I got back from East Africa a week ago, my hard drives groaning with over 20,000 images. Of those only about 1500 were made during my week in Lalibela, Ethiopia. Now, I shouldn’t be doing math right now, I’m jet lagged and haven’t had my coffee, but there’s something instructive in these numbers, so stick with me. Don’t like math? …
Venice: Watermark
It’s way too early as I write this, the sun is hours from coming up. The darkness lingers longer these days in the northern hemisphere, making it even harder to kick the jet lag or get anything done. Even my coffee isn’t helping, though after a month away it’s comforting to have it beside me—my own coffee in my familiar …
More Photographs, Less Money
Photography can be an expensive pursuit, and the cost of things (and the pressure to buy them all, buy them new, and buy them now) can get in the way of putting that money in better places. It’s not my place to tell you what to do with your money, but I do want to suggest you consider investing it …
The Power of Impatience?
Walking the streets of Sienna under a full moon, the whole town under a shifting blanket of fog that seems to roll around on its own whims, I walk around a corner and the scene I photographed so unsuccessfully yesterday is now a canvas of pastel colours: lilacs and yellows and emergent pinks. I catch my breath and make a …
The Biggest Misconceptions in Photography?
The other day I watched (skimmed, really) a video on YouTube promising I’d learn about the 20 biggest misconceptions in photography. The video had 1.2 million views. What, I wondered, could so many photographers be getting so wrong? It turns out the answer included focus breathing, reciprocal rules, sweet spots, megapixel density, the non-existence of depth of field, and how …
My Photography, My Rules.
You know how I’m always going on and on about how there are no rules in photography? I’m going to back-pedal a bit on that because the more I look at my own creative life, the more I realize that I have some very important rules. Rules without which I don’t make the best photographs of which I’m capable. Rules …
How Do I Find My Style?
“How do I find my style?“ Over a month ago I asked you and everyone else who reads these bi-weekly missives about your greatest struggles and A-HA moments; overwhelmingly, finding “style” was one of the most repeated frustrations. It’s a common enough question, and my answer has always been roughly the same over the years (though I worry it always …
How to Please Your Audience Everytime.
We live in strange times. Never before has an artist of any stripe been able to put their work into the world so broadly and so quickly. Never before has an artist been able to hear every voice that cares to praise, criticize, or issue feedback with neither context nor conversation. Most often it’s just a binary reaction: a like …
The Paralysis of Perfection
Is Perfection Paralyzing You? After teaching photography for about a dozen years without stopping to take a break, it’s become clear to me that after a year with the camera in our hands, the primary problems for most of us as photographers are not photographic problems at all. The problem is that we think they are, and so we look …
The Long Game of Craft
When I was a kid, new to photography, I poured over magazines lusting over the new gear advertised in their pages, and the photographs I thought that new gear would make for me. I wanted to make the kinds of photographs that would go into those magazines, and win those awards. It made a certain amount of sense to me, …