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...

WTO riots were just another day on the job for area photojournalists.

In what Time magazine called "The Battle of Seattle," news photographers were caught in the cross fire between police and protesters at the recent World Trade Organization summit.

For many of those trying to capture the protests on film, the specter of rubber bullets and gas grenades whizzing toward them seemed more surreal than sinister. Despite the fact that one photographer was shot in...

Home: Seattle

Favorite Gear: "I use Dyna-Lites, because I can travel with them," Karen Moskowitz says. "I use a Mamiya RZ. I don’t have a 35mm camera right now. It got stolen a couple of years ago, so now I just rent. I’m a big renter. I keep the minimum amount of gear, and rent stuff locally if I need extra firepower. I don’t use digital cameras. When speed is of the essence, I’ll scan my proof sheets and e-mail them to editors in New York. I’ve e-mailed high-res images to Germany for...

Reid Callanan, founder and director of the Santa Fe Workshops, is the PhotoMedia Photography Person of the Year for 1999. An engraved sculpture is given annually to a member of the photography industry who has earned recognition for "exceptional artistic and business accomplishments, passion, devotion to the industry, inspiration to colleagues, and humanitarian achievements in the community."

PhotoMedia honors Callanan and the Santa Fe Workshops for educating thousands of photographers at all career stages, while promoting the highest standards of professionalism, ethics and support for the photographic community in New Mexico and worldwide.. Through his dedication to these principles, Callanan has been able to attract the highest caliber...

The sun is fading over the Rocky Mountains on a late winter Friday afternoon in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Tom Mangelsen, a powerful man in his mid-50s, is tucked away in his downtown studio, surrounded by 2,500 boxes of film he has shot and developed in the past few years but not yet had time to review. With his whirlwind schedule this spring and summer, he's unlikely to catch up anytime soon.

By the end of June, he'll have released a new catalog, published a new book and opened his thirteenth Images of Nature photo gallery, this time in Kirkland, Wash. He'll miss the late April opening gala, however. That week he'll be spending his evenings huddling in a bamboo thicket...

Extreme action is the mark of photographer Colin Meagher, who captured whitewater kayaker Chuck Kern cresting the falls on the Kootenai River in Northwest Montana. Like his subjects, says Meagher, "I find that I am drawn to things that have a lot of high-energy. Whether it's running or climbing, mountain biking or snowboarding, I'm looking for that little slice of time that most people aren't even aware of."

It's on those occasions, Meagher says, that having a motor drive is one of the nicest luxuries. "It allows me to anticipate that moment, but often times, I won't even have the motor drive running. I'll just be clicking one frame at a time. Just to keep sharp...

Though he says he "thoroughly enjoys shooting at dirty factories," corporate photographer Patrick Bennett is finding new worlds to conquer in advertising. Much in demand, he uses blurring, color and odd angles to illustrate the energy of his subjects.

The scene of terror above was shot for ad agency DDB Worldwide's 50th anniversary. "They said we had to show as many DDB Seattle employees as possible and we had to show the Space Needle. But they didn't say we couldn't have Godzilla break the top off.

"We had about 80 takes where I was yelling through a megaphone and screaming at the employees to run from the imaginary monster. If there was anyone not running and screaming...

Home: San Francisco

Favorite Gear: "I’m not much of a gear hound," Ed Kashi says. "I use Leicas, a Minolta CLE with Leica lenses, and the Canon EOS-3.

Recent Assignments: California Department of Forests’ firefighters for Smithsonian Magazine; indigenous peoples living on Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines...

In the worlds hot spots, Ed Kashi finds the simple lives behind the news.

Ed Kashi has been a freelance photographer since 1979, but he is barely a decade into his second career, the one that gives meaning to his life. To page through his portfolio is to watch him slowly abandon the parachute journalism many young photographers dream of, deliberately turning his back on a high-profile day-rate career that was gathering him more than 350 assignments a year.

Now darting among the ruins of breaking news stories...

MSNBC finds documentary photo packages provide visual relief for click-weary web readers

On this Friday afternoon, MSNBC’s online photo director, a former college baseball shortstop with close-cropped hair and an easy grin, huddles in a humming corner of the high-tech MSNBC newsroom on the Microsoft main campus in Redmond, Wash.

He fields questions from seven different photo and audio editors as he flips channels on his computer/TV monitor, reviewing a dozen video feeds and a swirling demo of a future interactive TV version of the MSNBC Web site. Finally, he clicks to MSNBC’s next cover page, due to hit the site in three minutes....