I first began work on my “Explosion” series in 2004. I’ve always been interested in the relationship between the real and the imagined, and I’ve noticed how eyewitnesses to extreme events with fires and explosions refer to them as “filmic” or “like a movie,” because they’re used to seeing these events so often in action films.

Through an earlier series, I’d made a police contact who knew that I was interested in pyrotechnics and simulated environments, and who referred me to the Fire Services College in Gloucestershire, England. Its p.r. manager was willing to make me an artist-in-residence.

I had access to many facilities, but what interested me most was the Burn Unit. For forensic training exercises, shipping containers are set-dressed as domestic interiors or offices, and then burned down to ash. Trainees have to rake through the ashes and work out the cause of the fire, with the help of other evidence given by training officers.

For the set pictured here, “House Fire,” the scenario the officers had come up with was that children were home alone, playing with matches, and trying to get fire to come out of a toy dragon’s mouth.

For the burn exercises I could attend, I had only about 5 minutes to set up my camera and 5 minutes to take photographs, and I had to be very patient and adaptive. I couldn’t move props around or direct the action, and often I had unworkable compositions.

“House Fire” was one of the more successful situations because I had space to work with framing and composing. I was standing just inside of the shipping container, with my Mamiya RZ loaded with Kodak Portra 400NC, a portable flash on a stand, and a small softbox for fill flash, speedily shooting until the smoke levels grew too high. This was the last shot I took before I made a quick exit with my equipment.

This series was later included in my book, Explosions, Fires, and Public Order (Aperture, 2010), along with other photos I’ve taken of related simulated crisis environments. In terms of genre, the photos are documentary, but they’re documenting a representation of another reality, which makes it more interesting. You feel like you’re witnessing something dramatic, but what you’re seeing is very controlled.

Sarah Pickering is an exhibiting photographer based in London, England. See more of her work at www.sarahpickering.co.uk.

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When i was a little girl, my mother was an assistant curator at the Natural History Museum in Raleigh, NC. When she brought me with her to work, I would spend hours in its diorama room. These exhibits are both fascinating and macabre; I think of them now as a relic of our troubled coexistence with nature.

Visiting the Natural History Museum in New York, I accidentally captured my husband in a picture of a diorama. I liked the idea—the animals have been there for decades, but nothing is more fleeting than a reflection. I began returning and waiting by exhibits with a bounce flash, capturing people as they passed.

I love this photo because the girls are particularly fashionable, and there’s such a successful melding of the bodies. The one girl seems almost alarmed or uneasy, which is very fitting for a gazelle.

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I moved to New York City in 1996, and for the past five or six years I’ve spent a lot of time photographing Brooklyn. I’m interested most in the different communities in various neighborhoods. Though I’ve been interested in the Hasidim in South Williamsburg, I haven’t had many opportunities so far to photograph them. Many of their events are memorial, and many exclude film or video equipment.

One spring weekend in 2009, I woke very early and heard a news report about the Sun Blessing, an event that’s very significant to the community. It only takes place once every 28 years—it’s based on a cycle recorded in the Talmudic calendar, and according to their faith it signifies the solar anniversary of the beginning of the world. Seeing that it was very near to where I live, I jumped on my bike with my Nikon D200 and 17–55mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens and headed over.

I arrived near 5 a.m., just before the gathering started. For the first couple of hours I just spoke to the people who were arriving, asking them questions. No one minded me being there, and I think that it helped that it was a celebratory event—they were mainly waiting for the Grand Rebbe to arrive and hear him speak.

They’d erected a platform for him, about 10 feet above the crowd, and at some point someone said to me, “Do you want to go up there? He’s not here yet, so you can take some pictures.”

The men helped me climb up. It was an ideal vantage point, and it was an overcast day, which made it easier to shoot with just available light.

But soon it got crowded and, since I didn’t have any other way to exit, I climbed down to a flatbed truck that was supporting the platform, and that’s where I took this photo—right before the Grand Rebbe appeared to speak to them about the Sun Blessing.

I like photographing in Brooklyn because I like learning about the different people who live there, but also because I like having the opportunity to interact with them.

See more of Robert Hooman’s work at www.roberthooman.com__.

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I began the series “Illuminant Body” for my master’s thesis at the School of Visual Arts in New York. I’ve always been inspired by color and using different-colored light sources on a subject against a dark background. I wanted to use that to explore extravagance and sensuality in fashion photography. I added light painting to the series to add movement—it brings a perception of color in motion.

I’d been contacting various modeling agencies and worked with a stylist to find jewelry for each shoot. I set up two continuous light sources: on the left, with a yellow gel, and on the right, with cyan. In the front, I had a softbox with the flash set to front-curtain sync, and the camera set to expose for 0.8 seconds. When the flash pops, the subject is frozen—I use the remaining exposure to move the camera slightly up and down, painting in the sides with light.

On some shoots the model wouldn’t quite fit the mood, or the lighting setup wouldn’t quite work. I could tell within 10 seconds of shooting that this model knew how to move, and I was able to make the colors move around her.

