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, …
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 …
Travel Photography: What If I Bring The Wrong Gear?
I’ve been to some of the more dangerous places on this Earth, and each time, my friends and family sent me off with a warning and a plea to be careful. No one ever warned me about Tuscany. Yet it was there—and not the slums in Haiti or the backstreets of the Congo—that I fell off a wall seven years …
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? …
What’s the That?
After the start of my course, The Compelling Frame, there were some good questions and excellent conversations about the lesson on Intent. I thought I’d clarify it in the discussions we were having, but I’m going to post it here because I think it might be illuminating for a larger audience. I want you to imagine you and I are …
Is Composition Over-rated?
Sometimes the strangest things show up like unexpected gifts on the doorstep – like the comment I got just yesterday that told me (I’m paraphrasing) that all my talk about composition and storytelling was nonsense. The less-paraphrased version was that scenes are what they are and they compose themselves. I’m not going to lie: I would have laughed if it …
The Photographer’s Role
It comforts me to know I’m not a lone nutter standing on the edge of sanity shouting into the wind. In fact it turns out there’s really nothing about what I teach that better voices before mine have not taught. My voice is just an echo, but it echoes something I think is important – that this craft is a …