In the film era, medium-format photography was considered 35mm’s clumsy cousin, trading a bulkier camera and slower operation for substantial gains in image quality. That calculus has persisted into the digital age, making medium-format digital cameras a nonissue, but the reasons are more complicated now. Back at the turn of the millennium, Canon’s EOS D30 digital SLR was first to swap out the trusty, archetypal CCD—the charge-coupled device that had served to capture images since the first video camcorders—for a CMOS image sensor. (That stands for “complementary metal-oxide semiconductor,” if you care.) Almost all digital cameras with image sensors 35mm-sized or smaller have since followed suit, and for good reason. The gains of CMOS’s very different image-capture technology are considerable.

Medium-format cameras, by contrast, have clung to their clumsy CCDs—until late January, when out came the first medium-format digital back to incorporate a CMOS image sensor, the Phase One IQ250. Hasselblad tried to claim the race with a promissory note for the Hasselblad H5D-50c, which should be available by the time you read this; Ricoh isn’t far behind with its Pentax 645D 2014. (The year is part of the name, at least for now.) The Phase One and Hasselblad reportedly use the same 50-megapixel Sony-built chip; specs on the Pentax were yet to come as of this writing.

That it took so long for CMOS to make its way into medium format seems inexplicable. While CMOS sensors were once inferior to CCDs in their image quality—which made them a nonstarter for quality-driven medium format—this hasn’t been the case for years. CMOS chips are also much less power- hungry than CCDs. They allow images to be captured more quickly and in rapid succession, which in turn produces smooth video. But the game-changing thing about CMOS sensors in medium-format cameras, at least for photographers working outside the studio, is that they are more efficient than CCDs at their main assignment, gathering light. More about this in a minute.

One other benefit, of no small consequence to manufacturers, is that CMOS chips are cheaper to make—if you make them fairly small. There’s the rub. Cutting up a silicon wafer in pieces big enough for medium-format chips is a dicey business. And a few bad pixels can ruin an image sensor that is much larger and thus more expensive to manufacture than a 35mm-sized, or smaller, sensor. You have to throw more of them away. Given that sales of medium-format cameras are orders of magnitude less than those of more compact cameras, the economies of scale that apply to smaller sensors—whether in a cellphone or a digital SLR—simply don’t come into play.

Indeed, while CMOS sensors are cheaper to manufacture, it seems this won’t make an immediate difference in the breathtaking prices of medium-format digital cameras. The new Phase One costs $35,000, nearly 12 times the price of the full-frame Nikon D800, which at 36MP has only a third fewer pixels. That doesn’t even include the $5,000 or $6,000 for a medium-format camera body. The Hasselblad H5D-50c is almost as pricey. (We can hope that the Pentax will be less expensive given that the current 40MP Pentax 645D now costs a paltry $7,000.) And whether for cost-saving reasons or manufacturing constraints, that price buys you a physically smaller sensor than traditional medium format: The Phase One IQ250’s CMOS chip measures 33×44 millimeters, as opposed to the 40x54mm CCDs of previous Phase Ones. This “sensor crop” causes an effective increase in focal length, just as it does with the APS-sized chips used in 35mm-style DSLRs. In the IQ250’s case, the focal length multiplier is 1.3X.

Forgetting those prices for a moment—and hoping that Moore’s Law drives them down in a hurry—in what ways does a CMOS sensor really benefit medium-format photographers? For one thing, it handles more tasks than a CCD. A CMOS chip converts the analog electrical information that comprises a photograph into digital form (A-to-D) before that data even leaves the chip, while a CCD must send analog information to a separate processor for conversion. And, unlike a CCD, a CMOS image sensor makes initial autofocus calculations onboard. When it does send data elsewhere, a CMOS chip has more pathways along which to dispatch electrons. These abilities allow a CMOS chip to speed up the camera, affording a faster framing rate and nimbler autofocus, much-needed improvements with still-sluggish medium-format digital. (CMOS, along with ever-faster image-processing engines, has endowed smaller cameras with flashy features such as “sweep” panorama and in-camera HDR.) In the Phase One IQ250, the CMOS chip doubles shooting speed, though at 2 frames per second rather than the previous 1 fps or less, photographers probably won’t be shooting sports anytime soon with medium-format digital.

They will, however, be able to capture images in much lower light levels without as much annoying image noise. While current CCD-based medium-format digital cameras give iffy results even at their modest top sensitivity of ISO 800, the new CMOS models promise pleasing image quality at that speed and very acceptable quality at their top ISO of 6400. Photographers will be able to handhold a medium-format camera where none has gone before—capturing unblurred available-light candids that weren’t possible with CCD models. What’s more, CMOS delivers better image quality at longer shutter speeds, so it should open up new possibilities with tripod-mounted photography as well.

If the idea of finally putting CMOS sensors into medium-format digital cameras is to make them a viable alternative to high-resolution DSLRs, we’re not there yet. The first of these models, even if they deliver the expected image quality in lower light, are still likely to be too sluggish for photographers accustomed to 35mm-style DSLRs. Just as significant, they’re simply too expensive for all but the most well-endowed shooters (and those who rent or lease their gear for commercial work). Yet as anyone who has watched digital technology race through the photographic world should know by now, those hurdles may yet be cleared.

