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 …
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 …