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Knowledge of subject leads to more openness, more recognition, and thus more opportuniti...
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a deeper understanding of the subject leads them to anticipate things others would miss and to perceive things others don’t, or can’t.
now’s a good time to reframe Weegee’s idea that all we really need is “f/8 and be there.” This isn’t bad advice as long as we understand it to mean two things: choose your aperture intentionally, and be completely there.
We need to be present. Thinking about now. This moment. This sliver of time.
More photographs of beautiful moments have been lost by looking at our cameras than will ever be lost to missed focus or poor exposure.
This is where knowing your craft comes in. The more comfortable you are with your buttons and dials and your ability to use the camera, the less the camera will get in the way, and the more present and receptive you can remain.
Trust that the same creative process that has worked for a thousand generations of artists will work for you.
IF ONE OF THE RAW MATERIALS OF OUR CRAFT IS TIME, then patience is the necessary ability to gracefully and intentionally pass through time or control our reaction to its passage. It is the ability not only to wait, but to wait while remaining perceptive and open to possibilities, knowing that nothing ever stays the same and that if you wait long enough, something will happen.
Patience is sitting and waiting for the light to change, not even because the light right now is insufficient, but because it might yet get better, more interesting. There’s a certain curiosity in this kind of waiting.
Patience is waiting for the subject sitting for her portrait to reveal something more than the mask she came ready to keep in place for the entire session,
This kind of patience comes with a hunger for more: a creative discontent, a hope that something even better will come, if you wait.
Patience is waiting for the eagle you’ve been following all day to turn his head into the light, or for the dolphin to leap one more time, giving you the silhouette you missed the first hundred times.
Patience is allowing yourself longer than you thought it could possibly take to master your craft, the magazines and advertisements never having given you the faintest idea that simply knowing how to use a camera was barely the first step—and a lifelong one at that—in a journey with no final destination.
Patience is allowing others who do not understand you or your work to grow into that understanding (after all, you did) and to not allow yourself to be sidetracked while that happens. To keep doing your work until others see it differently, or until you do.
It’s how we wait that matters, just like it’s how we make more photographs that is important.
unless we perceive those moments, they themselves won’t force their way into our photographs.
trust that the same creative process that has worked for a thousand generations of artists will work for you.
if we allow that failure is our best teacher, and we let that teacher do her painful work, we’ll build upon those lessons, and when we do find success it will be because of those failures.
If you find a great scene that only lacks a great moment, wait for it.
Chasing originality is not only futile, it fails to consider the audience who will experience our work.
No matter who your audience is, they will almost universally be more moved by honest, compelling work than by something that is merely “new.”
“become a more interested person”
Life is not about photography; photography is about life.
In order to take the camera into the world, our world has to be more than just the camera.
Steve Jobs said that creativity was little more than connecting dots that hadn’t been connected before.
So “gathering dots” gives us the best shot at having new ideas.
It’s asking “What if?” over and over again that gets you there. It’s the desire to learn something new, and the humility to be open to learning or enjoying something more than you expected.
Take Time to Incubate
Your job is not to come up with great ideas. Your job is to increase the inputs, allow them time to incubate and form connections, and then listen to those connections.
Often our questions are more important than our answers. Questions open us to new possibilities,
intentionally create constraints. Pursue them, welcome them, and when they aren’t bold enough or limiting enough, make stronger constraints.
The less time between your coming up with the seed of an idea (or that rare epiphany) and your execution of that idea, the better.
I see my work with life as a collaboration.
“What’s in the way is the way.”
Submission is about going with the flow. It is not inactivity. It is not passivity.
Flow happens when our vision demands the fullness of our craft and pulls us into a state of extreme and almost unconscious focus.
Whatever our discipline, flow can’t happen without either craft or vision. There must be a challenge for it to happen, and a capability to meet that challenge.
Flow happens on the back of hard work, and if it’s really flow, you probably don’t have to think too hard about it; you just have to let it happen,
The more curious we are, the more creative we become.
get comfortable with, even willingly pursue, the unknown.
Read books about subjects on which you have no opinions.
Our brains latch onto things we find interesting, and until you expose yourself to a great many things that you don’t know anything about, you w...
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The point here is not to just fill your brain, but to expose yourself to new id...
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Ask a Lot of Questions
Beyond our photography, questioning the way we do everyday things creates a habit of looking at things obliquely.
Try New Things
Don’t just learn about new things, do them.
Embrace the Mystery
Embracing the mystery is about our relationship to the unknown, which is tightly tied to fear.
Mix things up a little.
