The Art of Fine Photography: Exploring the Works of Abelard Morel and Other Visionary Artists

Abelard Morel is a fine art photographer whose work is nothing short of remarkable. His use of a pinhole camera to project images onto walls behind rooms creates a unique and fascinating effect, allowing him to capture the world in a way that is both intimate and expansive. By projecting his images onto the wall, Morel is able to create a sense of depth and atmosphere that is reminiscent of classical cinematography. This technique allows him to convey complex emotions and moods with ease, making his work truly unforgettable.

Morel's portfolio is a masterclass in organization and curation. His website is divided into neatly categorized sections, each one showcasing a different aspect of his work. The "Upcoming Events" section is particularly noteworthy, highlighting the many exhibitions and publications that he has been featured in recently. Similarly, the "Money" gallery is a standout, featuring an impressive collection of photographs that explore the relationship between money and its cultural significance. Throughout his website, Morel's attention to detail and commitment to showcasing his work in the best possible light are evident.

One of the things that sets Morel apart from other photographers is his willingness to experiment with new techniques and mediums. His "Tent Camera" project, which uses a camera obscura to capture images on the walls of a tent, is a remarkable example of this. By setting up a makeshift studio in the middle of nowhere, Morel has created a unique and captivating way of capturing the natural world. The resulting images are full of texture and pattern, giving a glimpse into the intricate details of the natural world that we often overlook.

The Tent Camera project is just one example of Morel's innovative approach to photography. Throughout his work, he is pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the medium, exploring new ways of capturing light, color, and texture. His commitment to artistic expression is evident in every aspect of his work, from the meticulous composition of each image to the thoughtful curation of his website.

In addition to Morel's remarkable body of work, we also wanted to showcase a diverse range of other photographers who are making waves in the world of fine art photography. Joe Budd, for example, is a master of mineral photography, capturing the intricate patterns and colors of rocks with ease. His photographs are both beautiful and awe-inspiring, offering a glimpse into the hidden worlds that lie beneath our feet.

Keith Wood, on the other hand, is a travel photographer who has spent years honing his skills in some of the most exotic locations around the world. From the bustling streets of Tokyo to the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu, Wood's photographs are full of energy and life. His work is often described as "old school" – in that it captures the essence of photography as a medium that celebrates the beauty of the physical world.

Tyler Sharp, meanwhile, is a highly acclaimed editorial photographer who has worked with some of the biggest names in the industry. His photographs are both striking and thought-provoking, capturing the complexities and nuances of modern life with ease. What sets Sharp apart from other photographers is his ability to convey complex emotions and ideas through simple, yet powerful images.

Wade Griffith's architectural photographs are a masterclass in composition and lighting. His work captures the intricate details of buildings and landscapes, from the grandeur of ancient monuments to the humble charm of rural homes. Each image is full of texture and pattern, giving a glimpse into the intricate worlds that lie behind our own.

Finally, we wanted to feature Kevin Meredith, an author and teacher who has spent years honing his craft as a photographer. His website is a little different from the others, with a focus on storytelling and narrative. Meredith's photographs are both beautiful and evocative, capturing the complexities of human experience in a way that is both deeply personal and universally relatable.

As we move forward into future episodes, one thing becomes clear: the art of photography is not just about taking pictures – it's about telling stories, conveying emotions, and connecting with others. Whether you're a seasoned photographer or just starting out, there are countless ways to explore this medium and make your mark on the world. Over the coming weeks, we'll delve deeper into the world of fine art photography, exploring topics such as portraiture, landscape, still life, and more.

As we consider what it means to be a professional photographer, it's clear that there are many different paths to follow. Some photographers focus on commercial work, capturing images for advertising campaigns and corporate clients. Others focus on fine art, creating works of beauty and meaning that transcend the everyday world. And then there are those who fall somewhere in between – photographers who create work that is both personal and commercially viable.

The key takeaway from our exploration of these different photographers is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to photography. What matters most is finding a style and subject matter that resonates with you, and using your camera to tell stories that need to be told. Whether you're just starting out or have years of experience under your belt, the world of fine art photography is full of possibilities and opportunities waiting to be explored.

