If you’re at the place where you no longer wrestle as much with the basics of exposure and focus, it could be time to work on the photographs themselves: on content and composition, on vision and the deeper aspects of your craft and art. There are 4 questions I keep encouraging my students to ask themselves as they consider their …
Approval & Art
It is a short step from learning to use a camera to hoping others like what we create. It’s a natural step. But when the next step is allowing the tastes of others to change what we create, it’s a step in a direction that leads away from art. We are responsible for our art, and to be honest with …
Making Photographs & Magic
When I was 14 I picked up a camera at a neighbour’s garage sale, a little Voigtlander rangefinder that changed my life. Quickly I wanted what we all want at the beginning – more control, more lenses, more gear. My mother gave me a Pentax Spotmatic and a gadget back full of stuff, acquired from a co-worker who had recently …
Chasing Photographic Style.
We value style, forms of expression so unique to shooters that you can identify their work immediately. Show me a Jill Greenberg photograph, or an Annie Leibovitz cover and their name comes to mind without a conscious thought, much less looking for the photo credit. So valued is the notion of style that it won’t be long before someone writes …
Stop Using A Camera, Start Making Photographs
The day my photography changed was the day I stopped learning to use a camera and started learning to make photographs. Indulge me: it’s more than just semantics, at least it was for me. We begin, most of us, learning photography as the art of using a camera, figuring out the buttons and dials and learning to focus and expose. …
The Place of Craft
“Sharpness is over-rated. No one has ever looked at the best photographs of this century and been moved emotionally because it was tack sharp or because the histogram was perfect. We suffer, not from a lack of technical ability, but from a lack of visual literacy, imagination, and the willingness to connect emotionally – and vulnerably – with our subjects.” …
Enough.
Bull Kelp, Queen Charlotte Strait, British Columbia When I dropped into the waters of Queen Charlotte Strait a couple weeks ago it was a bit of a graduation for me. I’ve spent a year working towards it. Four different SCUBA certifications, a lot of reading, research, and far too much dreaming about the photographs I hoped I would make. And …
Back to Sucking.
This weekend I’m off to the northern tip of Vancouver Island to dive in the giant kelp forests with sea lions and octopus. I can’t wait! After a year of taking SCUBA courses and, forgive the pun, immersing myself in a hobby more bewildering than even photography, I am finally taking my cameras into the water and it feels like …
You Matter More
I should have known better; I should have known that I can’t just say, “we give our cameras way too much credit for their part in the photographic process,” on social media, toss it out over left field without further commentary and not get some yeah-buts and some push-back. My bad. I should have known that there will be those …
Finding Vision?
Tetrapods in the Sea of Japan. Hokkaido, 2015. I spent way too long last week trying to come up with a way to express something in the 140 characters that Twitter allows. I had seen something in one or another of my social media streams, something about a course where you can “find your photographic vision.” There was something about …