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, …
On Noise Reduction
Cavendish, Prince Edward Island We fear missing out, so we read it all, and listen to every voice we can, seldom aware that by doing so we’re missing so much more. This is not the post you think it might be. This is not about reducing the noise in your low-light, high-ISO, photographs. There’s software for that. This is about …
Finding Your Mojo
A friend and I, looking for our mojo on Prince Edward Island yesterday. Sometimes we find it, sometimes we don’t, but the search is our job. Last week I spent some time on Facebook answering questions. It was a lot of fun, and something I’d like to do more often. One question that came up a couple times in different …
Waiting, in Newfoundland.
I get nervous when things come too easily, which, as it turns out, is not remotely the case on this trip. Sadly, I also get nervous when things are tough and there are no guarantees that my work is going anywhere. That’s the tension I’ve been living in on this trip across Canada, now into its 6th week. I’ve been …
Process & Product
We’re stopping in Ottawa right now, after a couple days at the cottage, on the way to Labrador and Newfoundland to work on making images for my next coffee-table book. Emily, the Jeep, is in for service and tweaks, after 5500km and in preparation for many more on the rougher roads of rural Quebec and Labrador. What a journey we’re …