David duChemin's Blog, page 14

Your Next Step: Unified Work

If you’ve read my latest eBook, Making The Image, you know I’m a big fan of questions. Always have been. Questions open us to possibilities, especially when they lead to more questions, experimentation, increased curiosity, and play. This is the last in a series of articles about the power of four particular questions to drive our work forward. The first three: Is my work authentic? Is it vital? Does it tell a story? The final questions is this: is my work unified? Does it work together?

When we first learn photography we seem to go image-by-image. At first we’re just hoping to nail the focus, and the exposure, at the right moment. Then we get pickier about every element in the frame, begin to strengthen our compositions, and soon we’re making capable images one at a time. The next step might be the recognition that a single photograph can’t always tell the whole story; it might be time to begin creating bodies of work.

Bodies of work can be whole collections or a shorter series of images. There are no rules. I have a short series of work of a dozen images from Venice that are impressionist in nature, and a collection of more literal work that’s several dozen photographs. Some are short, and some are long. The most logical way to  unify your work is by giving them a shared theme, though what kind of theme is almost a limitless choice: location, activity, story, social issue, weather – if all the images in some connected way are about (not of) the same subject, that’s a theme. You could also choose to tie your work together with visual conventions, like a shared aspect ratio or colour palette, though it’s assumed those choices are made to strengthen how we communicate, not merely to force a connection.

“A single photograph can’t always tell the whole story; it might be time to begin creating bodies of work.”

What visual cohesiveness is not is homogeny, uniformity, or repetition. It’s not slapping all your monochrome images together into one gallery and calling it a body of work. It’s a thoughtful process of creating work – over a couple hours or several years – that as a collection is stronger than the sum of its parts. So on that note creating a body of work is also not a way to get away with weaker images hoping the stronger ones will carry them. The strength in a body of work lies in a ruthless edit that keeps only the best that work together. Better to have a strong collection of 12 powerful images than include another 8 and have a weaker collection of 20.

“What visual cohesiveness is not is homogeny, uniformity, or repetition. It’s not slapping all your monochrome images together into one gallery and calling it a body of work.”

Start small. Start with three images that together tell a fuller story about a portrait subject or a place to which you’ve traveled. The macro subject you’ve chosen. Whatever. This isn’t a photo-essay, though it could be, it’s just different single images on a theme. Three photographs of three different flowers that share similar or contrasting elements. Three portraits of the different sides of one person, or three images of people that do similar work, or share some similar characteristics – beards and tattoos should be an easy one these days. Now look through your work and see if a slightly different edit of your last trip to Brazil or New York, might give you new possibilities for a series of 6 images that work together.

How you do it is another way in which you flex your creativity. There are no rules. But there are principles, good reasons to create with bodies of work in mind. Just as there are for storytelling and other devices for creating vital images. This process is not without its struggle. That struggle can be guided a little, given some direction, with the right questions. I know there are others out there too, but start with these 4 and see where they lead you. Is my work authentic? Is it vital? Does it tell a story?(Or to put this another way – is it about something?) And, does it work together?

 

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Your Next Step: Narrative Work

The third in a series of questions I encourage students to ask themselves, and frankly, they’re questions I still ask myself – is this one: does my work tell a story?

Of course there’s a question that needs to be asked before any other: is story the best tool for the job? Not every photograph has to tell a story. Story is powerful but it’s not the only way of connecting. Some photographs are better poems, some are more like a song. Abstracts and impressionism, for example, can be more poetic than literal and just as powerful, if not more so. But story has been around a long, long time. But if the answer is yes, then two more questions come to mind: does my photograph tell a story? And, does it tell the most powerful story it can?

I often find myself telling students I feel like one or another of their images is incomplete – that it feels like they’ve created a great stage on which there are no characters, or that it feels like the characters are on the stage but there’s no action. I won’t go through the elements of story here again because I did that recently in this article, Tell Stronger Stories. But I do want to encourage you to consider that some of the best photographs of this century and the last, the most enduring ones, the ones that we now call iconic, contain strong elements of story and if you’re looking for a great next step, you could do much worse than beginning to tell stories with your work.

