Anything I Can Do On Film, You Can Do With a Digital Camera (But Do You Really Want To?)

For me, the fun is in the shooting the vintage film cameras (Leica M2, Nikon F2, Nikon S4, Rolleiflex 3.5F) and printing a photograph from the actual film negative in a traditional darkroom, making physical prints. Sure you can print your digital photos on an inkjet printer. But for me, somehow that leaves me wanting....

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...

A Little Art from My World

A lot of photographers have been struggling to find things to photograph in this pandemic-laden world, but I've been keeping busy with a lot of photos for my Roy Stryker photo project, now over five years old and publishing three times a week. The need for creating photos makes the photographic opportunities happen. The muse...

Artist vs. Photographer, A Search For Truth

(This is a follow-up to my last post, Film, Huh, Good God, What is it Good For?) The bricklayer takes bricks and cement and builds a wall.  It's an expression of function, and the result is useful as structure. The artist who uses bricks as his medium (if perhaps there is one that does) takes...