Tag:the life creative
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 […]
Years ago, I took my battered Land Rover Defender (that’s Jessie in the picture above) to the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley. I’m sure you’ve seen photographs of the playa: rocks sitting on parched earth and cracked mud, long trails behind them as if they’ve moved on their own. This fascinating phenomenon of what are called “sailing stones” is explained by thin sheets of melting ice and powerful winter winds, though that makes it no less mysterious to me. I […]
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 […]
Lying in a mud hole, looking up at a white rhino snuffling just inches from my camera, I was having a tough time not giggling or wetting my pants. I might have been a little nervous, but mostly, it was the thrill and the absurdity of it. To be this close to a massive rhinoceros with no remote gear—just me and my camera—was a dream. No guidance counsellor in any high school anywhere would have suggested this as a viable career […]
Among wildlife photographers, it is the long lens that gets all the glory. The bigger the glass, the more serious one is assumed to be about one’s craft. Less a tool than a symbol, sometimes, the bigger telephoto lenses telegraph to the world that we mean business. How I envied those photographers as a younger man, how incredible I imagined their photographs would be. And how disappointed I was when I could finally afford my first big lens, a used […]
My Land Rover pulled up just in time to watch the lions finish their meal. What remained had once been…what? A zebra? It’s sometimes hard to tell. Whatever it was, it’s mostly gone now. “We’re too late,” I hear someone say. “Nothing to see here.” Maybe it was the voice in my head. But hang on a moment. In the world of wildlife photography (which this article is not about, so keep reading if you’re into other things), I think […]
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 […]