Stories can be implied in one great photograph, or told more fully over several. The point isn’t that we tell stories, per se – that’s the means, not the end – so much as it is that our photographs connect with others. My last article (Your Next Step: Vital Work) suggested we ask ourselves if our work is vital, or alive. Story can help us do that. It can connect us with memories, emotion, or mystery. It can put us, through empathy, into the shoes of another, to feel or anticipate their emotions, to experience those emotions as though they were our own. Take a look at some of your favourite work, especially the work of reportage or documentary photographers – there will be strong elements of story there. See the work of Robert Doisneau, or Don McCullin, or Elliott Erwitt (doesn’t get much better than Erwitt for one-frame stories) for further study, and be sure to check out the article I mentioned: Tell Stronger Stories.

On a bigger scale, while we’re at it, perhaps it’s a good time to ask if your photographs, as a collection of works, tell – or speak to – a larger story. Are you talking about more universal things in your images – major themes we can all identify and resonate with? Missing that chance to talk about the truly important stuff in your work – like family, love, compassion, peacemaking, environmental issues, racial conflict, gender inequalities – is missing a chance to connect on a deeper level and to make a difference in our perceptions about those issues or stories.

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Your Next Step: Vital Work

Nothing, but nothing, makes a stronger photograph than it being alive. Not perfect focus, not a great exposure. Life. Spark. Energy or emotion that gives you goosebumps and doesn’t let you go all day.

Earlier this week I encouraged you to consider the question: is my work authentic? as one way to take a next step in your photographic work. Today I have another one for you: Is it vital? Is it alive?

These aren’t easy questions, and neither are the next two. They can be answered a million ways, and not easily repeated. How we make an image alive – how we give it that quality that allows it to connect to others on an emotional level – could be the subject of a whole book. It could be the angle of view or the quality of the light, or the choice of moment – any of them connecting to a childhood memory and the power of nostalgia, or the way a chosen moment reflects an emotion in a photographed subject and lights up the mirror neurons in our brains. It might be all kinds of things, but we know when an image ignites us, grabs us, shakes us, and inspires us. And we know when it doesn’t. More complicated, of course, is the fact that not all images will create the same experience in others as it does in us. But we do know when it works for us. And we can learn from those images that do that for us, that create that spark for us. And we can work hard to find that light, those moments, those compositions when it all comes together. And yes, we can learn our post-production and develop a ruthlessness with our edits, too. There are paths aplenty to get us there. The fun – and the work – is in discovering them.

“Make me care. Hook me. Fascinate me. Make me laugh or cry. Create some experience in me that makes me feel something, but for the love of Ansel Adams don’t let that something be indifference or boredom or apathy.”

Find a dozen photographs that you love, not your own, but those of others. The ones that spark your imagination like no others, that make your heart skip a beat, or that you’ve never been able to forget. What made that image, over others, do that for you? It’ll be different for all of us. But collectively there are things that make our hearts and minds experience a photograph as worlds more than just a two-dimensional image made of dots or pixels, tones, and lines. Find those things – be relentless in looking for the ones that you resonate most with – put those things into your image, regardless of the subject matter. A look. A gesture. A juxtaposition. A story. A mood. Make me care. Hook me. Fascinate me. Make me laugh or cry. Create some experience in me that makes me feel something, but for the love of Ansel Adams don’t let that something be indifference or boredom or apathy.

Like I said, this is not an easy question. Like the last question – Is it me? – this is part of the universal struggle of making art. If the answer was easy, found in a 5 minute YouTube tutorial or a 140-character Tweet, it wouldn’t be an answer at all because shortcuts and templates are notoriously bad at addressing the desires of the human heart for something alive and honest, no matter how hard we wish it were otherwise.

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Your Next Step: Authentic Work.

If you’re at the place where you no longer wrestle as much with the basics of exposure and focus,  it could be time to work on the photographs themselves: on content and composition, on vision and the deeper aspects of your craft and art.

There are 4 questions I keep encouraging my students to ask themselves as they consider their next steps. I’ll write a short article about each of them over the next week or so. Here’s the first.

Is it you?

