Tag: practice

Teaching mastery, ethics and excellence, in business and/or photography.

I was discussing ethics and publication photography with a friend. We were e-mailing back and forth in the wake of the recent news of how the New York Times Magazine photos that were not supposed to be “photoshop-ped” actually were. He was joking that the only thing left was to ban digital cameras and force publication photographers back to using film. After laughing at the thought, we agreed that even that drastic a step would not make a difference. The history of photography is full of folks who exploited film’s perceived documentary nature to their own advantage. Read More

Photographer’s Daily To Do List

I wish I could say I wrote the following photographer’s daily to do list, but I did NOT. The Ohio photographer, George Remington, whose work is at: www.georgeremington.com wrote this. Read the list carefully, to begin to get a better sense of all the things involved in being a professional photographer. Read More

Top ten keys to be a successful photojournalist (Part two)

I just wound up an interesting assignment in California. I wrote the first half of this two-part blog entry right after the first day of the project. Now that I have finished and I am writing the second half of the entry, certain points I wanted to share are even clearer to me than when I started. Read More

Top ten keys to be a successful photojournalist (Part one)

I am starting an interesting assignment in California. So far, it has been a lot of fun, but it has also been a great deal of hard work. To be honest, because I do not work on as many assignments as I once did, I was worried I would be rusty. In fact it has been quite the opposite. All the skills I developed over the decades that I was doing assignment work came back to me easily, a bit like riding a bicycle (or motorcycle.) Thinking about them led me to writing them down as a blog post. Read More

Spring means motor drives and motorcycles

When mid April rolls around, many things seem to happen all at once. Tax day is the most obvious one. For many photographers in the chilly North East, April is the time to start venturing outside again to photograph regularly. For me, mid-April also means I can start riding my motorcycle after the long winter hiatus. I was out riding recently and I ended up thinking about the similarities (and differences) between the folks outside enjoying their cameras and enjoying their motorcycles. Read More

The making of one image (a video)

This podcast explores the process of making one image, from recognizing the potential of the situation for a photograph, through composing and metering of the photograph and then actually making a variety of images. Read More

Learning how to learn, photographically

When I went to college, in pursuit of a Bachelor of Liberal Arts, my mother encouraged me to put my energy into what she called “learning how to learn.” I just finished a workshop where a student told me the best part of the class was that he had “learned how to learn the way to make the best photograph possible of a given situation.” Read More

Cameras do not make pictures, people do!

As I was flying cross-country recently to the warmth of sunny California, I was catching up on all the newspapers that had accumulated on my kitchen table. As a photographer, one item really caught my attention. Read More

The Internet is grand, isn’t it?

I was struggling as I tried not to write one more blathering post along the lines of “Ain’t the internet grand?” After pummeling myself about that for a while, I gave up, so here goes. Read More