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, …
Hone Your Creativity: 3 Ways
Two weeks ago I published Leaving Dafen (From Craft to Art), an article that discusses the shift from craft to art; rather, it promises that such a shift was possible and points out the need for courage to make it happen. It’s not an easy subject, nor one I intend to make simple. But I think that at the …
Leaving Dafen (From Craft to Art)
There is a village in China where thousands of painters make their living together, painting away their days in spartan studios, covered in paint, surrounded by canvases. The village is called Dafen, and it intrigues me because, for all the technical prowess possessed by the painters in that community, it is not known for its art. Not really. That is …
The One About Being “Realistic”
As we roll into 2018 with our usual expectations that this year is going to be different, or better, or the year we take things to the next level or dial things up to 11, or whatever, there will be no shortage of voices – many of them in your own brain – that are going to try to hold …
Making Creative & Technical Choices
This morning I’m going back to fundamentals and answering a question from several months ago that asked, simply, how and why do you choose a particular lens or aperture for a scene. I love this question because it gets to the heart of what it means to be a photographer, or any artist, and that is about making choices. If …
How To Get Sh*t Done
Have you ever felt like you’re insanely busy but not actually accomplishing anything? Like you’re frantically doing stuff but never getting stuff done? Being creative, no matter what the discipline or genre means making things, it means creating, and to do that – whether it’s one photograph or a significant body of work, never mind all the things we need …
The One About Creative Burnout
I’m tired. Not like the “I need a nap” kind of tired, but the kind of tired that goes into your soul and slows your thinking and makes you dread the things you were so excited to put on the calendar only a few months ago. The kind of tired that feels like the first signs of burning out. And …