The idea of authenticity gets thrown around so much I think we can all be forgiven for wondering if it means anything at all these days. It does, though you don’t have to use the word in daily conversations over artisanal goat-cheese and kale salads while pushing organic craft-brewed beer past your well-groomed mustache in order to for it to be meaningful. In fact, it’s probably best you don’t. It’s a guiding principle, not something to talk at length about. Your work either is, or it isn’t. And only you can know if it is. The rest of us won’t know if your work is or isn’t you, but we sure as hell won’t get to know you to any great depth if the work doesn’t come from that deep place within. And letting your work originate there, and limiting your work to only the very best and most honest, is an act of vulnerability. It’s not easy.

“Authenticity still means something, though you don’t have to use the word in daily conversations over artisanal goat-cheese and kale salads while pushing organic craft-brewed beer past your well-groomed mustache in order to for it to be meaningful.”

Is it me? Being authentic means you do work that is deeply meaningful to you. It means not only showing me what you see, but how you see it, and pulling no punches and hedging no bets about your opinions of things. If you see the world as hopeful and beautiful, then show me that. If you see it as a dark place full of angst, then show me that too. Have you seen Banksy’s new art installation, Dismaland? Google it. Might not be your cup of tea because you like your tea to have less angst and taste a little less like dystopia, but my God is it ever honest.

Most of us begin by copying the masters, emulating their compositions, adopting their forms as our own. We try on different subjects and techniques until we find ones that feel comfortable, like they fit. That’s a necessary step for most apprentices. But there comes a time when you step away from the works of others, abandon the templates and find your own sense of balance and momentum. At some point you stop singing the songs of others and start writing your own songs. The more personal those songs are, the more honest and vulnerable you can make them, the stronger your work will connect to others. And I’m guessing, because it’s been my experience, the more honest the work is, the more gratifying it is to create.

“Are my images really me?” is a great question, but so is: “Is the work I’m doing still me?” It might be time to move on.

Being authentic does not mean you don’t edit or curate your work. It doesn’t mean you just put it all out there, every frame you’ve ever shot. Even the most authentic, honest, literature, comedy, or film-making, is tightly edited in order to be the most powerful it can be. It could be that the next step for you is to go through the public faces of your work – your online portfolios or galleries, perhaps – and ask yourself, is this work still representative of who I am, how I see, or what I want to say? We all change. So does our work. Hanging on to every image you ever made, and making the rest of us look at them, just creates a confusing experience for the rest of us. “Are my images really me?” is a great question, but so is: “Is the work I’m doing still me?” It might be time to move on.

Moving on doesn’t necessarily mean you stop doing one thing to do another. I still do humanitarian work, but my concern for humanity extends to the planet on which we live, and to those with whom we share this planet. My photographic work has expanded to reflect that in what I think is a move that is authentic to who I am, and whom I am becoming.

I’m not sure this is a one-time thing. In fact I’m pretty sure it’s the basic struggle of art. I’m also sure there’s no easy answer to this stuff. Maybe the questions, and the fact that we’re asking them, are what’s important. Maybe it’s the question itself that keeps us honest and aware. Still, if you’re feeling there are next steps to be made, it might be worth looking at your work, asking how well it reflects who you are and how you see. If it doesn’t, it’s time to create new work. Follow your curiosity, learn something new, follow the thread of other things in your life that most ignite your mind and heart and see where they lead. Just don’t stay where you are and let your paint dry up.

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5 Days of Photography

The 5DayDeal starts in 20 days! Buy the 5DayDeal through me and you can change the world! Or, to put it another way, you can do some good, get free stuff, and win a chance to spend a day with me in Victoria, Canada, and we’ll pay your way to get here.

For the last 10 years I have lived and breathed photography, the craft I’ve loved since I was a kid. And through some unexpected turns of events, like the publishing of my first book, Within The Frame, you all have become part of that journey. What an incredible ride it has been, and continues to be. I hope I don’t need to tell you again how grateful I am, but I will: thank you. You mean the world to me.

I tell you all that because there’s some great opportunities coming up and I want you to hear about them from me first – in part because it’s going to get really noisy in a few days and this is important to me.

