Tag:the craft
My photography is never so difficult and robbed of its joy as when I try too hard to make it “good” (whatever that means) or worse: to make “art.“ The moment I focus my concern on the outcome of what I am making or how it is received by others, my work becomes rigid and self-conscious. Not only does the picture-making become more difficult (and the resulting photographs less infused with life), it all becomes so much less enjoyable, weighed […]
Wildlife photography should be easy: get a long lens, put the critter in the frame and don’t screw up the exposure. Simple, right? In the 20 years during which I have slid sideways into becoming a wildlife photographer, I have found myself both delighted and frustrated by the challenge of it. Surely if you know how to use a camera, the rest should be a matter of funding the lens and finding the animals. Beautiful creatures make for beautiful photographs, […]
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 […]
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 like a part of you: your fingers moving to buttons without conscious thought, your hands moving the whole rig left and […]
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 good stuff. Between game drives last week, I found myself telling one of my guests that I was experiencing something […]
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 that feels intuitive. Photographers seem more excited to lean into the former than into the latter, which is unfortunate if […]
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 […]