Selfies are Easy. Real Life is Hard.

A friend recently showed me his cousin's family photo book, printed at Blurb or Shutterfly or one of those on-demand online photo printing services. It was nicely printed, and big, about 15x15", so it featured a lot of pictures. He asked if it was made up of photos from a pro, and I looked through...

What’s So Good About Art? To Create. To Make What Wasn’t There Before.

It's Saturday night and I'm watching people dance to a band at Bootstrap Brewing, the pub where I write my blog posts. I love writing here with a cold Lush Puppy IPA. Tonight, it's so much fun to see folks enjoying themselves dancing up a storm. I even photographed them and may use them in...

A 4×6 Brag Book – It’s a Thing!

My partner MaryLee went to Cincinnati for her niece's wedding and took along a small Olympus XA2 35mm film camera loaded with a single roll of Ilford HP5+ Black and White Film. Good setup if you have decent light--the camera sports a 35mm f3.5 lens. She photographed some of the behind-the-scenes that she had access...

For Good Photography: Access > Gear

It's a simple equation, but good access beats top camera equipment every time. Because we need to be somewhere to make the photo, and where that is matters first, much more so than what camera and lens is in our hands. An example will make this clearer. I was at a friends' house on Christmas...

We Have Choices Today. I Choose the Analog. The Tangible.

Like vinyl records versus digital CDs. Tube versus solid-state guitar amplifiers. Home-cooked meals versus microwaved. Hand-written (or typed) greeting cards versus emails. Film versus digital photography. Traditional photographic prints versus NFTs. I'm in the tangible art business!~Kenneth Wajda I make film portraits using 20th-century techniques and cameras and print in a traditional darkroom. For those...

My Favorite Photograph to Make…

There's an old line in photography that, "My favorite photograph to make is the next one." But it's so true. I sometimes think life would be easier if I were into watching TV and sports, but I'm not. I have an insatiable need to create. I do that with photographs and writing. I also write...

Telling Our Stories in Photo Series

That's essentially what this is. A group of adults trying to figure out how to stop a ceiling fan from always turning. Then finding the missing switch, hitting it and celebrating. Simple little photo story that tells the tale of a single moment in the life of a bunch of friends. What could be a...

In a World of Fake Things, Give Me Something Real

Besides misinformation filling our airwaves, there are fake things filling our world nowadays. I was walking through a Costco today and I saw a box with ten "candles" for sale for $24.99 only they weren't really candles, they were battery-operated flameless candles supposed to look like real candles. They come complete with a wireless remote...

Holiday Gifts: Framed Photographs You Made

I am a proponent of printing photographs, to make them real and to make them last. So they're not seen for a second on a screen. The holidays are approaching and with that the stress over what to get someone. How much to spend? How many gifts? How much is enough? It's crazy the stress...

Gauche in the Living Room? No Way! (Changing The World, One Photograph at a Time)

It's a quite different world nowadays the way we use photography from when I was growing up. When I was a kid, there were regular visits to the portrait studio or a school photographer would setup in our auditorium to make our class photos. There was something to it--the lights, the camera, the tripod, the...