Last year the good people at 5DayDeal included me in their sale and because I was giving away 20% of what I earned as an affiliate, we sent some very significant donations to two organizations I am proud to be connected to. One of those, the BOMA Project is now an official charity partner of this year’s sale and stands to benefit even more. I will continue to give a portion of my affiliate commissions both to BOMA directly and to the pro-bono work I do for other organizations.

So – the sale is coming in 20 days. It’s bigger than last year. I’m not at liberty to tell you what’s coming, but it’s huge, and the offering is all different than last year. It’s massive. Did I say that already?

You’ll have lots of chances to buy the 5DayDeal. And because I’m hoping you’ll choose to participate specifically through the links I will be providing, I’m treating this less like the great sale it is and more like a 5 Day Celebration of Photography.

Free Stuff!

Every day during the sale – whether you buy through me or not – we’ll throw a switch on CraftAndVision.com and one product will be free for 24 hours.  Nothing tricky, no hidden agenda. This one’s going to drive my manager insane, but there have to be some perks to being the Chief Executive Nomad of this whole venture, right? And if you do buy through me, and if you don’t happen to win the day with me, we’re going to send 10 signed copies of my latest book, The Visual Toolbox, to 10 lucky runners-up

Vision Is Better Episodes!

Each day during the 5DayDeal I’ll be posting a new episode of Vision Is Better. Great content, totally free, whether or not you get in on the sale.

Do Some Good!

I will be giving 20% of my affiliate earnings to the BOMA Project and to finance my other pro-bono work, including the new assignment with BOMA who works with women and families in extreme poverty in Northern Kenya.

Spend a Day with Me!

Everyone that picks up the 5DayDeal through me gets not only to participate in some of the work I do, but one lucky person will be chosen to come spend a day with me, shooting, hanging out, and learning in whatever way I can help you with – and we’ll pay the airfare to get here. And I’ll pick up the hotel and the bill for meals. You, me, and some cameras in beautiful Victoria, BC.*

This is one of the ways I make my living. When you buy the 5DayDeal through me as an affiliate, I benefit. And so does BOMA and the pro-bono work I do for others. And as a thank you, there will be some great content and a chance to win a day with me. The sale starts on September 10, 20 days from now. I hope you’ll check it out, and if you choose to participate, I hope you’ll choose to do so through the links I give you. It costs you no more, but it gives you a chance to do even more good, and – if you’re lucky – win something no one else is offering.

Win Some Stuff Now!

And in the meantime, if you follow this link you can put your name in the draw for a photography giveaway with over $50,000 worth of prizes. No strings attached. Who’s in?!

* The not-so-fine-print – We’ll cover travel and expenses up to $1200. We love you and we’d love to see you arrive first-class, but this time it’ll have to be an economy seat. We’ll put you in a decent hotel, though, I promise. And the meals will be nice. I might even spring for the wine.  Either way, we’ll get you here and have a great time together.

Consider Your Colour Palette

One of the things you’ll notice consistently about the bodies of work of photographers who’ve been doing this a while, is that many of them, though not all, seem to work very intentionally to create a consistency within that body of work – some kind of unifying element. Often that element is on a theme, so it’d be a body of work about the female nude figure, for example. That theme alone can create a visual unity.

“Color is a power which directly influences the soul.” ~ Wassily Kandinsky

Another way of doing the same thing is with consistency in other constraints, like a shared crop ratio: every image being square or 4:5, for example. A consistent colour palette also does this powerfully, with every image sharing a common set of hues and tones. This creates a flow when the images are presented together, creating a common mood or emotion through the work, even when the gesture within the images changes dramatically. You can choose this palette while you photograph, and refine it as you become more and more aware of what the body of work is becoming.

