Respect Your Peers (Fellow photographers)

I have recently been seeing this a lot in social media, so I wanted to make a short video of it.

D5100 First Day Review

So, yesterday, after what felt like decades of waiting (even though it was actually less than a week), I finally got my new(-ish) Nikon D5100 in the mail that I ordered from B & H Photo Video. My first impression of the camera was that it was fairly similar to the Nikon D3300 that I was accustomed to shooting with, despite the obvious differences. Many of the functions seemed to be the same, and I had no trouble at all understanding how to operate the D5100 right after I pulled it out of the box.

In the video here, you can see my first thoughts on the D5100 after pulling it out of the box. Then, later last night, after I charged the battery and messed with the camera a little bit, I recorded the video below.

And then, below the video here, you can see some of the photos I've taken with the camera over the last twenty-four hours or so (not quite twenty four.). 

I have enjoyed the camera so far, and haven't really found any big problems with it, but I'll update with a new article possibly in the next few days to tell you about my further experiences with the camera.

Portraiture Advice From A Beginner

Portraiture From a Beginner

Mr. Smith, Greater Johnstown Senior High School Principle

To a young photographer with little to no experience, portraiture can be a very daunting experience to try.

A portrait is any photograph where your subject is a person, although normally, a portrait is more of a posed photo instead of the more candid ones.

This photo here is of my niece, Aria, when we went for a hike one day in the woods near her aunt's house.

The reason portraiture is a little scary to most new photographers is because it can seem so formal, like something that only professionals can really do, but in reality, that's not true. Every time you lift you camera and take a picture of another person, you are taking a portrait.

My brother, Melvin, and his daughter, Arial. 

To take a portrait, you don't necessarily have to bring your subject into a studio and spend twenty minutes getting a perfect pose out of them. Just try to capture their personality in your photos. That's really the ultimate goal of any portrait photographer, to just capture the personality of their subject and tell a story about the person with a photo.

When you're taking a photo of someone, do your best to make them feel comfortable. If they're nervous about being in front of the camera, you won't capture an authentic vision of who they are, because everyone acts different whenever they're in front of a camera. 

Make your subject forget that the camera is there. Make them think you're just a normal person-one of their friends even, and that's how you get the most genuine depiction of who a person truly is. 

Photos

Greater Johnstown Jazz Band

Say "hello" to the fantastic Greater Johnstown Senior High School's Jazz Band. The group has an upcoming concert. They will be performing at the First Lutheran Church on Vine Street, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on April 4th, 2017, at 12:00 P.M. 

I had the honor of holding their photo shoot to provide them with pictures for their promotional campaign, and look forward to seeing them in action.

A great group of talented individuals, consisting of Kate and Emily Knapp, Brady Hess, Marissa Moore, Chase Seelig, Joshua Spencer, Logan Gagan, Amber Kreasko, Luis Lache, Divine Rivera, Tyreis Berry, and Griffin Gagan,the Johnstown Jazz band has existed in several forms over recent years, including as a pep band for a period of time.

The group is headed by Mr. Eric Pfeil, a music teacher at both the high school and the middle school who is also the head of the marching band.

They will also be holding a concert on February 28, the theme of which will be "A Night At Apollo", and will focus on songs from movies, and will also feature poetry readings from other students.

Who is Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams, born February 20, 1902, is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential photographers of all time-even to this day, more than three decades after his death in 1984.

While presenting Adams with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, President James E. Carter said, “At one with the power of the American landscape, and renowned for the patient skill and timeless beauty of his work, photographer Ansel Adams has been a visionary in his efforts to preserve this country’s wild and scenic areas, both on film and on Earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature’s monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a monument himself, and by photographers as a national institution. It is through his foresight and fortitude that so much of America has been saved for future Americans.”

In life, Adams was primarily a landscape photographer, who also wrote several books containing his photos meant to help aspiring photographers to get introduced to the craft.

His photographs of the American mid-west, specifically the Yosemite National Park, have been widely reproduced, whether it be on the Internet, in calendars, or in other formats.

He was also known for being an active environmentalist who did everything he could to protect the planet.

