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...

Photographing Children at Play in Safe America

I wish we didn't live in a world where there was so much suspicion about each other, where everyone is assumed to be 'stranger danger' until proven innocent. Where every man is looked upon as a creep, and everyone on the street has bad intentions. A man with a camera can only mean bad news....

Photographer Duane Michals Tells It Like He Sees It

Here's a terrific interview with a most original photographer, Duane Michals. He's funny when he calls Garry Winogrand a hack. (Winogrand famously walked out of Duane's first gallery show saying, "Come on, let's go, this isn't photography.") At 88, Michals doesn't hold anything back. He really know what he wants as a photographer and artist...

Mr. Cowboy and the Wonder of Old Snapshots

It's a wonder to me that anyone would discard or sell their family photographs, but it happens time and again. I was at a local estate sale yesterday and saw a tackle box full of slide film from the 1970s in boxes and couldn't help but want to have them for my snapshot collection. You...

Why Gear Does and Doesn’t Matter

What is the need for the biggest and best most expensive gear? I was out and about this weekend and saw protesters for the Black Lives Matter movement in my town and made photographs in both digital format with a Nikon D610 and 35mm and 120 film in a Leica M3 and a Rolleiflex 2.8C....

A Crossroads in the History of Photography

We are at a crossroads, now more than ever.  At first it was just digital technology as a new way to capture light and make a picture. We all embraced it because it was no cost, no worry, shoot shoot shoot and delete later, or don't. (Because let's face it, we don't delete, we just...

The Magic is Missing in Phone-Snappy World

True story happened yesterday. I met a young couple, mid-20s, and we were talking about film photography. I told them how they could get one roll of black and white film from Mike's Camera and shoot one photo a month in an old Minolta SLR they had, and after three years they'd have a wonderful...

I Miss Straight Verticals

The photographers of days gone past, they used view cameras, those lovely wood 4x5 and 8x10 cameras, which gave them the ability to keep their verticals straight.  Not tilted.  Not leaning. Basically, if the film plane is parallel to the building, the vertical will stand straight.  But if you tilt the film up, like when...

Finding Beauty in the Frame and Showing Up to See It

I have a difficult time making photographs sometimes. It's because I know what I want a photograph to do, how I want it to look composition-ally, or story-wise, or just the right light. And when those don't come together in some combination, I don't fire the shutter. It just sits, idle, waiting. I'm reading a...