How did you get started shooting mixed martial arts?
I was big into Brazilian jiujitsu and muay thai, and I wanted to turn my camera onto what I loved. I started shooting portraits for fight posters and thought it would be fun to accompany one of my friends down to a fight in Mexico. I shot that fight, and shot a couple more. With just four fights under my belt, I was asked to shoot a huge Strikeforce event. Fifty UFC fights later, and I’ve been all over the world.

Does your fighting experience help your work?
My rudimen​tary understanding of mixed martial arts has contributed immensely. Initially, it opened the door, but it also helps me understand the fighters’ technique. Photographers without fighting experience may not position themselves to be ready when that action is happening. You have to make sure you’re in the right spot around the cage to catch that amazing knockout.

Walk us through shooting a fight.
We don’t look at the fight event in terms of a single night; we look at it as a week. There’s an open workout process, so all the fighters will come, warm up, and train—I’ll shoot those. After that, I’ll shoot the press conference. The next day they do weigh-ins. If I know the fighters, I’ll meet with them the night before as they’re cutting weight. I’ll sit in the 110-degree sauna with them. It gets pretty wild and they’re certainly suffering. Imagine cutting 20 pounds in a day!

What about the fight itself?
The fights start at 3:30 p.m. and last for a solid six hours. If you don’t pace yourself, there’s a risk of burning out, so I’ll listen to music and make sure I have a little bit of food on me. When the fighters are walking out, I’ll be six inches from these guys, capturing these great moments right before they’re about to hop in the cage. Once you get in your flow, you’re in a beautiful place where you’re just glued to the action.

What gear is essential for you?
I use Nikon D3s and D3 bodies, 70–200mm f/2.8G VR, 24–70mm f/2.8G, and 14–24mm f/2.8G Nikon zoom lenses, and a 50mm f/1.4G Nikon. I also shoot a lot of fun portraits with my Contax T3—a 35mm-film point-and-shoot camera. In digital, I shoot JPEGs instead of RAW because I can shoot longer bursts and don’t use as much storage space. If I were always shooting RAW, my buffer would fill up quicker and I would end up missing the shot that I really need. For gym portraits, I’ll also use three Profoto D1 Air monolights with a couple reflectors.

What sort of unique challenges do UFC photographers face?
The biggest challenge is keeping your concentration level up when you’re cage-side, shooting for six and a half hours. It can also be a tough lifestyle. Picture traveling for 21 hours to get to Rio de Janeiro. You check in and the first thing you need to do is to go shoot an open workout for four and a half hours, in a place that you’ve never been. You do that four times throughout the week. Back at home on Monday, we’re planning shoots and finalizing contracts. If you weren’t 100-percent in love with both photography and the sport, it would be a tough road.

_James Law, the photography director for UFC magazine, travels the world shooting mixed martial arts fights. See more of his work at __PopPhoto.com/JamesLaw and www.jameslawphotography.com_

The post I, Photographer: Martial arts photographer James Law appeared first on Popular Photography.

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For Will Steacy, telling stories runs in the blood. Steacy, 33, is a fine-art photographer who grew up in Philadelphia and comes from five generations of newspaper men. So after years of relying on newsprint to inform work documenting socioeconomic issues—like decrepit living conditions in New Orleans post-Katrina—Steacy turned his camera on his hometown newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Deadline was born.

Steacy got access with help from his dad Thomas, the paper’s national/foreign editor. Starting in 2009, he spent four years visiting the newsroom where the staff put stories together and the printing house where they were put to paper. He exposed thousands of large-format Kodak Portra negatives with his tripod-mounted K.B. Canham 4X5 field camera. Wanting to witness every step of the process, Steacy often worked 16-hour days, and in the process, grew close with the staff. “I spent a lot of time having really long in-depth conversations with reporters, editors, mail room guys, you know, just talking with people,” he says.

Steacy watched the paper struggle to cope with falling revenues, lay off many of its writers and editors (including his father), and get priced out of its historic home in Philadelphia’s iconic Elverson Building. The departure from the Elverson was a particularly bitter loss, Steacy says, and for many observers came to embody the industry’s great decay. Many of his photographs portray the slow disintegration of the newsroom as the staff moved to the third floor of a renovated department store.

At the Inquirer, years of staff cuts have taken their toll on the paper. While its writers collected an astonishing 17 Pulitzer Prizes in the two decades before 1990, the two decades since then—a time marked by regular rounds of lay-offs—have seen only one. Steacy, who hopes to publish Deadline as a book by early 2014, hopes to draw attention to newspapers’ human element.

But above all, Steacy is grateful for the opportunity to experience the world from his father’s point of view. “This project is a love song to my father. It honors him and what he devoted his life to.”

Empty newsroom at the Elverson

Rolls of Paper

Skeleton Crew on Moving Day

Printing Press

The Circulation Department

Editorial Cartoonist Tony Auth

The Inquirer’s public Health Reporter Don Sapatkin in the Newsroom at the Elverson Building

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Google Street View has been some interesting places. Now, they used their army of cameras to create an interactive tour of the Burj Khalifa, the monolithic skyscraper (2,717 feet!) at the heart of Dubai.

To supplement the tour, Google put together a behind-the-scenes look at the process they used to document the Burj Khalifa, which we’ve posted below.

Using the Street View Interface, you can explore the grounds surrounding the tower and a number of the building’s floors and observation decks. This includes a dramatic panorama from a maintenance platform hanging outside the 73rd floor. Using their backpack-based Trekker camera and rolling Trolley camera, Google personnel covered a large portion of the Burj Khalifa grounds over the course of three days to record this set of images.

This is the latest in a series of efforts to provide Street View access to interesting and unique locations, including famous art museums and local businesses.

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When the Lytro Light Field Cameras were first released in early 2012, they already had the potential for a built-in wireless connection, but it was turned off at the firmware level. Today, Lytro Inc. announced Lytro Mobile, a free app for iOS devices that allows you to view Lytro images on mobile devices and to upload them to Lytro.com, Facebook, and Twitter.

In order to use Lytro Mobile, Lytro-owners need to update their software to activate the camera’s wireless capabilities. The update will allow Lytro cameras to communicate directly with iOS devices, letting you send pictures straight to your iPhone or iPad through either a cellular of Wi-Fi network. Even if you don’t have a Lytro the app let’s you view and manipulate images uploaded by others.

In addition, Lytro Mobile will let you save Lytro images to your camera as animated GIFs and access a series of instructional tips that Lytro plans on adding to in the future. It’s interesting to see Lytro adding real functionality to their cameras via firmware updates. Let’s hope they keep it up.

You can download Lytro Mobile on the iTunes App Store.

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