View Post

Recalculating the Creative Life

In Creativity and Inspiration, Life Is Short, Pep Talks, The Craft, The Italian Incident, The Life Creative by David27 Comments

  I recently read of a 19-year-old football player, a goalkeeper for Real Madrid, who was in a serious car accident and left unable to walk for two years. The story caught my attention because it was 14 years ago this month that I had my own accident, which shattered both my feet, cracked my pelvis, and left me unable to walk with a long road …

View Post

Make It Different, Make it Yours.

In Creativity and Inspiration, Pep Talks, The Craft, The Life Creative, Thoughts & Theory by David6 Comments

One of the great photographic challenges is making a photograph that is different: different from what others are making and different from the images you’ve made so many times before. Taking the same photograph over and over doesn’t appeal to me. I want to go further, learn more, and get closer and closer to images that feel uniquely my own. I’m …

View Post

Over the Shoulders of Giants?

In Books, Pep Talks, The Craft, The Life Creative by David14 Comments

Years ago, I took my battered Land Rover Defender (that’s Jessie in the picture above) to the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley. I’m sure you’ve seen photographs of the playa: rocks sitting on parched earth and cracked mud, long trails behind them as if they’ve moved on their own. This fascinating phenomenon of what are called “sailing stones” is explained …

View Post

My Keeper Rate is Getting Worse

In Creativity and Inspiration, Pep Talks, The Craft, The Life Creative, Thoughts & Theory by David19 Comments

I have over 400,000 photographs on my hard drives. Of those, only 2,000 images have been compelling enough over the years to consider them final photographs or “keepers.” I suspect I’d have even fewer if I went through them all now. That’s a so-called keeper rate of 0.5% or less. After almost 40 years behind a camera, only half of one percent of …

View Post

The Problem with Mood

In Photographically Speaking, The Craft, The Life Creative, Thoughts & Theory, Vision Is Better by David75 Comments

I do a little moonlighting for a small computer and imaging company that rhymes with Snapple. They are under the mistaken impression that my nearly 40 years behind the camera means I know what I’m talking about. Still, I like the challenge. One of my first tasks as their Creative Storytelling Specialist (yeah, I don’t know what that means, either) …

View Post

The Power of Mood

In Pep Talks, The Craft, The Life Creative, Thoughts & Theory, Vision Is Better by David60 Comments

Photography can be many things. For some, it’s about capturing scenes. For me, it’s about conveying emotions and suggesting narratives that resonate deeply, first with me and then with the viewers who might experience the image. I’m not so much after eyes as I am hearts and minds. Mood does that. The mood of a photograph is its emotional tone—a …