Imagine you were fortunate enough to have attended Ansel Adams’ workshop in Yosemite. What do you suppose the grand master of photography would teach you? The complexities of his “Zone System” or how to operate a large format camera, or maybe he’d talk about some esoteric point of photography, while stroking his gray beard?

Nope.

It’s a characteristic of many students to sail right past the basics and expect what they need to improve their work, is some mysterious and hidden piece of knowledge.

Wrong again.

What they most need to learn is what is literally right in front of their face!

Let me ask you, what is in fact the most fundamental point of photography (or for that matter, most art)?

Is it the operation of your camera, our how to control a complex system?  Or how to get that perfect exposure? Or which filter to use to get the sky to turn black (as Ansel of did)?

Or could it be as simple as learning to see your photograph?

Yep, this is about as fundamental as it gets–look and see! 

That’s how we learn sports be it baseball, tennis, golf or surfing. “Keep your eye on the ball (or wave.)” The best have mastered this and arrive at square one.

Okay, here you are in a beautiful meadow in Yosemite, how did Ansel train you to look and see?  He handed out black rectangles and told you to go out and use it to find and frame your shots.

So for the first class of our photography school here’s what you’ll do (and don’t bail on this because “you can already do it” or “that’s for beginners” or “I don’t have time for this” or whatever excuse… just do it!)

1. Click here to Watch this short video with Charlie Cramer describing how to use Ansel’s “framing card.”

2. Get a piece of cardboard or a file card and cut out a rectangle the middle of it like this (or you can use this as a template and print it on the card.)

3. Now go out and practice seeing images, like you heard Charlie telling you, moving the card.

4. Keep this up until you learn something! And leave a comment and tell me what you learned.

5. Do this exercise often, as you would use a backboard in tennis or go to the driving range.

6. Now remember our school is free for now but we do ask you to spread the word to your friends–tweet, Facebook and tell them to come on board!

What did you learn?

Jacqueline Kennedy and Prime Minister Nehru, Delhi (1962). Photo courtesy Kulwant Roy Collections/Aditya Arya Archives

Thousands of never-before-seen photographs of 20th century India, including images of Jacqueline Kennedy and Gandhi, have been unearthed by an inheritor after spending years in large yellow crates.

For nearly five decades, photojournalist Kulwant Roy chronicled the birth of a new, free India during and after the country’s struggle for freedom. Roy managed to gain access to the inner circles of important figures such as Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, capturing powerful, intimate images of some of the century’s most influential people.

Throughout his career Roy sold many of his photos to news agencies, but tragically many of them were lost later in his life. Among the missing images was an iconic shot of Gandhi arguing with an Indian politician, as well as photographs of American first lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s visit to India.

“Roy had mailed the pictures to his address in Delhi, but they did not reach. Broken in spirit, he spent the last years of his life scouting post offices and hunting for boxes in garbage dumps of Delhi, placing ads in newspapers with rewards, and quit all his foreign assignments,” said Adita Arya, a fellow photographer who inherited the images when Roy died in 1984 and has spent the last two years restoring and annotating them.

Now, finally unearthed and open to the public, 500 of the black-and-white photographs are being featured in a new book called “History in the Making: The Visual Archives of Kulwant Roy.” The images are also at the center of a new exhibit at the Nehru Center in London, running now through June 4th.

Marc Silber Show guests win multiple Photo District News (PDN) Photo Annual 2010 awards.

PDN is an award-winning magazine focusing on the photographic community. Since 1980 PDN has been a premier source for breaking photo industry news, in-depth feature stories and work from today’s best emerging photographers.

The Marc Silber Show congratulates four of our past guests for winning PDN awards for their amazing work! Click on their links below to catch their videos if you haven’t yet, to find out what their secret sauce is!

Baldomero Fernandez  took home the Magazine/Editorial category with a photograph of actress Carla Gugino for the cover of New York Moves magazine.

Chase Jarvis won the advertising category with his awesome SanDisk Extreme Pro campaign.

RJ Muna secured the Corporate Design/Photo Product category with his series of marketing images created for the ODC Dance Company. And,

John Lund captured the Stock Photography category with his sumo stock series.

