It takes a while to learn to use your camera like a photographer for whom the camera feels natural in the hands, to move your fingers across the buttons almost unthinkingly, with intent and purpose. It takes even longer to think like a photographer for whom thoughts about composition and the look and feel of the image come in a way …
Real Photographers Do What?
Of all the prescriptive nonsense I hear about making photographs, the idea that “real photographers shoot on manual” has to be the most tiresome. As if burdening photographers with an even greater sense of obligation to the shoulds and the should-nots has ever led to greater creative freedom, less rigidity in our work, and more powerful photographs. I’ve heard similar …
Make It Different, Make it Yours.
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 …
My Keeper Rate is Getting Worse
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 …
Mwangaza: Light!
Lying in a mud hole, looking up at a white rhino snuffling just inches from my camera, I was having a tough time not giggling or wetting my pants. I might have been a little nervous, but mostly, it was the thrill and the absurdity of it. To be this close to a massive rhinoceros with no remote gear—just me and …
It’s Not a Photograph. Yet.
My Land Rover pulled up just in time to watch the lions finish their meal. What remained had once been…what? A zebra? It’s sometimes hard to tell. Whatever it was, it’s mostly gone now. “We’re too late,” I hear someone say. “Nothing to see here.” Maybe it was the voice in my head. But hang on a moment. In the …
What Makes the Image Work?
My cousin James had a reputation as a kid for taking things apart. One Christmas he dismantled down to the wiring every gift he was given. Remote-control cars? Give him 20 minutes, and there would be nothing left but a pile of tiny screws, little motors, and the tears of his mother who probably should have known better than to give him …
More Interested, More Interesting
A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting on a river, happily photographing grizzly bears. After a two-day drive and a quick turnaround at home, I was off to San Francisco to sign 1,000 copies of the hardcover special edition of my new book, Light, Space, & Time: Essays on Camera Craft and Creativity. I also spent time with my publisher and …
Show Me Less to Show Me More
As a photographer who learned his craft before autofocus became a truly reliable technology, my earliest challenge was focusing the lens. Those who picked up photography after the cameras could focus faster than we would ever be able to do ourselves won’t know the frustration of that particular learning curve. But focusing the lens was never so hard as learning …
Artists & Explorers
This one is a longer one, but I think it’s worth it. Put the coffee on, find a place to settle in. And then scroll to the bottom to see some images from my recent wolf expedition A month ago, I found myself in a tuxedo, eating ants and mealworms (but not the scorpions, grubs, or tarantulas also on offer) …