There is a scene in the 2023 Netflix series Kaleidoscope in which the lead character, played by the inimitable Giancarlo Esposito, says to his young daughter, “Show me where you’re brave.” She responds by putting her finger to her head. “Now show me where you’re strong,” he says, and in response, she puts her finger on her heart. I am feeling neither brave …
Amputated. A Personal Note.
I had my foot amputated yesterday morning. I wrote this a couple weeks ago knowing that my head might not be in the space to do so in the days after the surgery, so I can’t tell you how it went just yet, or how I’m feeling about it all, but I can bring you up to date. I don’t …
Life is Like a Camera?
“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.” – Ziad K. Abdelnour 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 …
3 Ways To Use Colour to Develop Your Voice
When I was a kid, our family got a roll of film developed every couple of months, and I remember getting the envelope of 4×6 prints back from the lab and hearing my mom remind me not to touch the prints. “You’ll get fingerprints on them,” she’d say. Not one to waste a good metaphor, as an adult, that’s all I …
Going Beyond The Single Image
The enigmatic Cat in the Hat once told us that “there is no one alive who is you-er than you.” The less fictional Miles Davis reminds us (as I tried to do two weeks ago in this article) that this is true but that it takes some time to arrive at, that it can take a long time to play, or—as a …
Shoot Like Yourself
“Sometimes,” observed the great jazz musician Miles Davis, “you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” Sometimes? I think he was graciously understating it. For most of us, learning to shoot like ourselves is not only a long journey but a necessarily winding one. When we first begin to make photographs and take our …
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 …
It’s All Been Done?
Somewhere out there, right now, sits a photographer who wants to throw in the towel, discouraged because they haven’t yet found their thing, their niche. I know this because I’ve been that photographer. Some of you have told me you’ve been there, too. Many photographers are still there, frustrated by how hard it is to be original. “It’s all been …
Best For What?
For years, the article that got the most traffic on this blog was titled “The Best Travel Tripod?” Google sent people there in droves, but most of them didn’t stay long because I stubbornly refused to give an actual answer to that question: what’s the best travel tripod? Instead, I tried to encourage a particular way of thinking for readers to find …
3 Ways To Love Your Photographs More
Click play to watch this 7-minute video Earlier this week I started a conversation I’ve been dying to have for a while: specifically, why do photographers get so intimidated by the edit and the “Now what?” that comes once we put the camera down? And are we missing important opportunities? For years, I’ve been signing my letters and articles to …