Courage & Gratitude

In A Beautiful Anarchy, Pep Talks, Rants and Sermons by David16 Comments

I woke up this morning, too early thanks to jet-lag, to find Victoria lying under a rare blanket of snow and silence. We got home about 36 hours ago, a day late thanks to fog in Lisbon where we spent a week in driving rain while I tried unsuccessfully to fight a cold. Yesterday I spent the day packing gear …

A Failure to Communicate

In Marketing, Self-Promotion, Rants and Sermons, VisionMongers by David29 Comments

A recent article on F-Stoppers, written by a wedding photographer, starts with the title, Why I Can’t Use a Mirrorless Camera Professionally. Anytime an article starts with “Why I Can’t…” I prepare myself for a personal defence of a position that should otherwise be titled, “Why I Won’t…” and I brace myself for a list of limiting beliefs. Now I …

Lens Caps

In Life Is Short, Rants and Sermons, The Life Creative by David22 Comments

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

In Life Is Short, Rants and Sermons, The Life Creative by David14 Comments

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

In Life Is Short, Rants and Sermons, The Life Creative by David36 Comments

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 …

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Cameras Don’t Make Photographs.

In Rants and Sermons, The Craft by David69 Comments

The recent outrage over Steve McCurry’s penchant for tweaking his photographs with Photoshop is just one in a long series of opportunities for photographers to get their panties in a twist over how photography should or should not be done. This morning, I’ve about as much desire to enter the fray as I have to pour this mug of coffee …

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Is It Good?

In Rants and Sermons by David30 Comments

By now there’s a good chance you’ve heard about the 4 young men from High On Life, a British Columbian clothing company, that have been wheeling their way around the USA in a bright blue bus, and, as it turns out, wreaking some havoc on the National Parks in the name of self-promotion and fun. Their latest escapade, and the …

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The Power of Failure

In Pep Talks, Rants and Sermons, The Life Creative by David18 Comments

I wrote this just before what I’ve come to call “The Italian Incident” 5 years ago, just after writing a different article, Choose Your Risk, which you can read here. It remains true, if not truer now than ever to me. After beginning the discussion on risk, my brain started churning through some of the responses and push-back left in …

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More Than Wow.

In Pep Talks, Rants and Sermons, The Craft by David29 Comments

I used to be a magician. An honest-to-God, I-do-this-for-a-living Magician. And a juggler too. And a comedian. But let’s talk about the magic part. I spent a lot of time by myself, learning how to hide coins and cards and make birds appear from nowhere. I had an illusion built that allowed me to cut myself in half on stage. …