Tag:creativity and inspiration
I’ve got a question for you. Do you know how your photographs work? Not your cameras, you know how to focus and expose and use enough of the other buttons that you can mostly make it do what you want, but do you know how your images work? A still image is a lot of moving parts (metaphorically speaking). Sure you need to focus on your subject, but how much focus do you want? I mean, do you want just […]
I went to Kenya last month with the usual mix of excitement and worry. Excitement for all the normal reasons, not the least of which was being in front of wonderful things in beautiful light with my camera in my hand. Worry because I really didn’t want to come back with different versions of the same photographs I’ve made before. I had been taking some of my own advice and asking “what’s missing from my images?” and I had come […]
This post is accompanied by some of the work I shot over the last 4 weeks in Kenya. What a trip it’s been. I hope you enjoy the images! My grand-dad was a Scout. At the time he was the highest decorated man in the scouting movement in the UK, a movement whose motto is “Be Prepared.” I like to think some of that desire to be ready for the unexpected has come down to me in my DNA, though […]
I once wrote that “what if?” was the central question for creative people. I also once wrote that our expectations of what we hope for—of a place, a subject matter, even an idea—can blind us to the reality of it. You show up in Venice to photograph the city in fog and experience agua alta, the high flood waters of winter, only to arrive to a sunny week with nothing but blue skies and sunshine. You go to the pyramids […]
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, “I was just thinking the same thing,” though I was wishing for something shorter. How many times has this scenario […]
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 worked at all, as is the case with my image of a common merganser in flight against golden water. Last […]
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 assertions about shooting in RAW (you must). And not cropping or using burst mode (you must not). And not using […]
I recently read of a 19-year-old football player, a goalkeeper for Real Madrid, who was in a serious car accident and left unable to walk for two years. The story caught my attention because it was 14 years ago this month that I had my own accident, which shattered both my feet, cracked my pelvis, and left me unable to walk with a long road back to normal. Life, they say, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. “Sh!t Happens,” says the bumper sticker […]
I have over 400,000 photographs on my hard drives. Of those, only 2,000 images have been compelling enough over the years to consider them final photographs or “keepers.” I suspect I’d have even fewer if I went through them all now. That’s a so-called keeper rate of 0.5% or less. After almost 40 years behind a camera, only half of one percent of the images I make become something I’m proud of, something that feels like it does what I wanted it to, something […]
I have a confession: I only know what 5% of the buttons, dials, and menu items on my camera do. I haven’t done the math; I’m guessing it could be even less than that. But I know that my first cameras only had the ability to focus, select the aperture, change the shutter speed, and specify the ISO. The menu options on my Sony a1 bodies feel almost infinite—it would be overwhelming if I felt I needed them all. But I […]