Joe Ellenbogen was, in my opinion, the ultimate photographer. He shot photos for thirty or forty years — beautiful ones like this here. Over the course of his life, he amassed thousands of images, each one a testament to his passion for traveling and family. I look at his photos often; they help me understand the world better and also him, as a person — his life, his loves.

Never heard of Joe? That’s no surprise, he was not a professional photographer. Famous only in a very small circle. Joe grew up dirt poor in Los Angeles, went to school…

Finding one’s voice in photography is kind of the holy grail. When you see it in others, it looks almost fantastically simple, but when you try to achieve it yourself, you come to realize just what a difficult journey it actually requires. The forces that combine to allow for a distinctive voice work in tandem with each other, across various aspects of development. And so finding one’s way here requires embracing the complexity — and this is where maps can help.

As you can see in this chart, there’s four parts to this. However, it’s really two parts that each…

This studio image here, of my son on a rainy day whim, is a high quality photo that one would once have had to pay a pretty penny for. It’s the kind of photo that, when I first started doing photography I might have looked at and spent a long time trying to figure out. But these days, we all know pretty much how it gets done. From the color matching technique to the single light and bounce technique, I’d be surprised if this image seemed at all mysterious to you.

Photography skill as we’ve known it is undergoing a…

I subscribe to the idea that people can hold two opposing thoughts in their heads at the same time. But nothing seems to force us to exercise this muscle more than social media; a world of contradictions.

Ten years ago, I wrote about the effects of social media on culture. Then, it was all about Facebook, but even so, the paradox of participation was deeply apparent. One interviewee put it this way:

“(Facebook makes me feel) closer to people I’m far away from. But maybe farther from people I’m close to.”

Platforms have changed in the last decade, but the…

The number 1 attribute I look for in a photographer is gray hair.

Clubhouse is the newest social media sensation, with a promise to be as big as… you know. It’s differentiator is that it is based entirely on audio. But other than that major experiential difference, it borrows heavily from early social media experiences, like AOL Chat Rooms. Despite being in “beta,” Clubhouse has been through three rounds of funding already, with a whopping $110M in the bank, led by giant Andreesson Horowitz and a valuation already at $1B. This is being driven by rapid adoption among individuals across every conceivable industry at breakneck speeds. At this time, the app currently has…

Once upon a time, photographers didn’t have to make difficult decisions on their images — this was mostly left to art directors, photo editors, curators and art buyers. You send off your work, people pore over it with a red pencil and decisions get made. As a photographer, you had the talent. But as the final publishers or buyers of your work — they had taste. Sure, there were fights, but the process was the process.

Today, taste is relative. Publishing is relative. Hell, photography is relative. As photographers, we’re often left with the decision-making. Or, at the very least…