Favorite Photographer

BlackWolF · Nov 6, 2009

David Ziser ... My favorite ... Definitely ... I like that he is not too stuck up to teach amateurs take better pictures without acting like he is the man ...

sarikjain · Nov 9, 2009

Artificial Light Photography, Ansel Adams.

And just to be unorthodox: a commemorative collection (the name escapes me) of Norman Rockwell covers, from which I have learned a great deal about composition.

After you've finished laughing, find some of those images online and spend some time looking at the way he has arranged the elements of the scene. Study the colors. Study the lighting. Study it the way you'd study a photograph. You might be surprised.

Fuller Photography · Nov 9, 2009

Martin Grahame-Dunn changed my photographic life, amazing trainer... and for landscape can't beat a bit of Tom Mackie.

craig · Nov 9, 2009

sarikjain said:
Artificial Light Photography, Ansel Adams.

And just to be unorthodox: a commemorative collection (the name escapes me) of Norman Rockwell covers, from which I have learned a great deal about composition.

After you've finished laughing, find some of those images online and spend some time looking at the way he has arranged the elements of the scene. Study the colors. Study the lighting. Study it the way you'd study a photograph. You might be surprised.

Norman Rockwell's work is brilliant. Vanity Fair ran a story about him a couple of months ago. He photographed and staged his ideas and then painted them. His museum here in the states is running an exhibition of said photos.Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera | Norman Rockwell Museum

Love & Bass

Pugs · Nov 9, 2009

Great thread! I've learned a lot new names that I'll have to look into!

My favorites are Lois Greenfield, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Thomas Mangelsen, MyaLover, Minor White, Imogen Cunningham.

Looking over that short list from off the top of my head, I find it interesting that none of them really match my "style". Huh...

george elsasser · Nov 23, 2009

some would be Harry Callahan, Edward Weston, Aaron Siskind

my website
my blog

Ilyon · Nov 24, 2009

many photographers use wrong light editing his works in Photoshop... and they have a lot of problems with it... I don't even know how to relate to this. I have discovered one photographer from Netherlands GJOA, have seen some of his photos on my gallery but the people say these works are with a bad lighting and looks like a painting pictures... You can view it in site which is in my signature below...

and I've found new photographers: Lukasz Taborski and Sergio Pachini...

may view here

Ilyon · Nov 30, 2009

...Alexandre Deschaumes

nomtea · Dec 2, 2009

I would say Cecil Beaton. He captured 50 years of fashion, art and celebrity, from the Sitwells in the 1920s to the Rolling Stones in the late 1960s.

Beaton photographed Wallis Simpson and her wedding to the Duke of Windsor in the 1930's. He visted Hollywood photographing many of the stars of the day: Tallulah Bankhead, Gary Cooper, Loretta Young, Marlene Dietrich and Johnny Weissmuler, preparing for his first Tarzan film.

Other works from the 1930s include French subjects taken in Paris, such as the fashion designers Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, and the artists Beaton befriended such as Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. He photographed for Vogue - a collaboration that lasted his whole career.

Beaton received the ultimate establishment seal of approval when he was commissioned by the Royal Family in 1939. The exhibition includes two studies of HM Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, at Buckingham Palace, taken in dappled light and offering fairytale romance.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Beaton devoted himself to his work as an official war photographer. Beaton created an unforgettable portrait of the 3 year-old blitz victim Eileen Dunne (1940) in a hospital bed in the north of England. During this period Beaton also captured wartime artists such as the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, composer Benjamin Britten.

In the post-war period Beaton photographed existentialist writers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris, and emerging actors in America, the 21 year old Marlon Brando and Yul Brynner, and the reclusive Greta Garbo, the subject of Beaton`s long-term romance.

In 1953 Beaton famously photographed the Queen at her Coronation. In 1956 Beaton started work on the costume designs for the first version of My Fair Lady for the American stage with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison and was to continue with the production in its various forms until his own Oscar-winning work for the film version starring Audrey Hepburn in 1964. In the midst of this he also won an Oscar for his work on another great film musical Gigi (1957) with Leslie Caron.

In the 1950s Beaton produced many of his most famous portraits of women including Audrey Hepburn, Maria Callas, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman. Male subjects included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Betjeman, Sugar Ray Robinson, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin.

It is testament to Beaton's flexibility and skill that he reinvented his photographic style for a new decade. In the 1960s he was revitalised by working with some of the era`s brightest cult figures such as David Hockney, Jean Shrimpton, Rudolf Nureyev and most importantly Mick Jagger. Up until a paralysing stroke in 1974, Beaton continued a punishing work schedule, whether working on the Barbra Streisand's film On a Clear Day You Can See Forever or photographing Warhol and his entourage in New York.:hug::