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 …
Vision-Driven Exposures
This is my confession. I no longer use a light meter. I don’t spot meter. In fact most of the time I don’t even know what metering mode I’m on. My life as a digital photographer became infinitely easier when I abandoned those, put my camera back to manual and simply began exposing for what’s important. Whether you use a …
Desktop Wallpaper: Sunset Leopard
It’s been too long since I posted a desktop wallpaper for you, somehow I just got distracted for a little while there, like a year or so. Oops. Sorry about that. This is Fig, a female African Leopard with whom we spent one of the most magical afternoons on Kenya’s Maasai Mara recently. Watching her nap, wake to kill …
Postcards from Istanbul
I remember some point in my childhood hearing the name Constantinople; like the name Zanzibar it conjured something exotic and romantic in my mind. Of this kind of romance there was no shortage in my childhood. Early on my mother had a massive National Geographic atlas, easily the largest book in the house and I’d lie on the floor looking …
Postcards from Jodhpur
Hello from Jodhpur, though by the time you get this, I’ll be in Delhi on my way to Istanbul for one final week of wandering before flying home. It’s been a beautiful week here, full of the chaos and colour I remembered and so loved the first time I came to India and has had me coming back ever since. …
Vision and Voice
I wrote a book called Vision & Voice. This is not about that. This is about the constant stream of questions I hear that all share a similar quest fuelled by a similar desperation. The questions all centre on one recurring desire: the longing to find your voice photographically. I have tried, in my way, to answer the question creatively, …
My Gear Shift
Once in a while I abandon all sense and do a gear post. This is one of them. I hope it’s helpful to you and that you find the question of why I use the gear I do more interesting than which gear, specifically, I use. It’s the one question that seems to get left out of these discussions; everyone …
What’s Your Potato?
It’s a slow Sunday afternoon. Coffee’s on. Van Morrison is mumbling his way through The Healing Game album. I head to Africa (finally!) at the end of this week after a three week delay. I’m restless. When I’m restless I write. And I’m hoping this time it sticks because I’ve written and re-written this article several times now, unable to …
Photographic Memories: Russia
It was January 1992 and the Iron Curtain had fallen so recently we were all still blinking our eyes. The cold war was over and I was in Russia, shivering through one of the coldest winters of my life, brought there by idealism and delusions of Dr. Zhivago. I lived that winter in an apartment in Yaroslavl that was colder …
Gear for 2+ Months
In a few days I jump onto my first flight of 2016 and head to Johannesburg. From there I drive to Lesotho and then on horseback into the mountains to photograph for a couple NGOs working among shepherd children. This will be the first leg of a trip that’ll take me to Namibia, Cape Town, Kenya’s Maasai Mara, Zanzibar, Rajasthan, …