Avid hiker Mike Albert grabbed this shot of a lonely trekker on the French alpine slopes of Mont Blanc three years ago while backpacking through Europe. Albert took the photo after riding a tram that takes hikers and tourists up the face of Mont Blanc, a massive glacier-encased mountain like Mount Rainier in Washington State, only higher at 15,771 feet.

About the tram ride, Albert says, "It's the only time I ever took the easy way out. It was a hot summer day. You wouldn't believe how many people were hiking that trail. Yet there was this one guy off by himself. I got this one shot...

At the end of a long, dark hallway, he opens the doorway of L.A.'s most famous feather prop house. Through a haze of feather dust, Morgan sees workers breathing through dust masks as they fashion angel wings of every shape and size. He picks out a few sets of small wings, then heads back to his studio, where his staff is fashioning tiny harnesses to hang hired pigs from his ceiling.
It's a long way to go to make something as mundane as an ad client's product—a door—look interesting. And the end result will look only subtly different had someone spent an afternoon fiddling with Photoshop.
 But the image Morgan creates in the camera, and the story behind it, will last a lifetime.

The world of studio photography has evolved rapidly since the advent of the digital age. From the digital stock CDs of the 1980s to the portfolio websites and digital editing tools of the 1990s to the photography megaportals of 2000 and beyond, the creative and collaborative opportunities offered by computing...

Instant composition is strength of next-generation digital gear.

Digital capture is becoming a reality for the professional photographer. Montizambert Photography Inc. built its dream studio and went fully digital last July, a move made possible by Foveon’s next-generation digital capture workstation.

With workflow much more streamlined than with traditional film photography, we are...