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 …
5 Ways to Make Deeper Images
In the coming weeks I’m going to be talking a lot about making images with soul, and being the source of that spark in our images. More than ever I believe, in our enthusiasm about the astonishing marvels our cameras can be, we’ve forgotten that in photography, to quote Eve Arnold “it’s the photographer, not the camera, that is the …
Why Go Monochrome?
I’ve been told it’s a curious decision to photograph so colourful a place as India in black and white, as though colour itself is the defining characteristic of the place therefore the most obvious way to photograph it. But there’s so much more to India than colour, though there’s plenty of that too. There is life and chaos and texture. …
It’s All Subjective
These were the questions I was asked last week and I think they open an interesting conversation. Here’s my take on it: Yes. A photograph needs a subject. It needs something about which to be. In the same way a story or a poem or a song needs to be about something, so too does a photograph. But remember …
Two Big Questions
Walking through Jodhpur with a friend last week he asked me a series of questions about the way I think when I photograph, specifically: how do I prioritize and make the decisions that I do? Do you choose aperture first, or shutter? Do you reach for a wider lens or a tighter? Do you back up, get close? So many …
You Can’t Zoom With Your Feet.
I get nervous when I hear teachers spouting platitudes, especially when they are expressed in the imperative. Do this. Do that. And I get really nervous when I hear my students repeating them. Platitudes are easy to remember. They simplify things. But they do not, generally speaking, teach. They do not change the way we think, only the way we …
More Than Smiles
For years I chased smiles. I still do. I love a great laugh for the spark and openness it brings to a subject. But laughter and smiles, universal as they are, do not tell the whole story or express the full emotional gamut of the human race (riddling, perplexed, labrynthical soul, as John Donne so well expressed it.) I use …
Seeing Colour
This image is a photograph of two black gondolas on black water. We do not see things as they are but as they look, and the brain will do whatever it can to untangle puzzles like this. So many people will walk past this scene and others like it and never see it. Not truly. They will see it at …
Vision-Driven Exposure: A Clarification
I wanted to follow up on my article about how I expose, to clarify a few things. If you’ve read that article, read on. If not, you might want to read it first. To make a few things clear, my last post was not a dismissal of craft. Craft has its place. Excellence matters. But there’s this thing about people …