Seattle-based photographer Daniel Berman shot portraits of costumed attendees at Emerald City Comicon.

I went down to check out Emerald City Comic Con on Saturday for a fun and exciting self-assignment. It was the chance to explore on my own time and make some different kinds of portraits of the great costumed attendees. Initially, I set up a small studio in the corner of the main lobby of the exhibition area, but decided to try something new. For a few hours, I roamed around with an Alien Bee, Vagabond Mini Lithium battery pack and 46″ Photek Softlighter II on a light stand with the legs folded up. Despite negotiating the large setup through a crowded environment, my biggest challenge was just making natural pictures. Everyone, understandably, wanted to give me their best pose — something usually that they have just done for ten other people — and that couldn’t be farther from what I sought to shoot.

See many more photos from the Emerald City Comicon on Daniel’s blog.

It’s Saturday night, St. Patrick’s Day.  Instead of going out and drinking green beer with my friends, I’m relaxing at home looking forward to an early night of sleep which I hope will refresh me for a third out of four days of portfolio reviews as part of FotoFest 2012 Biennial’s International Meeting Place at the Doubletree Hotel in Downtown Houston Texas. The Meeting Place, the largest portfolio review program in the world, consists of four 4-day sessions where photographers can network and be reviewed by twenty editors, museum directors, gallery owners, publishers and collectors each session. The contacts potentially lead to books published, exhibit opportunities and more. This represents my first large portfolio review outside of two student and alumni end of year reviews at the International Center of Photography (ICP) and a handful of reviews during my undergraduate years at various sports photography workshops. I cannot believe how incredibly exhausted I am (to be fair I returned earlier this week from a family trip to Israel and Jordan!)

Each day I carry two portfolios to the event. The first is an 11X17 box of images from my long-term personal project entitled “Seeing With Hands: Noa” that began as I studied photojournalism and documentary photography at ICP and continued these past three years. This portfolio garnered praise and extremely positive reviews across the board. The other is more experimental, a 5X7 box containing 22 images of people and portraits in square format all shot on my iPhone.  This portfolio that was recommended when I attended a ‘practice’ review at the Houston Center of Photography a few weeks ago; it has been attracting mixed reactions from my reviewers (volunteered comments range from “you should apply to be a part of an exhibition with some of these,” to “you need to be more focused and cohesive with the work” to simply “keep your day job!”).  I struggled with my iPhone portfolio most because I was not simply refreshing and updating a previous version.

I started with approximately 140 of my favorite portraits and people images shot over a period of a year on an iPhone app called Hipstamatic; it allows me to chose from a variety of ‘films’ and ‘lenses’ and facilitates different looks in a square format. I loaded them online to a private page and sent the link to a few trusted advisors for advice. I also printed them out as 2X2 thumbnails through Lightroom so that I would have a hard copy to work with.

Following that round of advice and my own editing I whittled them to 41 images. I printed those to my portfolio size and then created another page for others’ viewing consideration; I did not want to overwhelm the reviewers with 40 images.  I sought help from friends, family, and my social media account followers. I started with Instagram and posted the following…

It failed to generate anything but some ‘likes’ – no comments or emails.  I turned to my Photos by Talya fan page on Facebook and  ‘shared’ this entry with my friends on my personal Facebook page. This generated some excellent responses which I used as ‘votes’ that I wrote on the back of each thumbnail print.  I credited extra points to the images suggested by those in the photography business or highly connected with the art of photography (I would never typically chose a portfolio this way, but I think it was a great route to follow for this portfolio as the iPhone lends itself to being a social tool in general). I separated the 41 images into three piles – one which was  “definite” with lots of votes or images that I and one or two other individuals who got the extra points especially liked; – the “maybes;” – and images receiving few or no votes. There were 20  “definites” and about 10 in each of the others.

I subsequently laid them out in the order I wanted, removed one of a person I already had two other photos of, and added three from the “maybe” pile to round the whole thing out. Shazam! a 22 image portfolio was born!

Originally I planned to start with this image:

and end with this:

but after my layout I decided to open with an image of me with my phone:

and end it by sending my viewers off with a message of peace!

Finally, near the beginning of the portfolio, is the photo that has received the most comments and emotions overall – this image may stay in my future overall portfolio regardless of whether I continue with an iPhone portfolio or not.  It is entitled ‘lit’. It even garnered a shout out from my first newspaper internship’s photo editor, Todd Mizener, on his Facebook page that made me blush! “I LOVE this image. Talya Arbisser is really becoming a master of the iPhone as a storytelling tool.”

To see the final images included in my iPhone People and Portrait portfolio (for better or for worse) please go here – http://talyaarbisser.photoshelter.com/gallery/iPhonePortraiture/G00002w53qltavYM

PEACE! (I’m off to bed!)

NYC-based photographer Nick Laham took Instagram portraits of the Yankees players with his iPhone.

So yes. That was me in the locker room bathroom shooting portraits of the New York Yankees players with my iPhone. This was not my choice, I wasn’t given the option of studio or bathroom stall and decided on the latter. I joined the chain of photographers at 6am in the confines of the New York Yankees Spring Training facility in Tampa, and took what space I could get and worked with it.

See more portraits of the players on Nick’s blog. Also, click here to see Nick in action shooting this iPhone series!