NOTEWORTHY SPECS: PHASE ONE IQ250
SENSOR 50MP 44x33mm medium-format CMOS
SENSITIVITY ISO 100–6400
LCD 3.2-inch 1.15 million-dot touchscreen
BACK MOUNTS Phase One 645DF+ and Mamiya 645DF+; Hasselblad H1 and H2; Hasselblad 555ELD, 553ELX, 503CW, and 501CM; Contax 645AF; Mamiya RZ67 Pro IID and RB67 (with an adaptor)
BUY IT $35,000, back only; phaseone.com

NOTEWORTHY SPECS:HASSELBLAD H5D-50C
SENSOR 50MP 44x33mm medium-format CMOS
SENSITIVITY ISO 100–6400
LCD 3-inch 460,320-dot TFT
SHUTTER SPEED 1/800 sec to 12 min
VIEWFINDER OPTIONS HVD 90x (90-degree eye-level with 3.1X magnification); HV 90x (90-degree eye-level with 2.7X magnification); HVM (waist-level with 3.2X magnification)
BUY IT $27,500, back only; hasselbladusa.com

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You don’t have to be a native to earn a place in the USA Landscape Photographer of the Year Awards. “We received work by photographers from around the world, which is just what we were hoping for,” says Charlie Waite, the founder of this new contest. “We are delighted to have seen such a superbly high standard of photography, with distinctive styles and an incredible variety of images.”

Classic View: Metlako Falls

My USA: Oregon

Urban Landscape: Lake Michigan, Chicago

Landscape on the Move: Yellowstone National Park

Overall Youth Winner: Yosemite National Park

Overall Youth Winner: Sierra Nevada Mountains, California

Black & White: New York City

Overall Adult Winner: Glacier National Park

Overall Adult Winner: Glacier National Park

Overall Adult Winner: Glacier National Park

Judge’s Choice: Death Valley, California

Highly Recommended: San Diego

Highly Recommended: Chicago

Highly Recommended: Santa Fe Mountians, New Mexico

Highly Recommended: San Francisco

Highly Recommended: Paradise Cove

Highly Recommended: Alaska

Highly Recommended: New York City

Highly Recommended: San Francisco

Highly Recommended: Shiprock, New Mexico

Highly Recommended: New York City

Highly Recommended: San Francisco

Highly Recommended: Death Valley, California

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ohn Lennon and Yoko Ono during the filming of a video to promote their new album, “Double Fantasy”

The photo-collecting scene seems to be in limbo these days. The prices commercial galleries ask for fine-art photography keep escalating, while few seem interested in taking on unknown or emerging artists. Low-cost alternatives such as Etsy offer photographic prints alongside homemade baubles or framed photos so bland they’re reduced to decorators’ placeholders. What’s an aspiring collector to do? How does a relatively unknown photographer make a buck?

A happy medium can be found in cyberspace. Many online collecting websites now aim for the middle ground, with signed, high-quality prints at prices lower than you’d pay for a new lens. Whether you want to start a serious collection, populate your walls, or sell your own work, consider these online marketplaces.

Several sites included here offer artwork in other media, and they vary in the quantity and quality of their offerings. Most let you submit your work for possible inclusion. They keep prices low in part by forgoing tight editions, which are often encouraged by commercial galleries to inflate the value of prints. Several online galleries take a more democratic approach, offering editions in the dozens or hundreds, or even just “open.”

The downside: You may find a lot of derivative work in these collections. We 
spotted plenty of facile, Maggie Taylor–inspired fairy-tale collages; tack-sharp retail spaces a la Andreas Gursky; and distressed, multi-panel Starn twins knockoffs. There are nudes with f-holes in their backs (roll over, Man Ray) and people with arms coming out of their eye sockets.

Shop carefully. Watch for the gems. Happy hunting!

ROCK PAPER PHOTO

rockpaperphoto.com

For music buffs, Rock Paper Photo can’t be beat as a place to buy original prints at affordable prices, with artists ranging from Death Cab for Cutie back to French Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt. Many shots are rarely seen, such as Allan Tannenbaum’s candid of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which starts at $150 for 8.5×11 prints, with signed 13×19 prints at $750. RPP’s subjects are not all rockers: The rich Columbia Records archive, from which an 11×14 print costs $300, contains images of earlier stars from genres including classical and jazz. The site also has categories for celebrities, sports figures, and art and fashion personalities—so if you’re a photographer who has access to the elite, upload 50 images and wait for curatorial approval. The site invites “guest curators” to pick faves from the archive, so you get rock-and-roll through the eyes of, say, Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash. Some selections are shown as a group, such as Remembering Lou Reed, a tribute to the late rocker; 11×14 silver prints of Reed by Mark Hanauer, Andrew Kent, and Steve Emberton go for $400 to $600. A new collection of unseen Beatles pictures by Henry Grossman includes 11x14s for $500. Our advice: Don’t think twice and pick up an 11×14 black-and-white variation of Don Hunstein’s cover shot for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan for just $300.

