I once wrote that “what if?” was the central question for creative people. I also once wrote that our expectations of what we hope for—of a place, a subject matter, even an idea—can blind us to the reality of it. You show up in Venice to photograph the city in fog and experience agua alta, the high flood waters of …
Change Your Lens, Or…?
Imagine this: we’re side by side at a local pond, a thermos of coffee between us as the first light comes up. You’ve got your camera with a 24-105mm lens. I’ve got mine, too, but chose to bring my 300mm lens instead. As we set up, you say you wish now that you’d brought a longer lens. “Funny,” I say, …
The Golden Merganser: About the Image
My best photographs are usually a surprise to me. Long after I’ve made them, they feel familiar and almost inevitable as I look back on them, but not one of them could I have really ever anticipated at the time. The light, the composition, even the subject—I often never see them coming. Sometimes, the surprise is that the image even …
Real Photographers Do What?
Of all the prescriptive nonsense I hear about making photographs, the idea that “real photographers shoot on manual” has to be the most tiresome. As if burdening photographers with an even greater sense of obligation to the shoulds and the should-nots has ever led to greater creative freedom, less rigidity in our work, and more powerful photographs. I’ve heard similar …
Recalculating the Creative Life
I recently read of a 19-year-old football player, a goalkeeper for Real Madrid, who was in a serious car accident and left unable to walk for two years. The story caught my attention because it was 14 years ago this month that I had my own accident, which shattered both my feet, cracked my pelvis, and left me unable to walk with a long road …
Make It Different, Make it Yours.
One of the great photographic challenges is making a photograph that is different: different from what others are making and different from the images you’ve made so many times before. Taking the same photograph over and over doesn’t appeal to me. I want to go further, learn more, and get closer and closer to images that feel uniquely my own. I’m …
My Keeper Rate is Getting Worse
I have over 400,000 photographs on my hard drives. Of those, only 2,000 images have been compelling enough over the years to consider them final photographs or “keepers.” I suspect I’d have even fewer if I went through them all now. That’s a so-called keeper rate of 0.5% or less. After almost 40 years behind a camera, only half of one percent of …
Are You Pushing the Right Buttons?
I have a confession: I only know what 5% of the buttons, dials, and menu items on my camera do. I haven’t done the math; I’m guessing it could be even less than that. But I know that my first cameras only had the ability to focus, select the aperture, change the shutter speed, and specify the ISO. The menu options …
Light, Space & Time
My newest book is just about to be released, and there are a couple of ways to get it, including getting one of only 1,000 signed special editions and even picking it up in person if you’re near San Francisco. But give me a moment to talk about the book itself. Despite the wildlife photographs that illustrate the book, Light, …
Keep At It. Wonder Awaits.
It was 39 years ago on a summer day much like today when I picked up a 35mm Voigtländer rangefinder camera at a neighbour’s garage sale. That whim would change my life, drain my bank account many times over the decades that followed, and make me a different human being than I might have been if I’d bought the tennis racquet instead. …