Northern Kenya, Pt. 1
The black road leading towards the dust-shrouded sun is warming, Flanked by a thousand citizens walking to work, to school, to anywhere but here. Nairobi wakes to birds and dogs and the honking horns of every car and bus That soon will choke these roads. And we, today, head-fogged and time-lost from half a world away, Are heading north, half-drunk …
To Africa with the Fuji X-T1
My conversion to, and love affair with, smaller cameras is about as complete as it can be now. If the social media I’m reading is to be believed, it’s complete for many others as well. Photographers seem to be jettisoning their heavy DSLR gear in favour of smaller mirror-less cameras, and while I doubted I’d be doing so as quickly, …
The Travelling Photographer
“Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.” ~ Neil Gaiman In Hokkaido last month one of the guys I was traveling with made an astute observation, that no matter where we travel as photographers, we will always have the same creative struggles as we do at home because “we take that same photographer with us wherever we go.” Indeed. …
Commodity Failure: A Rant
Oh, am I going to catch shit for this one… Every once in a while, despite my best efforts to keep my head down and avoid this stuff, I hear someone complain again about “amateur” photographers (don’t even get me started on the term faux-tographer, I’ll have an aneurism) cannibalising the photography market because they work for less than industry …
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 …
See The World Packing List
On February 11 we’re releasing SEE THE WORLD: 20 Lessons for Stronger Travel Photographs. As I gear up for it, and start packing for the trip to Kenya that follows hot on its heels (I leave February 15), I thought I’d give you a copy of my own packing list. I’ll drop it down at the bottom of this post …
Talking Money with Zack Arias
Months ago I wrote a post called Photographers and Money, We Should Talk. The blog post seemed to get a lot of traction and generated a lot of comments and questions. Since then I’ve wanted to get my friend Zack Arias on the line and record a conversation about this stuff, because Zack’s made almost as many mistakes as I …
Hokkaido Boat Abstracts
Halfway through this last trip to Hokkaido my brain needed a break from all the white, elegant, graphic stuff. Beautiful, to be sure, but I needed something tangental, something different. In part, I think, I wanted something manmade, probably longed for some colour as well. What I found in the old boat yards, the boats all up on blocks, some …
Back from Hokkaido
I got in from Japan yesterday and dove headlong into the blur of jetlag. By now I’m pretty good at the auto-pilot chores and the mindless digging out from the pile of things accumulated in my absence. It’s not just jetlag that makes it hard, but the more whole-body confusion that results from longing to be back where I just …
Postcards from Hokkaido
When I came to Hokkaido for the first time for a wildlife tour in 2013, I fell in love with the place. It’s vast, wild, elegant, and her people live close to the land. I left with a longing to return, so when Martin Bailey asked me to come back and do this trip again, but with a landscape emphasis, …