A couple times a month, I get on the phone or Skype with some wonderfully talented photographers to mentor them and nudge them forward in their craft. Almost every time the concerns are the same, the questions are similar. Is my work any good? What are my next steps? How do I grow? Of course every conversation is different, …
Empty?
Sometimes you’re on a roll.You’re on fire. Everything you touch turns to gold, and ideas come faster than you know what to do with them. Other times you’ve got nothing. Standing there in the middle of one of those places that’s so amazing you can’t make a bad photograph and feeling like an idiot because the only thing you’ve made is …
Art: To Like or To Listen?
Weeks ago I posted an image to the Vision-Collective, my private mentoring community to which many of you belong. The image was Wynn Bullock’s Child in Forest, 1951. The responses to that image and the resulting conversations were intriguing to me. Some responded to the image as I do, finding in the image a sense of idyllic calm. Some were …
Your Worst Images Might Be Your Most Important
No one nails it on the first shot. No one. I know: you have this one friend who got lucky back in 1986. One shot. Nailed it. You might have done so, too—that one time you raised the camera to your face, made one frame and it’s now your absolute favourite photograph and it hangs on your wall to this day …
Everyone’s A F*cking Photographer
(A Labour-Day Weekend Rant for you, with apologies to those who cringe when I cuss.) Last time I was in Venice I saw a camera-ladened photographer, a huge tripod slung over his shoulder, turn to a friend and gesture to the crowds of people happily making photographs with their mobile phones, as he sneered, “now everybody thinks they’re a f*cking …
Travel Photography: More Than Snapshots & Postcards
On my recent trip to India, not everything went to plan. Bad wiring in the hotel room meant things kept blowing up. We were trying to film videos like the one I posted last week, Have Camera Will Travel, and if I wasn’t being interrupted by noisy packs of wild dogs, I was being shit on by birds, or having to …
Travel Photography: If It’s Not Muggers, It’s Monkeys
On my first (and to this point, only) trip to Russia, I was mugged. Rather, it was an attempted mugging. A man approached my friend and me in a small underpass in St. Petersburg and asked for money. When I repeatedly told him I had none, he flashed a small safety razor blade at me and growled, “Your money or …
Is It Any Good?
Have you ever looked at one of your photographs and thought, is it any good? I often wonder if this is the one big question that goes through the minds of most photographers, after the one about whether we should get another camera bag, which is ridiculous, because you can never have too many camera bags. Is it any good? …
All The Light We Can Get
Years ago I wrote a letter to a woman named Jennifer. A collection of many people I know and who’ve asked me questions over the years, Jennifer was more a symbol than a real person, but my words to her couldn’t have been more true. Today I got a letter from Emily. It could have been anyone, or everyone. You, …
Composition: The Power of Simplicity
“Simplify, simplify, simplify.” ~ Henry David Thoreau “One ‘simplify’ would have sufficed.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson It took me years to figure out that photographic composition is about organization of elements in the frame, that making a photograph has so much more to do with my decisions than it does with the scene in front of me. Before that realization, …