Michael "Nick" Nichols

Nick is a wildlife photographer for National Geographic. http://www.michaelnicknichols.com/
I am really drawn to his work. He uses remote cameras that are triggerd by animals breaking an invisible beam. Some animals are so afraid of humans that it’s nearly impossible to photograph them up close. The trick is to have the animal make the kind of image that you would do if you were there.

He used this method to capture images of leopards. "In that first foray, after months of trial and error, we only had one publishable image (of a leopard with half his face out of the frame). Since then, we’ve refined the process, with much better results, as you’ll see here.Leopards have a huge range, from Northern China and Siberia all the way down to South Africa. The only place they can be seen regularly is in the private game reserves of South Africa, where baiting and hidden radio transmitters have been used to habituate them for tourism. They are incredibly secretive — a few even survive on dogs, pigeons, and rodents in the streets of Bombay."
"Legend (and maybe fact) has it that one leopard killed over 500 humans before finally being killed by the famed tiger hunter Jim Corbett. They are not meant to be seen except with a fleeting glance that leaves you unsure of what was there."

He took the famous image of Jane Goodall with the gorilla reaching out to touch her hair. I like this because she is not afraid of the animal and uses disarming body language with him.
I like the intimacy in his photographs. They make you feel like the people or animals do in the image.

Christophe Huet

Christophe Huet is a french photoshopretoucher. I find his work very interesting and fascinating. He does advertising and I think that is even better because he can make money from his work. He created advertisings for Nike, Motorola, AIDES and Playstation. He started out working as a printer, and he trained himself on retouching. He has been retouching now for 10 years. I read that his main purpose is to make people forget the retouching itself even if it seems obvious because of the singularity of the image. Now he keeps on working as retoucher and manager at ASILE since 2005.
Sometimes, he refuses projects for personal reasons like ads for cigarettes, for junk industrial food, or others that degrade any kind of people. He thinks we have to be responsible for our act, that’s the attitude he tries to have for himself even if it’s not always easy to do. He does not want to say ‘yes’ to everything in the name of money. The artistic part of his job can’t make him forget his responsability. Likewise, he always tries to keep time to offert his job for association that struggle against cancer, smoking, aids, all bad treatment, ecology...
On his website, we can view his work and he also has a section where he shows the different steps involved in making the complex images. I find it amazing how he starts with one image and ends up only using a portion of it. He uses so many images in one piece and he makes it look so real even though most of them are impossibilities. I think his website is great. I like how he is not just a photographer and a retoucher, he comes up with the advertising ideas that are so original and eye catching.
I hope to develop photoshop skills that are half as successful as his are.
link: http://www.christophehuet.com/