As we look to the future, one thing becomes clear: the art of photography is a powerful tool for self-expression and connection. It has the ability to capture our imagination, evoke emotions, and inspire us to see the world in new and wondrous ways. Whether you're a seasoned photographer or just starting out, there's never been a better time to pick up a camera and explore this incredible medium.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone my name is ted forbes and welcome back to another episode of the art of photography and a couple episodes ago i put a little feeler out there and i was asking you guys what you might like to see um trying to do some new stuff with the show trying to reinvent ourselves in some ways while maintaining the stuff that we've already done and i want to thank every one of you that responded we had a lot of really good comments on this i had a lot of good emails so if you reached out via email comment tweet facebook whatever thank you very much there were some really nice suggestions and i'll go ahead and say that i don't want to reveal too much right now but in the next two weeks here i'm going to announce some things that we're going to be doing coming up i just don't want to put them out there too early before i've got my head around them but i think we got some really cool stuff in the works and also today for our subject i wanted to address some issues because there were a lot of people who wanted to see stuff and had questions mainly on you know what it means to be a working photographer what it means to be a professional photographer and i thought that might make a good subject for today's show and we'll probably revisit this over a couple episodes and because i think there's a lot to it and i think it's really interesting and i think we're in uh particularly sometimes i think it's weird but it definitely is an interesting time um in terms of what it means to do creative work professionally and when i was a kid i grew up and i've said this before on the show but you know my dad was an illustrator and that's what he did his entire career and he basically made paintings for magazine covers for advertising for corporate clients he did portraits he did all kinds of things and by all means of the word he was a professional illustrator and you know growing up as a kid in the 70s and 80s of course you know being my dad i looked up to him and i really was always enamored by the fact that my dad did something very unusual for a career but i also knew you know my parents had friends that were other illustrators we knew photographers um people i know to this day and i think in the 70s and 80s when you said you were a professional photographer and it was a very viable source of income usually what that meant is you were in some line of work where you shot product photography you did annual reports maybe there was a lot of travel involved sometimes it was celebrity portraits there were a lot of different things that were very viable in terms of photography at that time particularly in the advertising industry and when i grew up that's what i associated as being a professional photographer and it's really interesting because i think we've seen a big turn about this probably starting in the late 90s into the tech boom and the way the world has changed and what that means to us as professionals so to speak and nowadays you know due to the rise of stock photography and i don't think this is a bad thing it's just kind of a weird thing that a lot of you know there's so much imagery out there i mean you could also make the argument that digital cameras are so easy to get that a lot of people don't hire professional for certain things anymore or maybe they want to do it themselves or they're maybe they're more photographers there's more competition there's a lot of reasons to this but i really think that the industry has changed a lot i still think it can be done i still think you can make your living as a photographer um definitely part-time if not full-time it's just changed and trying to figure out how to make that work is kind of you know the premise for all this now i do another podcast called the photography show that i do with my friend wade and we talk a lot about business and a lot about being a professional photographer on there but just for this episode i want to hit on what that might mean because it really can mean anything you know the term professional just it basically indicates that you know some portion of income that you probably get taxed on by the government at the end of the year is made with your camera shooting pictures whether that is selling your pictures in a fine art kind of way or whether that's doing commercial work for a client kind of situation or whether that's shooting weddings or whether that shooting product or whatever that is and you know there still is work to be found and it's changed a lot but what also i think is interesting is there was a statement that was made in the news recently that you guys may have caught a couple months maybe about a month ago flickr had a big redesign and it was long overdue beautifully done there was some controversy because it was very different than what they had before and that's not the subject i'm going for but around that time marissa mayer who is the ceo now of yahoo who owns flickr had made an announcement in the press that it was answering a question the reporter had asked her and i think in some ways she probably was caught off guard somewhat but anyway it went like this for years if you have been on flickr before in the old days they had what was called a pro account and basically all that meant was it was the paid account where you had some more features than just the basic sign up for free account and one of the designations is that you they put the word pro next to your username to indicate that you had a pro account it did not mean you were a professional photographer in fact i think most people on flickr got that and never associated with it and i'm not sure maybe marissa understood that which is kind of unfortunate too but anyway the question was asked of her that why they decided to change the business model and get rid of the pro accounts and unfortunately her response was that there's no really such thing as a pro photographer anymore that there are no professional photographers anymore so they were making these changes and i want i just read that i thought god ouch and i i kind of feel bad for because i think the question may have caught her off guard i don't think she understood what it was and i think that statement was really uh very uninformed and extremely naive in a lot of ways because i know a lot of people who are doing it and it is not an easy industry to be in most people work for themselves there's not a lot of like full-time employment jobs they're few we'll talk about them but you know normally it's not like you work for a company and you have benefits and you know you get a paycheck it's working for yourself and you have to invoice your clients and you're responsible for your own insurance and all those things and it just kind of i think came off as a little bit of an insult to some photographers because i read a lot of negative reactions about that too but if we define being a professional photographer and forget what marissa says um if you define being a professional photographer is some of your income comes from photography and what i've always thought was odd too was there's always some kind of prestige that comes with saying that yes i'm a professional photographer and sometimes it has a little bit of a snooty connotation