar Ruining Your Next Photograph

    You know the feeling before you have even left the house. A quiet sense that today needs to produce something good. Wanting to make good work is not the problem. The invisible bar you are unconsciously measuring yourself against is.

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  • Weekly News Roundup

    Weekly News Roundup

    A total solar eclipse crosses the Arctic, Iceland, and Spain on August 12, and a new app promises to let photographers actually watch it instead of hiding behind a viewfinder. Colorado wildlife photographers are pushing back hard on a proposed annual fee. A decade long documentary project reframes how we see women serving life sentences.…

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  • Intuition Is Deliberate Practice in Disguise

    Intuition Is Deliberate Practice in Disguise

    We spend a lot of time here talking about being deliberate, studying light, naming what you see, slowing down before you shoot. This is the other side of that coin. Does intuition have a place in photography, and if it does, where does it actually come from?

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  • What the Architect Already Knew Before You Got There

    What the Architect Already Knew Before You Got There

    An architect spends years thinking about how light will move through a building before a single stone gets laid. A photographer usually gets an afternoon to figure that same thing out from scratch. Here is what architects already know that can close that gap.

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  • Bring The Viewer With You

    Bring The Viewer With You

    Most photographs put the viewer on the outside, looking in, the way you might look through a window at something happening on the other side of the glass. Some photographs do something different. They collapse that distance completely. Here is how to make your images do that.

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  • Photographer Spotlight: Edward Boches

    Photographer Spotlight: Edward Boches

    Edward Boches was pulled into photography by John Filo’s 1970 image of a woman kneeling over Jeffrey Miller at Kent State, the entire story of a moment held in a single frame. He has spent his career chasing that same rawness, documenting amateur boxers, oyster farmers, Boston’s homeless community, and neighborhoods in transition, always in…

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  • Behind The shot With Rakesh Subramanian

    Behind The shot With Rakesh Subramanian

    The Milky Way never showed. Two nights of clouds over the Vermillion Cliffs erased the whole reason for the trip. A dinner table tip about a quieter canyon and one last morning before flying home turned the loss into the shot that actually mattered.

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