Wild dogs of Zambia.

Wild Focus

This is the web site of my portfolios. There, you will see the subjects I really fell in love with and some more personal projects (often still a work in progress, like my half-portraits).

• The Art of Waves: A Lifetime of Awe-Inspiring Surf Photographs talks about the book of Clark Little which demonstrates that you can shoot photos of waves during 15 years: The Art of Waves. And he is interested in the wave itself, and what is below.
• Photographing Waves: One of The Most Rewarding Subjects is another PetaPixel post wirtten by Rachael Talibart. There she describes her passion and how she invites us to dive into wave photography.

Maybe, this will push you into photographing some waves during the Summer vacations.

One of its endangered sub-specie is the Iberian lynx, whose name reminds you that it comes from Spain and Portugal only. Protected and quite shy, it is not always easy to catch pictures of the Iberian lynx (the photographer should better be quiet and patient). There is a photo gallery on Wild Focus (Iberian lynx page) where I assembled a small portfolio of this cute cat.

However, both of them did a great job of showing them in ways that make them shine.

Warren Keelan

You should visit his website, Instagram, Facebook, 500px, and Twitter.

Even better, you can buy the 2020 calendar edited by Warren from some of his best pictures. A good way to keep looking at these photographs all eyar long.

Rachael Talibart

Growing in Southeast England, Rachael spent quite some time in her father’s boat. Apparently, she did not find the experience very pleasant and she did not grow into a great sailor, but into a great photographer, both fascinated and inspired by the waves of a furious sea.

Several major storms gave her the opportunity to go and shoot waves in violent conditions, leading to superb images that most people would not know how to create in most cases. Her website is full of gorgeous such pictures.

• An unusual subject: An iceberg just after it flipped over (the part which is normally deep under water bumps up out of the sea and is not yet worn out by the weather) and shows its colors and transparency.
• Tough lighting conditions: In Antarctica, light is usually soft but requires a lot of technique to master fully.
• Transparency that is hard to represent in the photograph.
• It’s not easy shooting in cold weather!

Result? Some crazy nice pictures like this one:

The others are on Alex Cornell’s web site that I warmly recommend visiting.

Andrew Jackson was next and his picture was taken several times including the following daguerreotype, of 1845, a few months before his death:

Interestignly, it seems that Barack Obama was the very first President of the United States to replace the formal painted portrait with a (digital) photography.

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art web site, John Q Adams’ image is a copy of a lost daguerreotype of Adams taken by Philip Haas in 1843.

He shot the picture.

Via Peta Pixel

His web site is very rich and you will certainly spend a lot of time both checking the technique and diving into subjects coming from all corners of the world. His eyes watch it with a wide look, too.

I photographed in Abkhazia in August/September 2009. I’ve traveled a lot photographing in the former Soviet Union during the past years, and like Transnistria, Abkhazia is another one of these small pieces of land that broke themselves loose in the aftermath of the breakdown of the empire. It is very isolated as just a few countries have recognized it, the most important being Russia of course. Very little investments have been made since the civil war with Georgia in 1993, and going there was like returning to Bosnia just after the Dayton Agreement. Destroyed houses and cities all over, and a tense atmosphere because of the hostile situation with Georgia proper. Strange and scary. And still people try to live their ordinary daily life in spite of it all.

Question: What would be the first thing to teach a young new photographers?
Answer from Jens Olof Lasthein: Time is important, but presence is crucial.

The picture was taken in Chiba, Japan in October 2006, where Juergen came across this kid sliding down this plastic grass construction.

Question: Why and how did you start photography?
Juergen Specht’s answer: hm, it was more accidental. Somebody lend me a Nikon F3, because he never used it and I got hooked on photography. I had my first darkroom in my bathroom and shot B&W exclusively for many years, then changed to digital in 1999 and never looked back.