to it there's definitely a you know this pretentious prestige that comes with it and it really isn't i mean honestly i've gone through periods of my life where i've made money from photography and periods where i just did it for myself and i did it for my own personal gain and i'll be honest i felt more prestigious about the times i wasn't making any money about it and the reason was is because i was able to shoot what i wanted to shoot and i think that's really important and that's a really important takeaway here so i guess all this is just to say that that you know this being a professional photographer it's it's it's the right thing to do if you know you want to do that and if you feel like you have to do that and you feel like that's really part of you and you feel like you're going to draw satisfaction and happiness from that having said that there you know the scope of being a professional photographer is so broad and so wide and like i said this can mean a lot of things maybe this means you sell prints maybe this means that you know you shoot weddings maybe this means you're a fine art photographer maybe this means that you do stock photography and those are all very different occupations under this umbrella of being a pro photographer and so what i want to do today is i want to look at some websites i would be willing to bet that most people out there have not updated their website in a while and that goes for me too and that's a project that i want to do this summer and so some of this i'll talk about and i'll be able to show you and work through too as we go along and we'll look at some examples but today i want to look at some examples of some websites that i think are particularly good and i want to look at the range of work people are doing and what your website tells the world that you do and and what that indicates about you and hopefully you'll see some cool work that's inspiring too today and that's another big intention of this so come on over to the computer and we're going to get online have a look okay so we're going to look at some photography websites of various professional photographers and what i've done today is i've picked a pretty wide range of stuff to cover and this is a pretty wide range of photographers and i will be the first to admit that some of these people i know personally and i that's not why they're in here i really really respect their work and i think they're doing something right on their website so all these photography websites are great examples i'm not wanting to show you so much the greatness of their website so much i mean all these are wonderful but in terms of being a professional photographer what is it that they're communicating with their website so what are they showing and what are they indicating um and why does this work does it give a good clue of who they are and what they do and you know we'll take it from there the first example i want to look at this is a guy named wade griffith that i do another podcast with called the photography show that you can look up in itunes wade is a very good friend of mine he is an excellent photographer no question about it and wade has carved a niche um he does a lot of professional work these days but he has carved a really wonderful niche of architectural photography and portraits and i love the fact that his website starts out giving you both those things um the pictures are big um you know we're just sitting here talking and he's got a slideshow that it defaults to and you get a really good sense that this guy has his stuff together and he can shoot he has this wonderful sense of symmetry when he does architectural work um and that shows through in the photos it's very clean there's not a lot of text on here um he doesn't really need it he needs to show his photos because if you are an architectural firm or you have a building you're very proud of or you have that kind of a need for for a photographer this is the guy you want to hire professionally certainly his portfolio comes up first you can go look at hotel shots if you want um he has this so you can skip through them if you want you can look at thumbnails or you can auto play them and if you were interested in architecture photography there's no bs here i mean wade is really being very clear about that um so anyway that's just a very clean nicely done website and of course i'm a dear friend of wade's but um i think he does this really well and i certainly would not have showed this otherwise a couple other people this is another guy that i've known for years this is a gentleman named keith wood who is a good friend of mine he is a photographer out of portland oregon and he has done he's had a very long career uh probably 30 40 years of doing commercial work huge clients like exxon i'll show you his portfolio here he does a lot of cultural work for big oil companies he does some sculpture he has some personal work in here but you you can get a sense that you know if you need a location guy that's going to go overseas and shoot in africa i mean he certainly has done this well and you know the other thing i really like about what keith does is there's a lot of text on here to talk about some of these images and i think that's because there's sometimes some context behind them that does need to be described and he talks about the job he did he talked about he'll talk about uh you know what the subject of the photo was the other thing i really like about keith's website is he has this wonderful um it's sort of a blog i mean i guess it is a blog for all intents and purposes but he puts his own work up and then talks about it which is something that i think photographers need to learn how to do more it's not extensive it's just sometimes a paragraph or a couple sentences but he just explains what's going on in the photo his work is brilliant and it does speak for itself but because keith is oh in a lot of ways a street photographer in essence even with the corporate clients that he does with a lot of uh with a lot of the uh the foreign country travel that he does um sometimes there is some story behind it much in the sense of a national geographic kind of thing and so i think keith does that really well and so you know this is a great website for not only seeing great work but getting under the hood a little bit and learning more about keith and i think that is a really important thing on the complete other end of the spectrum i want to talk about my buddy joe budd and joe is actually a neighbor of mine that i met last year we met up on the roof of our loft building watching fireworks and joe's a really good guy we've become very good friends and what is fascinating about joe other than he's a really nice guy but he has carved a niche as a professional by shooting strictly mineral photography he calls it shooting rocks and this is his website it's joebudphotography.com and uh i'll put all the links to these in the show notes so if you're watching them on the website just look below the video and you can you can go check these out on your own but what i think this is this is really interesting because this one i'm talking about with with in terms of careers changing you know you look at a guy like keith who's been around for years and years and has enormous reputation an enormous amount of context in various businesses and if you need somebody to go out and shoot an oil rig or roughnecks or drums or whatever he's your guy and this is a harder business for newer people to break into just because um you know this guy's been around and he's got these connections however you take somebody like joe who's a lot