A Better Edit Makes Better Photographs
Take a few minutes to watch the video above or, if you’re more of a written word person, keep reading. It’s not uncommon for me to come home from a trip with thousands of photographs. On a wildlife trip I can average 1,000 photographs a day, which is really easy to do when you’re in a moving boat, excited about …
Change Your Lens, Or…?
Imagine this: we’re side by side at a local pond, a thermos of coffee between us as the first light comes up. You’ve got your camera with a 24-105mm lens. I’ve got mine, too, but chose to bring my 300mm lens instead. As we set up, you say you wish now that you’d brought a longer lens. “Funny,” I say, …
The Golden Merganser: About the Image
My best photographs are usually a surprise to me. Long after I’ve made them, they feel familiar and almost inevitable as I look back on them, but not one of them could I have really ever anticipated at the time. The light, the composition, even the subject—I often never see them coming. Sometimes, the surprise is that the image even …
The Evolving Photographer
I am not the photographer I once was—and neither are you. Change is inevitable (and desirable), and as you look at your work, I hope you see that change reflected in the photographs you have made. As the months and years roll by, the camera becomes a little more familiar, a little less intimidating. At some point, it just feels …
Diminishing Returns? I Don’t Think So.
I came home from Zambia with a small handful of images I love. Maybe eight. The jury is still out. But a couple of them I really love. The rest are just meh, a collection of sketch images that don’t make me lean in or quicken my heart. Far from failures, they’re what it takes to get me to the …
Change is Hard (At Least You Aren’t a Lobster)
Something a little different for you this morning. My heart stopped dead when I saw the black snake in my tent. Walking barefoot to the washroom in the middle of the night, my mind needed no time at all to jump to the certainty that what I was looking at was not just any snake but one of the most …
Check Your Composition
I gotta tell you, I have no idea how any of us ever managed to learn this craft well enough to make the photographs we do. There’s just so much to learn! Exposure alone can be tricky at first, but these days, there are so many different modes and buttons and dials. With time, it becomes intuitive-feeling, but it’s a …
Are You Good, or Just Lucky?
Every photograph I’ve ever made has been a lucky shot. The light was just right; without it, there’d be no mood in the image. The weather cooperated, or it didn’t, but in the end, the resulting rain or fog made for a much more visceral photograph. The elephants lined up just so, and I was lucky. That I even get …
Find the Contrast, Find the Interest
It takes a while to learn to use your camera like a photographer for whom the camera feels natural in the hands, to move your fingers across the buttons almost unthinkingly, with intent and purpose. It takes even longer to think like a photographer for whom thoughts about composition and the look and feel of the image come in a way …
Real Photographers Do What?
Of all the prescriptive nonsense I hear about making photographs, the idea that “real photographers shoot on manual” has to be the most tiresome. As if burdening photographers with an even greater sense of obligation to the shoulds and the should-nots has ever led to greater creative freedom, less rigidity in our work, and more powerful photographs. I’ve heard similar …