Links

Documentary

• Sort of documentary: check out the very cool photo travelogue, Travels with Samantha.
• Carl Cook's studio photos of wildlife are frankly amazing... I'm especially fond of the baby crow.
• Emilie, webmaster for Sterling Payot in San Francisco, has carved out a little part of their website for her gallery of snapshots of San Francisco, with new work every friday. Good stuff and a good example to follow: I know that if I was posting new work every week, it would force me to shoot more, and more regularly.
• André Ranieri, besides having the excellent taste to have dated Miz Becky before she became my wife, is a hell of a photojournalist.
• Gary Walts, Photographs of my Father: A powerful documentary story, complete with audio clips of the photographer talking about the images, documenting the years leading up to his father's suicide.

Fine Art

• An example of a complete site -- great photos, great web design, completely consistant feel throughout -- is Ann Elliot Cutting's site. She does a lot of her work with toy cameras.
• Then there's Holly Francis Dupre's website -- full of beautiful polaroid transfers and an excellent and extensive document on how to make polaroid transfers. I learned a lot from her.
• Krzysztof Marcinkiewicz has some great photos of motorcycle engines, along with soulful portraits. An odd combination that works.
• Another odd combination: Gustavo Abreu's photos of skaters and swimmers...
• Maria Roussos' photos are quietly beautiful.
• Nathaniel Burkins is showing a bunch of photos that are sort of highly graphical street photography... almost iconic.
• Another site that could loosely be described as "street photography" is Bob Hines' -- he uses a technique of shooting multiple color snapshots to capture parts of a scene and collaging (?) them together.
  You've probably seen this technique before, but what I especially like about Bob's work is that he allows the photos to show passage of time by having people appear in multiple places in the final collage. Very cool and semi-surreal.
• Bill Mattick has photos and poetry... interesting work.
• William McCanless has some interesting work up on his site. My favorite so far is "Smile".
• Brad Rines only has a few photos up, but they're great. My personal taste, surprise, is for the black and white abstracts but several of the color pictures moved me as well, which is unusual.
• Steve Mereu: Some interesting stuff here. What seems to be photos of the crowd at concerts in "ritual reality" -- some good, surreal stuff but could be edited better; also some evocative high-contrast stuff in "memory icons".
• Steve Carty: Fashion, portraiture, and a fascinating dissertation on Rastafarianism. What more could you want?
• Mike Morizio: Two galleries, the first some interesting street work called "new jersey boardwalks 1975-1985", the other a few fairly random 3D computer generated artworks. Stick to the first gallery.
• Sally Russ: This site is divided into three sections: Erotica, Flora, and Fauna. Erotica contains some interesting nudes -- nice lighting and composition, mostly detail images. Fauna isn't very interesting -- she's not applying what she obviously knows about composition to most of these images, although I'm inordinately fond of this one: http://www.sallyruss.com/fauna12.htm. My favorite part of the site is Flora -- some really great, simple still lifes there.
• Julian C.R. Okwu: Wow. Two sets of photos on this site, the first being beautiful portraits of seemingly random people -- elegant, poised, classic images. The second section is some portraits excerpted from his book "Face Forward: Young African American Men in a Critical Age". Each portrait is accompanied by a quote from the person pictured. And the site is beautifully designed, too. What more could you want?

Groups, Galleries, and Magazines

• Photo Group Krama is a Greek photo club with a pretty good website and excellent work on it.
• The Eye of the Low Countries is a Dutch website with a wide variety of kinds of work represented; with text in both Dutch and English.
• Chim: The Photographs of David Seymour -- Tons of content on this site, a life story of "Chim", AKA David Seymour. Check out especially the photo of Chim and Robert Capa by Cartier-Bresson, and Chim's photo of Ingrid Bergman. My only complaint is that the design is pretty noisy and crammed -- it doesn't fit well on my 21" monitor at work...

Miscellaneous

• Jorge Soriano has the usual wide variety of work up on his web page, in both English and Spanish... I only wish there was more of some of the sections, especially Chronicles of the Disused.

Book Recommendations

Really great books and movies about photography.

Note: Previously, I had these books linked to amazon.com as part of their affiliate program. However, in protest of their patenting of the idea of the affiliate program -- thus acting more like Microsoft than Microsoft ever has -- I have removed those links, and encourage you to buy these books at your local bookseller.

First off of course has to be Ansel Adam's trio of books The Camera, The Negative, and The Print. They're a little dense, but if you want to really understand how to produce quality negatives and prints, these books are definitely an important resource. The master of exposure and printing technique tells basically everything he knows, and his self deprecating humor about his mistakes help make the man more human.

Another book by Adams, this one talking more about process and less about technique, is Examples: The making of 40 photographs. Ansel writes candidly about what was going through his head when he was taking many of his most famous photographs. His description of setting up his camera while the sun was dropping lower and lower and doing the exposure calculations in his head before snapping the one frame of "Moonrise, Hernandez" is both funny and inspiring.

For an equally great but more approachable book about printing, check out Tim Rudman's The Photographer's Master Printing Course. He goes into great depth about burning and dodging, toning, variable-contrast printing, Lith printing, and all kinds of other great information. My printing technique benefited immediately from reading and applying the techniques Rudman describes in this book.

For those of you who are lucky enough to be building a darkroom in your home, I recommend Lista Duren & Will McDonald's Build Your Own Home Darkroom. Everything you could possibly need is described and diagrammed clearly and simply, in easy steps. There's even a section at the beginning describing what kinds of tools you need, how they work, what the different kinds and grades of lumber are, and so on. A very cool book. I'm not particularly handy but I was able to build a great enlarger table by following their directions, and this winter I'll be building a sink based on their plans.

If you're interested in artificial lighting in the studio or on location, I recommend a fantastic movie called Visions of Light. It's a history of cinemotography, but the lighting and framing they show is definitely applicable to still photography.

Kathleen Carr's book Polaroid Transfers is a great introduction to the techniqes involved in this sometimes frustrating photographic technique. Her clear explanations demystify and simplify the process of figuring out how to make polaroid transfers.