younger and is a little more new at his career and he's carved what you know you call a niche and a niche is simply you know you've come up with something very specific that you specialize in in this case it's rock so his clients consist of a lot of museums they consist of people who collect rocks and believe it or not there's a lot of wealthy collectors out there that deal with minerals they're very proud of what they've got they deal these things all the time they're always buying and selling and there is an avenue to hire a photographer who knows what they're doing in there i remember when joe first told me about this and i'm like you shoot rocks huh and so you know they're minerals but you look at these and he's got a great eye i mean a lot of these they're they're minerals but it's it's macro photography it has to be specially lit the color accuracy is completely important with this because a lot of times they'll end up using these in catalogs or places where they're actually buying selling and trading minerals and so the color correction is very important on these and joe is a very meticulous person and i think he shoots these extremely well he's got a beautiful website um a couple things that are interesting about this is you know you can certainly go in and if you you know deal with courts a lot you can you know dial right over to that section but upon the top here just as far as his navigation goes um i i think his website is well done in this way because it the his audience is not other photographers necessarily it's the clients and the potential clients so you know you've got your home tab and he's got published images in here and this is interesting and you do see photographers do this a lot where they'll go ahead and do tear sheets magazine covers and what he is is he's showing two things here one he's showing his work in context of what was used in the end and two he's also in a very subtle way showing who he's worked for in some of the the bigger magazines now you and i may not have heard of a lot of these but if you're in the rock and gem industry you probably have and he's done an enormous amount of work and had a good success with this um and i think his website is great i think it shows that it's very clean it doesn't try to be anything more than this one thing i like that joe doesn't put a lot of personal work on here he keeps it very straightforward to what he can do and and what he's out there to you know be a professional with and make money at um i think he's extremely good let's go to another end of the spectrum here this is a gentleman named tyler sharp who i met recently because we did an interview with him on the other podcast tyler is amazing he shoots a lot of he has a very eclectic career in a lot of ways very beautiful website i love the way the thumbnails are laid out in this kind of grid like format and he shoots great work um you click on the image it gets big and he's done a wonderful selection of just narrowing it down to his best stuff uh sometimes he'll have two shots on a page which is kind of interesting if they're things that go together other times it's just one and it's very well done the other thing i like about tyler is he is kind of a little bit of an eclectic guy in the sense that he shoots photos but he also is a writer and he does some video work and so he's done some documentaries that you can see on here you can go in and look at his video reel and he's got some really really beautiful work on there and he also has these writing with short stories now we will come back around to this later when we start talking about building websites in another episode but one thing that's really important is that i think more photographers need to learn how to write about their own work this is something that a lot of people do not understand and unfortunately the world of the internet to a lot of people out there is google and google is not going to index your images based on content necessarily now there's technology in place that's changing this but you do need to learn how to write and describe your work if you're interested in search traffic and i think that tyler does this really really well he's an amazing guy amazing photographer he's got a very eclectic client list his website reflects that and he has a wide range of work that he does and a lot of variety it's very different than somebody like joe budd who specializes in something that's very niche in a lot of ways so anyway wonderful stuff um another gentleman i will show you the work of is this is kevin meredith who i have met on a couple occasions just online uh kevin's amazing photographer um he is known as lomo kev on flickr and he is one of the more popular guys on flickr and has been for years and kevin is his vocation on here or how he makes his living is he deals in teaching and authoring books and so his photography website is going to be a lot different he of course has his portfolio on here so you can go in he shoots largely with a lomo lca camera and has done some wonderful work again look he's describing his photos he knows how to write about his work and shows big large beautiful colored photos on here and uh this is one of my favorites this is actually imaging cunningham riding a bike um who's a friend of his and uh anyway so a wonderful retro style photographer who brings in a lot of this old school vibe to a lot of his shots um you know you see this kind of world of bracon and robert frank that his influence but he doesn't look like those guys but that that is definitely maybe something behind his work and he puts wonderful stuff in here and this is really just his best work if you want to go see everything he can go to flickr but he does a great job of dialing this down into things that really work well and he knows how to write about it so anyway um and also he does have information on here go back up to the top of workshops that he does for the hotshots photography course that he teaches and then also his book projects which he's an amazing guy and he's done some amazing work he's a really nice guy too and i'd love to meet him in person one day we've only met online a few times but very nice gentlemen so another guy that i want to show you who i think this is a complete opposite end of the spectrum here is abelardo morel and and morel is a fine art photographer that is what he does he does not do commercial work in that sense he sells prints in major galleries and he is one of the top photographers in the world these days and if you watch the show you know i'm a huge fan of his work i just he's one of the best and he does a lot of work with camera obscura and what you're looking at in this photo right here and i love how this is the first image on here because it's very compelling if you don't understand what's going on he will get a hotel room across the street from whatever scene he's quote unquote photographing cover the windows in hefty bags black out the room cut a small quarter sized hole in it and what you get is a camera obscura which works just like a pinhole camera so the image is actually projected onto the wall behind the room and so then he will photograph the room with this image being projected and he does absolutely disgustingly wonderful work to the point where you just can't stand it because he is so good um and his portfolio is very well organized into little niches that he does very well um he's got enough text on here with upcoming events upcoming work retrospectives things like that shows that he's doing and you know here's a whole thing on on money that he's he's done here's a whole gallery on various still lifes with