Call of the Wild Tony Berling
Photographing wild animals in their natural habitats is one of the most rewarding and interesting forms of nature photography. Indeed, most big game hunts in Africa and other places these days are pursued with cameras rather than guns. Hire an experienced guide, and you can track down polar bears in arctic conditions, visit lions, elephants, and hyenas in the savannas, and see feral Mustangs in the American West. If capturing truly wild animals in the act of being themselves is your goal,...
Cheryl Donovan
I consider myself an enthusiastic amateur photographer who has always loved taking pictures of my family and friends to document their lives. It was easy to become more interested in photography when the digital era arrived, making it more affordable to shoot enough frames to actually get a better understanding of apertures, focal lengths, and shutter speeds. In the fall of 2006, I enrolled in the Cleveland Photographic Society's fundamental photography class. I had...
High Dynamic Goat Carol Sahley
I have personally met the Pygmy goat, Mimi, pictured here, and can attest that this barnyard denizen does, indeed, have a distinct personality, one that's worth capturing, although I'm obligated to warn you that opening a bag of potato chips around her is done at your own peril. This shot of Mimi standing guard over her domain shows that, despite her small stature, this goat is firmly in charge. The image is also a demonstration of what you can do with HDR (high dynamic range) processing. This...
The Covenant John Earl Brown
Photographs don't always need to be explicit. Sometimes, their message can be cloaked in metaphor that needs to be decoded before you can understand exactly what the photograph is about. All of John Earl Brown's photographs make you think, and this one, The Covenant will have you thinking more than most, especially once you understand a little of the history behind the metaphor. The image is actually about transitions, particularly those that this room, located in a building listed in The...
Chalk Festival Rob Erick
The Cleveland Museum of Art has famed works by Caravaggio, Picasso, El Greco, Matisse, and Renoir, but for one weekend each September, none of these masters is as popular as the contemporary artists who participate in the Museum's annual Chalk Festival. It's a celebration of a tradition begun in 16th Century Italy by beggars who copied paintings of the Madonna in chalk on the plazas outside cathedrals. According to photographer Rob Erick, Cleveland's version has professional artists mixing with...
Beggar Woman Nathalie Lovera Snyder
Poverty isn't an abstract concept it's a reality throughout the world, and it becomes more real when we see the faces of those who live in its grasp. Good photojournalism, street photography, and documentary photography can provide us with a glimpse of places and conditions that may otherwise be unknown to us, and Nathalie Lovera Snyder has combined all three perspectives in this photograph of a Mexican beggar woman. Most of us have never heard of the historic town of Morelia, even though it is...
Toyota Alien Joe Polevoi
If you want to visit an otherworldly place, you need go no farther than Japan, home of high-tech toilets, birthplace of all the electronics fads that engulf the rest of the world a few months later, and source of cool automobiles including the baroque Toyota pictured by Joe Polevoi in the image on the opposite page. I read somewhere that the reason that Japanese cars are festooned with so many name badges, bits of chrome trim, and other doodads is that, in their crowded urban areas, being able...
Acknowledgments
Although my name is on the cover, this book is really a joint effort that involved the contributions of many people working behind the scenes at the publisher and within the Cleveland Photographic Society. One driving force who really made this book possible was Rob Erick, President of CPS during the period this book was compiled, and now esteemed Past President. Rob functioned as CEO for the project, drumming up support and participation, keeping it on track, and fine-tuning how the entries...
Barn Owl Rob Erick
Rob Erick's Barn Owl is an example of how to take a distinctive photograph of a fairly common subject. Humans seem fascinated by owls. We think they are exceptionally wise (they are not). Commandos use their hoots as secret signals while creeping stealthily through jungles. Harry Potter and his friends rely on them as extra versatile carrier pigeons and pets. Owls are associated with dozens of stereotypes, including a few of the photographic variety, which Erick has studiously managed to avoid....
Don Keller
I played with photography while a teenager after receiving a developing kit as a gift. What a thrill it was to see the image come up in the developer It wasn't important at the time to have only a box camera, the thrill was there. While in the service I took record shots of places I visited fully expecting them to be photographic masterpieces. This attitude continued for many years but my shooting became limited to vacations when I became the photographic artist wanna-be only to have the slides...