SAATCHI ART

saatchiart.com

An online extension of the eponymous London gallery, Saatchi’s site reflects that art world institution’s broad take on contemporary work as well as its commitment to showing lesser-known artists. The site offers tens of thousands of photographic prints of all conceivable genres, from purely decorative to dark and gritty. There are one-click filters for style (from Dada to Folk), subjects (cats to culture), and location, as well as for size, orientation, and of course price, which is adjustable with a slider up to $25,000.

Click “View original in a room” and you’ll see the print you’re interested in hanging above a sofa next to a potted plant and a walking figure. Mouse over dimensions, if the print is available in different sizes, and its proportions change relative to the room. While a so-called original may be pricey, you can often get it at smaller sizes for a song. Ed Freeman’s “Sunken Bus, Bombay Beach, CA” sells for $3,500 as a 40×53 original C-print; the same image goes for $113 at 12×16. There are lots of good pieces in the $300 to $400 range from an eclectic group of artists. Interested in becoming one of them? Fill out an online form and upload examples of your work; if you’re accepted you get an exceptionally high 70 percent of your price, with no contract or exclusivity. Saatchi can even do the printing for you.

ARTSPACE

artspace.com

You’ll spot a lot of artistic brand names on this site, where out of nearly 4,500 works for sale, about a third are photos. Set the medium to photography and click the price slider to a maximum of $500, and you get about 300 images to choose from. Artspace offers special editions of work by big-idea photographers such as Matthew Pillsbury (an 8×10 for $500, from an edition of 40), Ross Bleckner (a 12×17 for $250, from an edition of 250), and David Levinthal, whose 12×17 prints go for just $300, from editions of 75 (though at least some of these are apparently approved 
copies from his big Polaroids). It’s not uncommon here to find as few as one image from a given well-known photographer. (Unknown photographers need not apply to Artspace.)

The site also offers good deals outside its own editions, some in partnership with galleries and book publishers, such as a $500 12×16 digital C-print (edition of 50) by Magnum photographer Jonas Bendikson from his great series on the remains of the Soviet Union. Fork out a few hundred dollars more and the horizons expand: We found a nice 11×19 silver print by Sally Gall, from an Aperture-sponsored edition of 15, going for $900. One of our favorite Artspace offerings is a series of contact sheets from famous Magnum photographers, enlarged to 16×20 with all their original grease-pencil markings on them. These include an Eve Arnold roll from shooting on the set of The Misfits (with Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable), Brigitte Bardot doing Philippe Halsman’s famous “jump,” and James Dean just looking cool for Dennis Stock. Get your favorite for $350.

CIRCUIT GALLERY

circuitgallery.com

Circuit Gallery is a brick-and-mortar art and photo showcase based in Toronto, but that real-world space is just an anchor of sorts for an impressive online gallery of photographs and other works on paper. While Circuit’s stable of photographers seems somewhat exclusive, its pricing isn’t. Most photographers are asked, politely, to sell an 8×10 for $30, an 11×14 for $60, or a 16×20 for $120, in editions of up to 500. The gallery takes 50 percent, sometimes even less depending on print specs.

When browsing, set the price at $120 and you get a nice if narrow selection of prints to choose from, most of them pigment inkjet prints. Print sizes increase and editions become more exclusive at higher prices. Click $121–$200 and you get another highly varied group of prints that are larger (up to 16×20), though some of these are also available in smaller, cheaper sizes. Spend $500 or more and you get work by photographers who want a higher price but may be offering a bigger print or a smaller edition. Alejandro Cartagena’s “Untitled Lost River #6,” from his Suburbia Mexicana Project, sells for $1,150 for a 20×16 in an edition of ten. There are pictures here by bigger names—such as images by Donald Weber of the VII photo agency, from his haunting Interrogations series—starting at $3,000. For artists who submit and are accepted, Circuit offers an affordable inkjet printing service. Editions 
on the site are exclusive to Circuit, but artists can show at, and affiliate with, other physical galleries. The important thing, says a Circuit spokesperson, is to make ownership of real art possible for “people who have graduated from posters.”

20X200

youshouldbuyart.com

Gallery owner Jen Bekman has entered the online print scene with a website that, value-wise, blows all but Circuit out of the water. The site sells 8×10 prints for a mere $24, though a number of those have already sold out their large editions. Bigger names at 8×10 command $60. That price will get you a snowflake by the Starn twins or a 12-frame study of Fay the Weimeraner by William Wegman. (We’d pay the $120 for an 11×14 version.) Amy Stein’s “Powerpuff Girls” (right) starts at $24 for 8×8 prints; you can get a 16×16 for $240 from an edition of 50.

The number of works by living and emerging 
photographers on 20×200 is smaller than it first appears because there are quite a lot of archival images. (Submissions apparently are not being accepted.) Though you’ll find a dozen or so of Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion studies available at different sizes and some nice NASA images, much of the archival work focuses on a few of the great women of documentary photography: 
Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, and Berenice Abbott, all selling in pigment inkjet. Our choice for something substantial, contemporary, and likely to increase in value is a 16×16, Roger Ballen’s “Culprit,” the only one of his works on the site, from an edition of 50. In 2013, 20×200 suffered a bit of an online backlash due to fulfillment issues, which reportedly have been resolved. While the collection is relatively small, the site reflects Bekman’s artistic taste—which, based on the number of already sold-out editions, is quite the commodity.