money and i think it's absolutely wonderful a very creative mind um a very interesting photographer he does a lot of wonderful stuff i just really can't say enough good things about him but what i like and he just recently redesigned this website is that he keeps this very straightforward if you need to know what the publications are what books are being published want to read the blog look at the photography it's very well laid out i mean this i'm not sure it feels like wordpress what he's using and we'll get into that more specifically when we talk about websites um this is a new thing he's working on with images he's making he's calling this the tent camera and so their camera obscuras but he shoots them on the wall of a tent that he carries around and so the idea of the tent is you don't have to have a hotel room somewhere you can pretty much pick this up and set it anywhere and uh you end up getting the texture and the pattern of whatever the tent material is made of this one's actually made on the on the ground so anyway it creates a really interesting canvas and like i said morel is really pushing the boundaries of fine art and what can be done and i think he's extremely unusual that he does this better than no one else and uh beautiful work once again i'm gonna put all the links to these in the show notes and you can go check them out and the intent here was not just to fumble through some photography websites but i wanted to show you some specific people who are all working in various different things abelard morel is a fine art photographer we looked at joe budd who does mineral work very strict niche keith wood who does a lot of travel work a lot of corporate work kind of more old school we've also looked at tyler sharp who is amazing um does more editorial kinds of stuff but is very modern the way he does it we looked at wade griffith who does a lot of beautiful architectural work and finally kevin meredith who is an author and a teacher for a vocation and how his website is a little bit different as well so anyway all this to say is i think this is really important when you go look at stuff and it's really important to find out what it is you want to focus on as a photographer no pun intended and what it is that you are doing that makes you a professional and what it is that you want to communicate through your website many of you probably already have websites i know i do and i bet that many of them probably need to be updated and i know mine does and so we'll talk more about this in future episodes but this is what i'm trying to get across today and this is what i want you guys to start thinking about and just you know looking at the breadth of what can be done whether or not you like the aesthetics or the design of these websites is past the point in fact you'll notice they do run the gamut some of them are very you know eloquently designed and some of them are a little more utilitarian but the point is is design aside are you communicating your photos in the way that you want to communicate yourself as a photographer okay so we've looked at a pretty wide scope of different photographers online and what they do and you know this whole concept of what it means to be a pro and a professional and i want to revisit this and i want you guys to think about what that means to you and the reason i said is because i really did get a lot of questions of people who are interested in what they need to be putting together in their portfolio and how to select their own work and in coming episodes what we're going to do is i want to revisit this and i want to get more in depth than i have in the past about it um you know we've done episodes on this before and i want to try and take them to the next level and dig a little deeper and maybe give you guys some more assignment based things and takeaways you can do um you know from watching the show so anyway um all that will be to come and thanks again for watching once again guys it's been the art of photography and i will see you next time take carehey everyone my name is ted forbes and welcome back to another episode of the art of photography and a couple episodes ago i put a little feeler out there and i was asking you guys what you might like to see um trying to do some new stuff with the show trying to reinvent ourselves in some ways while maintaining the stuff that we've already done and i want to thank every one of you that responded we had a lot of really good comments on this i had a lot of good emails so if you reached out via email comment tweet facebook whatever thank you very much there were some really nice suggestions and i'll go ahead and say that i don't want to reveal too much right now but in the next two weeks here i'm going to announce some things that we're going to be doing coming up i just don't want to put them out there too early before i've got my head around them but i think we got some really cool stuff in the works and also today for our subject i wanted to address some issues because there were a lot of people who wanted to see stuff and had questions mainly on you know what it means to be a working photographer what it means to be a professional photographer and i thought that might make a good subject for today's show and we'll probably revisit this over a couple episodes and because i think there's a lot to it and i think it's really interesting and i think we're in uh particularly sometimes i think it's weird but it definitely is an interesting time um in terms of what it means to do creative work professionally and when i was a kid i grew up and i've said this before on the show but you know my dad was an illustrator and that's what he did his entire career and he basically made paintings for magazine covers for advertising for corporate clients he did portraits he did all kinds of things and by all means of the word he was a professional illustrator and you know growing up as a kid in the 70s and 80s of course you know being my dad i looked up to him and i really was always enamored by the fact that my dad did something very unusual for a career but i also knew you know my parents had friends that were other illustrators we knew photographers um people i know to this day and i think in the 70s and 80s when you said you were a professional photographer and it was a very viable source of income usually what that meant is you were in some line of work where you shot product photography you did annual reports maybe there was a lot of travel involved sometimes it was celebrity portraits there were a lot of different things that were very viable in terms of photography at that time particularly in the advertising industry and when i grew up that's what i associated as being a professional photographer and it's really interesting because i think we've seen a big turn about this probably starting in the late 90s into the tech boom and the way the world has changed and what that means to us as professionals so to speak and nowadays you know due to the rise of stock photography and i don't think this is a bad thing it's just kind of a weird thing that a lot of you know there's so much imagery out there i mean you could also make the argument that digital cameras are so easy to get that a lot of people don't hire professional for certain things anymore or maybe they want to do it themselves or they're maybe they're more photographers there's more competition there's a lot of reasons to this but i really think that the industry has changed a lot i still think it can be done i still think you can make your living as a photographer um definitely part-time if not full-time it's just