Grapefruit Stack of Donuts Elisha Cerino
Food photography is a specialized type of product photography, and is a lot harder than it looks. The food must be prepared to perfection especially from a visual standpoint and needs to look fresh and scrumptious in the photo. Some kinds of foods spoil or melt quickly, so the time available to shoot them can be limited. Without the cues of smell and taste to enhance our perception of the food, the photographer must rely on sight to convey texture and appeal. In short, using photographic...
Green Apples Nancy Balluck
Photographer Nancy Balluck calls this a lucky fluke, but looking at how everything pulls together in her picture Green Apples, I'm forced to think of golfer Gary Player's observation, The harder I work, the luckier I get. The photo breaks a couple rules those green fronds growing from somewhere off-screen to the left are technically mergers but there are enough positives, including the shimmering reflections off the water and rich glow of autumn colors, to make this image a real winner. This...
Hurdlers Six Points Look Ma No Hands David Busch
Because photojournalism is, after all, journalism, the same Who, What, When, Where, and Why rules apply to the images, just as they apply to the printed word. When I began working for a daily newspaper, my photo editor imprinted this lesson on my brain after my first assignment at a college basketball game. Pointing to an image I'd circled in grease pencil on a contact sheet, he said, That's a great sports photograph. It's well-exposed, the action is sensational, and you really captured the...
Bosom Buddies Barb Pennington
Those of us who had siblings, or who have been parents to more than one child, understand the special bond that brothers and sisters have for each other. Photographer Barb Pennington has captured that bond in her photograph, Bosom Buddies, which shows two twin girls posing for a picture that gives new meaning to the term op art. Sibling revelry is something most of us can identify with. The possible exception might be comic Steven Wright, who claims he was an only child .eventually. (Thanks to...
The Skeleton Bike Todd Liebenauer
Todd Liebenauer encountered the motorcycle-riding skeleton at the Cleveland Autorama and grabbed a shot with his Canon Digital Rebel XT using the camera's 18-55 kit lens. The built-in flash caused the eyes to glow, which was the photographer's inspiration to transform the image into something right out of the movie Ghost Rider. A lot of processing in Photoshop was done to create this image, he says in a masterpiece of understatement. The first thing I did was remove items from the background by...
Snow Princess Shannon Rice
If you want to move your personal photographic To-Do list out of your comfort zone, try tackling a high fashion photo shoot. A multitude of interesting challenges await you all of them surprisingly surmountable once you get in the swing of things and you'll definitely add some interesting and eyecatching shots to your portfolio. Once the high fashion fantasy bug has bit you, you may find that you've discovered a whole new realm of photography that, like landscape or macro photography, can...
Missy Elisha Cerino
What elevates a youth portrait or any portrait of someone under the age of 30 from the mundane to something special It's not the sports paraphernalia or cheesy props that scream, This photographer is with it Rad Sick (or whatever term was current nine or ten months ago). As it turns out, the real key to shooting an effective portrait of a younger person is timeless. Your goal should be to capture the optimism and enthusiasm you'll find in every subject who has an entire life of experiences...
Baby Robins Dan Le Hoty
Mother Nature is a harsh mistress, but also a gentle momma. For every moment that Nature is red in tooth and claw (as Tennyson put it), there is an amazing miracle of birth and growth, like the one shown in Dan Le Hoty's Baby Robins, shown on the next page. These private moments are difficult to capture, but can be very moving. As with all wild animals, you'll need to be diligent, alert, a little sneaky, and, above all, cautious if you want to add a tender scene like this one to your Bucket...
Listening InA Tense Moment Dale and Jen Simmons
Reproducing a memorable photographic style can be an exciting outlet for creativity, as you can see from this pair of photographs by the photo team of Dale and Jen Simmons. They draw on the look of film noir classics like The Maltese Falcon, and the covers of noir detective novels of the 1940s and 1950s to create a pair of riveting images steeped in nostalgia and mystery. Listening In, shown in this page, was the Simmons' second serious attempt at shooting the noir genre. We try very hard to...
Alien Visitor Carol Sahley
Carol Sahley, who brought you the macro shot of inverted water drops in the last chapter, explores close-up photography further with this portrait of a grasshopper that she calls, Alien Visitor. She's right, of course. Insects and their kin are so different from us that they might as well be from another planet. Odds are that our first extraterrestrial visitors will resemble grasshoppers more than they do us. So, the insect world is well worth your study. In the United States alone,...