Not all of us begin a body of work to find it becomes, in the end, the thing we imagined it at the beginning. There’s often an evolution and that often creates stronger, more unexpected, work than if we’d not allowed ourselves to divert in a new direction. You can also chose, or refine, this palette in the digital darkroom. In the case of my Hokkaido series I was very intentional while I photographed and needed very little adjustments in Lightroom. The grizzly series from the Khutzeymateen all shared a consistent palette when I photographed it, but not the one I wanted, so I worked hard to subdue some of the hyper-saturated greens, and bring a common warmth to the images, which I made over seven days in very different weather, needed some help with the tones to bring them all a little closer to being cohesive

Intentionally chosen colour palettes are not only for unifying bodies of work. A painter sitting at his easel and wanting to create a certain mood, will choose a colour palette. It’s a little easier for painters, but photographers work with an existing reality. While we can do anything we want with Photoshop or Lightroom, it’s not my style to be so heavy handed. But you can be selective while you still have the camera in your hand. Being intentional while you look at the scene, choosing weather or time of day that contributes to what you’re trying to accomplish, or lighting the studio and dressing the set – none of these happen accidentally and if you go into your work remembering that a well-chosen colour palette is a powerful tool, you can at very least begin to exclude elements that do not conform to your vision.

I like to get this kind of thing right in camera, but the refinements can also happen in post-production. Using shifts in colour temperature is one way to do this. So is the use of a tool like Lightroom’s Split Tone panel. Or you could use presets as your starting point. My friend Piet Van den Eynde has some excellent colour-grading presets from which you could probably learn a lot about the use of colour tools in Lightroom if you dig under the hood a little. You can find those here at Craft & Vision if you’re interested.

Your Assignment:

Fashion photographers, and commercial photographers, do this very well. If you can get your hands on either Applied Arts or Communication Arts, both magazines produce Photography and Illustration annuals. Take some time to look through these and look at the way both photographers and illustrators chose their palettes. You’ll notice it in both single pieces and bodies of work.

Often you can tell a photographer simply by her consistent use of colour. My friend Dave Delnea – DaveDelnea.com – does this really well and at the time of writing his website has some excellent examples of this. Do a Google image search for Erik Almas – you’ll notice an amazing intentionality and consistency. Same thing with Brooke Shaden. Annie Leibovitz, too. Spend some time looking at these, and other photographers. See what you can learn from their use of colour. Check out Saul Leiter, too. I like Google image searches because it shows the images well together and allows easier comparing and contrasting. Note that when I talk about consistency, and you’ll see it in the work I’ve suggested you look at, that I do not mean homogeny or uniformity.

These lessons are from The Visual Toolbox, 60 Lessons for Stronger Photographs. I plan to post a few more of these from the book, but if you find them helpful you might want to look at the whole book, available on Amazon (Link here).

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Postcard from Isla Mujeres

My friend Andy dives without his prosthetic leg, and can swim circles around me.

Since I was a kid I’ve been fascinated by sharks and whales and anything large that swam the seas, and there’s none larger in the shark family than the Whale Shark. There are a couple places in the world you can reliably swim with congregations of these large, peaceful, sharks; the closest to me is Isla Mujeres off the coast of Mexico near Cancun. I’ve just spent the last 5 days looking for, and photographing, whale sharks: not as easy as you’d expect for something so big and given to feeding in large groups. Now sunburned and exhausted and heading home, my time with them is over and I’m wondering how it went so quickly.

We were up every morning around 5:30, out the door with our wetsuits and camera housings by 6:30, and on the water not long after that, bouncing across the waves looking for the large dorsal and tail fins that told us to slide quietly (but not always gracefully) into the water with our cameras. Some mornings we found them fairly early, some mornings we looked for hours and found nothing, but the moments in the water with these fish were everything I always thought they’d be. More than just something to check off a bucket list, these encounters were a lot like my recent experiences with grizzly bears closer to home – humbling, peaceful, and a reminder of my place on this planet. Floating there in a hundred feet of perfect blue water, while a 40-foot shark swims toward you, mouth open and undaunted by your presence, is pretty amazing.

Not all of it was beautiful. As the mornings wore on we were often surrounded with boats full of tourists, thrashing about, yelling, acting like this patch of ocean was their own cerulean amusement park. They pushed and shoved and acted badly. I saw one guy literally ride a shark. Show me any sanctuary in the world that hasn’t somehow been desecrated; it’s sad but it doesn’t diminish the sacred thing itself, just us. I am not always proud to be human.

