On Sunday, I showed you one of my photographs and sent you to my blog to discuss it, asking questions about the decisions I made and the effect of those decisions. Thanks to everyone who chimed in! The point was to get you thinking about the all the many choices we make in order to create one photograph. I promised …
What Makes the Image Work?
My cousin James had a reputation as a kid for taking things apart. One Christmas he dismantled down to the wiring every gift he was given. Remote-control cars? Give him 20 minutes, and there would be nothing left but a pile of tiny screws, little motors, and the tears of his mother who probably should have known better than to give him …
Show Me Less to Show Me More
As a photographer who learned his craft before autofocus became a truly reliable technology, my earliest challenge was focusing the lens. Those who picked up photography after the cameras could focus faster than we would ever be able to do ourselves won’t know the frustration of that particular learning curve. But focusing the lens was never so hard as learning …
What Makes An Image Work (Part 2)
Last Sunday I posted a photograph on the blog, and in The Contact Sheet email, inviting you to consider how I made one of my photographs. The exercise was a simple one, and I know some of you have seen it before but you can still learn from it. Look at the image and ask yourself what decisions I made …
One Photograph, Many Choices
Being able to dissect an image is a helpful skill. Looking at a photograph and identifying the various choices that led to the look and feel of that image, even when it’s your own (maybe especially when it’s your own) makes us stronger photographers that are more fluent in the visual language. I’ve been talking a lot lately about the …
Cooking a Better Photograph
How is it that two photographers can stand in the same place and make two very different photographs? What accounts for the frustrating reality that, in that moment, one photographer can make something truly compelling and beautiful while the results of the other’s efforts are underwhelming? Surely it can’t be just better gear. Sometimes it’s different gear. Different gear represents different possibilities, …
Want Different Results? Try Different Things.
Landing in Nairobi last month, my usual fears were running amok. Would my luggage arrive with me? Would I have problems at customs? Would the bartender at the first camp be able to make me a decent Old Fashioned, of which I was desperately in need? You know the ones. But most heavy of all, the one weighing me down …
To Make Better Photographs, Study More Photographs, Part Two
The first installment of this two-part series began an exploration of the way in which we study a photograph, first to experience it and then to learn from it. If you missed it, you can read the first part of To Make Better Photographs, Study More Photographs here. The main point in that first article was this: our first point …
To Make Better Photographs, Study More Photographs, Part One
I started this craft innocently enough—purchasing on a whim a Voigtlander rangefinder with a fixed 35mm lens when I was 14—but by the time I was 16 years old, I was hooked and desperate for something with a few more options. I wanted “a real camera.” I have no idea where I thought my mother would get the money for …
Making the Poetic Image, Part Two
You wouldn’t be wrong if you called the last article I posted a bit of a “think piece” and wondered when the more practical advice was going to show up. Think of that last one as a nudge towards considering why an intentional use of composition is important if you want to make images that don’t just show us what …