See all the PDN Photo Annual 2010 winners here:

Way to go guys and thanks again for giving us an inside look into your world of photography!

And after you watch, tell us what you learned and if you’re brave, attach one of your own photos.

The winning photo for 2009 Dog Photographer of the year. Photo by Terry Pover

The 2010 Dog Photographer of the Year competition is now underway, giving photographers and animal-lovers everywhere a reason to snap pictures of their favorite furry friends.

Sponsored by London’s Kennel Club Charitable Trust, the photography competition offers a chance for both amateur and expert photographers alike to “show off their artistic talents to a wide audience and emphasize the loving and animated characteristics of our pets.”

The winning photograph (like last year’s top dog seen above, a shot of a rescue retriever at work) will be put on display at major dog events in London, and will be featured on the cover of the Kennel Club’s magazine, Kennel Gazette.

Plus, all entry fees and donations will go straight to the foundation, which funds a variety of work such as research on canine diseases and promotion of animal support companions.

“Dogs can make for truly amazing images,” says Caroline Kisko, Communications Director at the Kennel Club. “Their spontaneous nature can give a fresh and dynamic feel to photos in just seconds. The entries we have had over the past years of the competition have been fascinating and we look forward to seeing this year’s entries.”

To enter the 2010 Dog Photographer of the Year competition, head to www.TheKennelClub.org. You can also see past winners here.

 Kate Moss in Marrakech, Morocco (1993). Photos by Albert Watson

Photographs of a naked Kate Moss, one of the world’s most recognizable supermodels, will go under the hammer today in a sale that is expected to fetch nearly $45,000.

A contact sheet of black-and-white photographs enlarged to a size of 7 feet shows the iconic supermodel nude and hunched over. Taken in the city of Marrakech in Morocco in 1993, the shots from US photographer Albert Watson show a 19 year-old Moss who had just begun to skyrocket in the fashion and modeling worlds. She has since become one of the most photographed women in the world.

Both specialist collectors and die-hard Moss fans are expected to start a bidding war on the iconic images, which will undoubtedly drive the final sale price to the upper ends of expectations. According to Philippe Garner, Christie’s international head of photograph sales, the photos are well worth it.

“It’s an image that appeals far beyond the specialist world of photography,” Garner said. “Kate Moss is one of the lasting emblems of this age’s ideal of beauty.”

Images of Moss have so far done very well at auction, with many claiming these particular photographs are a good investment because of the model’s appeal. One photo from the Marrakesh shoot already sold at Christie’s in 2007 for a whopping $75,000, and a bronze of the model from artist Marc Quinn was sold in 2008 for a record $605,000.

Ilse Bing’s Self-Portrait in Mirrors (1931). Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York

A new exhibit at the New York Museum of Modern Art attempts to tell the story of photography through the lens of female photographers.

Titled “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography,” the exhibit features over 200 images from master female photographers like Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, Claude Cahun, Imogen Cunningham, Rineke Dijkstra, Florence Henri  and many others that span the art-form’s 170-year history.

Organized chronologically, the exhibit leads museum-goers on a visual tour through the contributions of female photographers to a medium that was largely overshadowed by male figures during the 19th and 20th centuries. Every image in the collection was taken by a woman, and many are of women themselves.

Showcased are early, influential photos from Gertrude Kasebier, who created symbolic images of Victorian maternity at the turn of the century, a large collection of European photographs from the ’20s and ’30s, such as Ilse Bing’s famous “Self Portrait in Mirrors” (above), and the work of French photographer Dora Maar, a lover and muse to Pablo Picasso.

There is also an extensive section devoted to famed US documentary photographer and photojournalist Dorothea Lange (her iconic Depression-era “Migrant Mother” photograph is on hand), as well as notable works from later 20th century artists like Diane Arbus, Lisette Model and Yoko Ono.

“Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography” runs now through March 21, 2010, at the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Mapplethorpe’s Calla Lily (1984). Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s

A print of one of Robert Mapplethorpe’s most iconic images, a white lily, is set to bring in a huge sum in an upcoming auction at Sotheby’s. Mapplethorpe’s photograph could fetch $80,000.

