The Perceptive Photographer

Episode 347 In photography, we often talk about the notion of the decisive moment. That idea that all the elements of form, frame, composition, and gesture all come together in a complete image. There is the flash of time where everything is in alignment. I believe there is also something else in photography that is equally if not more important. The idea of a defining moment. A moment in your pho...

Episode 346 We all collect stuff. Some of us embrace our collections and proudly display them for others to see. Other collections are more personal and private. In the game of photography, there are lots of distractions we can collect that keep us from achieving our goals. I am sure if you look around your photography space, you will see too much of some things you have collected and not enough o...

Episode 345 One of the criteria we can use to judge our own photographs is does this image match my memory of the thing I photographed? A photograph is a record of something just like our memory. Many times, I think we use this criteria as a way to evaluate our images. Does is match? If yes the photograph is good, and if not, the photograph is lacking. In this week’s podcast, we jump into th...

Episode 344 If you haven’t taken the time to make a contact sheet, you should. They are worth their weight in gold. Many people think the contact sheet is used to select your best photograph to edit or enlarge, but I also think contacts teach you something about your approach to photographs and time behind the camera. The contact sheet lets you see how your vision unfolds and how the world y...

Episode 343 Have you ever had a good glass of wine where you could taste the subtle notes of flavor? Maybe it was in a cup of coffee or something you cooked. That little sensation of blueberries, mint, rosemary, or plum. It is out there waiting to be discovered and enhance our pleasure eating or drinking. Photography has that same experience. There are little notes of flavor in composition, framin...

Episode 342 This week’s podcast takes a look at how clarity can impact our photography from before the shutter clicks to after the print is made. As always, I hope you and yours are safe, and please remember to keep safe and wear your mask. Get your Photoshop Virtual Summit Pass Here! One of the questions I get asked frequently is what sort of equipment do I use to record my podcast. I have...

Episode 341 Have you turned it off and on again? This was a common question when I was in IT for 20 years. Often times starting over again with a clean reboot fixed a lot of issues. In some cases, when the issues came back, it could tell us of a systemic issue verse a random out-of-the-air issue. In the case of our photography, sometimes when we have a problem with what we are doing, a reboot can...

Episode 340 In this week’s podcast, we take a note from the quote by Twain and how we might apply the concepts behind that quote to make a better photograph. Much of photography is about telling a story in our images. If we start telling a story before we know what we want to say, we might make uninteresting work. However, by listening to others tell stories and the stories we tell, we might...

Episode 339 In this week’s podcast, we dive into some ideas around how to increase the success rate behind the camera so that you have more images to work with on your various projects. For many of us, coming home from a shoot with lots of photographs can be a challenge to sort and work with in a meaningful way. Having a plan and idea of what matters, awareness behind the camera, and organiz...

Episode 338 I have heard, more times than I can count, that inspiration is a magic gift from the beyond that moves and shakes up to create amazing things. I am on the other end of the spectrum where I think inspiration comes from the work. What we might think of as a eureka idea actually has been there all along we just haven’t been listening closely enough. In that work of inspiration, I ha...

Episode 337 I received an email asking me about the correct settings to use when photographing something. I quickly replied back with my opinion and some commonly used settings that we might do when approaching the type of work they mentioned. Afterwards, I got to really thinking about the idea and impact of the correct settings on creating interesting work. Does the notion of a single correct set...

Episode 336 There was a game we used to play back in at a company I worked at. Several of us worked in a common open area. Work was slow at times, so we would have entire conversations that had to be movie quotes. The only rules were had to be a quote and someone had to guess the quote. Now, I didn’t say it was a good game, but it passed the time. I have wondered sometimes looking back at th...

Episode 335 One of the challenges that we photographers face is that our work isn’t what we photograph but rather what that image represents. We see a tree and photograph the tree. In our seeing, that tree is something else. It might be a person, face, galaxy, love, empathy, or joy. The object of our affection is really about the relationship we have to something else. In this week’s p...

Episode 334 One challenge I believe that many of us face when sharing our work is having a conversation about the work rather than about technical aspects of the work. For many people, the basic what is it, what f/stop type questions are a starting point. Maybe they don’t know what to ask about the work or have the words to ask so they ask what they know. We, as photographers, answer the que...

Episode 333 We are trying out a new segment for the podcast called footnotes and endnotes. This segment is a collection of small random thoughts I have in my notebooks and conversations that rather than stretch into a longer podcast where I might get a little redundant I rapidly cover each topic in a few minutes. This week’s podcast covers ordering off-menu, hard being easy and simple being...

Episode 332 In the movie Office Space the main character has a goal to do nothing as a successful job. At one point, he has a day where he does nothing and says it was everything he hoped it would be. Our photography can be a lot like the movie. It becomes easy to define success as series of tasks or skills to accomplish, but our photography is more than just a set of tasks. In this week’s p...

Episode 331 I have heard over the past several weeks’ other photographers talking about other people’s photographs. What caught my ear was how critical these photographers were of people’s subject selection, the commonness of the subject, or general bashing of the image as been there done that. I found it interesting that these photographers couldn’t see past their own same...

Episode 330 I often hear people talk about or suggest the proper settings for your camera to make good photographs. You might also find people who are suggesting the proper methods to edit your photographs for maximum impact. In this week’s podcast, we take a look at that approach and discuss how more times than not, taking or editing a good photograph requires you to think more about your a...

Episode 329 Often timed I find myself in a rush to do something. When that happens not much good comes from it. In this week’s podcast, I talk about how rushing can often lead to less than ideal results. As always, I hope you and yours are safe, and please remember to keep safe and wear your mask.

Episode 328 We all have places we work on editing our photographs. It might be a dedicated studio or room in the house, and for others, it might be a shared desk in the kitchen. In this week’s podcast, I talk about how setting up your space to work is similar to how you might approach working on a photograph behind the camera. I also talk about how getting a space set up to reflect your pers...

Episode 327 In this week’s podcast, I talk about how the work we make is all about the small details and impacts. Like ripples in a pond you never know how big of impact something you do might be but obsessing about how big the impact is or should be can lead to a dark creative place. Much of the work we do in art isn’t about major groundshaking events, it is in the smallest moments. A...

Episode 326 In this week’s podcast, we take a look at the question of does our style change when we change what we photograph or is our style consistent. I was asked recently if our style changes all the time based on what we photograph. They gave the example of black and white landscapes verse color fashion photography each being of interest but having a completely different look and approa...

Episode 325 There are times that everyone faces in their photography when you feel like things are going nowhere. Maybe you are spending more money than you wanted or time than you have on things you don’t need or want to do. The longer we spend on photography, the less time and energy we have to do photography. I imagine that each one of us has that thing that got us into photography that w...

Episode 324 In this week’s podcast, I take a quick look at the notion of accuracy in a photograph. Each photograph has a given set of attributes that we respond to when we look at the image. In critiquing work, there is often a sense of correctness to those decisions behind the camera. In the discussion this week, I challenge the idea that there is one accurate way to create and respond to t...

Episode 323 In this week’s podcast, we talk about the duality of many of the concepts and ideas that we might face when making photographs. We look at how ideas can be both easy and hard or how expectations can be both meet and disappointing. As we face this dual nature of many aspects in our photography, how to ultimately choose to use that duality to make more interesting photographs is a...