My satchel, my iPod, and me on the boat to San Frutuosso, Italy. This is the least amount of gear I have ever shot with. Photo Credit to my friend Stuart Sipahigil. I know, I look very zen. In reality I think I was calculating the hours until lunch. As an artist I’m scared of repeating myself. I don’t want …
Sucking Is Not Enough
Ladakh, India, 2008. Finding images to illustrate these things ain’t always easy, so I picked something completely at random and because, well, I guess because Ladakh doesn’t suck. I dunno. Just read the post, ignore the caption. Lest anyone think the last post about Suck-Mode was a license to celebrate mediocrity, I want to look at this all from the …
Suck-Mode.
Me. Happily in Suck-Mode in Kenya. Man I miss Africa! The image has nothing whatsoever to do with the post so don’t go looking for deeper meanings. Sometimes a photograph is just filler, ya know? During the Q&A time at Amazon the other day a guy in the audience asked me a question. It must have been very complicated because …
From Confession To Photographic Penance
I have to tell you the response to Monday’s post absolutely blew me away. It clearly hit a nerve and that tells me there are a lot of photographers out there that have been told one thing in the face of a very different reality. And the truth is that the bulk of the pros I know routinely do some …
Confessions of a So-Called PRO.
Shot in Senegal. Long shutter speed. Dawn. Through the windshield. Moments before driver drove off the road, through the ditch and stalled in the bushes. A while back I wrote a piece about the “I’m only an amateur” mentality. In brief it was an unashamed rally call to photographers everywhere to stop seeing themselves as merely an enthusiast, not yet …
No Vision Without Passion
My friend Yves on safari in Kenya. Yves will travel with me to India this year too, and I can’t wait to hang out with him again. He’s a surgeon, but his passion for photography would humble many of the pros I know. I think it was Zack Arias who recently said that if he hear the word “passion” one …
Sustaining, Part II
Self portrait, Jan 03, 2010 Last week I started a discussion about sustaining the practice of art, based on the Kurt Vonnegut quote about the purpose of art being the growth of the soul. Y’all chimed in with what you do to sustain your creativity, and if you haven’t read through the comments in that post, you’ll want to. This …
Sustaining The Practice of Art
“The practice of art isn’t to make a living. It’s to make your soul grow.” ~Kurt Vonnegut Chase Jarvis recently posted about his Create-Share-Sustain paradigm. I’ve referenced it, linked to it, quoted it several times this past year. In that paradigm, the notion of sustaining the create-share cycle is generally seen as a financial one. It’s the grease on the …
Process versus Product
Chris Orwig making a portrait of me making a portrait of him. For a moment there we nearly got stuck in some crazy space/time-continuum mobius. (While we’re speaking of shooting film, and of Chris Orwig, check this out on his blog – love it in so many ways.) I have been resisting my return to film for a while. Trying …
JUST?
At least a couple times a week I get a great email from someone with something nice to say, some piece of advice they’re seeking, or just a general “hey how are ya?” and that email will say something like “I’m just an amateur photographer, but…” Just? That word elicits some pretty mixed responses in me. It makes me angry …