To get the ball rolling, the photographer who inspires me is the great photojournalist David Burnett: He's given me valuable advice as well, on shooting Congressional hearings... With a Speed Graphic.
And Yes, he's the guy who shoots Presidential campaigns with a Holga and Speed Graphic... Here's a two minute video clip of him on the campaign trail; and here is the NY Times article on him entitled Which Camera Does This Pro Use? It Depends on the Shot.
Also, Burnett has been featured in the Washington Post's Camera Works column. [NB: In the WaPo article, Burnett mentions Frank Cancellare.]
David's online portfolio is here.
Allow me to quote from the NY Times article; and you'll see why he inspires me:
...So with four decades of war, sports and politics at hand, it was easy for Mr. Burnett, one of his generation's top photojournalists, to engage the dozens of photo experts who packed the back room of a Manhattan restaurant last month for one of his guided slideshows.
Yet through the first 20 minutes of Mr. Burnett's presentation, the cognoscenti seemed less deeply moved by his work and more entertained by his banter ("These are some of the farmers," he said drolly about a picture of Secret Service agents in a pasture during the 1988 campaign).
With one transition on the screen, that changed. In an instant, the chatter stopped, replaced by gasps and a collective groan of appreciation.
Mr. Burnett was explaining why in this age of ever more plentiful megapixels, at this moment when the concept of "film" seems as old-fashioned as a rotary telephone, he has spent most of the last two years lugging around a 55-year-old 4-by-5-inch Graflex Speed Graphic camera, complete with tripod.
[Note from Dan: He uses an f/2.5 178mm (7 inch) Aero-Ektar, removed from a WWII K-24 aerial camera.]
On the screen was a wide overhead picture of a John Kerry rally last fall in Madison, Wis., which Mr. Burnett shot with a Canon 20D digital camera, the same camera used by thousands of other professionals around the world. Not surprisingly, the picture looks like thousands of others that were shipped around the globe during the campaign.
The colors are bright. Every part of the image is crisp, so crisp that just picking the minuscule figure of Mr. Kerry out of the huge crowd takes a "Where's Waldo?" moment.
And then Mr. Burnett flipped to a photograph taken seconds later with the ancient Speed Graphic. Suddenly, the image took on a luminescent depth. The center of the image, with Mr. Kerry, was clear. Yet soon the crowd along the edges began to float into softer focus on translucent planes of color.
The effect is to direct the viewer's eye to Mr. Kerry while also conveying the scale and intensity of the crowd. In accomplishing both at the same time, the old-fashioned photograph communicates a rich sense of meaning that the digital file does not.
The digital picture pretends to display raw reality. The analog picture is a visualization of human memory.
At least for me, Burnett is quite an inspiration.
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