If I just duplicated each of these photographers' gear, I'd be awesome!
Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars #26
Hello, everyone!
Long time, no newsletter, so let’s get into it, shall we? Here’s a photo I took recently:
That’s actually two photos stitched together into a single panorama by the wonderful program Lightroom, which I’ve started using for photo editing over the last couple months. The subject of the photo is one of the grain elevators on Buffalo’s Outer Harbor, reflected in the waters of one of Lake Erie’s small bays. This section of harbor is protected by a series of seawalls, making for an area of relative calm, protected from the waves of the open water. The Outer Harbor is one of my favorite places in Buffalo, because it’s a place where the old detritus of Buffalo’s industrial past exists alongside the nature that is slowly taking back over the spaces that were carved from it a century ago.
I’ve been looking at that photo a lot since I took it and edited it, because…well, it’s good. I mean, that photo is good. For me, it’s art.
Over the last year I’ve dug deep into photography, trying to go a lot farther than just snapshots on a cell phone or a point-and-shoot camera. I’ve been trying to learn about this art, in a lot of ways. Is this a mid-life crisis, that manifested for me not in the desire to buy a fast car but an expensive camera? I don’t know, really. I’ve loved taking photos my entire life, but I’ve never really put a whole lot of thought into it until now.
There are a lot of ways to learn about photography as a technical skill, but it’s also an art, and the best way to learn about an art and to find inspiration in how to do it is to look at the work of other artists, and that’s something I’ve done a lot of over the last year. So, the balance of this letter is simply a roster of photographers whose work I’ve enjoyed and found inspiring since I started getting into this particular art seriously. Many of these folks I have found via YouTube, which has led me to note over the last year that for all our complaining about algorithms on social media shaping the content we encounter, I have to give the YouTube algorithm props for actually bringing me content that I found valuable.
Kenneth Hines is a multidisciplinary photographer based in Atlanta and New York City. He is one of the very first photographers I “discovered” because when I was first looking for advice on cameras on Google and YouTube, the YT algorithm served up a video that has become an all-time favorite of mine: The Ultimate Guide to Street Photography, featuring Hines (who goes by “The Professor”). Hines does seem to be known best for street photography, but he doesn’t consider himself primarily a street photographer; he shoots anything that strikes his fancy. I find his work and approach inspiring, and it’s because of him that I’ve named my camera. (More on that later.)
Speaking of The Ultimate Guide to Street Photography, that video is hosted by another photographer and videographer whom I’ve come to value a great deal: Jason Vong. Vong characterizes himself as a digital content creator who crafts travel and educational content that is fast-paced and laced with good humor. In addition to doing lots of good work, Vong (and his partner Vivienne, who shows up in a lot of his work) always seems to be enjoying what he’s doing, which is a giant plus. I respond to fun and humor more than dour seriousness these days.
Yewon Perry’s videos are always a breath of fresh air. She mainly does street photography in Los Angeles, and her videos are almost never about gear, but just about her experiences in roaming the streets and composing her photographs. Her videos are rarely longer than 10 minutes, and she usually drops them around 1pm Eastern on Fridays, which is great because that usually coincides with my lunch break on Fridays and her videos make me feel like I’ve almost reached the weekend. Plus, her photos are terrific; you can learn a lot about composition and the approach to street photography by watching her work, but she doesn’t go into the weeds of talking about stuff like “leading lines” and “rule of thirds” and the like. All of which is fine and necessary! But her approach seems more down-to-earth. Oh, and her videos always feature her lovely cat in the background.
From Scotland we have Kim Grant, a nature photographer and content creator who spends a lot of time in her region’s forests and seascapes. Her approach to photography is deeply warm and holistic, rooted in her love of nature and her view of photography as a gateway to experiencing the world more deeply. I enjoy her YouTube videos a great deal, though in recent months she has backed off the frequency somewhat. She is, though, putting together several new projects intended to foster a sense of community among photographers.
Also in Great Britain is Courtney Victoria, an artist whose approach to photography seems to me quite similar to Kim Grant’s. Victoria is also drawn to the forests and lakes and rivers of her region, and I’ve learned a lot from watching her videos about how to approach things like macrophotography of funguses. (I’m serious!) She always seems to be having real, genuine fun as she tromps around occasionally damp and dank forests in search of things to capture. Some of her videos even include footage of her dancing in the forest. (No, I will not be following suit on that.)
Another amazing nature photographer, this one a wildlife specialist, is Dani Connor Wild. What I admire about really good wildlife photographers is that they have to know so much to be good at what they do: not only do they have to really know their photography, they have to know their wildlife…and they also need to have staggering amounts of patience. (This is a quality I don’t tend to have, which is why I tend thus far in my photography life to focus on landscapes and street photography.) If you ever thought that not enough photographers were focusing on red squirrels, or if you’d never considered red squirrels at all, you should check her work out.
One of my favorites making instructional videos for photographers is Simon d’Entremont, who is a professional wildlife and nature photographer working out of northeastern Canada. His videos are full of genial and succinct explanations of various issues in photography, from getting good focus to working in low light to managing the exploding gigabytes of photos you suddenly have to deal with when you take up this hobby. He ends each video with a cheerful “I know you can do it!”, which is just the right tone to take. I’m always happy to see that he’s got a new video out.
Pat Kay is a professional travel photographer who also spends a lot of time creating material to help novices get better at photography, but more than that, he has recently moved on to discussing creative work in general, which I find very welcome as I am now working on fitting my newfound passion for photography into an already-creative life.
One of the genres I find myself gravitating strongly towards is landscape photography, so I follow a number of landscape photographers as well. Two of my favorites are Ian Worth and Mark Denney. These two men are both energetic and enthusiastic teachers of the craft, who bring to their work the challenges particular to their individual landscapes. Worth is British and thus has a lot of content about dealing with lackluster light, for instance, and Denney has taught me a lot about editing my photos, such as using a linear gradient sometimes instead of a universal vignette.
Roman Fox and Leanne Boulton are both street photographers whose work inspires greatly. I decided to follow Fox on the strength of one video in which he gave great advice on how to go out and shoot if your best time to get out is the middle of the day, when the light is awful. I found this very helpful, because “Stay home until golden hour” isn’t really all that workable at times. I’ve also learned a lot from Fox about how to create interesting abstracts from various streetscapes, which is especially useful in a city like Buffalo where there aren’t always tons of people about to make human-centric street photography particularly feasible. Boulton, on the other hand, focuses entirely on people (mostly of Edinburgh), and her work is wonderful in its featuring of the human element. Every photo of hers makes me want to go set up camp in a crowded place and capture the faces of the passers-by, and I think that’s the point!
One last name for this newsletter—though there are a lot of other photographers I follow and have been learning from, so this probably won’t be the last letter of mine like this—is Julia Trotti, an Australian portrait photographer from Sidney. She reviews gear, walks viewers through her portrait shoots, and provides photography basics lessons for beginners and novices. Just last week she had a basics video in which she clarified something about white balance that I’d been struggling with, and she clarified that in one sentence.
I see some discussions here and there on social media about unpleasantness in the photography community online: gatekeeping and toxic behavior in general. I’m happy to say that so far, I haven’t seen any of that, though I know it must be out there. My self-curated experience has been the opposite: a community of friendly and knowledgeable people who really, truly want to share the “secrets” of their craft with those who are coming into it now. Maybe someday I can pay that forward as well.
And with that, I will close with another recent photo, of one of the many waterfalls at Chestnut Ridge Park, in the hills south of Buffalo:
Keep well, folks, and we’ll see you around the Galaxy!
Exeunt,
-K.