changed and trying to figure out how to make that work is kind of you know the premise for all this now i do another podcast called the photography show that i do with my friend wade and we talk a lot about business and a lot about being a professional photographer on there but just for this episode i want to hit on what that might mean because it really can mean anything you know the term professional just it basically indicates that you know some portion of income that you probably get taxed on by the government at the end of the year is made with your camera shooting pictures whether that is selling your pictures in a fine art kind of way or whether that's doing commercial work for a client kind of situation or whether that's shooting weddings or whether that shooting product or whatever that is and you know there still is work to be found and it's changed a lot but what also i think is interesting is there was a statement that was made in the news recently that you guys may have caught a couple months maybe about a month ago flickr had a big redesign and it was long overdue beautifully done there was some controversy because it was very different than what they had before and that's not the subject i'm going for but around that time marissa mayer who is the ceo now of yahoo who owns flickr had made an announcement in the press that it was answering a question the reporter had asked her and i think in some ways she probably was caught off guard somewhat but anyway it went like this for years if you have been on flickr before in the old days they had what was called a pro account and basically all that meant was it was the paid account where you had some more features than just the basic sign up for free account and one of the designations is that you they put the word pro next to your username to indicate that you had a pro account it did not mean you were a professional photographer in fact i think most people on flickr got that and never associated with it and i'm not sure maybe marissa understood that which is kind of unfortunate too but anyway the question was asked of her that why they decided to change the business model and get rid of the pro accounts and unfortunately her response was that there's no really such thing as a pro photographer anymore that there are no professional photographers anymore so they were making these changes and i want i just read that i thought god ouch and i i kind of feel bad for because i think the question may have caught her off guard i don't think she understood what it was and i think that statement was really uh very uninformed and extremely naive in a lot of ways because i know a lot of people who are doing it and it is not an easy industry to be in most people work for themselves there's not a lot of like full-time employment jobs they're few we'll talk about them but you know normally it's not like you work for a company and you have benefits and you know you get a paycheck it's working for yourself and you have to invoice your clients and you're responsible for your own insurance and all those things and it just kind of i think came off as a little bit of an insult to some photographers because i read a lot of negative reactions about that too but if we define being a professional photographer and forget what marissa says um if you define being a professional photographer is some of your income comes from photography and what i've always thought was odd too was there's always some kind of prestige that comes with saying that yes i'm a professional photographer and sometimes it has a little bit of a snooty connotation to it there's definitely a you know this pretentious prestige that comes with it and it really isn't i mean honestly i've gone through periods of my life where i've made money from photography and periods where i just did it for myself and i did it for my own personal gain and i'll be honest i felt more prestigious about the times i wasn't making any money about it and the reason was is because i was able to shoot what i wanted to shoot and i think that's really important and that's a really important takeaway here so i guess all this is just to say that that you know this being a professional photographer it's it's it's the right thing to do if you know you want to do that and if you feel like you have to do that and you feel like that's really part of you and you feel like you're going to draw satisfaction and happiness from that having said that there you know the scope of being a professional photographer is so broad and so wide and like i said this can mean a lot of things maybe this means you sell prints maybe this means that you know you shoot weddings maybe this means you're a fine art photographer maybe this means that you do stock photography and those are all very different occupations under this umbrella of being a pro photographer and so what i want to do today is i want to look at some websites i would be willing to bet that most people out there have not updated their website in a while and that goes for me too and that's a project that i want to do this summer and so some of this i'll talk about and i'll be able to show you and work through too as we go along and we'll look at some examples but today i want to look at some examples of some websites that i think are particularly good and i want to look at the range of work people are doing and what your website tells the world that you do and and what that indicates about you and hopefully you'll see some cool work that's inspiring too today and that's another big intention of this so come on over to the computer and we're going to get online have a look okay so we're going to look at some photography websites of various professional photographers and what i've done today is i've picked a pretty wide range of stuff to cover and this is a pretty wide range of photographers and i will be the first to admit that some of these people i know personally and i that's not why they're in here i really really respect their work and i think they're doing something right on their website so all these photography websites are great examples i'm not wanting to show you so much the greatness of their website so much i mean all these are wonderful but in terms of being a professional photographer what is it that they're communicating with their website so what are they showing and what are they indicating um and why does this work does it give a good clue of who they are and what they do and you know we'll take it from there the first example i want to look at this is a guy named wade griffith that i do another podcast with called the photography show that you can look up in itunes wade is a very good friend of mine he is an excellent photographer no question about it and wade has carved a niche um he does a lot of professional work these days but he has carved a really wonderful niche of architectural photography and portraits and i love the fact that his website starts out giving you both those things um the pictures are big um you know we're just sitting here talking and he's got a slideshow that it defaults to and you get a really good sense that this guy has his stuff together and he can shoot he has this wonderful sense of symmetry when he does architectural work um and that shows through in the photos it's very clean there's not a lot of text on here um he doesn't really need it he needs to show his photos because if you are an architectural firm or you have a building you're very proud of or you have that kind of a need for for a photographer this is the guy you want to hire professionally certainly his portfolio comes up first you can go