Busy, Huh, (Good God), What Is It Good For?

I read a recent opinion piece in the NY Times about one father's goal to teach his kid to be lazy. Not only productive. To stop and savor life. To enjoy the small moments. I liked it. I enjoyed his writing about not just being a worker bee, but stopping to enjoy smelling the flower...

Why Film, Really, Why Kenneth?

I always carry a Nikon DSLR and a 28mm f1.8 lens with me in case I come across a story for my Roy Stryker photo project. And I have a few lenses in in my car, the most useful is a 70-300mm f4-5.6 Nikkor Zoom that is slow, cheap ($75) and small, yet sharp as...

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...

The Video Store is Gone. But We Can Always Go Back In Photos

We don't realize it while we're in it, but we're experiencing things that are slowly disappearing. Everything that is here today isn't going to be here tomorrow. Like video stores. We used to peruse the aisles of these stores with their new releases, looking for that evening's entertainment. Long before there was Netflix streaming and...

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...

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...

Christmas Morning Photographs (Tuesday Morning, Too!)

I saw someone published a photograph of Christmas morning by Diane Arbus and another one by Elliott Erwitt on Christmas Day. Both were from the 1950s and they were significant because they were...old. They showed us how we used to be. You've heard me say if you read my essays regularly, that photographs only get...

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...

Goals: 2022

Here comes a new year. What are we doing with it? What are our goals? I am quite prolific as an artist, working on a series of personal photography projects--The Wise Photo Project, Roy Stryker Photography Project--as well as teaching and leading other people and hopefully being an inspiration to some. But it's not enough....