U GALLERY

ugallery.com

With a selection of around 1,500 photographs, UGallery makes a decided effort to contain print prices, and the work is good. Price controls even 
apply to some limited editions—one of only 10 available 16x20s might set you back just $300 or $400—but many prints are from open editions. Others fall in between, with edition sizes of 50 or 100. Chris Gug’s “Alien” ranges from $375 for 16×24 prints to $475 for 24×36, from a total edition of 200.

Opt for a smaller print size, if one is available, and you could pay something between $100 and $200. Mark Elverson, one of UGallery’s “top artists” (best sellers who get a little badge next to their pictures in the gallery view), does studies of colored swirling smoke that start at $175 for a 12×18. For a nice abstract like his, though, it might be worth spending the $400 for a 24×36.

While browsing, you can filter by size (XS to XL), price ($100 to $2,000+), or even palette, which you do by clicking a color swatch. 
UGallery’s “virtual wall” button displays the image, at your selected size, on a wall behind a sofa, side table, and lamp; you change the wall and floor colors by clicking on swatches. A loupe feature on the site lets you scrutinize the image you’re interested in. But if you get the picture on your real wall and decide within a week that it doesn’t suit you or your decor, you can return it for a refund. UGallery’s easygoing ways extend to photographers who sell on the site, with whom they split the proceeds 50-50 and don’t require physical-gallery exclusivity. (Photographers apply online for a five-dollar fee.) UGallery can do the printing for you, but if you do it yourself, a proper-sized prepaid shipping box is mailed to you upon each sale. You just put your print in the box and drop it off at the nearest FedEx location.

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“I’ve never been a documentarian,” says Andrea Modica. Anyone familiar with Modica’s pensive images would agree. Yet one of her summer projects seems, on its surface, to be documentary: a study of horses recovering from surgical anesthesia in Bagnarolo di Budrio near Bologna, Italy.

Modica has been to Italy many times since a 1990 Fulbright Scholarship in Sicily. This summer she connected with a veterinarian who specializes in horses, a man who also happened to be an artist. Sympathetic to Modica’s fascination with his day job, the vet invited her to set up her 8×10 view camera where she pleased. “I was primarily drawn to the post-operative recovery rooms,” says the photographer. “They were simple padded stalls with overhead windows that created beautiful, soft light, with floors covered in the doctor’s shredded junk mail, medical journals, and art publications.”

Modica’s horses are at odds with our usual notions of equine beauty and grandness. Rather than standing tall they languish on the floor, mouths open, as likely to be dead as alive. That uncertainty makes the images disturbing and poignant. “I’m deeply interested in ambiguity,” says Modica. “The images are printed in platinum, by contact, so they have a beauty that may seem in opposition to the horses’ vulnerable state.”

Photographing this subject with a view camera seems counter to the demands of its environment, in which low light creates a risk of blur. “I required a minimum one-second exposure,” Modica recalls. “The horses were still enough for that. But I got that adrenaline rush from having to get it done before the horse woke up and bolted. An attending vet would quickly close the doors to the stall at the first flicker of an eyelid.”

When asked about the impact on viewers of her unorthodox representation of an animal that has such sentimental meaning for humans, Modica demurs. “Though shooting is often emotionally charged for me, my method of working is to tackle the problem of physically making the photograph,” she says. “So I give little conscious attention to what the outcome might mean for a viewer. Of course, this changes after I live with the image and think about putting it out into the world.”

Andrea Modica is a professor at Drexel University.

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Richard Ross has devoted the past five years to an exploration of the growing problem of imprisoned young people, creating portraits of them in detention facilities across the country. He presented this work in 2012’s award-winning book Juvenile in Justice, which featured 150 portraits and interviews with their subjects.

A second volume, Girls in Justice, is due out in January 2015. “As the project evolved, I realized that the children in this system aren’t all just small adults in orange jumpsuits,” says the photographer. “The girls experience incarceration differently from boys.” Getting into facilities was tough, and Ross was not allowed to name the girls or show their faces—which is why, in most of the images, his subject turns away; he blurs those that would have contained a recognizable face.

Ross is comfortable with this limitation. “I don’t want these kids having an image come back to haunt them,” he explains. He also feels that the absence of an identifiable face makes the images more universal. “I want someone to feel that it could be herself, or his or her own daughter, or any kid they might know whose normal adolescent behavior has been criminalized,” he says.

When Ross first meets his subjects, he sits on the floor of their cells. “I spend about an hour taking notes,” he says. Ross’s interviews confirm the circumstances, typically beyond a girl’s control, that landed her in detention. At the end, he says, “I cry. These kids are heartbreaking. But it’s a privilege to have them trust me with their stories.” And the stories are crucial—excerpts from the interviews accompany each image as its title.