My photographs, while important to me, were not the point. My photographs are rarely the first or only reason I go somewhere. I go to experience, to learn, to discover. Good thing too, because the learning curve for this underwater stuff continues to challenge me, and going home with these cards full of mostly rubbish would be a deep disappointment otherwise. But boy did I learn a lot over this week, like learning photography all over again. And while it stings a little to have to re-learn something I thought I was, frankly, getting pretty good at, I feel a little like a kid again, finding magic and joy in the learning and discovery, and if my photographs disappoint a little, there’s comfort in knowing they’re getting better. Though mostly I’m distracted by the memory of being out there, surrounded by hundreds of miles of ocean, bobbing up and down with my camera, waiting for the next shark to swim by like a great spotted school bus. Hard to tell you how happy that made me after all these years.

Learn to Isolate More

Isolation: Use a Longer Lens

The Visual Toolbox, Lesson 13

N ikon D800, 300mm, 1/400 @ f/11. ISO 800

This Whooper swan was photographed tight with a 300mm lens.

 Telephoto lenses, anything over a 35mm equivalent of 50-60mm, have the opposite effect of a wide angle, and the longer they get (200, 300, 600mm) the greater the difference. As telephoto lenses get longer in focal length, they have tighter and tighter angles of view and greater and greater magnification. They excel at pulling far things near, compressing elements, and really isolating – not just to get that great shot of a duck, but to set that duck – or tree, or child on a swing – against its context and exclude all else. Photography is as much about what we exclude from the frame as it is about what we include. Every element in the frame exerts some visual mass, and the more elements exerting that pull on the eye, the less impact each of those elements has.

Sometimes the best tool for achieving impact is isolation, and the shallow angle of view and illusion of compression that’s created by telephoto lenses does isolation really well.

The other advantage of using a longer lens is that the depth of field at a given aperture appears much shallower than with a wider lens. In my humanitarian work I’ve often put a 200/2.8 lens on, and backed up a little, giving me a little more context, but still powerfully isolating my subject. Shallow depth of field and a tight angle of view makes background control much easier.

 YOUR ASSIGNMENT

Beg, borrow, or steal a 200mm lens and, resisting the urge to use it merely to bring far stuff a little closer, pay close attention to 3 behaviours.

How tight is the angle of view? What are you able to exclude from the frame? You might not want the main subject to fill the frame, so back up a little. I know, it’s as counter-intuitive as get close with a wide lens, but back up and use that telephoto. When I use a wide I think “Wide lens close,” and when I use a long lens, I think “Long lens distant.”
How do foreground and background elements appear compressed? Could that change what you’re trying to say with your photograph? Could it create a more graphic look than a wide or standard lens in the same scene?
How does the combination of a long lens and a shallow depth of field (wide aperture) allow you to isolate elements in ways you couldn’t do with a wide or standard lens?

Isolation: Use a Wider Aperture

The Visual Toolbox, Lesson 13

 Nikon D800, 300mm, 1/1250 @ f/7.1. ISO 400

300mm @ f/7.1 which at this focal length, and the extreme proximity of my subject, is relatively wide and blurs the background beautifully.

 We’ve already touched on the ability of a longer lens to isolate subjects and give them greater visual mass, or pull on the eye, than they might have otherwise. A shallow depth of field can strengthen that, but it doesn’t have to be used in conjunction with a long lens. In fact, photographs made with a wider lens can often benefit because the wide lens makes background control difficult, simply by virtue of there being so much more background to wrestle into place.

A softer focus on the background can diminish the pull on the eye, which in turn strengthens the impact of the elements in focus. Here’s what you need to know about depth of field.