Denise Pace In Memoriam
There is no greater gift than to see the look of amazement on the model's face after she sees what I've done.- Denise. Denise Pace was an accomplished and creative makeup artist with experience in all aspects of media makeup fashion, video, and print. She worked with many creative teams especially around Ohio (including Dale & Jen Simmons, a.k.a. BlackWatch, featured in this book). Denise's diverse background and experience created a unique style accredited...
Very Serious Stop Sign Joe Polevoi
Our next Polevoi-age takes us on a journey to the ridiculous, to a realm where road signs can be confusing, contradictory, or even preposterous. In other words, Cleveland, Ohio. I could tell you that this image was snapped with a Canon EOS 40D camera and Canon 17-85mm zoom lens, at f 16 and 1 250th second at ISO 400, but that wouldn't mean much. Although Very Serious Stop Sign looks like a straight shot, it was actually born in the mind of Joe Polevoi, who took relatively harmless signage at a...
Idyllic Winter John Earl Brown
Those of us who live where there are four distinct seasons have multiple opportunities to record Nature's yearly cycle of changes, here exemplified by John Earl Brown's wonderful image, Idyllic Winter. Not everyone is so lucky, of course. I once lived in Rochester, NY, which typically experiences nine months of Winter, and three months of poor skiing weather. (During my first year there, the first snowfall was in late September, and the last of the season was the following May.) Others live in...
Focus on Love New Beginning Isabel Martins
Aside from, say, capturing the first human footsteps on the Moon, few photographic endeavors have such high stakes as wedding photography. Even though marriages themselves may not be the once-in-a-lifetime events they once were, each ceremony is still a special moment that can't be repeated or restaged, and absolutely must be imaged perfectly by the photographer on the first attempt. The best wedding photographs must capture an ephemeral moment, embody the romantic dreams of the bride and...
My House in a Drop Carol Sahley
What a great photograph this is from a number of different perspectives It shows languid drops of water suspended from a branch, each drop forming a tiny lens that images a miniature picture of the photographer's house. The moment was ephemeral, the picture sharply realized, and the result is a macro shot that's not quite like the usual close-up image you're likely to encounter. I'm hoping the imagination that Carol Sahley put into this image will impel you to add a world-within-a-world image...
Wine Girl George Sipl
Still life images date back to the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs, where their depictions of food and drink were thought to provide nourishment for the deceased ruler. More recently, still life compositions have been prized not for the tasty tidbits, potent potables, or other objects they portrayed but for the flexibility they provide the artist photographer in arranging the subject in attractive (and often allegorical) ways. Unlike portrait subjects, the still life is often more pliant and a...
Juggling ClownEd Rynes
Festivals, circuses, and major events of all types provide opportunities for capturing people at their light-hearted best. You can photograph family members enjoying the food, marveling at the sights, thrilling to amusement park rides, or watching the variety of entertainers who work hard to keep the festive mood alive. But don't limit yourself to the folks you came with Other people in the crowd are worth a snapshot or two, and the entertainers themselves are likely to be colorfully dressed...
Mill Creek Overlook Rick Wetterau
You got to view Rick Wetterau's infrared portrayal of nature in Chapter 3. Mill Creek Overlook is another example, taken on a brisk fall day with clouds illuminated by the mid-day sun. Shot with a Nikkor 12-24mm wide-angle lens at 12mm with Wetterau's Nikon D80 (converted to full time infrared use by LifePixel at www.lifepixel.com). The picture was taken handheld at ISO 100 with an exposure of 1 320th second and f 9. As with basic IR images, the resulting photograph was rendered in a...
Idea Man Varina Patel
In addition to offering nature and landscape photography seminars with her husband, Jay, Varina Patel is a prolific stock photographer. One key to success in the field is to have a large number of creative images that can be readily applied to various product, packaging, and business applications. Patel spends a lot of time shooting photographs, not because they have an immediate application, but because they can potentially be useful for a broad range of messages. Idea Man is a conceptual...
Tattooed EntertainersEd Rynes
Down through the years, the term alternative lifestyle has come to mean many things, starting with the long hair that first seemed to sprout alongside the Beatles and, later, with the hippie movement, to vegetarianism, communes, up through today's punks and goths. Generally, any subculture with many enthusiastic adherents is considered an alternative lifestyle by those who prefer another, less adventurous, way of living. And even when a particular life choice becomes exceedingly common and...