While an art critic might make much of the connection between Girls in Justice and earlier projects such as the Guggenheim-funded The 
Architecture of Authority (spaces that “exert power” over people), or Waiting for the End of the World (post–Cold War bomb shelters)—and the way in which they show how fluid the line between security and captivity can be—the photographer’s objectives are more altruistic. “I’m more interested in changing the way we treat kids,” says Ross. Girls in Justice will hang this fall in the rotunda of Washington, D.C.’s Russell Senate Office Building, where, he hopes, “policy makers see it and it moves the discussion forward.”

Richard Ross is a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara.

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“El Sistema” refers to the Sistema de Orquestas de Guatemala, a nonprofit group that aims to give hope and self-esteem to that Latin American 
nation’s disadvantaged young people by teaching them to play classical music. Jaime Permuth produced the project’s photographs and video on a recent three-week trip to Guatemala.

The photographer’s first subject was a small string orchestra in a remote agricultural village. “The locals refer to it as the Orchestra of Vegetables,” says Permuth. “The conductor finances the group with proceeds from his yearly crop.” He then traveled to a larger town with a 50-piece youth orchestra now sponsored by the local government. “Originally, a group of five musicians earned money to buy the instruments by selling homemade 
burritos from backpacks in the local marketplace,” he says. Permuth’s final stop was a still-larger orchestra of students at a Catholic school in a crime-ridden neighborhood of Guatemala City. “The school has been under siege from local gang members trying to extort money,” he says. “The perimeter is surrounded by razor wire.”

Permuth says that photographing in the school was like working in a bunker. Indeed, the ease and upbeat nature of El Sistema’s images belie the often difficult circumstances of their creation. Permuth didn’t make things any easier with his determination not simply to show young people learning and playing their instruments in formal settings, but also to put their experience in the context of a sometimes desperate daily life by including images of such things as the sugar cane harvest, their ramshackle homes, and the daunting barricades that are often part of the landscape. “I wanted to raise awareness of the dire conditions in which my country’s youth struggle to reach adulthood and self-realization,” Permuth explains. “But I also wanted to find a metaphor for hope and redemption.”

Permuth spent the rest of his summer in Washington, D.C., on a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. That project, titled The Street Becomes, incorporates archival images from the Smith-sonian’s Anacostia Community Museum and the National Museum of American History.

Jamie Permuth is a faculty member at School of Visual Arts

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Reports of the death of analog photography have been greatly exaggerated. In the consumer world, film may have been sunk by digital technology, but wet black-and-white darkroom photography is alive and well in academia. “I’ve heard the rumors,” says Tom Shillea, director of art programs at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “But we still have one of the best-equipped black-and-white darkrooms in the region.”

Ask college photo teachers to name a school that has given up traditional black-and-white, in fact, and you’ll draw plenty of blanks. Most photo programs now offer instruction in digital imaging along with traditional approaches to darkroom photography, of course. And the programs that have abandoned film—including some community colleges and most high schools—have done so not necessarily because of a perceived loss of value in learning things the old-fashioned way, but for utilitarian reasons.

“We were the first community college in North Carolina to go completely digital,” says Blake Madden, who heads the photo program at McDowell Technical in Marion, North Carolina. “We discussed the issue at length, but given that the world of commercial photography was going almost exclusively digital, we thought it was in the best interest of our students.” He points out that he has just two years to prepare his students for possible careers in photography, and that having to teach the mechanics of traditional approaches might impede that.

The other factor in purging film, in North Carolina and elsewhere, has been cost. It’s harder than ever to pay for darkroom photography materials, given the shrinking budgets of publicly funded college systems. Time constraints have also driven analog photography out of associate’s degree-granting programs and professional schools. Hallmark Institute of Photography in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, is one example. Exclusively career-oriented, it offers a 10-month intensive curriculum that would probably be impossible without the immediate visual feedback provided by digital capture and printing. “We train students on what they’re going to find when they enter the working world,” says Lisa Robinson, director of education at Hallmark. “They’re not likely to encounter darkrooms. And in terms of teaching, digital lets students see their results right away, so that the lesson registers more quickly.”

Four-year programs, whether in art schools or liberal arts colleges, are divided in the way analog photography is incorporated into the curriculum. Some regard darkroom photography as a foundation skill—an important way to teach beginning students how the medium really works, unobscured by electronic technology. Digital imaging is offered only later. Other schools view wet black-and-white as a more advanced technique—something to try after a student has learned the basics through digital capture and printmaking. In these programs, the use of film is reserved for students who have made a serious commitment to photography.

Even in programs that start with film, students don’t always stick with it. “We have a couple of darkrooms and teach the fundamentals traditionally,” says Henry Horenstein, who teaches at Rhode Island School of Design and literally wrote the book on the subject. (His bestselling Black-and-White Photography: A Basic Manual has been the beginner’s bible for four decades.) “Students seem to like it that way, but ultimately they choose to go hybrid—shooting film then scanning it for digital printing—or to digital capture. We rarely see traditional black-and-white after a second- or third-level course.”

Maxine Payne, who heads the photography department at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, sees traditional black-and-white as the only true path in a liberal arts setting. She uses it to disabuse new students of the notion that they are already photographers. “What that often means is that they’ve taken pictures with their phones and put them on social media, or gotten them into a high-school yearbook or art show,” she says. “Rarely have they printed those pictures on anything more than a home printer. They also have no sense of failure, because they can shoot as much as they want and just delete what they don’t like—or use an app that corrects and often changes the original image to fit preconceived notions, usually from popular culture, about what makes a good photograph.”

