We often talk about composition as though its something that can be done right or done wrong. When you look at it in those terms photography is not about expression, but about following the rules. The best thing I ever learned on the photographic journey was this: there are no rules. None. Nope, not even the rule of thirds. No …
Impressions & Abstracts
Next week we’re releasing my next eBook – The Visual Imagination, a book about creative techniques and ideas that focuses mostly on impressionism and abstraction. Yesterday I was doing a pre-release podcast interviews, talking to Ibarionex Perello, the amazing voice and mind of The Candid Frame, and he asked me the one question I’m so fond of asking others. Why? …
Exploration & Expression
It’s been a while since I wrote about vision. Lately I’ve replaced the word with intent or intention. Almost every time I wrote about vision someone told me how frustrated they were about the whole vision thing. Inevitably it ended – or started – in tears. I can’t remember a workshop that didn’t include someone in tears over this. Sometimes …
Make It Human.
I don’t imagine there’s much point, this far down the line, in another rant about how photography has become a technocracy, a place where the artifice means more than the art. But is anyone else feeling that all this technical perfection is leaving too little room for the humanity we long for? People don’t resonate with perfection, because life isn’t …
Thoughts on Done
I sat earlier this week around the coffee table in my loft with three very close friends, all of them thinkers and artists and several margaritas into the evening. We talked, as photographers and storytellers do, about our art and the art of others, and the struggle we all love enough that we keep doing it. One of the things …
Automatic Art, A Rant.
A year ago I walked by a place that does framing here in Vancouver. The sign in the window said something like, “Get it framed! Turn your photos into art!” I pulled out my iPhone and made a quick photograph, shook my head and walked on. I only just remembered this because yesterday a banner ad online said something that …
Getting UnStuck
The late Steve Jobs once said that creativity was nothing more than connecting dots. Ignoring for a moment that creativity is more than just idea generation, and necessarily includes idea execution, I like the metaphor. The more divergent those dots, the more unusual and interesting our ideas and the solutions to the problems we’re working on, whether that’s a new …
Winning at Yoga
One of the best things most of us can do right now is stop asking so many people what they think of our art, whether that’s photography or not. Art is not a democracy, it’s a way of sounding your voice and when you allow others – especially unknown or anonymous others – to determine the direction of that art, …
The Power of Constraint
I spent the last 4 days on Vancouver Island on a beach near Ucluelet. Gorgeous. Passing whales. Beer. Hammock. Silence. My girl and a couple dear friends. Some beautiful light too, and though I didn’t go to make photographs I did take an hour each evening to play. We just finished the inaugural The Created Image seminar here in Vancouver …
Why Sketch?
I’m a big believer in sketch photographs, making frames you know aren’t working but have some idea in them you want to explore. The alternative is to believe that all the images I make that don’t work the way I had hoped are failures and I don’t believe in the notion of failure in creative endeavors. At least not in …