Here’s one of my favourite images from the trip up to the arctic last month, and a quick walk-through on the post-processing. In Vision & Voice I explain what I call the vision-driven workflow, and there are 4 steps: Identify Intent, Minimize Distractions, Maximize Mood, and Direct the Eye. Identifying the intent here was simply a matter of asking myself …
Cape Kiwanda Post-Production
On Wednesday I was digging around the archives, looking for something new for this month’s desktop wallpaper when I found an image I forgot I had. This is Cape Kiwanda, near Pacific City, Oregon. I did about 10 minutes of post-production on it in Lightroom 3 as one last hurrah before moving to Lightroom 4. Here are some of the …
Mara Impressions I
Mara Impressions I, Kenya, 2012. Click it to see it larger as the smaller image really does it no justice. I made this in the Maasai Mara, still under the spell of my friend Wendy’s expressionist / abstract work. What struck me most about her work is the effect of motion and light to create new lines, almost brush strokes, …
Faking It.
Ice Abstract, Peggy’s Cove, NS. 2012. Every artist I know, particularly those who feel uncomfortable calling themselves artists, feels like they’re faking it. In those moments when I’m totally transparent and feeling brave, I’ll tell you it’s one of the two fears with which I wrestle daily – the first that one day I’ll wake to find my muse has …
My Next Book – The Print & The Process
My next book just went up on Amazon. It’s always a little surreal because no one tells me these things and suddenly I’m looking at a cover of a book that looks suspiciously like mine. The less coffee I’ve had, the longer it takes me to figure it out. Wait! That’s MY book! 🙂 The Print & The Process began …
Mongolia Dodged & Burnt
Gobi Desert, Mongolia, 2012. Click to enlarge. I shot this image in the Gobi last week and used it to show a little dodge and burn to some of the photographers I was traveling with. Most of my images get a little dodge (lighten) and burn (darken), to push and pull the eye subtly through the image. If you know …
Photographing My Father
This fall I took my girl and my camera to visit my father. We drank some wine, watched the leaves change colour, spent some time riding around the back roads in his 1949 Willys Jeep, Patches. And we went off for an hour to do a portrait project I’ve been wanting to do, more and more urgently as my father …
A Beautiful Anarchy
Self Portrait, iPhone. There are rules for engineering bridges, and flying airplanes. There are laws about how you drive a car and file your taxes. There are no rules or laws in art. Art is a beautiful anarchy, a place wherein we express – or try to – the inexpressible, to “eff the ineffable” as author Nick Hornby once wrote. …
CREATE. SHARE. REPEAT.
A couple large prints would look great on these walls. Photographers are a funny lot. So easily distracted. I just came back from the camera store where I came within an inch of buying the new Fuji X Pro 1. I resisted and had a cupcake instead. But as I drove home I thought about it. I had been working …