Craig Stevens, a professor of photography at Georgia’s Savannah College of Art and Design, has observed the same phenomenon. “Digital technology is so good that it creates an automatic acceptance of the end product, as is,” he explains. “Using black-and-white film defies that notion. Students must consider exposure, development, and how technical choices combine with aesthetic decisions to affect the final image,” he says. It forces students who have grown up in the fast-and-furious world of digital to slow down.

Grace Oxley, one of Payne’s photography students at Hendrix College, corroborates that view. “Studying film photography has taught me to shoot and print more deliberately,” she says. “I know I only have 36 shots on a roll, so I have to make careful decisions concerning light and composition that I just don’t think about with my digital camera.”

Along with making students think harder about their own photography, Payne believes that the benefit of learning darkroom photography is relevant to other aspects of their academic and personal lives as well. “They learn that an investment of time in anything they do yields greater understanding and appreciation, and ultimately skill,” she says. “It’s a good way to think about their reading, their writing, or their relationships.”

Story originally published in Popular Photography On Campus

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For our 25th anniversary issue, we asked photo experts to weigh in on the most important trends of the past quarter century, a time of incredible transformation in photography.

Like the universe it inhabits, the development of photographic technology is accelerating at an exponential rate. Consider that when the first issue of American Photo appeared in January 1990, the big bang of digital capture was still a couple of years off. Working with images on a computer was an exotic idea, hampered by primitive software; filmless photography meant video stills saved on a downsized floppy disk.

Yet even before the realization of digital capture, technology was helping to blur the lines between the once-discreet precincts of art, editorial, and advertising photography. In the early ’90s, professional photographers began to adopt ideas and techniques from other genres and borrow from consumer technology, just as pros today shoot with iPhones. Then technology threw a $20,000 wrench into the photo world. In 1992’s January/February issue came word of the Kodak Professional Digital Camera System, the first true digital SLR. It was a manual-focus Nikon F3 fitted with a 1.3-megapixel image sensor and tethered to a massive shoulder pack for image storage and review. Digital capture had arrived, albeit still out of reach for most photographers.

The price of digital cameras would soon go into years of free fall, bringing them into the realm of newsgathering organizations and then of amateurs within a decade. In the November/December 1999 issue of American Photo we ran a story about how photographer Chip Simons was submitting his assignments—by modem—shot in maximum JPEG with the Nikon Coolpix 950 compact. Just one year later, though, came the 3.25MP Canon EOS D30, at $3,000 the cheapest DSLR yet. That epochal camera gave many photographers a new comfort with digital capture. This magazine might claim it was prescient in offering a mid-2003 page of new cell phones with built-in cameras, but no one could have known the extent to which Apple’s iPhone, announced in 2007, would come to dominate photography.

Then things seemed to change, both in the pages of American Photo and in photographic culture at large. The emphasis shifted from camera technology to how to manage the exponentially larger number of images that it allowed photographers to create. Workflow became the buzzword as we ran more and more stories about the ways in which digital was changing photographers’ working lives, mostly for the better. We taught everything from how to read a histogram to how to make good prints—something photographers had not been able to do on their own since abandoning their wet darkrooms.

Yet many new products helped regraft the medium to its roots, whether upscaling DSLR image sensors to the physical dimensions of the once-familiar 35mm frame (the Canon EOS-1Ds); ramping up DSLR resolution to a level once achieved only with medium format (the Nikon D3); or even successfully bringing the classic rangefinder into the digital age (the Leica M8). There were a few fond farewells, though. In 2011 American Photo told the sad tale of how National Geographic’s Steve McCurry went about shooting the very last roll of Kodachrome. And now progress seems to have come full circle, as some of today’s most cutting-edge photographers, who were reared on digital, make their best work by taking up film as their medium of choice.

Russell Hart is former Senior and Executive Editor of American Photo magazine (1990–2011)

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“There are millions of people out there who can make gorgeous pictures,” says New York-based Will Styer, a Rochester Institute of Technology grad who, after several years as a photo assistant, shoots still lifes for clients such as Esquire, Armani and Ralph Lauren. “But a lot of what goes into being a professional photographer is dealing with clients, solving problems as a team and making sure things go smoothly on the day of the shoot—skills that have nothing to do with actual photography.” Want to learn these skills so you can succeed as a pro? Start by assisting.

1. Sell yourself.

Put together a portfolio that shows off your creative and technical prowess. Then customize it to the photographer you want to work for; if he or she relies mainly on studio lighting, for example, include images that show your ability with lights. Build a solid website and keep it updated, so that anyone hiring has a reference. Then go for it. “As long as you’re upfront with a photographer you want to assist about your knowledge and experience, it’s never too soon,” says Styer. “You don’t have to know how equipment works to carry it. Be honest about your abilities and realistic in your expectations.”

