I came home from my last trip with almost 20,000 photographs, which is, by any standard, a whole lot of photographs. I edited them down to about 30. That’s 19,970 images that didn’t make the cut. If I looked at every one of those photographs for only three seconds, it would take me 1,000 minutes, or almost 16 hours, to …
Who Says There’s No Un-Suck Filter?
In my first book, Within The Frame, before all of this blew up and I became a writer (and just how exactly did that happen, anyway?) I wrote that “there was no Un-Suck filter in our photography” and since I didn’t get a flood of emails asking me what on God’s green earth I was talking about, I assumed people …
Give Your Photographs The Finger (It’s Not What You Think)
In the now classic comedy, City Slickers, veteran cowboy Curly says to Mitch (played by Billy Crystal), “Do you know what the secret of life is?” Mitch says, “No, what?” And Curly holds up his finger. “This.” “Your finger?” asks Mitch. “One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean sh*t.” “That’s great but what’s the …
Learning to Focus
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: 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 …