As a child, my cousin James had a reputation for taking things apart. I recall one Christmas when he dismantled down to the wiring every gift he was given. Remote-control cars? Give him 20 minutes, and there’d be nothing left but a pile of tiny screws, little motors, and the tears of his mother who probably should have known better than to …
The Joy of Photography?
A couple of weeks ago, I confessed to you that I hadn’t picked up my camera for six months. The replies I received by email and comments on the blog were like a big collective sigh of relief from so many of you—like we were all holding our breath, thinking we were the only ones who had lost some of our …
Making the Edit Easier
I came home from my last trip with almost 20,000 photographs, which is, by any standard, a whole lot of photographs. I edited them down to about 30. That’s 19,970 images that didn’t make the cut. If I looked at every one of those photographs for only three seconds, it would take me 1,000 minutes, or almost 16 hours, to …
Who Says There’s No Un-Suck Filter?
In my first book, Within The Frame, before all of this blew up and I became a writer (and just how exactly did that happen, anyway?) I wrote that “there was no Un-Suck filter in our photography” and since I didn’t get a flood of emails asking me what on God’s green earth I was talking about, I assumed people …
Give Your Photographs The Finger (It’s Not What You Think)
In the now classic comedy, City Slickers, veteran cowboy Curly says to Mitch (played by Billy Crystal), “Do you know what the secret of life is?” Mitch says, “No, what?” And Curly holds up his finger. “This.” “Your finger?” asks Mitch. “One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean sh*t.” “That’s great but what’s the …
Learning to Focus
A couple times a month, I get on the phone or Skype with some wonderfully talented photographers to mentor them and nudge them forward in their craft. Almost every time the concerns are the same, the questions are similar. Is my work any good? What are my next steps? How do I grow? Of course every conversation is different, …
Art: To Like or To Listen?
Weeks ago I posted an image to the Vision-Collective, my private mentoring community to which many of you belong. The image was Wynn Bullock’s Child in Forest, 1951. The responses to that image and the resulting conversations were intriguing to me. Some responded to the image as I do, finding in the image a sense of idyllic calm. Some were …
Your Worst Images Might Be Your Most Important
No one nails it on the first shot. No one. I know: you have this one friend who got lucky back in 1986. One shot. Nailed it. You might have done so, too—that one time you raised the camera to your face, made one frame and it’s now your absolute favourite photograph and it hangs on your wall to this day …
Travel Photography: What If I Bring The Wrong Gear?
I’ve been to some of the more dangerous places on this Earth, and each time, my friends and family sent me off with a warning and a plea to be careful. No one ever warned me about Tuscany. Yet it was there—and not the slums in Haiti or the backstreets of the Congo—that I fell off a wall seven years …
Travel Photography: More Than Snapshots & Postcards
On my recent trip to India, not everything went to plan. Bad wiring in the hotel room meant things kept blowing up. We were trying to film videos like the one I posted last week, Have Camera Will Travel, and if I wasn’t being interrupted by noisy packs of wild dogs, I was being shit on by birds, or having to …