I told her I had a few things left on my bucket list. She told me my life was a bucket list. I pulled my pen from my pocket, scribbled that down in my dog-eared little notebook. It seemed clever at the time. Like that one time when a friend told me she thought of me as Indiana Jones with …
Fill Your Canvas
My mother and I on safari this January. Photographs by Cynthia Haynes. On Friday I re-posted Life is Short. The comments and the emails I’ve had since that original post have lit me on fire in a way I can’t describe, reminding me how deeply we can live when we get intentional about it. It also reminds me of the …
Life Is Short – A Re-Post
Several years ago this post (below) was deeply significant to me. It was an act of nailing my colours to the mast, and not long after I posted it, I began a trip that would change my life forever – selling most of what I owned, putting the rest into a tired Land Rover Defender, and setting off to live …
On Luck & Trenches
There’s a terrific recording of an excerpt from an interview with photographer Robert Capa (1913-1954) making the rounds right now. In it he describes the making of one of his most iconic photographs (above) and the role of luck in its creation. Capa says he raised the camera as the soldiers were climbing out of the trench to storm the …
Thoughts on Done
I sat earlier this week around the coffee table in my loft with three very close friends, all of them thinkers and artists and several margaritas into the evening. We talked, as photographers and storytellers do, about our art and the art of others, and the struggle we all love enough that we keep doing it. One of the things …
Follow Your Passion?
As trendy as it has been recently for people to write about doing things fueled by our passion, it looks like we’ve now swung the other way, fatigued, I suspect, by all this talk of passion, which like any hot-burning fire, takes constant fuel to feed it. No wonder we’re tiring of the word “passion”. But it would be a …
On Authenticity, Again.
Yesterday I wrote an article about authenticity. This is part two. Photography can be a lens through which we look at the world, and in that world find wonder and experiences we might never have without the camera. But sometimes it’s a little too easy to see our own reflection in the viewfinder. And from there a little too easy …
On Authenticity
It’s been a while since I wrote about vision and voice in the life of the photographer. Recent conversations have pulled me back into those old discussions we used to have here on this blog. One of those recent conversations was with someone wrestling with the idea of authenticity. Was her voice authentic? And how much mucking around with new …
Toward Mastery
I’m uncomfortable with the notion of mastery. It’s not that I don’t believe we can’t, in some broad way, master a craft – gain a level of comfort and expertise that the tools become an extension of ourselves and we wield them purely through muscle memory. I do. In fact if it’s that comfort that’s an indicator of our approach …
Awake Enough.
I was talking to a photographer recently who said something I’ve heard, in so many different words, from so many of us, including myself. She’s taking a trip, going somewhere epic, somewhere she’s obviously been dreaming about, a place that’s already well lodged into her heart and imagination even though she’s never been there. She said she was worried it …