My Mantra: Make Your Photographs, We Need You!

I see a world full of people who don't try, who don't seek to have their work seen. Who don't believe in themselves. Who think they have nothing to say. Who are either unmotivated or inertia is just too great to overcome. Or the alternative--those who strive to be like someone else. Their idols. The...

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...

Everything Doesn’t Work Out As Planned (and That’s a Good Thing)

I was working on a photo prompt "pairs" for The Photo Game, and I was going for the obvious, photographing a pair of pears on my light table. Alright, that's fair, meets the requirements. It's a fine enough photo. Something else, what else can I do--I know, I'll try them on the window sill. Then...

Making Photographs Versus Taking Pictures

I was listening to the Camerosity podcast, which I enjoy. It's a production by Mike Eckman, who has quite a few quality camera reviews online and whose site is a fun place to spend a few minutes when you want to read about cameras. There's an episode I highly recommend to folks interested in Nikon...

The Car Assignment in The Photo Game

There are seven photographers in the The Photo Game that began in mid-November. Here is my submissions for the latest prompt: The Automobile, The Horseless Carriage, The Car. Projects and assignments make me inspired and I become very prolific. These four photographs were completed a couple of days after the assignment dropped on Saturday 11/20/21....

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...

Goodbye Daylight Savings Time, Hello Short Days & Darkroom Printing

Today's the first day of standard time in the U.S., and we all know that means the loss of daylight way too early in the evening. One place that has no affect is when I head down the stairs and into the darkroom. This is the time of year I look forward to because I...

The Photo Game

I'm inspired by deadlines. I love goals and making art by the time it's due. Deadlines make things happen--that's been my mantra for some time now. Everyone who knows me has heard it. THE SONG GAME I'm also inspired by The Song Game. It was started by musician Bob Schneider years ago and his goal...

A Time for Documentary, A Time for Conceptual

I talk about making photos and my approach, and sometimes I forget that there's another whole way to make photographs. Not documentary. Not people that you meet in the street and ask for their portrait. Not street photography. A photographer friend recently commented that she is looking for more photo subjects, new ideas of what...

To Be an Amateur Is To Be an Artist. To Be an Amateur Is To Be Unshackled.

Alfred Stieglitz, back 120 years ago, was instrumental in promoting photography as a real art form--equal to painting and sculpture. He was the editor of Camera Notes and later Camera Work and he was the creator of the Photo-Secession which included many photographers wishing to separate from the idea that photography had to be pictorial--painterly--and...