Shelly Perry, from Portland, Oregon, left a decade-long career working with children in a social services capacity to pursue her life-long love of photography in 2003. Now an established professional, her images have been seen all over the globe on album covers, books, magazines, catalogues, websites, ad campaigns, and even on TV. Her work has also appeared in several local exhibits and gallery shows.
While she makes most of her photography income through stock, her real photography love is documentary and creative fine art. An excellent presenter, Shelly has joined numerous Great Escape workshops to share her experiences and help our readers to follow in her footsteps. Shelly’s specialty is people photography - what she calls documentary or lifestyle portraits.
Today: I can't imagine ever having a "regular job" again.
Best adventure: I have had so many epic moments, but these are a few standouts: swimming with the giant sea turtles in the Galapagos, walking the Great Wall of China, riding an elephant in Thailand (way better than riding a camel in Egypt), flying in a tiny piper plane over the wilds of Alaska, being at the Lantern Festival in Thailand, seeing the Shaman in Ecuador, meeting and making friends all over the world.
Favorite Photographer: Gregory Colbert
People don’t know: I’m scared of heights!
Last week, when I woke up on my first morning in Quito, Ecuador, I pulled back the curtains on my hotel room window and looked out to see… an absolutely stunning view of the sunrise over the valley below. And I promptly kicked myself. I could have been up 20 minutes earlier and captured it […]
Getting a working knowledge of how to process your digital images — whether in Photoshop, Lightroom, or some other imaging software — can be daunting. In Austin at the Ultimate Money-Making Photo Workshop a couple of weeks ago, we hosted several sessions dedicated to helping folks learn the basics of digital photo processing. And last […]
Last month’s photo challenge theme was “Passages and Doorways.” It was a record- breaking month for submissions, and a number of images stood out as winners. I hope you had the chance to browse through all the entries. December’s winner, David Wallace, acted as our guest judge taking on the challenge of choosing our first-place […]
Selling photos for editorial use is a are very different market compared to selling photos as stock. While it is industry standard that editorial photos remain unaltered, it is acceptable and sometimes required to edit photos for stock.
Shelly Perry answers a reader’s questions about model releases and model compensation.
Professional photographer Shelly Perry details when and why you need a model release.
In most cases, photographers do not need a model release in order to sell their photos of people. The exception to this are photos that will be used and sold for commercial purposes (advertising) and images that will be submitted and sold in stock agencies (sites like iStockphoto.com).
Last month’s photo challenge theme was “Traditions” — and everyone must have been very busy with their own as we didn’t have many entries. Nevertheless, there were great shots among those who did submit entries. Here are the winners… **First Place goes to dwphoto for “Thai Festival in Sydney” **Second Place goes to pencraft for […]
One of the biggest problems travel photographers (and well, all photographers for that matter) face, is lighting. When you’re on an assignment and you have just two days to bring back an article with photographs of a place, you have to deal with whatever light God gives you on those two days. You can get […]
The week before last, we looked at light — specifically, at how your camera attempts to evaluate and expose your shots for middle gray. This week, I want to look at another issue of light — that from a flash. Looking at two particular shots from this month’s photo challenge, I can see that the […]