New York-based photographer Matt Eisman traveled to Reykjavík and did an extensive portrait series of Icelandic musicians.

One light, a black background, 13 bands (one not even named yet!) and 50+ faces. I traveled to Reykjavík at the end of January for two weeks to visit friends and work on a personal project. The idea was simple–photograph as many faces of the Icelandic music scene as possible.

See the rest of the portraits on Matt’s website.

Phoenix-based sports photographer Mark Rebilas shot portraits of the 2012 Aaron’s NHRA drivers.

At the beginning of January I made my first flight of the year up to Indianapolis to shoot portraits of the 2012 Aarons NHRA drivers.

The two NHRA drivers for Aarons in 2012 are Antron Brown in top fuel and Matt Hagan in his funny car. The two drivers are both teammates at Don Schumacher Racing so the location for the shoot would take place in the DSR shop in Brownsburg, IN.

Continue reading and see more photos of the portrait shoot on Mark’s blog.

Atlanta-based photographer and LUCEO Images co-founder David Walter Banks shot a portraits series for AARP to give a face to those affected by South Carolina’s voter identification law.

The state of South Carolina painted the South as a politically and socially regressive corner of the country yet again earlier this month when the state filed a lawsuit challenging the Justice Department’s recent blocking of South Carolina’s voter identification law.  The state’s fight to uphold Jim Crow-like voter suppression laws could cost taxpayers nearly $1 million or more before it’s all said and done.  The act comes as a proverbial slap in the face to generations of civil rights activists, and an insult to South Carolina taxpayers and their already overburdened budget.

Conitnue reading and see more photos on the LUCEO blog.

VICE produced a video about photographer Ziyah Gafic and his amazing travels to Saudi Arabia to document the homes and lives of Saudi women.

If you can’t watch the video, please click here.

Forty-five percent of Saudi Arabia’s population is female. Ironically, these ladies control an estimated $11.9 billion of the nation’s wealth but are denied rights that most women take for granted: They are forbidden from voting (until 2015), can’t drive, and require written permission from their male “guardians” (usually a father or husband) if they wish to travel abroad or open a business. It’s no wonder they are often stereotyped as faceless, voiceless shadows without control over their own destinies.

Offered a unique opportunity, I was invited into a world rarely visited by outsiders—one that is usually considered off-limits and impenetrable—to lift the abaya and niqab and meet the women underneath.

Dr. Fawzia Akhdar, retired member of the ministry of education: “The Saudi woman is a chancellor, judge, leader, and mother. She can shake the world with her left hand and rock her child with her right, as Napoleon said. The rest of the world views the Saudi woman differently because she is covered and wearing a hijab, so she must be oppressed. But the opposite is true. The Saudi woman is like the rest of the women of the world, or even stronger because she has had to fight to reach where she is.”

See more of Ziyah’s photos on VICE’s website.

Houston-based freelancer Robert Seale spent a weekend with the Doolittle Raiders and was flown around in a B-25 with a 95-year-old pilot!

I’m a real military aviation history buff, so it was an incredible honor when I was recently assigned to take portraits of the Doolittle Raiders for Smithsonian Air and Space Magazine. It was especially gratifying because I was able to pitch the idea to the magazine and then get the green light to take on the assignment.

The Doolittle Raid was America’s first major strike back at the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. On April 18, 1942, Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle led an all volunteer group 80 men launched 16 B-25 bombers from the USS Hornet and struck Japan. Because a Japanese fishing boat detected the carrier group early, the crews launched early, which weakened their already compromised range, and prevented them from landing safely on Chinese airfields as planned. The crews bailed out or ditched their planes near the coast of China after running out of fuel. Three men were killed in the raid, and eight more would die in Japanese POW camps. Miraculously, most of the crews were eventually rescued and safely transferred back to the US by the Chinese.

Continue reading and see more photos on Robert’s blog.

Sacramento, CA-based photographer Michael Starghill recently documented and shot portraits of a summer basketball league in Washington DC.

Well, I had a grand plan to spend all summer in Barry Farms photographing the ins and outs of the Goodman League but that plan was curtailed when I moved to California early in July. I did spend a good amount of time there in June and was even successful in shooting some portraits of the players. Ironically, the day I hopped on a plane, John Wall (DCs biggest basketball star) showed up and dropped 41. Oh well…at least I was able to shoot these portraits.

See more photos on Michael’s blog.

DC-based freelancer Melissa Golden recently photographed a story for Marie Claire about a woman who had to give up her pregnancy in Louisville, KY.

Marie Claire called me up last October to go to Kentucky to photograph Sarah Ivens, who had experienced the trauma of having to give up her pregnancy.  It’s tragic enough when a woman is told her fetus is not viable, especially when that woman has tried desperately to get pregnant in the first place, but Mrs. Ivens’ story doesn’t end there.  While going through the agony of an unwanted abortion, this British ex-pat living in Louisville, KY was told that she was going to Hell.  You can read her first person account here.

I photographed Sarah and her husband at their home in Louisville.  They are a particularly beautiful couple, but it was obvious that they were still very hurt by the situation.

I spent the rest of my time in town shooting abortion clinics, pro-life centers and baby cemeteries to provide context and a sense of place.

See more photos on Melissa’s blog.