If you look closely, my pictures – especially the studio or planned ones – have often not more than 3 primary colors. So I never went that far from my b/w beginnings

Documentary photography is a genre that has its difficulties (even when it’s not about war photography), but it also has the huge advantage of putting the spectator (and the photograph) in front of real people in their own lives, creating a window between two worlds.

Simone Lueck made a two-week trip in Cuba and immediately noticed that, at night, the only light seemed to be coming from the ubiquitous TV sets in the homes. She spent days entering strangers home to ask if she could photograph the working TV set. This led to a very interesting series named Cuba TV and a book extracted from this.

The Mountain from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

Terje Sorgjerd web site.

This series only started last year and it will certainly evolve a lot in the near future. As he says:

I live on the west coast of Canada North Vancouver Island in Port Hardy, an area where the rain forest meets the sea, I only have to walk along the shoreline to see how nature creates wonderful shapes and textures, colours from the materials washed up on this shoreline. […] These images look so good in print and I am very excited about the potential of this project.

To the question of “What do you consider your worst weakness in photography and how do you try and correct it?”, he answers:

I think I would have to say that sometimes I get too focused on a particular aim of a photo trip, ie (I am out in the forest and want to make an image of a bear) that I miss other things around me! So I now try to go on a photo hike with an open mind and celebrate what is good in our world!

Which explains that Alan can cover so different subjects.

Coming from another world (agencies and new documentary), Franco Limosani also has used his technical knowledge to explore first astrophotography, then wildlife photography. Today, Franco follows the tracks of the Fox and bring us some very pleasant pictures like the following one:

The world of Peter Kayafas is mainly in black and white, but it’s our common world: A little out of our cities and their comemrcial malls, empty spaces are still there and contain the marks of our man’s activity. These abandoned marks in the wide empty spaces of North America are seen by Peter Kayafas as some mythical and religious experience (something not far from the Easter Island stone statues).

A portfolio which must be visited slowly like you would taste a great wine: Plains totems.

Question: Is there something that could make you stop shooting photographs?
Peter Kayafas’ answer: Short of being physically incapable of making photographs, there is nothing that would stop me from continuing to explore the world with a camera. The subject matter that I am interested in is ubiquitous and always changing, which, of course, means that it warrants ongoing study.

So many photographers (even pros) do the same photo again and again, forgetting that they could use their own ingenuity to build their own pictures. Claes Axstål made a giant move when he decided to use Flash to do aerial photography. This made his photographs distinctly different. Nothing technically impossible, just a LOT of work to be sure to maintain flash-based technology in a large scale. Suddenly, those planes, boats and helicopters get a different treatment and Claes gets to shoot and shoot and shoot again.

Claes made his own airborne Flash (a BIG flash: 250kg of equipment, sometimes more) which can be brought into a plane or an helicopter to make photos that we don’t usually see. In the photography above, he was actually shooting from the air traffic tower.

As he says: “I use my own made flash I call Airborne Flash Photography due to I usually operate it from another aircraft air to air. In this case I have one guy aiming the flash and another guy measure the distances to the object with a laser. I am trigging the flash with a PocketWizard so I can move freely. The helicopter then just fly by the tower (like in the movie Top Gun or hover as in this case.”

Web: Carpe Momentum Photography
Book: Airborne Flash Photography
Facebook: CMP

« Miverina » means « to come back ».

Rijasolo was born in Madagascar and the « Miverina » series is a move back to rediscover this country. His photography is a kind of black and white photography which touched me deeply.

Question : Is there something that could make you stop shooting photographs?
Rijasolo’s answer: At first, nothing could stop me shooting pictures, be a witness of people’s life, to report the state of the world we live in. Then, it is quite possible that, one day, photography will stop being, that the work of photographers will no longer be recognized by society at large, that it will create more and more obstacles to photographer’s activity. It is also quite possible that we, photographers, become conditioned to format our work, to adopt visual codes, a moral code, standards that can no longer be brought down. These things could happen some time, here, in a country like Madagascar. If that day came, I may think about stopping photography because I would have lost what is the central interest of a photographer’s job: To be a social activist.