look at hotel shots if you want um he has this so you can skip through them if you want you can look at thumbnails or you can auto play them and if you were interested in architecture photography there's no bs here i mean wade is really being very clear about that um so anyway that's just a very clean nicely done website and of course i'm a dear friend of wade's but um i think he does this really well and i certainly would not have showed this otherwise a couple other people this is another guy that i've known for years this is a gentleman named keith wood who is a good friend of mine he is a photographer out of portland oregon and he has done he's had a very long career uh probably 30 40 years of doing commercial work huge clients like exxon i'll show you his portfolio here he does a lot of cultural work for big oil companies he does some sculpture he has some personal work in here but you you can get a sense that you know if you need a location guy that's going to go overseas and shoot in africa i mean he certainly has done this well and you know the other thing i really like about what keith does is there's a lot of text on here to talk about some of these images and i think that's because there's sometimes some context behind them that does need to be described and he talks about the job he did he talked about he'll talk about uh you know what the subject of the photo was the other thing i really like about keith's website is he has this wonderful um it's sort of a blog i mean i guess it is a blog for all intents and purposes but he puts his own work up and then talks about it which is something that i think photographers need to learn how to do more it's not extensive it's just sometimes a paragraph or a couple sentences but he just explains what's going on in the photo his work is brilliant and it does speak for itself but because keith is oh in a lot of ways a street photographer in essence even with the corporate clients that he does with a lot of uh with a lot of the uh the foreign country travel that he does um sometimes there is some story behind it much in the sense of a national geographic kind of thing and so i think keith does that really well and so you know this is a great website for not only seeing great work but getting under the hood a little bit and learning more about keith and i think that is a really important thing on the complete other end of the spectrum i want to talk about my buddy joe budd and joe is actually a neighbor of mine that i met last year we met up on the roof of our loft building watching fireworks and joe's a really good guy we've become very good friends and what is fascinating about joe other than he's a really nice guy but he has carved a niche as a professional by shooting strictly mineral photography he calls it shooting rocks and this is his website it's joebudphotography.com and uh i'll put all the links to these in the show notes so if you're watching them on the website just look below the video and you can you can go check these out on your own but what i think this is this is really interesting because this one i'm talking about with with in terms of careers changing you know you look at a guy like keith who's been around for years and years and has enormous reputation an enormous amount of context in various businesses and if you need somebody to go out and shoot an oil rig or roughnecks or drums or whatever he's your guy and this is a harder business for newer people to break into just because um you know this guy's been around and he's got these connections however you take somebody like joe who's a lot younger and is a little more new at his career and he's carved what you know you call a niche and a niche is simply you know you've come up with something very specific that you specialize in in this case it's rock so his clients consist of a lot of museums they consist of people who collect rocks and believe it or not there's a lot of wealthy collectors out there that deal with minerals they're very proud of what they've got they deal these things all the time they're always buying and selling and there is an avenue to hire a photographer who knows what they're doing in there i remember when joe first told me about this and i'm like you shoot rocks huh and so you know they're minerals but you look at these and he's got a great eye i mean a lot of these they're they're minerals but it's it's macro photography it has to be specially lit the color accuracy is completely important with this because a lot of times they'll end up using these in catalogs or places where they're actually buying selling and trading minerals and so the color correction is very important on these and joe is a very meticulous person and i think he shoots these extremely well he's got a beautiful website um a couple things that are interesting about this is you know you can certainly go in and if you you know deal with courts a lot you can you know dial right over to that section but upon the top here just as far as his navigation goes um i i think his website is well done in this way because it the his audience is not other photographers necessarily it's the clients and the potential clients so you know you've got your home tab and he's got published images in here and this is interesting and you do see photographers do this a lot where they'll go ahead and do tear sheets magazine covers and what he is is he's showing two things here one he's showing his work in context of what was used in the end and two he's also in a very subtle way showing who he's worked for in some of the the bigger magazines now you and i may not have heard of a lot of these but if you're in the rock and gem industry you probably have and he's done an enormous amount of work and had a good success with this um and i think his website is great i think it shows that it's very clean it doesn't try to be anything more than this one thing i like that joe doesn't put a lot of personal work on here he keeps it very straightforward to what he can do and and what he's out there to you know be a professional with and make money at um i think he's extremely good let's go to another end of the spectrum here this is a gentleman named tyler sharp who i met recently because we did an interview with him on the other podcast tyler is amazing he shoots a lot of he has a very eclectic career in a lot of ways very beautiful website i love the way the thumbnails are laid out in this kind of grid like format and he shoots great work um you click on the image it gets big and he's done a wonderful selection of just narrowing it down to his best stuff uh sometimes he'll have two shots on a page which is kind of interesting if they're things that go together other times it's just one and it's very well done the other thing i like about tyler is he is kind of a little bit of an eclectic guy in the sense that he shoots photos but he also is a writer and he does some video work and so he's done some documentaries that you can see on here you can go in and look at his video reel and he's got some really really beautiful work on there and he also has these writing with short stories now we will come back around to this later when we start talking about building websites in another episode but one thing that's really important is that i think more photographers need to learn how to write about their own work this is something that a lot of people do not understand and unfortunately the world of the internet to a lot of people out there is google and google is not going to index your images based on content necessarily now there's technology in place that's changing this but you do need