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I first learned about the construction of the Hoover Dam bypass bridge while on a road trip in 2009. I was so fascinated by it that I began photographing it as a personal project for 22 months. The final series, “The Bridge at Hoover Dam,” will be published as a book in the fall of 2011 by Nazraeli Press.

I wanted to capture the bridge in its state of transition, but also within its complex landscape—its relationship to the Colorado River, Lake Mead, and the Black Canyon. Photographing a work under construction puts you under pressure to constantly reevaluate, knowing you’ll never see it the same.

My 10 shoots from a helicopter enhanced that feeling, because I was working from changing perspectives. I’d be in the air, framing and reframing, trying to capture a unique moment of the bridge in a relatively simple way that also shows its relationship to the landscape. This photo was made in June 2009. On this particular day there was a bank of clouds coming over the ridge, and while I cursed it at first, once I was in the air I appreciated how it made the light from this direction more diffuse. The bridge was at a poignant moment where the arch segments were finally coming together, and I wanted to express the tension of the two arches trying to meet in the middle. The lighting allowed me to capture this as well as the complicated landscape.

Now, the bridge is complete and open to the public. It was an engaging challenge—certain days I’d have beautiful light during a particularly photogenic phase of construction, but I’d never know if I’d have that same gift later on.

See Jamey Stillings’ full series at www.bridgeathooverdam.com.

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I took this in Rwanda, where I went in 2008 with two charities, Tearfund UK and Compassion UK. They help children in third-world countries create products for export, to earn money for their communities. This child was making a basket by a window in a very dark class- room—there isn’t any electricity. I wanted to make people wonder about what’s going on in the image. This could be someone doing a task under extraordinarily difficult conditions for very little money; it could also be someone who has a skill and who enjoys working in his trade. For me, this image shows craftsmanship by a very young individual, using what materials he has, to make things he loves.
-Jide Alakija

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Every two years, elite military officers from many Western nations compete in an event called the Swiss Raid Commando. This is a hardcore, 72-hour-long, nonstop event involving war-tactic strategy focused on counterterrorism, including freeing hostages.

It’s a friendly competition, done in part to learn from others’ tactics and techniques. But because it involves special forces, only a few photographers are allowed to shoot it for newspapers and magazines.

As part of the competition, airborne units land in specific locations at specific times. What you see here is someone from the Swiss Grenadiers’ Airborne unit coming in from a mission. Being in the middle of the action, everything goes very fast—I was trying to capture the impact and the discipline of it.

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“Nocturnal Visitor” is from a series on nectar-feeding bats and nocturnal flowers that are bat-pollinated. Bats find these flowers with echolocation; the flowers have evolved to be easier to detect acoustically. It’s an alliance.

This photo was made in Costa Rica, in a biological station’s flight tent where bats fly freely after spending some time observing the researchers. Nectar-seeking bats have extraordinary object-recognition skills, and they would search my figure and face in the darkness; because of the way a human nose sticks out, they often come close to see if it’s a flower. I had to “teach” the bats with flight nectar to get them to approach the flower in a certain way to capture them, which I did using three or four flashes set on low power.

We don’t often have the chance to meet with bats. Perhaps these photographs can alter the way we see them.

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For Scott Ferguson, photographing a league of Mixed Martial Arts fighters meant changing his ways. “My work is more conceptual shots, where I have control over the lighting and the scenario,” the St. Louis-based advertising photographer explains. “This project was more like photojournalism, which I have very little experience in.”

But in mid-2010, he found himself seeking that type of venture. Ferguson had learned about MMA fighting, a full-contact hybrid form of combat sport, when the son of a friend took it up several years earlier: “I’d watched him transform himself, physically and mentally, through great discipline,” he says. Attracted to the idea of such a transformation, he contacted his friend’s son’s league and got the okay to shoot. By showing immediate respect for the fighters and offering to make a promotional video, he quickly built trust and access at matches and the gym.

Greater were the creative and technical challenges. “I wanted to do portraits as well as action photos of the fights, many of which took place in crowded, dimly lit areas,” says Ferguson.

Used to a tripod and an arsenal of lights, he instead handheld his Canon EOS 5D Mark II and wide-angle or telephoto zoom, using just a Speedlite. “I used a lot of bounced light, which is less intrusive,” he says. A Smith-Victor over-shoulder stabilizing brace helped add steadiness.

For training and pre-fight por- traits, he’s used a direct approach; post-fight capture requires more sensitivity, as these athletes are often severely beaten. “MMA takes extreme discipline,” he says. “I’ve never once seen anybody lose con- trol of their emotion post-match, which shows respect for the train- ing. I want to respect that, as well.”

Now, more than a year into the project, Ferguson has a great series of images and no plan to quit. “Putting yourself in an environ- ment where you’re constantly pushing yourself, while really get- ting to know the people, has given me a completely new experience of photography,” he says. “And it’s also let me live through them vicariously.”

See Scott Ferguson’s professional and personal work at ScottFergusonPhoto.com.

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