Adams was born in San Francisco, California, to Charles Hitchcock, a businessman, and Olive Bray. The family was fairly wealthy and lived in a house among the sand dunes of the Golden Gate.

When Adams was four years old, an aftershock of the great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 through him to the ground and broke his nose, marking him in a unique way for life.

Just a year later, Adams’s family lost their fortune to the financial panic of 1907, and his father spent the rest of his life fighting to win the fortune back, without any success.

Due to natural shyness, and certain other factors, Adams always had trouble fitting in at school, and in later life, he also stated that it is likely he was hyperactive, as well as possibly dyslexic. Thus, his parents ended up sending him to several different schools, none of which he managed to succeed at, and eventually, his father and aunt chose to home-tutor him instead of sending him to even more schools that he was unlikely to succeed at.

Ultimately, he managed to receive what he called a “legitimizing diploma” from the Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School-approximately equivalent to completing the eighth grade.

This solitary lifetime caused Adams to develop a great love for nature, which is shown by the fact that he often took long walks in the still-wild reaches of The Golden Gate.

When Adams was twelve, he taught himself to play the piano and to read music. Soon after, he was taking lessons in music and even considered it as a future profession, although he ultimately abandoned music for photography.

Adams first published photos in the 1922 bulletin of the Sierra Club, and his first ever one-man exhibition was in 1928 at the club’s San Francisco headquarters.

In the late 1920’s Adams began to realize that he could actually earn more money as a professional photographer than he ever could as a concert pianist.

1927 was perhaps the most important year of Adam’s life. In that year, he took his first fully visualized photograph, titled The Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, and more importantly, he met Albert M. Bender, a patron of arts and artists.

Exactly a day after first meeting Adams, Bender started working on putting together the photographer’s first portfolio-which they titled Parmelian Prints of the High Scenarios. Bender’s support of Adams and his work changed the young artist’s life for the better.

In fact, many believe that it was Bender’s friendship and support that changed Adams from a concert pianist to a professional photographer and an artist. Although Adam’s career didn’t change overnight, after meeting Bender, his passion rapidly changed from music to photography.

In the year 1927, Adams met a fellow photographer named Edward Weston, and the two instantly formed a friendship that would affect their lives and the lives of many others for years to come.

The two became very important to each other as friends and colleagues, and eventually worked together as co-founders of the famous photography group known as F/64. F/64 was a popular photographic group during the time period, consisting of photographers who shared a similar style in their works, characterized by sharply focused, and carefully composed images showing events through a Westerner's viewpoint.

The group quickly gained popularity, and their work was shown in numerous exhibits across the country.

Even after his death, Adams was considered a great photographer, and today, he is widely considered to be one of the greatest landscape photographers of all time.

Who is Eddie Adams?

Who Is Eddie Adams?

Eddie Adams was a famous photojournalist and a nobel prize winner. He is known for his portraits of politicians and of celebrities, as well as his coverage of thirty different wars throughout the course of his career.

Adams was born in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, on June 12, 1933, and died on September 18, 2004, in New York City, New York, at the age of 71.

As a teenager, Adams developed an interest in photography, and served on his school newspaper’s photography staff, and also worked as a wedding and portrait photographer. After graduating from high school, Adams enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, where he served as a combat photographer during the Korean War.

After leaving the United States Marine Corps, Adams joined the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin as a photographer. From 1958 to 1962, he also managed to become a photographer for the Associated Press.

In 1956, Adams decided to travel to Vietnam and photograph the war there. He remained in Vietnam for about a year, photographing the way as a journalist.

Adams then left Vietnam, but would return once again, and while there in 1968, he took what is likely his most famous photograph, a picture of a Viet Cong soldier being executed by a police chief, which would then earn him the pulitzer prize. This photo also established him as a great photojournalist who knew what kind of photographs to take.

Adams' famous photo of the execution of a Viet Cong soldier

Along with earning the Pulitzer prize, Adams also earned over 500 other awards throughout the course of his career.

In May of 2004, Adams was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Despite this, he continued with his work, and even created a video profile of himself, which was shown during the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon to help raise awareness about the illness.

Throughout his life, Eddie Adams had a great impact on people throughout the world, whether it be through his photographs of wars or through his video about his illness towards the end of his life, and he will certainly be remembered for a long time.