Taken in 1984, Calla Lily is part of a flower study that is perhaps Mapplethorpe’s most famed series of photographs outside his more controversial images of male nudes. The lily image was famously used for the cover of a catalog for the 1988 retrospective exhibition, The Perfect Moment, which showcased photographs deemed obscene by conservative lawmakers nation-wide.

The photograph is part of a larger Sotheby’s auction that seeks to trace the history of photography through exhibits from some of the most influential photographers, including Robert Frank, William Eggleston and Irving Penn.

“This sale includes works by world-renowned artists who have pushed the boundaries of photography from Eugene Atget in the 1920s to Mitra Tabrizian in this century,” said Simone Klein, head of photographs at Sotheby’s.

The famous photograph from Atget, considered by many to be the first Modernist photographer, is a 1921 Henri Cartier Bresson-lookalike of a French prostitute.

The photography auction will be held at Sotheby’s in London on May 20.

The panoramic shot of Dubai by photographer Gerald Donovan.

The world record for the largest digital photograph now belongs to a massive image of Dubai. Nearly doubling the previous record-holder, photographer Gerald Donovan’s photo is a whopping 45 gigapixels and, if printed out, would be big enough to cover 1,200 billboards.

Using the GigaPan EPIC Pro robotic camera, which was designed according to technology used by NASA’s Mars Rover, Donovan took over 4,000 pictures during a 4-hour marathon shoot, then patched all the photos together to create one gargantuan image.

“This was intended as a technical test,” said Donovan said in a press release. “It was about exploring the limits of the hardware and software out there.”

In the image itself, which you can see at GigaPan.org, you can zoom in on the world’s tallest building, Burj Khailfa, along with hundreds of other structures in the city of Dubai. The image has good clarity, though Donovan says the city’s poor air quality is to blame for the fact that it looks slightly muddled.

Megan Fox. Courtesy of Saturday Night Live

Photographer Mary Ellen Matthews, the woman behind the popular celebrity “bumper photos” seen right before and after commercial breaks during Saturday Night Live, is finally getting her time in the sun. Matthews’ work will be the subject of a new exhibit in New York City.

Titled “Live From New York: A Decade of Portraits,” Matthews’ exhibit is presented at the John Varvatos store on Bowery (formerly the iconic rock ‘n’ roll club CBGB) and features some of her most notable portraits from the 17 years she has served as photographer for the sketch comedy show.

For almost two decades Matthews has honed her style of taking the show’s host or musical guest for that week, putting them in various positions and backgrounds and creating memorable images that are used as “bumpers” for the show’s sketches. From recent guests like Betty White, Jude law and Jennifer Lopez, to musical guests like Pearl Jam and u2, the colorful, stylish images are often times the most memorable parts of the show itself.

The exhibit, which debuted Monday night, was attended by multiple SNL cast members including Kristen Wiig, Fred Armisen and Kenan Thompson, all out to show their support for their friend’s work.

“It’s awesome,” Thompson told the WSJ’s Speakeasy. “She brings out different people in well known people’s personalities every week. Sometimes it’s action packed, but she always captures things in a very special way.”

“Live From New York: A Decade of Portraits,” runs now through August 3 at 315 Bowery.

Stockholm’s Fotografiska

Stockholm’s first ever photography museum, Fotografiska, is set to open its doors to the public on May 21, welcoming them with exhibitions from photographers AnnieLeibovitz, Joel-Peter Witkin and Lennart Nilsson. Swedish photography lovers wait in anticipation, while fans of the iconic pop group ABBA shake their heads.

Built in 1906, the red brick building overlooking the city’s harbor where Fotografiska now calls home was supposed to be the world’s largest ABBA museum. The building, a stop for trade ships in the early 20th century, was largely abandoned until the bell-bottomed boogiers decided it would be a great place for an homage to the colorfully costumed pop stars.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your musical tastes), construction costs forced delays and the building was handed over to Fotografiska. The revamped building will have 2,500 square meters of show space, making it one of the world’s largest photography museums.

Fotografiska is set to have its grand opening with the globe-trotting retrospective “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005.” The exhibition features many of Leibovitz’s professional photographs of celebrities, like Bill Clinton, Demi Moore and Michael Jordan, as well as her personal images of friends and family.

The museum plans to have at least four major exhibits a year, as well as 15-20 minor exhibitions.