My father. He has been ill for much of my life but while he still could he would take photographs of family, friends and strangers, and deliver prints to them. His sole reason was to go out of his way to bring people joy, not just with the camera. He hasn’t been able to take photos for more than a decade. He is the reason that I enjoy photography and this community.
I’m a big fan of Dan Winters and his portraits. He commands his lights in interesting ways and often finds wonderful views of his subjects. His control and flagging of his key lights is always visually striking.
@s7habo, I’d never heard of this guy but those images really stopped me in my tracks. I went to his site to see more of his work, and his work is definitely worth studying. Thanks!
Thing is, when I look back on my experiences making images, what inspires me today is rooted in what he did and wrote about:
Subject: His renditions of the American West are one of the reasons I sought to live there.
Composition: Large and compelling compositional objects are a scattered all over the landscape, so to speak, and he was a master of organizing them in the frame. In my early years I admired the color work of the Arizona Highways photographers; Adams was the black & white corollary.
Technical: He very much advocated the understanding of the medium in order to effectively use it, which inspired a lot of my study in the day. I’ve recently enjoyed revisiting The Negative, his book on exposure and film development, and exploring the corollaries between film and digital imaging.
Even today, I’ll grayscale a digital image to explore what it might do in the context I learned studying Ansel Adams.
This is a great idea for a thread! There are many inspirations I could list. My dad got me into it as a kid, so that’s the first. In terms of classic photographers, I’ve always been very inspired by Sebastao Salgado: