Shooting

In less than three years, some 500 photographers, independent book publishers, product designers, and other photo-related project creators have turned their dreams into a reality. How? By sourcing money from the crowd in an online incubator called Kickstarter.

It's practically a photographic rite of passage: Making what you think are great photos only to be disappointed later when you find the images just don’t live up to your expectations. You then embark on the quest to discover the secret of photographic expressiveness, only to find it’s a never-ending challenge.Commercial photographer Jason Lindsey has traveled this road, and he finds that a conscious thought process combined with immediate feedback from others can lead to a satisfying outcome. This is how he succeeded with this shot.

In the fall of 2010, Boston Magazine hired Teru Onishi, a talented jewelry, cosmetics, and liquids specialist, to shoot 25 different drinks in his Manhattan studio. The photos were to illustrate one of the magazine’s cocktail roundups–the image shown here is a whiskey smash. All had to be styled and shot in less than five hours, leaving about seven minutes for each drink.

Like most pros, music photog-rapher Michael Weintrob tries to coax more from his portrait subjects than boilerplate promo shots. So he began to ask his subjects to “mess around” with their instruments during shoots.“These musicians look at instruments as an extension of their body, much like the way a photographer thinks of his camera,” he says.Making surreal images was not the purpose of these portrait sessions, but when the musicians placed their instruments in front of their faces, Weintrob realized he had something special.