to learn how to write and describe your work if you're interested in search traffic and i think that tyler does this really really well he's an amazing guy amazing photographer he's got a very eclectic client list his website reflects that and he has a wide range of work that he does and a lot of variety it's very different than somebody like joe budd who specializes in something that's very niche in a lot of ways so anyway wonderful stuff um another gentleman i will show you the work of is this is kevin meredith who i have met on a couple occasions just online uh kevin's amazing photographer um he is known as lomo kev on flickr and he is one of the more popular guys on flickr and has been for years and kevin is his vocation on here or how he makes his living is he deals in teaching and authoring books and so his photography website is going to be a lot different he of course has his portfolio on here so you can go in he shoots largely with a lomo lca camera and has done some wonderful work again look he's describing his photos he knows how to write about his work and shows big large beautiful colored photos on here and uh this is one of my favorites this is actually imaging cunningham riding a bike um who's a friend of his and uh anyway so a wonderful retro style photographer who brings in a lot of this old school vibe to a lot of his shots um you know you see this kind of world of bracon and robert frank that his influence but he doesn't look like those guys but that that is definitely maybe something behind his work and he puts wonderful stuff in here and this is really just his best work if you want to go see everything he can go to flickr but he does a great job of dialing this down into things that really work well and he knows how to write about it so anyway um and also he does have information on here go back up to the top of workshops that he does for the hotshots photography course that he teaches and then also his book projects which he's an amazing guy and he's done some amazing work he's a really nice guy too and i'd love to meet him in person one day we've only met online a few times but very nice gentlemen so another guy that i want to show you who i think this is a complete opposite end of the spectrum here is abelardo morel and and morel is a fine art photographer that is what he does he does not do commercial work in that sense he sells prints in major galleries and he is one of the top photographers in the world these days and if you watch the show you know i'm a huge fan of his work i just he's one of the best and he does a lot of work with camera obscura and what you're looking at in this photo right here and i love how this is the first image on here because it's very compelling if you don't understand what's going on he will get a hotel room across the street from whatever scene he's quote unquote photographing cover the windows in hefty bags black out the room cut a small quarter sized hole in it and what you get is a camera obscura which works just like a pinhole camera so the image is actually projected onto the wall behind the room and so then he will photograph the room with this image being projected and he does absolutely disgustingly wonderful work to the point where you just can't stand it because he is so good um and his portfolio is very well organized into little niches that he does very well um he's got enough text on here with upcoming events upcoming work retrospectives things like that shows that he's doing and you know here's a whole thing on on money that he's he's done here's a whole gallery on various still lifes with money and i think it's absolutely wonderful a very creative mind um a very interesting photographer he does a lot of wonderful stuff i just really can't say enough good things about him but what i like and he just recently redesigned this website is that he keeps this very straightforward if you need to know what the publications are what books are being published want to read the blog look at the photography it's very well laid out i mean this i'm not sure it feels like wordpress what he's using and we'll get into that more specifically when we talk about websites um this is a new thing he's working on with images he's making he's calling this the tent camera and so their camera obscuras but he shoots them on the wall of a tent that he carries around and so the idea of the tent is you don't have to have a hotel room somewhere you can pretty much pick this up and set it anywhere and uh you end up getting the texture and the pattern of whatever the tent material is made of this one's actually made on the on the ground so anyway it creates a really interesting canvas and like i said morel is really pushing the boundaries of fine art and what can be done and i think he's extremely unusual that he does this better than no one else and uh beautiful work once again i'm gonna put all the links to these in the show notes and you can go check them out and the intent here was not just to fumble through some photography websites but i wanted to show you some specific people who are all working in various different things abelard morel is a fine art photographer we looked at joe budd who does mineral work very strict niche keith wood who does a lot of travel work a lot of corporate work kind of more old school we've also looked at tyler sharp who is amazing um does more editorial kinds of stuff but is very modern the way he does it we looked at wade griffith who does a lot of beautiful architectural work and finally kevin meredith who is an author and a teacher for a vocation and how his website is a little bit different as well so anyway all this to say is i think this is really important when you go look at stuff and it's really important to find out what it is you want to focus on as a photographer no pun intended and what it is that you are doing that makes you a professional and what it is that you want to communicate through your website many of you probably already have websites i know i do and i bet that many of them probably need to be updated and i know mine does and so we'll talk more about this in future episodes but this is what i'm trying to get across today and this is what i want you guys to start thinking about and just you know looking at the breadth of what can be done whether or not you like the aesthetics or the design of these websites is past the point in fact you'll notice they do run the gamut some of them are very you know eloquently designed and some of them are a little more utilitarian but the point is is design aside are you communicating your photos in the way that you want to communicate yourself as a photographer okay so we've looked at a pretty wide scope of different photographers online and what they do and you know this whole concept of what it means to be a pro and a professional and i want to revisit this and i want you guys to think about what that means to you and the reason i said is because i really did get a lot of questions of people who are interested in what they need to be putting together in their portfolio and how to select their own work and in coming episodes what we're going to do is i want to revisit this and i want to get more in depth than i have in the past about it um you know we've done episodes on this before and i want to try and take them to the next level and dig a little deeper and maybe give you guys some more assignment based things and takeaways you can do um you know from watching the show so anyway um all that will be to come and thanks again for watching once again guys it's been the art of photography and i will see you next time take care\n"