Starting has always been tough. They don’t tell you that when you buy a camera. Or the new lens you get so excited to use. “This,” we think, “is going to change everything!” Except it doesn’t. At least not yet, because you’re (to misquote Julia Roberts in Notting Hill) still just a girl standing in front of a boy asking …
It’s Enough to Know Enough
Put the coffee on, maybe pour a glass of wine. This will take you about eight minutes to read, but it might be a great way to recalibrate for the year ahead. If you’re looking for the winners of the Gura Gear Giveaway, you can find those towards the bottom of this piece. My first camera was relatively easy to use. A …
Is it Getting Better?
Two weeks ago, I suggested you stop asking if your photographs are good and that you not concern yourself with whether they are or are not art. I advocated a more playful approach guided by what you love and what brings you joy. I argued that the growth in your craft could be channelled by that love because the more you love doing …
Stop Making Art?
My photography is never so difficult and robbed of its joy as when I try too hard to make it “good” (whatever that means) or worse: to make “art.“ The moment I focus my concern on the outcome of what I am making or how it is received by others, my work becomes rigid and self-conscious. Not only does the …
Between What If? and What Now?
I once wrote that “what if?” was the central question for creative people. I also once wrote that our expectations of what we hope for—of a place, a subject matter, even an idea—can blind us to the reality of it. You show up in Venice to photograph the city in fog and experience agua alta, the high flood waters of …
A Word About Art-Making
One of the happy perils of posting your work online is the very real possibility of criticism. I suppose posting it anywhere exposes you, but the internet gives people both a microphone and anonymity. Things get said online that would never be said in person to another soul. The internet, especially social media, emboldens us. But it’s not only the internet. …
More Important Than Good?
Some of your photographs aren’t very “good”; they’re way more important than that. You’ve felt it—I know you have. You’ve experienced the rush of making a photograph that turns out exactly as you planned. Perhaps better. It’s sharp in all the right places, the colours work together, and it has a certain je ne sais quoi that garners more …
Two Stories
The First Story A guy walks into a music store, credit card in hand. “What brings you in?” asks the clerk. “How can I help you?” “I’d like to buy a microphone,” he says. “My grandfather had a microphone when I was a kid, and I loved to hear him sing. I’d play with it when he wasn’t looking, imagining I …
10,000 Frames to Make One. What’s Wrong with Me?
I loaded my gear into my truck last week and headed 12 hours north to the mouth of the Chilko River, my first trip since the amputation. I drove the same route a year ago, through towering mountains and golden aspens, my mind less on the bears I would photograph and more on the looming surgery. If I didn’t change …
Creative Failure: Teacher or Trap?
In the creative life very few things go the way we expect them to, and I suspect when they do, it’s because we’re not reaching far enough beyond our comfort zone, not risking enough. First steps into any new endeavour—whether that’s learning a new technique or beginning a new body of work—are not the steps that get you to a …