Month: July 2011

Buying lenses for travel photography

A student-to-be wrote me question about what to bring to a class later this year. His question was specific to the class I am teaching but also broad enough that I suspect I will be revisiting the same topic in the future. So I figured I would kill two birds with one stone and make a blog entry out of the answer to his wise question. Read More

Nostalgia, photography and pablum

Because it is summer, my recent blog entries have been shorter (and I am hoping sweeter.) This week I am writing something equally short but maybe not so sweet. I will be exploring a weird convergence of marketing, nostalgia and photography that I recently came across. What I read got me pretty agitated, but I wanted to “sit on my anger” for a few weeks, to see if my initial reaction was still appropriate. Now I can say that what I thought back when I first saw the offending passage is what I still think, a few weeks later. Read More

Lazy Artists Rip-Off

In last week’s blog, I started with an quote attributed to Picasso, who is supposed to have said: “Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal.” I explored the importance of inspiration and how most artwork is built on work that precedes it. The stealing that Picasso referred to, in my opinion, was stealing the core idea behind a great piece of art but making new and uniquely authored work building on that “stolen” core. That essence is the only thing that should be “stolen” from other artists. A recent on-line controversy left me thinking that a new line needs to be added to Picasso’s quote, which would be something like “Lazy Artists Rip-Off.” Read More

Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal, Lazy Artists Rip-Off

That idea has been floating around in my thinking in one form or another for as long as I have been a photographer. Studying the history of photography, or the history of any creative medium really, is a pretty explicit way of embracing that idea. I have been following a controversy on line involving a photographer I know, copyright rules that I value, an on-line lynch mob that prompted me to wince and the larger question of influences, appropriation and finally flat-out theft. Read More

Computers for workshops

The workshop I finished last week in Italy got me thinking about lap top computers, digital imaging and photography workshops. When I started teaching photography workshops, almost twenty years ago, arguably the biggest concern was how to get film processed in a timely manner, so we could look at the work the students were doing. Early on, we worked with black and white negative film and then with color transparencies, each media having strengths and weaknesses. Today, the digital revolution has eliminated that set of problems. On the other hand, it has opened up a whole other can of worms when it comes to computers digital imaging and photography workshops. Read More