Project: Kids & Teens, Unsupervised

I'm working on a street documentary set of photographs about kids and teens and the way they behave primarily when they're unsupervised by adults. I am interested in documenting youngsters and their body language as they grow up. I am always working on a project (or six). This one, honestly, I wasn't starting, it found...

Photographers Rate Card (PhotographersRateCard.com)

How is a new photographer supposed to know what to charge for professional photography services? You don't see lawyers, and architects and contractors working for low rates, to get started, to get their foot in the door of their profession. Somehow, because anyone with a camera and little else in the way of credentials can...

My Eternal Quest to Motivate Showing Up

I talk about this a lot. The idea that we can capture magic with our cameras, but we have to show up. Have to go out and find the photographs by getting out of our easy chair and out into the world, camera at the ready. I was lying awake a couple nights ago thinking...

Missing: Memories in a Shoebox

David Burnett, the Newsweek photojournalist speaking on a podcast mentioned that of all the places he's traveled in his career over the last 50 years, in all the countries he's made pictures, the photos that he wishes he had are the ones of him and his friends in college, sitting around their dorm rooms and...

Photographs + Time = Value!

The black and white photo below is a scene Ansel Adams photographed in 1947. A simple depiction of life at a street corner in Los Angeles. Why would he photograph that? At a time when people mostly used their cameras for special occasions and maybe big purchases--new house or car--those people probably couldn't fathom making...

Kenneth Wajda’s Leica (Why it Matters to Me)

The other day I wrote about Ralph Gibson's Leica and why it matters to him, what shooting the Leica versus any other camera means to his way of working, and why once he started with the German brand, he never left. So, I was ruminating about my own workflow and how I use Leicas, but...

The Wise Photo Project Goes Worldwide to Photograph Sweet Wonderful Old Faces

It really started kind of small in Kenneth Wajda’s Boulder Colorado commercial portrait studio back in 2015. He advertised an open studio on Mondays in the local events listings for seniors age 70 and over to come in and get a formal portrait made at no cost, figuring that was his slowest day at the...

Social Media and the New Photography

Social media has a bad rap. It's full of great family photos but it has a whole lot of misinformation and even dangerous content. I think that's why people are afraid if you take their photograph with a real camera, like if you're a street photographer, because they don't know where their photo might end...

When the Audience Changes and We Have to Show Proof

A snapshot used to be a simple thing. We used a camera to save a moment from our lives to tuck it away under the bed in a shoebox or in a photo album, so that we could travel back in time at a future date and relive it. We even did it shortly after...

The Tech Beat Generation

I coined the “Tech Beat Generation” after searching for a name for the kind of person I am—interested in using tech to create work like photographs, stories and recordings, both audio and video, but tired of being constantly in front of a screen and having a device in my pocket that won’t stop vying for...