Photojournalism and Travel Photography with Phil Norton

Phil Norton is an American Canadian. He worked in the photography department of the Montreal Gazette during the transition from film to digital. While shooting assignments throughout the city and the Southwest Quebec region and writing travel articles, he was in charge of the photo archives dating back to 1900. He sold the stock photography to publishers and film documentary producers around the world. For the Year 2000 he helped select images for a book about The Gazette’s photography during that century.

As a teenager in the 1970s he sold photos to magazines with mostly nature photography. It was at Penn State University, when he needed access to a darkroom, that he tried out for the Daily Collegian newspaper which launched him into photojournalism and writing as a career. Norton served as editor of a bilingual weekly newspaper in Quebec and then started a journalism program in the local high school producing the pages for print on Adobe InDesign and building websites.He worked alongside and guided several National Geographic photographers and writers in Canada and along the US border, including Sarah Leen who  became the magazine’s Director of Photography. Guiding amateur photographers to all points of North America became his profession in 2012 until Covid stalled his business www.photographyadventures.net .

During the pandemic he published his photos in 2 regional books in the series “A Four Seasons County”, using a drone for aerial imagery. When vaccines came out, he bicycled and camped alone for 90 days from Prince Edward County, Ontario to the border of Mexico. It was a repeat of a similar bicycle tour he did 41 years earlier. To document it he carried only a phone and a pocket-sized camera. “Downsizing” is a presentation he gives to camera clubs about using smart phones and the Sony RX100 as professional tools. His recent coverage of the shooting at the Trump Rally was done strictly as video and screen captures on an iPhone 14.