How is it that two photographers can stand in the same place and make two very different photographs? What accounts for the frustrating reality that, in that moment, one photographer can make something truly compelling and beautiful while the results of the other’s efforts are underwhelming? Surely it can’t be just better gear. Sometimes it’s different gear. Different gear represents different possibilities, …
Masking and Lightroom Presets
What I’m about to show you is my favourite discovery of the year in terms of my workflow. I tend to do a lot of the same kinds of adjustments to similar photographs, especially when creating a body of work. I might globally add some exposure and contrast, tweak some colours, and then apply a mask to my main subject …
Masking In Lightroom, An Introduction
I love the masking tool in Lightroom Classic and it has seen some changes over the last few iterations, some of them pretty significant. I was asked recently about this and it seemed like something you might be interested in if you’re a Lightroom user. If you do any dodging and burning at all, the new AI functions are game …
Want Different Results? Try Different Things.
Landing in Nairobi last month, my usual fears were running amok. Would my luggage arrive with me? Would I have problems at customs? Would the bartender at the first camp be able to make me a decent Old Fashioned, of which I was desperately in need? You know the ones. But most heavy of all, the one weighing me down …
Life is Like a Camera?
“Life is like a camera. Just focus on what’s important and capture the good times, develop from the negatives, and if things don’t work out, just take another shot.” – Ziad K. Abdelnour Respectfully, life is not like a camera. To assert otherwise is glib and cheesy and only shows a lack of experience in both life and photography. Life …
3 Ways To Use Colour to Develop Your Voice
When I was a kid, our family got a roll of film developed every couple of months, and I remember getting the envelope of 4×6 prints back from the lab and hearing my mom remind me not to touch the prints. “You’ll get fingerprints on them,” she’d say. Not one to waste a good metaphor, as an adult, that’s all I …
Going Beyond The Single Image
The enigmatic Cat in the Hat once told us that “there is no one alive who is you-er than you.” The less fictional Miles Davis reminds us (as I tried to do two weeks ago in this article) that this is true but that it takes some time to arrive at, that it can take a long time to play, or—as a …
Shoot Like Yourself
“Sometimes,” observed the great jazz musician Miles Davis, “you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” Sometimes? I think he was graciously understating it. For most of us, learning to shoot like ourselves is not only a long journey but a necessarily winding one. When we first begin to make photographs and take our …
What Gets Overlooked (Don’t Let it be This)
Your biggest challenges, the ones that stand in the way of your best photographs, are not technical; they are creative. I’d put money on that being true for almost everyone who reads this. Once you’ve learned the fundamentals, the challenges you have won’t be solved with your tools so much as by your thinking. When you look at the work you’re …
To Hunt or Gather?
It seems to me there are two very different approaches often taken in making photographs. The first is very ad hoc and opportunistic. You walk the streets of India (or wherever) and photograph whatever catches your eye. You wander and you photograph anything and everything that you can find at the intersection of your curiosity and great light. There’s nothing …