Depth of field at any given aperture is narrower if your subject is closer than if your subject is further away. Camera to Subject distance matters, so if you want way less depth of field, and you’ve opened your aperture as wide as you can, get closer. Vice verse, if you want more depth of field at a given aperture, step back a little.
Depth of field can be seen through the lens, but only if you tell the camera to stop the lens down for you. Remember when you read the manual? That was the button called the Depth of Field Preview. Using it will cause the viewfinder to get dark, which makes things harder to see, but I find the DOF Preview to be very helpful.
It’s helpful to know that the in-focus zone in front of, and behind, the subject, are not the same. The in-focus subject does not even split the in-focus zone, but cuts it in thirds: one third in focus in front of the subject, two thirds behind. Knowing this allows you to pull the focus back towards you if you’re finding the background too sharp and you’ve already opened the aperture as far as you can. Or you can get closer.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

Spend a day or two making three sets of photographs, all of them the same subject, focused at the same point, but changing the aperture. First f/1.8, or as wide as you can go, then f/6.3, then f/16. The more you get a sense for the difference between shallow focus, deep focus, and the middle-ground in between, the more able you’ll be to comfortably make choices without the mystery. Now do the same with a subject quiet close to you – perhaps within 3 feet, and notice how much shallower the shallow zone of focus is, and how much deeper, by comparison, the deep zone (f/16) is.

These lessons are from The Visual Toolbox, 60 Lessons for Stronger Photographs. I plan to post a few more of these from the book, but if you find them helpful you might want to look at the whole book, available on Amazon (Link here).

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Making the Image

Have you ever wanted an experienced photographer to look over your shoulder once in a while and ask you why you’re doing this or that, and whether you’d considered trying something different? Have you ever wished you could peer over the shoulder of a photographer who makes work you respect, and see what decisions they’re making and why? Yes? You’re exactly the person I made this latest book for. Today Making the Image – the 160-page eBook, the Quick Reference Guide, and the Companion video – are finally available, made with love and the hope that it’ll be the next step you’ve been looking for on the path to learning to create photographs that are stronger, and more authentic and creative.

Making the image is a 160-page PDF eBook, and comes with a 45-minute companion video, and a handy Quick Reference PDF for your iPhone or Android. Get Making The Image this week, save 20% and get a chance to win one of 3 image / portfolio reviews with me.

Wanting to make this resource as accessible to as many people as possible we’ve priced it at $25, but if you pick it up this week, before August 12 at 11:59 PM (PDT) it’s yours for $20. And there’s one more thing.

Everyone that picks up Making the Image before August 12 at 11:59 PM (PDT) also gets a chance to win one of three portfolio or image reviews with me. This gives me a chance to connect with a couple more of you, and gives three of you a chance to go a little deeper with your own images and process. No restrictions, no fine print. Everyone that gets Making the Image before August 12 at 11:59 PM (PDT) gets a great resource for 20% off what I hope is already a really great price, and a chance to win some time with me.

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Approval & Art

It is a short step from learning to use a camera to hoping others like what we create. It’s a natural step. But when the next step is allowing the tastes of others to change what we create, it’s a step in a direction that leads away from art.

We are responsible for our art, and to be honest with it. Others will react as they choose – some positive, some negative. We sometimes lose sight of this: it is the high calling of art not to create consensus but to stir something. What it stirs in others is beyond our control.

But we like control.

We like the likes.

They make us feel safe.

The problem is that safety, in many ways, is toxic to art. We get addicted to it. We cling to it and venture out less and less. We risk less. We repeat what “works” and avoid what doesn’t. But if what works is what holds us back, it becomes a kind of sabotage to keep doing it.

This hunger for approval is understandable. It’s just not sustainable. Or, ultimately, desirable. Art, I’ve heard it said, should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. It should make us more human, and that means a stirring of all our emotions, so we can see them all, sift through them, experience them. If we accept that there’s a kind of responsibility to create this stirring, then it is not “likes” that should remotely concern us. It is engagement.

The most disheartening thing someone can say about my work is that it stirs nothing at all. I’ll take strong honest feelings any day over homogeny or apathy.

Not everyone will like your art. That’s not only OK, it’s good.

Don’t look to the public to be the voice that guides what you do and how you do it. It is not their job to mentor you. They don’t know you except through your art. They will pull you in a million directions, hoping you’ll make art that’s a closer reflection of who they are, what they like, what makes them comfortable. And we all creep closer and closer to sameness.

Your job is to make your art. It will find the audience it finds. God have mercy on the artist that creates for the adoration, and on us when she does.