Ralf Uicker

First off, I love Ralf Uicker. I think he's a brilliant photographer with a real eye for urban landscapes. I like him so much that I have one of his photographs framed in my room ready to go up on the wall. Ralf captures a wide variety of street life, in various cities around the world, often simply from a normal person's point of view. He almost exclusively works with Black & White film, but has recently started to adopt digital colour photography.

This photograph of the New York skyline was very inspirational to me and I hope to be able to create something similar from the buildings of London. I want to be able to photograph the idea of "A city that never sleeps" But due to travel cost and time I can only really venture anywhere as far as London, oh well London'll do :)

What I really like about this photograph is the use of water to reflect the building's lights, yet not exactly mirroring them. I also like how Ralf has shot it so that the sky is almost pitch black, showing that it was late at night when there is very little light in the sky from the sun. It is truly at night.

The use of Black and hite enhances this photo as it gives a sense of sophistication and gives the building added majesty and grace with the way they tower over the city like guardians or watchers.

Martin Schoeller

Martin Schoeller is a photographer that really caught my eye whilst I was looking for inspiration for my Body shoot. One area of his work particularly focuses on straight on flat photographs of people looking straight at the camera. He uses a very small depth of field from a large aperture lens, and almost always focuses on the subjects eyes. He keeps his backgrounds simple and plain as to keep the viewer's attention fixed solely on the subject. This use of small depth of field creates a kind of veil around the parts of the photograph that are out of focus, making us look at the subjects eyes more and more. It's a very clever technique that I would love to include in my work somehow.

Martin tries to keep the Portraits he takes quite similar, but occasionally adds in extra things within the frame, such as a prop specific to the subject or allowing them to pull a certain pose during the shoot. Because he sits and talks to the people during the shoot, they never really know when the photograph will be taken so they cannot really prepare for it and add any kind of fakery to it. What is captured is a very accurate representation of their personalities and lives.