Posts by: Alison Zavos

The Print Swap site on Squarespace

When deciding to set up The Print Swap, Feature Shoot’s new project which connects photographers from around the world through a large-scale physical print swap, I knew immediately that I wanted to use Squarespace for the site. I’m not tech savvy and I’m also very busy, but I also wanted to get the site up quickly. Squarespace is my go to because they make it super easy to put together a professional site for impatient (need it done yesterday), yet technically-challenged folks like myself. Here’s the steps I took to get it up and running in just 48 hours.

© Tyler Shields

Tyler Shields: Nothing.

Gretchen Robinette: One thing I would like to change is the major news outlets constantly seeking out free photo/videos on Instagram on groundbreaking news stories. It’s a way to not hire or pay any real photographers. I see constantly as a comment, “Hi, this is WNBC. Can we use your photo on all platforms for credit? Reply ‘yes.'” And some non-professional photographer thinks this leads to work eventually, or it’s just cool to have a photo on a news site. It’s not cool because its reducing the quality of news content and taking work away from professionals. Instagram has made it too easy for companies to get free photography, and the average person has no idea what this is doing to the photo industry.

Muir Vidler: The fees! I’ve always loved doing editorial work, and I still do a lot of it. One of the best things about shooting portraits and reportage for magazines is that you get to go to some really interesting places and meet very interesting people. But the money’s worse now than it was when I started. There are of course other fields of photography that pay well, but it’s a shame that it’s now pretty hard to make a good living with just editorial work.

© Laura Pannack

Laura Pannack: Keep shooting, keep thinking, keep making mistakes.

Jonathan May: I would say to totally immerse yourself in the craft. Do a course/degree, or if you don’t have the time, then read books on the technical aspect, study famous photographers, find a mentor and work/assist him for free to start so he can teach you and also critique your work. Watch documentaries. Follow blogs to stay on top of the current trends. Learn the power of editing/selecting your photographs, as in what makes the shot strong, and of course always be shooting so you can constantly be improving your work/brand by replacing the weaker images. It is very important to find your style and work on bodies of work rather than single images, and to do this, I would say to photograph what you enjoy.

Seth Casteel: I am a completely self-taught photographer, and my motto has always been shoot, shoot, shoot, and experiment! If there’s something you want to create, go create it. Find a way to do it no matter what.

Ian Willms: “Shoot, shoot, think. Think, think, shoot.” — Frank O’Connor

Wasma Mansour: I think there are many ways to enrich one’s knowledge of photography and to improve their practice – besides academia. Photobooks for me have been a great source. Photography blogs are also great platforms because these often include overviews of established photographers’ practices as well as interviews. For the technical aspect of photography, I often search on YouTube. Lastly, practice! Sometimes the best way is to do a mock-up of a particular shoot, if possible, to test the composition, lighting, etc.

Danny Lynch – the Great Stromboli © Muir Vidler

Muir Vidler: Longwinded, pretentious artist statements. A couple of sentences about the theme or intent can be useful, but if you have to tell me why your photos are good or what you’re trying to say with them, then they’re not doing their job very well. More and more I like photographers, or any artists, writers, musicians, who do work that is very simple yet powerful and doesn’t require an explanation.

Ed Kashi: Talking about photography too much.

© Muir Vidler

Muir Vidler: I was shooting an international beauty pageant in Libya. On the last day, the organiser somehow arranged that we’d all go and meet Colonel Gaddafi, so an hour later, myself, the journalist and fifteen beauty pageant contestants found ourselves in a room in Gaddafi’s house waiting for him to appear.

Lots of frantic Libyan men with moustaches and shiny suits were running around preparing for him and building up a pretty good sense of anticipation.

Just before he walked in, one of the frantic Libyans told me I wasn’t allowed to take photos and took my camera away from me. So a minute later, I was standing with no camera, watching Gaddafi swishing around the room in a yellow robe kissing and hugging all the girls.

Our Libyan friend told me afterwards that Gaddafi had gestured to me and asked who I was. “A photographer,” he was told. “Then where’s his camera?” he asked. His aide apparently replied, “I don’t know. Maybe he forgot it.’ It’s horrible standing with your hands in your pockets with no camera, watching something that’d be great to photograph.

Fortunately, I did get to go back a few weeks later with the American contestant, and that time I was allowed to photograph him very briefly, although I wasn’t allowed to talk to him – I just had to walk around him shooting while he stood there staring off into space.

© Andi Schreiber

Andi Schreiber: I crave routine in terms of my art making but it’s impossible to achieve. I’m a full-time parent so I try to get my work done when my kids are out of the house or at school. While it would seem that the hours are endless, the days go by fast, usually emptied by various household responsibilities. My fine art routine has adjusted to fit into these other obligations, like by taking my camera along to my children’s dental checkups or having it on hand when I’m spending an afternoon on the sidelines. I’m also good about uploading to my computer regularly, selecting my images in Photo Mechanic and then processing in Lightroom. The better images get exported as tiffs while the rest are exported as jpegs. Then I do some tweaking in Photoshop and the keepers get placed into folders for various projects. I have a blog that I use to share my new work but I’m not posting as often these days. Now it seems that that my photographs need more time to marinate before I’m ready to share them publicly. Maybe blogs are so 2010 but I still find mine to be a useful place for thinking about my work and my process.

Bruce Gilden: I get up early. I go to sleep early.

Diana Markosian: Doesn’t matter where I am, which home I am in, or what hotel I am staying in, I am fairly structured with my day. I wake up around 5 am, shoot for the first two hours (if I am on assignment), then go home and make breakfast — usually oatmeal and coffee. Then I work through the morning as late as I can before going to the gym. The morning is my most productive time, so I try to prolong it. I spend the afternoons/evenings in the field, working on my story. I come home late. Edit. Afterwards, I usually read for a while and then go to bed around midnight.

RSVP here.

Recently we asked some of our favorite Instagram photographers to walk us through their coveted post-processing techniques using Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop. They’ve shown us step-by-step how to transform an underexposed or incomplete photo into an electrifying vision.

Gavin Pickford, Nana-Ampofo, Britt Marie Bye, and Vicky Navarro each created an exclusive tutorial using Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, or both. While Pickford introduced bright, vivid light and tone to a shot of South African wildflowers, Bye brought out the shadowy corners of an abandoned house, revealing details that would otherwise have been lost to darkness.

Ampofo constructed an ambitious, science-fiction-worthy composite scene using two separate images, one shot in the bucolic Romanian mountains and the other taken from a helicopter soaring over the Manhattan skyline. Finally, Navarro brought radiance, contrast, and life to a portrait of her friend, Chula The Clown, on a whimsical adventure in the woods.

All the photographers guided us through the process in 5-10 easy steps, taking us behind the scenes and into the secret inner workings that go into any popular, viral photograph.

Photographer Ami Vitale with a rhinoceros friend

Ami Vitale: Failure is a tough lesson. It hurts but the best thing that comes out of it is the honesty it brings.