2. Decide how you want to work.

Should you work full-time for one photographer or freelance with different photographers who use photo assistants as needed? “There are pros and cons to each,” says New York advertising and editorial photographer Jack Reznicki, who assisted for five years after getting his BFA from RIT and now shoots for big-ticket clients such as Hyatt, AT&T and The Wall Street Journal. “With full-time work, you get to see the entire production from first phone call to finished product. As a freelancer you usually see only a piece of the process, but you experience a lot more different kinds of shooting,” he adds. James Porto, an influential high-concept photographer, thinks you should do both. “The ideal path would be to work for a single photographer who you admire for at least a year, then to freelance for multiple photographers,” Porto says. “Freelancing pays better, too.”

3. Pick your bosses wisely.

Either way, hire yourself out to photographers you can learn from. Look at their work, especially in magazines and other print media, and when you make contact tell them where you’ve seen it and why you like it. If you know what kind of work you want to do, assist photographers who do it; if you’re still trying to decide, mix it up. In the process, you may even find a mentor.

4. Choose the best way to make contact.

Email may seem the easiest and least obnoxious, but it’s also easy to ignore. “I think phone calls are better and more personal than email,” says Reznicki. “With the first call I usually say I can’t talk then, but I tell them to call me back at a certain time. What’s amazing is that only about 25 percent of people follow through with that request.” The remaining 75 percent, says Reznicki, “don’t get through the door,” even if they call back some other time.

5. Be persistent but polite.

“I’m not going to remember you from one interaction,” says Tony Gale, an assistant-turned-photographer who has taught assisting workshops co-sponsored by American Photographic Artists (APA, of which he’s now president) and Sony, to whose Artisans of Imagery group he belongs. “Being consistent is important. I would suggest trying a few different ways to reach out—postcards, email, social media. Just don’t do them all at once or too frequently.”

6. Do whatever needs to be done.

Once you start assisting, know your place. “As an assistant, your job is to make the shoot as smooth as possible,” says Gale. “That might mean setting up lights, but it could also mean mopping the bathroom. Don’t be reluctant to get your hands dirty.”

7. Be seen and not heard.

“Unless you’re the first assistant and know exactly what’s going on, you won’t endear yourself to the boss by always putting in your two cents on set,” says Reznicki, who recalls a photo assistant who gave unsolicited advice in front of a client. “He didn’t realize that there was also a political aspect to the problem,” the photographer says. “I never hired him again.”

8. Bring your own “kit.”

Pack simple tools and materials that will reduce your need to ask for things—a multipurpose pocket tool, clamps, gaffer’s tape, a roll of black foil to control light, a pad and pen for keeping notes, Power Bars so you won’t have to work on an empty stomach. “I used to bring memory cards, which more than once solved what could have been a huge problem,” says Gale.

9. Anticipate the photographer’s needs.

Don’t make the photographer ask for everything he or she wants you to do—go ahead and start to do it. Be judicious, though. “Some of my assistants know exactly what needs to be done before I even tell them because they’ve worked with me so long,” says Styer. “But if it’s your first time assisting a particular photographer, I’d pay close attention and just be ready when you’re asked to do something.”

10. Ask questions.

Don’t be afraid to admit what you don’t know. Your boss knows you’re there not just to earn some money, but also to learn. Just don’t overdo it—after all, you took Photo I in school. “Be confident, but be teachable,” advises veteran Minneapolis-based assistant Tim Olsen, who maintains APhotoAssistant.com, a website dedicated to assisting.

11. Be ready.

Sometimes photographers need photo assistants at very short notice—especially if a member of their go-to crew can’t take on the assignment. Last-minute substitutions can lead to regular work.

12. Have a positive attitude.

“If you pay attention, listen, and can focus on a task, that’s what I care most about,” says Gale. “Knowing more is always good, but if I’m going to spend from six hours to several days with someone, personality is important.”

13. Don’t use your smartphone on set.

“It’s very disrespectful, especially when time is money and so much is on the line,” says Jack Reznicki. “If you have to, do it on your lunch break or go to the bathroom.” Reznicki tells of a case in which a photographer was sued by his client because his assistant uploaded a behind-the-scenes image of the shoot to social media.

14. Follow up.

If you’ve assisted a photographer and all went well, send a thank-you note saying you’d like to work for him or her again and expressing the hope that he or she will refer you to other photographers.

15. Keep networking.

Even if you end up working full-time as a photo assistant for one photographer, it’s important to establish new connections. Do this on shoots, of course, but attend photo community events too. And be sure to make friends with your local photo equipment rental house.

16. Exploit social media.

“It’s actually one of the ways I’ve met a lot of well-known photographers,” says Detroit-based Matthew LaVere, who is now making the transition to full-time professional. “Down the line, they’ve called me up to see if I was available to assist. Instagram and Twitter have really helped me network.” Facebook offers similar opportunities.

17. Start mixing in your own jobs.

“It is absolutely possible to assist and shoot at the same time,” says Gale. “I know some people believe you should make a clean break as soon as you think you’re ready, but I’m not sure that’s realistic. Gradually shooting more and assisting less is a perfectly fine way to do it. And if you start turning down shooting jobs because you’re already booked to assist, you know it’s time to quit assisting!”