Web: http://www.rijasolo.com/

You may have seen this photo somewhere else (I found it on an FTP dump site). Please, let me know who is the author.

Look at this photo from Semâ Bekirovic. At first it would seem of limited interest, then you will notice how the photographer included an object in the photography (the wave picture) and how this becomes a photo of “Water in Water.”

I really like the way Semâ builds her photos to tell a story. Not a documentary story, an inner story. The technique is non-essential (a sheet of printed paper in a pond in the near a house).

As Semâ Bekirovic says: “The Trap of photography is that it is quiet easy to make a good photograph. In my opinion, the concept of an image is at least as important as the easthetics.”

Who would dare challenge this?

Christian Del Rosario: Visit the many picture galleries of his web site.

Timelapse – The City Limits from Dominic

http://www.dominicboudreault.com/

Mindrelic (another guy from RedBubble) spent a weekin Manhattan shooting time lapses of the city day and night.

Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

http://www.mindrelic.com/

On August 6, 1945 (we’ll be celebrating this event anniversary in a few days) the Enola Gay US bomber dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

The images of the deadly effects of this new kind of bomb have been restricted in circulation by the US government, while they were taken and used in order to fully evaluate the actual impact of these new bombs. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (SBS) Damage Division was tasked to photograph and analyze the effects of the bombing. These photographs (or some of them) have been acquired by the International Center of Photography.

They are currently in exhibition there until August 28, 2011.

Is there something that could make you stop shooting photographs?

Sure, if my camera broke?  (But, I’d just get another.) 

Shooting a tangible photograph is just the end product, though.  Photographing is seeing, it is a way of conversing and interacting with the world.  With my work in particular, it’s a license and a reminder to always be open to new ideas, people and places.  To constantly be learning something, to give a voice to someone’s story, to make a lasting representation of a moment I experienced.

It’s my excuse for wandering off, for daydreaming, for seeming to be half-listening while I’m watching everything going on around me.  It’s something I’ve never really been able to turn off. 

Sarina Finkelstein has an approach to documentary-style photography that I like a lot. There is calm, moderation, nearness to people. The series I brought to light here is all about modern-day gold prospectors who re-installed in California (probably because of the economic recession). But she is also giving us her own look onto men and women who leave the social standards and choose to live both their passion and the sacrifices they adopted.

Their environment is not an easy one, the Law is not in their favor either.

You will find him on the wrong side of the Niagara Falls (on the underground side), in abandoned plants or subway stations (check his photos of the Paris Métro), sometimes climbing on the roof of some unusual places.

This series of photos were shot inside the disused waste water tunnels of the Niagara Falls Toronto Power Company hydroelectric power station in Canada. The tunnels are over 10m diameter, 500m long and each red brick was painstaking laid by hand over 100 years ago. It is an amazing space and monument to human ingenuity that can only be accesses by rappelling through the decaying remains of the abandoned power station. Due to the difficulties in accessing the tunnels, only a handful of human beings have been fortunate enough to stand at ‘The Confluence’.

Often, shooting a photography is a matter of choosing the angle. This is confirmed by the flying heron photograph presented to us by Michael Kircher.

Here is a bird shot from high above (while birds tend to appear from below to us, mere mortals). Nevertheless, it is shot against a patch of blue sky (which nothing more than the sky’s reflection in the water). Each and every photographer should build at least one photograph in similar rigorous conditions for framing.

Michael Kircher photographs the Potomac River Gorge for other five years. It started simply, as a personal project. It has grown into a true passion. “The place is amazing. Great beauty, wildlife, adventure. And it’s all just outside of Washington, DC!”

Like many, I just sort of fell into photography. It’s difficult for me to pin point the time when it went from being just a fun exercise to something much more than that. But somewhere along the way I realized I couldn’t live without it. A hobby turned profession turned passion.

The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.