Beyond The Frame: Coney Island's Barkers

Photograph © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
On the corner of West 12th Street and Surf Avenue is the eye-catching Coney Island Museum and the Side-Show by The Sea. Its facade is decorated with colorful artwork depicting the Side-Show's features, such as Donny Vomit the death defying performer, Angelica the fire dancer, Heather Holliday, the sword swallower and Serpentina the Snake Charmer. This is one of the photographs of the Side-Show's barker....a dandyfied gentleman who encourages the public to pay the $7.50 entry fee to watch the so-called freak shows.

Photograph © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
The area's seediness and its current decay has a charming aesthetic to it, and a hot dog eaten on Coney Island's boardwalk tastes better than anywhere else!

Frans Lanting: LIFE

Here's a seamless, smooth and utterly professional multimedia production entitled LIFE: A Journey Through Time with the gorgeous photography of Frans Lanting.

Lanting is hailed as one of the great nature photographers of our time, and his photographs appear in books, magazines, and exhibitions around the world. He documented wildlife and nature from the Amazon to Antarctica.

This is museum-quality multimedia, with "new age" type of music by Philip Glass and you'll need time to savor its many ingredients. It's not travel nor editorial photography but I found it so well produced that I had to mention it here on TTP. I'm sure it'll be a favorite for years to come.

Rick Sammon & On-Location Portraits

Photograph © Rick Sammon-All Rights Reserved
Rick Sammon is a prolific travel photographer, author and instructor who has just written an interesting article in Layers magazine titled The Art of the On-Location Portraits.

This sentence caught my eye: "For me, the key to getting a good on-location portrait is to fall in love—photographically—with the subject. That’s exactly what I did when I saw this young woman. Out of the 50 or so people who lived in this particular village, she caught my eye immediately.

I couldn't agree more. The key to a good portrait (in fact, I'd argue it's the same whether on location or in a studio) is to establish a rapport with your subject. I've posted about this very thing in June last year in a post titled POV: Better Travel Photography . The foundation of successful environmental portraiture and ethnographic photography is the establishment of a relationship between the photographer and subjects....it's a no-brainer. When I lead my photo tours, I always sound like a broken record, and the mantra is "connect with your subject(s)...befriend them and start a conversation". Not only will the photographers make much better photographs, but they'll have background stories to go along with them. You'll be surprised at how long these memories stay with you.

So yes, absolutely...do what Rick Sammon says, fall in love photographically with your subject!!!

Via David duChemin's excellent Pixelated Image blog