I believe now more than ever in this beautiful craft. I love its democratic nature, I love the way it uses such elegant raw materials: light and time. I love the mechanics, and the way the cameras feel in my hands. And I adore the final print. In fact the moment I’m done writing this I’m going to run some …
Learning Mastery
Facebook did it to me again. A headline promised me I could master photography easily. It sent me (I couldn’t help it, I was curious) to an infographic about apertures and shutter speeds and focus modes and rules of thirds. I read it all. And when I was done I knew exactly what I knew when I was 15 years …
Making Photographs & Magic
When I was 14 I picked up a camera at a neighbour’s garage sale, a little Voigtlander rangefinder that changed my life. Quickly I wanted what we all want at the beginning – more control, more lenses, more gear. My mother gave me a Pentax Spotmatic and a gadget back full of stuff, acquired from a co-worker who had recently …
OverSharing?
A couple years ago I went for sushi with Chase Jarvis and as we sat across the table talking about art and commerce and life and stuff, he expressed an idea that I’ve loved and played with ever since – that the task of an artist is this: to create, and to share, and to do whatever you need to …
Back to Sucking.
This weekend I’m off to the northern tip of Vancouver Island to dive in the giant kelp forests with sea lions and octopus. I can’t wait! After a year of taking SCUBA courses and, forgive the pun, immersing myself in a hobby more bewildering than even photography, I am finally taking my cameras into the water and it feels like …
You Matter More
I should have known better; I should have known that I can’t just say, “we give our cameras way too much credit for their part in the photographic process,” on social media, toss it out over left field without further commentary and not get some yeah-buts and some push-back. My bad. I should have known that there will be those …
Forget Practice
Boat under Snow. Hokkaido, Japan. 2015. Yesterday I linked my social media accounts out to an old blog post – Toward Mastery. One of the replies I got was refreshingly honest: I’ve hit a brick wall, and no amount of practicing is working. Twitter isn’t the kind of place to reply meaningfully to that kind of candor, so if you’ll …
Hungry?
“When your hands are full of thorns but you can’t quit groping for the rose…” ~Bruce Cockburn. I feel myself getting hungry. Or perhaps I’m always hungry but only now recognizing that gnawing feeling for what it is. I get that way when I come out of a time of gorging myself creatively, as I have recently in Kenya. I …
About Critique
Popular photography education is awash in the idea that critique is helpful. God knows there are more than enough voices out there willing to give it, solicited or otherwise. And while I think it can be helpful, it often falls wildly short on the ability to provide that critique in a positive way. Nor, I think, does it give any …
Inspired by the Tangible
Any company whose mission revolves around being inspired by the tangible and getting images off our devices and into our hands is a company run by people I want to hang out with. So I’ve been ordering prints from Artifact Uprising and am seriously impressed with them – their quality and their service are spectacular. And their blog is inspiring, …