HT0758 - Fatigue Images

I've noticed over the course of my photographic life that I tend to make different pictures depending on my level of fatigue. At the end of the day, after driving or hiking for long hours, my images are more intuitive and less intellectual. And better! I wish there was a Lightroom metadata sort by time of day.

HT0759 - The New Schedule

Starting next week, we are adding three new channels to our LensWork Online content — Exploring the Back Issues, Q&A, and Field Notes.

HT0760 - Rethinking the Tripod

The primary use for a tripod all these years has been to stabilize camera movement. But now with OIS and IBS, tripods have fallen out of favor. Too bad, because eliminating camera movement is not the only reason to use a tripod.

HT0761 - Print Size and Archivability

An odd lesson from my recent downsizing was the challenge of archiving large prints. I realized that the larger the print, the more challenging it was to keep it, to store it, to protect it, to find a home for it. The larger the print, the more of a challenge and problem it was to deal with in my downsizing project.

HT0762 - Print with Margins

I used to print my images in the wet darkroom as close to the edge of the paper as I could. This allowed me to make larger images. But I've discovered that a lot of those images have damaged or bent corners just from handling. Now I leave a generous margin between the edge of the paper and the image content — just to be safe and help avoid damage to the image itself.

HT0763 - Life Happens

An important bit of self-knowledge is to understand the difference between being lazy and being unproductive in our art life for some pretty good reasons. Sometimes, life just happens.

HT0764 - Damned Fuzz

A couple of quick things to understand about optics and gunk.

HT0765 - Butterfingered Disasters

It's a good thing I'm not a surgeon. A really good thing.

HT0766 - The Old Stores

I miss those old camera stores where you could find every piece of odd and ancient gear of your dreams. I'm not sure I'd want to go back to those days, but I do remember them fondly.

HT0767 - The Importance of Failures

First, if you have no failures you are it far to safe. And if you are not spending time with your failures to learn from them, you are wasting one of your greatest assets.

HT0771 - What They See

As is always true in art, the viewing experience is the intersection of the content of the artwork with the viewer's interpretation. Sometimes their experience can so color their interpretation that there's little we can do to overcome that gap between our intent and their understanding.

HT0772 - Bouncing Off the Surface

The vast majority of photographs I see (and make) are, truth be told, pretty shallow. Viewing them I feel like I just bounce off the surface. But every once in a while there's an image that connects with me in a way that engages my conscious attention more deeply. I ask questions, I think, I feel, I spend time with it. My imagination is engaged These are the images that are the reason why we are involved in photography.

HT0773 - When I Think About Photography

When I'm reading a novel and think, "What a beautifully written paragraph," I know there's trouble. When I look at a photograph I've made and think, "That's a clever photograph" I know I've failed. Success in art is achieved at its highest level when we are unaware that we are looking at art.

HT0774 - Better Than the Original

On numerous occasions, I've discovered a new piece of music, at least new to me, because I have heard what is called in the musical world a "cover." Someone has re-recorded a song made famous as an original by some other artist. It's amazing how many times I like the cover better than the original, but maybe because I heard it first?

HT0778 - Giving In to the Possible

If I'm working on an image and it just won't bend to my will, my knee-jerk reaction is to stop and move on to the next image. Over the years, however, I've learned that there's another alternative: let the image become what it wants to become even if that quite different from my intentions.

HT0779 - How Black Feels

It's easy to become seduced by the measurement of maximum black as some sort of photographic virtue. But when it comes to artwork, how black feels is more important than how it measures.

HT0780 - Rotating the World

We all know about cropping and use the crop tool with regularity. It's much more rare, but sometimes incredibly powerful, to use the crop tool's ability to simply rotate an image. It's a brain thing.

HT0781 - Expanding Time

If photography has an Achilles heel, it's that it presents us with an instant in time. One of the great challenges of Photography is how to expand that time. When successfully accomplished, it can dramatically alter the impact of a photograph.

HT0785 - Features I Didn't Know

I think with most photographers from time to time it occurs to them that they might need a new camera. But today's cameras are so complex and so feature-laden it might be that we just need a deeper dive into the feature-set we already own.

HT0786 - Becoming One with the Camera

When a talented musician wants to play a musical phrase, they don't have to think how to move their fingers. They're so at one with the instrument they just think the melody and their fingers find the keys. The same can be said of learning a new language. There comes that moment when you don't have to translate in your mind, you just start thinking in the new language. That "becoming one with the instrument" is what we should strive for with our cameras.

HT0787 - Memory Cards Don't Last Forever

Yesterday while I was out photographing, I had a memory card simply fail. There was no logical reason, I hadn't done anything, there were no static discharges, simply no reason the card should have failed, but it did. I'm so grateful I had a camera with dual card slots and a backup card to replace the failed one.