A look at a professional who reached the top of his industry before switching gears to lead a new life behind a camera lens.

One of the most successful examples of the dual-career trend is Bill Atkinson, a businessman and photographer.

"When I was 10 years old, my mother gave me a subscription to Arizona Highways magazine," Atkinson recalls. "I cut out several nature photographs and displayed them on my bedroom walls. I found that each day I viewed them, I felt nourished and inspired."

Those photographs inspired a lifelong passion for photography, even though Atkinson has had an illustrious business career.

He was one of the architects of many of Apple Computer's early software products. During the 1980s, he was the main designer for the Lisa computer, which preceded the Macintosh, and he wrote the MacPaint and QuickDraw graphics primitives on which every Macintosh system was built...

The new SP-570 Ultra Zoom digital compact camera by Olympus offers users a 20x, wide-angle optical zoom (26-520mm equivalent), a 10-megapixel resolution and advanced manual controls found in digital SLRs, and the ability to capture in RAW format.

The SP-570 UZ photographs through an f/2.8-4.5 lens with 100x total zoom (5x digital zoom) that combines high-refractive, aspherical and extra-dispersion lens elements. The camera displays images on a...

Location: Beverly Hills, Calif.

Popular wedding destinations: Venice and the Amalfi Coast in Italy; Mexico; The Bahamas; New York City; Napa Valley, Calif.; the south of France; Miami; and Aspen, Colo.

Accolades: Buissink has received numerous International Grand Awards for his work from the Wedding and Portrait Photographers International. In February 2007, American Photo nominated him as one of the Top 10 Wedding Photographers in the World. Kodak hired Buissink to shoot its ad campaign for the Portra film line in 2003. He was also selected in 2005 to be Apple's spokesperson for the wedding industry for the release of the Aperture suite.

Website: JoeBuissink.com

With his training psychology, wedding photographer Joe Buissink knows how to put nervous couples at ease, making him a popular choice on the high-end wedding circuit.

What do Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Simpson, Hilary Swank and Christina Aguilera have in common? Aside from being beautiful, rich and famous, all have been captured by the insightful lens of Joe Buissink, wedding photographer to the "A-list" crowd.

In a little more than a decade, Buissink has become one of the foremost wedding photographers in the industry. Named one of the top 10 wedding photographers in the world by American Photo, and voted one of the top five by the BBC in 2003, Buissink has also received the International Leadership Award in photography from the International Photographic Council at the United Nations. Why Joe? His name kept coming up based upon a consensus of opinions from Photo District News, WPPI, PPA and other renowned photographic organizations.

How did this not-so-average Joe achieve such acclaim...

As part of the 10th anniversary of the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired images by Felice Beato, Tim Hawkinson and Irving Penn.

Beato was one of the first photographers to chronicle war and social upheaval. His images document many different conflicts, ranging from the Crimea and India to China and Korea, where, in 1871, he made the first known photographs of Korean people. The Beato collection acquired by the Getty includes more than...

A U.S. District Court has ruled in favor of Seattle-based photographer Lloyd Shugart in a case brought against him by shoe company Propet USA. According to Shugart's attorney, Philip Mann, the case could be the first ruling under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to favor a photographer.

Shugart had photographed products and images for Propet from 1999 through 2005, when he claimed the company used the images outside the scope of their intended purpose and removed copyright management information from the photos. When warned by Shugart, Propet filed...

Magnum Photos and Seattle-based OnRequest Images have formed a partnership that will help the photojournalists of Magnum form stronger ties with the corporate clients that use OnRequest for their advertising campaigns.

According to OnRequest CEO David Norris, the alliance was formed due to a growing demand for a "more realistic editorial style" in the corporate advertising and branding campaigns that have become...

Adobe Stock Photos, the royalty-free image service provided by Adobe, will discontinue service as of April 1.

On Feb. 4, CS2 and CS3 customers with Adobe Bridge-enabled applications received e-mail with information about the discontinuation. In a statement on its website, Adobe did not comment on the service's appearance in the upcoming versions of Adobe Creative Suite.

Adobe Stock Photos will be fully operational through March 3, after which it will disable the search feature. Customers may still purchase images through March 31, however, and customer support will be available until June 1. Adobe recommends uninstalling Adobe Stock Photos from the Creative Suite applications to ease...

In November, a federal court ruled that Corbis Corp. is liable for the loss of over 12,000 images taken by photographer Chris Usher. Usher sued Corbis in 2003 for damages when the agency failed to return all of the images he took on assignment in 2000 to 2001.

Though Usher had no record keeping method, he hired archivist Adrienne DeArmas to conduct a review. Corbis claimed that no more than 5,349 images were lost, but the court sided with DeArmas' calculation of 12,666 images.

In May 2005, a separate ruling had also favored a photographer against Corbis for losing about 40,000 images.

Amid this controversy, Corbis is expected to lay off 125 employees and close several offices...

Corbis Corp., the stock photography agency privately owned by Bill Gates, has applied for a patent that would offer a dynamic pricing model for royalty-free images. The "royalty-free plus" (RF+) model would not offer a fixed price, as most royalty-free models do, but, instead, would offer an arrangement under which both the seller and the buyer of an image can profit.

RF+ pricing will categorize images based on intrinsic values, including the cost of obtaining the content, the source and author of the content, and the cost to manufacture the content in different media. The new pricing will also incorporate extrinsic values that pertain to a user's previous sales history, current promotions or the current popularity...