Author: Mark E. Johnson

September 16, 2011

Get Paid

Over at Black Star Rising, Brandon Cotter has a good post up on some tips to make sure clients pay up. The best, I agree, is to be paid up front, but that’s almost impossible in most news situations. Stiff – enforced – late fees are useful, but there’s a growing trend to offer discounts for early payments. I also...

Categories Business & Industry

September 16, 2011

Commit. You Must Commit

A few weeks ago I handed every single one of my photojournalism students a camera kit. It’s theirs to use through the semester, to complete assignments, to learn on. The catch, of course, is that they have to use it. If they don’t, there’s no real point in taking these classes. So I tell them I expect it to be...

Categories Advice & Learning/Craft

September 16, 2011

Back to Work

Joao Silva has returned to work, shooting a White House Medal of Honor presentation for the New York Times. Welcome back, Mr. Silva. It’s good to see your seeing again.

Categories At Work/Business & Industry

September 15, 2011

More You Know You’re a Photojournalist When …

The Chicago Tribune’s Alex Garcia adds 50 more ways to know you’re a photojournalist. I know it is trite and overdone, but I love these lists … have hit everyone of them at some point in my life. Here’s a few of mine … When looking at new cars, you think about how much gear you can get in the...

Categories Advice & Learning/At Work

September 14, 2011

Shooting Baseball

Nice piece on the pressure of shooting baseball and transmitting from the field on the Milwaukee Brewers’ web site. It’s different from my days at Fenway Park, shooting for 45 minutes and then running to the darkroom to soup and ship a couple of images, then get back to the field for PMers. Not sure if it’s better or worse...

Categories At Work/Photojournalism/Tech Talk

September 14, 2011

A Well Turned Phrase

Photography is full of jargon … f-stops, dragging the shutter, pop a strobe, blow out the background and (the one that first horrifies my students before they settle into a comfortable usage) kill your babies.* Picked up a new on in this post from Gordon Lewis this morning for describing the noise in a digital image: Because I braced myself...

Categories Tech Talk

September 14, 2011

On Patience

Over at the New York Times’ Lens blog, Kerri MacDonald has a short interview up with Jared Soares where he talks about the impact of one of my favorite images by Sam Abell. I remember studying that photo for hours. I would look at that photo, then I would run off to a country fair and I would try to...

Categories Advice & Learning/Business & Industry/Craft/Journalism/Photojournalism

September 14, 2011

To Increase and Diffuse

If you’ve been here a while, you know how big a fan I am of Joe McNally. I’ve seen him speak a dozen times or more, stood in a room with him while he led a small lighting workshop, hung strobes in a diner in Syracuse as part of that and have studied every book and image he’s published. The...

Categories Advice & Learning/Craft/Thoughts & Theory

September 13, 2011

New Skills for the Modern Storyteller

Stanley Leary put up a nice compilation of the skills now being asked for in job descriptions for photographers. To me, there is nothing surprising in the job listings – it’s an evolution that’s been going on for the last decade or so. But the key thing he points out is that, regardless of the skill set, being able to...

Categories Advice & Learning/Business & Industry/Photojournalism/Thoughts & Theory

September 13, 2011

What is Fine Art?

Over at Shutterfinger, Gordon Lewis has a take on how you define “fine art” these days. Using a list from Alain Briot, I think the first one eliminates all of photojournalism and documentary photography: 1. Fine art photography is first about the artist. I have no problem with art (aside from an inherent inability to understand an awful lot of...

Categories Craft/Thoughts & Theory