I believe that when Robert Capa said “if your photographs aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough,” part of what he implied was more than just physical proximity, but a more intimate knowledge of the subject. They’re connected of course, and if there’s one thing that I love hearing from others about my work, it’s the word “intimacy.” I want …
Visualizing Spots in LR5
If there’s one feature I love in the newest version of Adobe’s Lightroom, it’s the Visualize Spots tool. There wasn’t much fanfare about it, it kind of snuck under the radar a little, but for me this is huge. Lord knows I try to keep my sensor clean but it’s a losing battle. My usual workflow involves a pretty paranoid …
The Power of Constraint
I spent the last 4 days on Vancouver Island on a beach near Ucluelet. Gorgeous. Passing whales. Beer. Hammock. Silence. My girl and a couple dear friends. Some beautiful light too, and though I didn’t go to make photographs I did take an hour each evening to play. We just finished the inaugural The Created Image seminar here in Vancouver …
Why Sketch?
I’m a big believer in sketch photographs, making frames you know aren’t working but have some idea in them you want to explore. The alternative is to believe that all the images I make that don’t work the way I had hoped are failures and I don’t believe in the notion of failure in creative endeavors. At least not in …
The Magic Wand
This weekend I posted about my experience with the new Fuji XE-1. It’s a great camera. It’s capable of making some beautiful photographs. But I didn’t say the one thing I most wanted to. My heart was screaming to say it and got over-ridden by my mind and it’s always a mistake not to listen to my heart. I wrote …
Let Them Steal
Some days my time online makes it seem like photographers spend more time making watermarks than they do making photographs. So as it’s been a while since I’ve allowed myself a rant, let me weigh in with my opinions about the theft of images. But first a caveat. Yes, copyright laws matter. Yes, you should register your work. Yes, you …
Printing Hokkaido
After narrowing down my Hokkaido work through my edit process, I’m now left with a collection of images to print. Here’s my rough process. 1. Image Prep. I take each image through a final pass in Lightroom’s Develop module. Here are the questions I’m asking myself as I go through the panels. Is my monitor recently calibrated? Am I completely …
Different Ways to Point
We had an interesting conversation in Hokkaido one evening, and it stands out because when you put 15 photographers together for a meal, and there’s no shortage of drink, conversation tends to end up with everyone telling lies about how long they can hand-hold their long lens, or how Ansel Adams was a total hack. This time it was about …
Editing Hokkaido
Coming home from Hokkaido with 8000 images to edit should seem intimidating, but it isn’t. I got a couple requests from people to share my editing process, which hadn’t even occurred to me until I got them, because I’m pretty much done already. So then I went and told Twitter and Facebook I’d show people how I do this painlessly …
Long Exposure Light Leaks
I shot the image above in Patagonia this year, my first real work with the new Nikon D800, which always makes me nervous. So when I saw the weird banding you can see in the frame on the left, I got a little freaked out. In 25 years of photography, I’d seen some weird things, but never this. I was …