Each month when I was a little girl, we received the National Geographic magazine. And each month, I acquired another animal to be concerned about or another person’s plight to care about. I had never seen a sea turtle, but I cried when I saw a photograph of one entangled in a net. When I looked at the photographs of whalers hunting off the coast of Japan; the urgent cries of the whales, their thrashing, and the spray of their blood was entirely real for me. I’d never been to Biafra, but the children with those big sad eyes and distended bellies touched me in a way that shaped who I would become. (more…)

When film was popular, most photographers had it easy when it came to getting photos printed. With the exception of photographers who had their own darkroom, we all took our photos to a lab, asked for a specific size, and left the rest to the experts.

And up until this decade, slides were the standard way to provide photos for many competitions as well as inclusion in printed publications such as this one. If we shot negative film, we might be able to submit the prints produced from it. We didn’t send unprocessed negatives; we wouldn’t know what they looked like, and nobody would want to deal with processing someone else’s photos. (more…)