Tag:the life creative
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 […]
Not 20 minutes after my arrival at Kutali Camp on the Zambezi River in Zambia, a large bull elephant strode through camp, walked up to the lunch table, and sampled—then summarily rejected—the cucumber salad that was due to be my lunch. Two mornings later, I woke to find him outside my tent at 4 am, walking right past the tent door (door? It was a screen with a zipper). Lying in bed, wearing neither a stitch of clothing nor the prosthetic […]
Starting has always been tough. They don’t tell you that when you buy a camera. Or the new lens you get so excited to use. “This,” we think, “is going to change everything!” Except it doesn’t. At least not yet, because you’re (to misquote Julia Roberts in Notting Hill) still just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her. Except you’re just a photographer standing in front of a scene asking…”where the heck do I […]
Two weeks ago, I suggested you stop asking if your photographs are good and that you not concern yourself with whether they are or are not art. I advocated a more playful approach guided by what you love and what brings you joy. I argued that the growth in your craft could be channelled by that love because the more you love doing something, the more you do it, and the more you learn. Or so I believe. But that doesn’t remove the […]
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 […]