If you’re a regular reader of this column, you might remember I once mentioned that a year after I’d graduated from high school I spent the summer working on a Merchant Marine ship that traveled to Scandinavia, England, and Ireland. It was on that trip that I fell in love with photography (I’d just bought a Minolta SR-T 101) and with travel. In that column I wrote, “I look...
You read this magazine. You’re reading this column right now. So I’m thinking that you’ve got your act together. You keep up with the new gear; you pick up tips and techniques, ideas and inspiration. Your skills are sharp and you know what you need to get the pictures you want to get. So when you go out to shoot this summer, you’re going to go with one camera body, maybe...
I was on the road almost nonstop during November and December last year, shooting in exotic locations like Tobago, Barbados, and the South Pacific. I shot for Tobago tourism and several luxury villas, plus for my usual mix of travel/lifestyle stock. Along the way I saw tons of tourists and vacationers—well, hundreds at least—and what I realized as I watched them taking pictures was...
Every year my family journeys from our home in Texas to spend a few summer weeks at our house on Cape Cod. In the fall I usually return to the Cape by myself for a month. I spend half that time doing some commercial shooting, and it’s always my intention to spend the remaining two weeks just relaxing and doing pretty much nothing before the fall season of photo shows, assignments, and...
They’re people like me—professional photographers, and I see them at shows and workshops, drop in on their conversations on web forums, and exchange e-mail with them. Problem is, what they talk about, for the most part, is the business. And while the business is a real concern, it’s not what I want to talk about.
Gather 'round, guys. Right here, around the campfire. Closer...that's it. There's something we have to talk about, something I want you to do. I want you to shoot more like women.
And I want you to do it when you're photographing other men.
Because I think you have a problem photographing men.
Once in a while the idea for a column comes with a little help from my friends. This one did. A writer I know, viewing photos I'd taken on a recent trip to India, said, "You know, you really have a way of handling backgrounds. You should write about that in one of your columns."
My first thought was, do people really need more advice about...
It was something I read in a magazine not too long ago that inspired this column. The writer was talking about the three levels of creativity: imitative, adaptive, and innovative. I wish I could remember the context, but I made a quick connection to photography. We're imitative at the start; we copy others. Then we're adaptive; we make what we've imitated our...
When I started out, I was strictly a travel photographer, and naturally I tended to see and depict people according to the demands of the market. I'd often be in a place that was new and different, and I'd be seeing people whose lifestyles and culture were different, even exotic, and it was my job to bring to the market images that reflected and revealed those...
Call it instinct or intuition, but something is telling you what pictures you should be taking. I call it the quiet little voice, and when it talks, I try to listen. The problem is, as we move on in our careers, or our hobbies, other voices take over, and we often stop listening, or listening enough, to the guiding voice that comes from within.