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Sometimes it seems as if pure landscape photography is a dying art. People and the places where they live hold sway as photographic subject matter, and even the most depopulated views focus on the effects of human intervention and environmental abuse in the landscape. That isn’t the case on Flickr, though, where landscape for landscape’s sake is thriving. So for this issue’s installment of the Flickr Creative Showcase, we bring you three of our favorite landscape photographers now sharing their work on the website. And remember that there are more where these came from.

Close-Up: Jim Patterson

Hometown: Santa Cruz, CA

Camera: Nikon D300

Flickr member since: 2006

Website: jimpattersonphotography.com

From his work as a scuba outfitter and as a frequent diver, Jim Patterson knows that the landscape beneath the waves can be just as beautiful, in its gnarly way, as the one above. Indeed, he has been photographing underwater since 2001. It was a little more than a year ago that Patterson started shooting on relatively dry land – and yet he has produced the spectacular marine views you see here.

Either way, why does Patterson prefer to shoot landscapes – or in his case, seascapes – over other kinds of subject matter? “Because it is a meditative, relaxing experience,” says the Santa Cruz, California-based photographer. “Tuning in to the details of a scene such as the angle of the light, the movement of the waves and the balance of elements is much more rewarding for me.”

Patterson credits both Flickr and digital photography for his accelerated learning. “I did shoot film seriously for about three years before switching to digital,” he says. “But with film, the timeintensive process of getting images from camera to computer was always a roadblock to shooting and editing. Digital has helped me improve my work, because it gives me much faster feedback, and feedback while I’m still on location.”

He feels likewise about Flickr. “It’s definitely a great way to learn when other photographers offer their thoughts on your images,” he says. “And I’ve found that many photographers are willing to share tips and processing techniques.” Other Flickr photographers Patterson admires include Chip Phillips and Stephen Oachs, as well as Patrick Smith, whose work we featured in our “12 Flickr Superstars” issue (May/June ’09). What goes around comes around. AP

Close-Up Katarina Stefanović

Hometown: Belgrade, Serbia

Camera: Nikon F80 (Nikon N80 in U.S.)

Flickr member since: 2007

Flickr page:flickr.com/photos/jup3nep

An engineer by day, Katarina Stefanović was seduced by photography’s charms when she spruced up her family home with prints of her travel pictures. “I discovered through visitors’ reactions that the photos could be more than decorations on a wall,” says Stefanović. “So I got myself busy and made a portfolio.” She showed the portfolio to photographer friends, who encouraged her to exhibit the work. But she needed more “affrmation,” so Stefanović joined Flickr. And she soon took on a major photographic project: permanently installing her prints in a hospital in her native Belgrade. “I had to gather as much courage as I could to do it,” she says.

Stefanović’s photographs seem the perfect remedy for a hospital environment. Their intense color and extraordinary landforms transport the viewer to a dreamy, beautiful place. “I want the viewer to go into that world and explore, to feel that he or she is on the spot where the picture was taken,” she says. In fact, that world is often quite close to home, with many of her photographs made in the nearby Pannonian Plain. “You could live your whole life within a 50-kilometer ring around Belgrade and always find landscapes worth photographing,” she says.

Unlike most of her fellow Flickr-ites, Stefanović still shoots film, though she scans it and uses image editing tools to manipulate shapes and colors. “I remain faithful to my old 35mm SLR,” she says. And film’s more-deliberative demands seem suited to her attitude about photography. “I take pictures when I feel like it,” she says, “out of pure pleasure.” AP

Close-Up Joel Tjintjelaar’s

Like many of Flickr’s most talented members, Joel Tjintjelaar didn’t take his photography seriously until recently. “I always admired black and white, but I only did some happy snapping,” says the Dutch information-technology project manager. “Then I thought, ‘Hey, why not produce these beautiful images myself?'”

That makes Tjintjelaar’s work sound easier than it is. “The first time a subject catches my attention, it’s rare that I can shoot it the way I see it in my mind,” he explains. “So I go back again and again until everything is perfect – light, weather, the tides. I’ve shot a few piers and breakwaters along the Dutch coast maybe a thousand times, from all angles and in all weather conditions, in broad daylight and in the dark of night, at high tide and low tide. And still I think I’m missing that one special shot that captures the essence of that pier. My wife hates it because I take her with me when she’d rather go shopping.” That’s understandable, given the photographer’s love of long exposures. “A long-exposure shoot of mine usually takes two or three hours,” he says. “If I’m really lucky, I’ll get five good frames.”

Despite that attention to capture, Tjintjelaar does plenty of image editing to make the world look the way he sees it. “It’s mostly just heavy dodging and burning, but it amounts to 80 percent of the time I put into a photograph,” he says. “Like Ansel Adams said, dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships. But steps sometimes turn out to be big leaps.” View his official site here. AP

Be sure to join our American Photo Creative Showcase on Flickr. As a Showcase member, you can post your best images and give advice and encouragement to our other avid users. And since the magazine showcases a different Flickr photographer in every issue, you just may see your contributions end up on the pages of American Photo****!

Plus, we want you to give us a piece of your mind, so don’t forget to come back often to fuel our discussion section!

*The statements and images posted on PopPhoto.com are the views and responsibility of those who posted them and do not necessarily represent the views of FUJIFILM.

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