Photography: What Is It Today?

We are in a very different time in the history of photography. Many people never print a photograph. The creation and delivery method for the image is now the small phone screen, from creation to deletion: Made.Sent.Seen.Deleted, never to be seen again. It's more like note-taking and diary-sharing for a brief moment than it is...

Gifted Art Film Portraits

[www.gofundme.com/f/buy-4x5-film-to-gift-art-portraits-of-people - You can help this project with a contribution to buy more film.] "I PHOTOGRAPH THEIR LIGHT, AND THERE'S NOTHING MORE SPECIAL!" As I hold up the old wooden camera by its thin leather handle, a camera that feels like a step out of time, a throwback to the early days of photography, their...

We’re Bored Because We’re Boring

As Americans, we were taught from an early age that the great American dream is to get more and keep getting. Buying is the thing that makes us happiest.   Shopping became a pastime. Something we were encouraged to do. A lot.   Then the pandemic shut the stores. The economy was all atwitter. "What...

Four Photos, Just Four Photos

Four. (4). Just 1+1+1+1. I've been going out with the Graflex Speed Graphic and Ebony 4x5 with the purpose of making photographs. But not some unknown number of photographs, four photographs. Just four. Can you imagine going out and shooting only four photographs? Just four exposures? I only bring two film holders. Yesterday, (I'm only...

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....

Editorial Truth and Public Trust

While digital photography and technology are here to stay, TRUST is the one thing of utmost importance for news/media companies to maintain as we enter a new world of Deepfakes. [Deepfakes (a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake") are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone...

I Don’t Need Anything, But This Leica and This Notebook

Being both a photographer (documentary/street) and a writer (stand-up comedy/screenplays), I came to the realization that there is a correlation between the two. Because both require something of me. See, I carry a Leica and notebook everywhere I go. When my parents took photographs when I was growing up, they took them out at Christmas,...

The Difference is the Seeing

What's the difference between these two photos? I see a lot of photographers who are enamored with photos of older vehicles, but who never photograph the cars of today, which as I see it, will someday be the older vehicles they'll wish they had photos of back when then were new. But they don't see...

Likes and Votes for the Win is a Lose!

Ok, I know there are gatekeepers to the creative world, the gallery curator, the magazine editor, etc. but I have a real problem with any award being given out for who can generate the most votes for their work. Any kind of work. Years ago, I was at a film festival and the "audience award"...