Every time you launch Photoshop, you’re greeted momentarily with a splash screen showing a cloud of names that give credit to the people who have worked on the program. This “Behind the Splash Screen” video introduces you to some of the people whose names are found there, and provides some background on how Photoshop CS5 was developed (as well as the huge challenges they faced).
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David Gallagher was one of the earliest photobloggers with his (now defunct) website lightningfield.com. He is currently an editor at the New York Times.
PetaPixel: Could you tell me a little about yourself?
David Gallagher: I was born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with my wife Fiona. I’ve been involved with journalism and the Internet since I got out of college. Now I work at The New York Times, where I’m an editor dealing with tech news.
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Here’s a pretty interesting 45-minute interview with Pete Souza, which was done via a live web chat at the end of October. Souza is responsible for the behind-the-scenes photographs posted regularly to the official White House Flickr stream. He talks about everything from how photos are selected to crawling around on the floor of the Oval Office to get the perfect shot.
(via Blurberati Blog)
Heather Champ is cofounder of Fertile Medium, an online community consultancy. She was formerly the Director of Community at Flickr and the co-founder of JPG Magazine, which she started with her husband Derek Powazek. Visit her website here.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us about yourself and your background?
Heather Champ: Living in San Francisco, I’m roughly 2,439 miles and worlds away from Ottawa, the city of my birth. There’s very little of my accent left, though there will be a moment when I can see the wheels turning in someone’s brain and that follows with “are you Canadian?” I have a studio fine arts degree and have hopped and skipped my way through a variety of careers that have built upon that creative foundation.
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In 1983 the BBC aired a series called “Master Photographers” in which they interviewed some of the biggest names in photography at the time, including Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The series can’t be found anywhere on DVD, but luckily many of the episodes have been uploaded to YouTube. If you’re at all interested in learning how historical greats worked and thought, this is a video series you have to bookmark and chew through.
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Haje Jan Kamps is the blogger behind Photocritic.org
PP: Can you tell us about yourself and your background?
HJK: Sure thing. I was born in the Netherlands, and moved to Norway when I was about 5 or so. I started taking photos when I was about 14, but the art of photography didn’t really click with me until I got my paws on my first digital camera – a Casio SX-2000, I think it was.
When I was doing research into my first digital camera, I was apalked by how little info there was about them in Norwegian – and decided to rectify that by starting a website. Not long after, it was bought off me, and it changed name to digitalkamera.no – now akam.no. It was sn exciting time to be writing about digital photography, and I guess I was writing about photography as much as I was taking photos, right from the start.
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Udi Tirosh is the blogger behind DIYPhotography.net and the creator of the Bokeh Masters Kit.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us about yourself and your background?
Udi Tirosh: I started photographing when I was in high school, and like lots of amateurs photographers I did photowalks, studio sessions and all the family events. At some point, I started DIYPhotography for the fun of it and thought of myself as a high-tech guy who photographs and has a site. DIYP has evolved beyond my expectations and for a long while I changed the order of my self definition to blogger who also takes pictures. Today, I am finding that I am slowly gaining photography as being first.
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The Sydney Morning Herald has an amazing collection of interviews with their photojournalists, sharing how they approach photography and the stories they wish to convey through their images. Each photographer has a different focus and style, but all of their images and narrations are very inspiring. It’s powerful to see so much emotion conveyed and art created through photojournalism.
See them on the Sydney Morning Herald site.
Trey Ratcliff is the renown photographer behind the travel photography blog Stuck in Customs and a pioneer in HDR photography. He has written a popular tutorial on HDR photography, and answers your questions on Twitter as @TreyRatcliff.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Trey Ratcliff: Even though my educational background is in all the hard sciences of Computer Science and Math, I really tend to get much more of a thrill out of the artistic side of my life. Rather than bore you with all the little bits of my life, I’ll just keep it simple and say I love struggling with innovative art and pushing it in new directions.
If you really want to know more, I keep one of those “About Me” pages with enough info to satisfy 90% of stalkers.
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Thom Hogan is the writer and photographer behind bythom.com, a website that provides extensive information about Nikon gear. He has written over 30 books on computers and photography.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Thom Hogan: I’ve always had a weird half-and-half personality: half science/technology, half art. To some degree, that may have been what led me into an undergraduate degree in telecommunications (filmmaking and television production). It let me play with technology and art simultaneously ;~). But I’ve always taken a circuitous route to where I’m going. I went from architecture to music to filmmaking to television to statistics to management to Silicon Valley, with stops at many magazines along the way. The only thing that was constant was that I wrote about what I was doing and what I knew, I taught it to others, and I often photographed alongside that writing. When I dumped my high tech career in the 90’s to run Backpacker magazine, it was the start of emphasizing just those two constants: writing and photography. When I decided to leave Backpacker and Rodale, it happened to coincide with the mass migration from film to digital in photography, and my long tech career, which included designing some early digital cameras, suddenly came back into play.
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