Making Within The Frame
The original cover concept I sent the publisher. I’m glad they over-ruled me. Six years ago, I got a phone call from a publisher asking me to write a book. The original author had bailed due to health issues, and they wanted to know if I was interested. I wasn’t, but it got my foot in the door and I …
Within The Frame Giveaway: Deluxe Edition
Last month I walked into a bindery with two copies of Within The Frame (which is 5 years old this month!) and asked them to make a very special edition of this book. I just picked them up and they’re gorgeous! Custom bound in rich brown goat leather, with black end papers, and silver embossing, there’s not another one like …
Within The Frame: 5 Years
Never underestimate the power of one decision, one conversation, one risk taken, to completely change the course of your life. 5 years ago this month Within The Frame, my first book, rolled off the presses and into the hands of what would be way more people than I ever imagined. In that time Within The Frame’s been translated into over …
Study the Masters: Fred Herzog
Over the last two weeks I introduced you to Saul Leiter and Ernst Haas, two of the great colour pioneers, and this week I want you to meet another – Fred Herzog (1930 – present). You can see his stuff quickly here in a Google Image search, but there’s no substitute for having it on paper and his book – …
Study the Masters: Ernst Haas
Born in 1921 in Austria, Ernst Haas (1921-1986), like Saul Leiter born two years later, became known for his early work with Kodachrome. His photography was strongly graphic, emphasizing colour as a compositional elements and often using motion and reflections. Haas was a member of Magnum and a colleague of contemporaries Robert Capa and Henri Cartier Bresson. You can see …
Personal Projects
Mongolia series. 2012. Hasselblad and some old film. There’s a lot of talk among photographers about personal projects. I assume, by this, we mean projects that are not for clients, though I’ve tried very hard to never do a project that is not in some way also personal. Life’s too short. For me the key word isn’t “personal” because that’s …
Composition & Questions
We often talk about composition as though its something that can be done right or done wrong. When you look at it in those terms photography is not about expression, but about following the rules. The best thing I ever learned on the photographic journey was this: there are no rules. None. Nope, not even the rule of thirds. No …
Study The Masters: Saul Leiter
I’m starting a new series called Study the Masters. Short and sweet, it’s my chance to put you on to photographers from the past that have made our art what it is. Hands down, the best photographic education, once you know how to use a camera, is to study the work of others. This is my way of suggesting who …
Impressions & Abstracts
Next week we’re releasing my next eBook – The Visual Imagination, a book about creative techniques and ideas that focuses mostly on impressionism and abstraction. Yesterday I was doing a pre-release podcast interviews, talking to Ibarionex Perello, the amazing voice and mind of The Candid Frame, and he asked me the one question I’m so fond of asking others. Why? …
Choose Your Risk: A RePost
I wrote this post three years ago this month (April 20). A couple days later I fell off the wall in Pisa that so changed my life. Don’t think I don’t appreciate the irony of the timing. Seemed a good candidate for a repost from the archives. Funny how it all plays out… Last year I decided to make a …