Dance Class Dale and Jen Simmons
For kids, special moments come at life's milestones those first steps, first days of school, and those first tentative attempts to gain special skills. For parents and youngsters alike, kiddie dance or martial arts classes, beginner music lessons, that first tee-ball or soccer practice, are all precious times that can be effectively captured as unforgettable images. Dale and Jen Simmons recognized the possibilities when asked to photograph a class at a Cleveland dance school for an...
Goofy Geisha DaleJen Simmons
Who needs Photoshop One of the most remarkable things about this quirky photograph is that it's almost entirely a straight image. Photoshop was used to change a sedate background to a more garish and color-appropriate purple, but, other than that, this photo is, basically, entirely the non-computer-assisted work of Blackwatch Studios photography team Dale and Jen Simmons, and a supporting cast that included an adventurous model, and an inventive makeup artist who assisted with hair styling. The...
Bark Up a Tree New Germany State Park Rick Wetterau
Once he fell in love with infrared photography, Cleveland Photographic Society member Rick Wetterau was determined to explore every nuance of this experimental form of photography. One of his shots, Bark Up a Tree, shown on this page, demonstrates the possibilities of a technique called channel swapping, while the other image, New Germany State Park, on the opposite page, explores the possibilities of HDR high dynamic range infrared photography. Wetterau used a Nikon D80, which has been...
Classic Beauty DaleJen Simmons
If you think glamour photography is challenging, try photographing nudes sometime. Dale and Jen Simmons make it look easy with this photograph that mimics the presentation and mood of an Old Masters classic, but that's far from the case in real life. That makes the Simmons' photo that much more impressive. All the elements lighting, posing, facial expression, and an overall concept all came together to create a timeless shot. If a great nude photo is on your Bucket List, you could do worse than...
Horse Drive Ron Wilson
I know photographer Ron Wilson didn't intend his image Horse Drive as photojournalism. He was aiming for a pictorial representation of the American West. But I've had the privilege of viewing his lengthy presentation of images from his sessions at an Oregon ranch, and found the stirring series of pictures told a story worthy of any exercise in photojournalism. Although the round-up is staged annually, the images look as authentic as anything you might have seen in two weeks on the Oregon Trail....
Vogue Dennis Goebelt
You never hear anyone say, They don't take glamour photos like they used to because certain kinds of pictures not only never went out of style, they're gaining new fans as the latest generations of photographers rediscover Hollywood glamour, as captured by Dennis Goebelt's great image titled Vogue. The young woman in this picture reminds me of the famous publicity photograph of Jane Russell ensconced in a haystack for the 1943 movie The Outlaw. There's more hay and less clothing in this...
Impure Thoughts Tony Berling
Within the Cleveland Photographic Society, photographer Tony Berling is best known for his remarkable photographs of wolves one of which appears later in this book . More recently, however, Berling has begun branching out into a less dangerous type of photography portraits and glamour. This picture, Impure Thoughts, was selected for the book because it perfectly embodies the kind of photograph that provides a sultry, glamorous look that has definite sex appeal without venturing beyond PG-13...
Jumping Jenna Jan DeBlaay
Latvian photographer Philippe Halsman 1906-1979 had a profound effect on how portraits are captured, even among photographers who profess to be unfamiliar with his work. Surely, though, every image of a human leaping during an otherwise ordinary portrait session like the exuberance shown by the young woman in Jan DeBlaay's Jumping Jenna, shown here has to draw from Halsman's invention of what he called jumpol-ogy. Many of his 101 covers for Life magazine used the technique for irreverant...
Navajo Rider Barb Pennington
Native American culture is admired, studied, and imitated not just in North America, but worldwide. Indeed, while writing this book, I visited Prague where, I discovered, the Czech equivalent to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts involves youngsters at summer camps learning about Native American respect for nature, survival skills in the wilderness, and courage. In the U.S.A, we're fortunate that our own indigenous people including several of my maternal grandfather's ancestors are able and willing...
Self PortraitNathalie Lovera Snyder
Let's ramp up the difficulty level even one more notch. Glamour photography and nude photography made my list of Bucket List suggestions not because they are easy, but, in the words of JFK, because they are hard. That's why I'm more than a little jealous of the photographers in this book who seem to tackle photographing women and men almost intuitively. That's why photographer Nathalie Lovera Snyder's intimate portrait of herself, tastefully and glamorously nude, is such an impressive...
