Home:  Long Beach, Calif., following what he calls a “three-year stint of homelessness.”

Interests: When he’s not shooting, Loomis says he also enjoys snowboarding, camping, scuba diving, rock climbing, mountain biking and “the company of wonderdog Tikka.”

Pet Peeve: Sometimes people talk about photography instead of doing it. “Don’t talk about it, just do it,” Loomis says. “Go out and do it.”

Main Influences: Dave LaBelle, photo instructor at Western Kentucky University; Michael Williamson of The Washington Post; Gail Fisher, former photo editor at The Los Angeles Times, now at National Geographic; and Alex Webb. Also Sebastião Salgado: “I walked through an exhibit of his when I was in college and I cried before I got to the end,” Loomis says.

Website: loomisphotography.com

Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Rick Loomis always remembers to put people first when telling his visual stories.

"I might die.”

That was the thought running through the head of Rick Loomis, photojournalist with The Los Angeles Times, while he was embedded with a company of U.S. Marines during the pivotal Battle of Fallujah in Iraq on April 26, 2004.

The day started out as a search for insurgents, but it quickly became a fight for their lives as scores of armed militiamen massed around them, nearly surrounding the house they were in. The insurgents used everything at their disposal to level the building and kill the Marines – machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Loomis had never been in a more dangerous...

Home and studio: Telluride, Colo., and upstate New York.

Clients: National Geographic Publications, Time, Life, The New York Times, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, the International Red Cross, Amnesty International, the United Nations.

Personal Projects: He has two book projects in the works, one that deals with capturing the meaning of the word "sacred" and the other on ancient Asia. Visit chrisrainier.com for details.

Advice for aspiring travel photographers: "You have to be driven by passion. You have to be driven by a love of telling the story. And if that's not there, something's missing.

Website:chrisrainier.com

The mission of the Enduring Voices Project is to document endangered languages around the globe and work to prevent the extinction of those languages. According to a sobering National Geographic statistic, almost 80 percent of the world's population speaks only 1 percent of its languages. The corollary is that only a handful of people are left who speak some of the several thousand other languages. When those people are gone, the language becomes extinct – forever...

Chris Rainier was born to travel. With a father who worked in the oil industry, Chris was in constant motion as a child, living, at various times, on four different continents. Growing up in so many different parts of the world has given him the ability to feel at home no matter where he finds himself.

"I feel very comfortable getting on a plane. I have a very high tolerance for travel," Rainier says. "I spend a significant amount of time each year on the road, because there's so much to see and there's so little time to understand this dynamic, changing world."...

Home and studio locations: San Francisco and Paris, France.

Preferred equipment: Horseman SW and Silvestri Flexicam medium-format view cameras; Rodenstock and Schneider digital lenses; Phase One and Leaf digital backs; Broncolor lights for still-life and Briese lights for people.

Personal projects: Photographing the great, classic bars of the world. He hopes to publish the collection as a book one day.

Advice to aspiring studio photographers:"Eliminate things [from] the photo that don't need to be there," he says. "Figure out the minimum amount of elements to tell a story." He also recommends learning photography on a view camera.

Website: musilek.com

No matter the subject, studio shooter Stan Musilek creates his own "decisive moment" to achieve results that are larger than life, better than real.

A Stan Musilek image is composed of opposites: monumental and intimate, luscious and spare.

Even in such a mundane space as a kitchen, these forces play out. The imposing, panoramic expanse of red and gray, the brushed-steel appliances and fixtures standing out like islands in a sea of crimson.

Your eye is drawn to the elegant woman as she leans against the counter and then to the man who pauses in mid-step in the background.

The scene is both austere and inviting at the same time.

Or consider an elegant model presented in beautiful pearly grays unveiling...