“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.” – Anonymous 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 is so …
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 …
Stay (Alive & Awake) In The Moment
You will (I hope) be learning this craft for a very long time. The learning curve may flatten out a little and certain skills may come more easily, but after 36 years, I’ve not found myself within sight of the kind of mastery beyond which there is nothing new to learn. My 14-year-old self would be shocked to know what a …
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 …
Stop Looking. Start Making.
I recorded an episode of Vision Is Better last week (Episode 61) and just posted it. I want you to watch it. Please. Some of you need to see this – to hear this – and since I’m not sure which of you that is I’m just going to go ahead and recommend you all take 7 minutes or so …
2016
What a year. It’s not over yet but as I’ve spent 36 hours on the Nautilus Belle Ami, in each direction, heading out over the bluest water to dive the Revillagigedo archipelago, almost 400Km southwest of the southernmost tip of Mexico’s Baja peninsula, I’ve had loads of time to reflect. Here are a couple of those reflections, and a handful …
Lens Caps
I’m not sure whether anyone needs to hear this or I just needed to say it. But it’s starting to feel like the spirit of our current time is fear and fear often leads us to build walls around our hearts, to do what we can to protect ourselves. And the thing that was meant to protect us quickly becomes …
Cath(art)ic
What if art has always been, in some deeply human way, cathartic for us? What if we used art as a way to respond to the heartache and the fear and the thoughts and emotions we had no other way to explore or express? What if we once responded to the world in the medium that worked best for us; …
Paying Attention
Every day we draw upon limited resources for the things we want in life. We choose what we spend our time on, what we spend our money on, and what we will pay attention to. All three of these give us either greater freedom or impose stricter limits on our lives. What we spend frivolously now we will not have …
Photographic Memories: Russia
It was January 1992 and the Iron Curtain had fallen so recently we were all still blinking our eyes. The cold war was over and I was in Russia, shivering through one of the coldest winters of my life, brought there by idealism and delusions of Dr. Zhivago. I lived that winter in an apartment in Yaroslavl that was colder …