Less Camera Baggage

This Must Be The Place

There’s a French term, mise-en-place, which translates to putting in place, or to translate more properly, it’s the idea of everything having its place. It is often associated with cooking, where it refers to a particular spot for your pots, pans, bowl, plates, tools, spices, sauces… everything. Always in the same place. And this way, when you’re busy cooking, you’re not also wondering where things are. You can go into a bit of auto pilot with the more technical aspects of your endeavor. Find your flow.

Photography also has its versions of this. From packing the bag to ingesting and editing photos, you can create a routine with it that can reach mise-en-place levels. And routine is powerful, not only for the flow-state it can enable, but as an emotional tether in difficult times. It provides a certain amount of predictability. And when life seems to be thrown into chaos, a great routine can be an incredible soother of nerves. …

A Photographer’s Journey to Escape Inertia, Depression & High Heat

Nothing thrills me like photography. Well, I should say, nothing used to thrill me like photography. Somehow, the weight of a global health crisis, the daily crush of terrible news and this constant, thick foreboding is like a big creative tar pit; creating a difficult and slow plodding to even the simplest of endeavors.

And to be clear, it’s me, not photography. Photography itself is having a hey day, with images of empty streets, portraits of people in their doorways and behind their windows, the world seen from inside a car, FaceTime portraits and images from demonstrations. It seems the world of photography is as healthy as the world is sick. …

Part 1

My mother liked to say that “lighting is everything.” It was one of many bon mots she had at the ready. I always thought it a kind of funny vanity thing, but over the years, I’ve come to value it as something more serious. A kind of trade secret. A mantra. An approach.

As a photographer, one of your main preoccupations is light. It’s an elusive part of the occupation, often misleadingly broken up into Natural Light and Studio Light. But in both cases, it gets exceedingly complicated the more you explore it. Today, when I think about the role of light in my work, I think of light almost reverentially. …

A little over a year ago, in the article Photography in a Post Instagram World, I talked about how the Facebook/Instagram platform had been restricting organic growth for photographers. The algorithm gave, then the algorithm tooketh away. Since this time, a new set of tools have emerged within the platform, as well as new approaches to using it. As a tool for photographers, Instagram is no longer the only player in town (perhaps it never was), but like any evolving entity, it isn’t nothing, either. …

PHOTOGRAPHY

From Seeing in BW to Using Lightroom Presets

As I’ve written about before, black and white imagery is not about contrast, tones or dynamic range. People love to argue about it, but it’s pure intellectualism to talk about black and white imagery in terms of the amount of grays. I work as a professional photographer and I’ve been lucky enough to have established myself as, largely, a black and white artist. …

Pushing Into The Darkness

Tenebrism, a term often intertwined with Chiaroscuro, is a manner of using light where — as I like to think of it — darkness is a character in your image. Tenebrism, perhaps, went further with it. More entirely about darkness, not only a character, a theme. Chiaroscuro, for me, is the detail. Tenebrism, the commitment.

Many simply like to categorize these styles as the contrast of light and dark, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Contrast can be applied to any image, what we’re talking about goes beyond image into intent.

For the emotive qualities of true Tenebrism or Chiaroscuro, the photographer I believe begins with a desire to delve… many talk of darkness, few truly walk into it. …

The evolution of one’s photography has a trajectory and it leans toward homogeny, even though it often begins with the romance of finding and capturing something unique.

Here, I want to explore that initial spark that drove you toward the camera. I want to put you back in touch with the odd and the terrifying. The crazy and the unknown. It’s important to embrace your weirdness in photography, being not ashamed of the quirks and the idiosyncrasies of your strange ways and warped thoughts. …

As a photographer, you may either be a small business or a freelancer — in either case, you’re eligible for financial aid through the $2 trillion relief plan the government just put into place to help us through the crisis. And, of course, this isn’t just true for photographers. I happen to write about this specific business, but no matter what business you’re in — if you’re doing it as a small business owner (under 500 people, but also non-profits, farmers, co-ops… many can apply), you are no doubt being affected by COVID-19 and are entitled to get relief.

To cut through the glut of information out there, allow me to get you to just the two things you can apply for right now that might make a big and immediate difference to you. They are live and working. I just did these two things and the entire process took me less time than it did to write this article. …