Radiating Youth with a 70-Year-Old Rolleiflex

I've always enjoyed photographing people's stories, making street photos and portraits of people I meet of all ages. I have a project dedicated to creating legacy portraits of older faces, The Wise Photo Project, but that doesn't mean that is the only age I photograph. I recently was out with the Rolleiflex and a few...

Evolution of Photography: A Real-Time Glimpse Instead of a Memory

I'm very well read on the history and trends in photography starting with its discovery in 1839. (Really not that long ago in the grand scheme of things.) The original photographers were few in number, you had to be a scientist and tinkerer to make a photograph. The introduction of the Kodak Brownie camera by...

I’m a Photographer, I Make Photographs

A couple of weeks ago I was down in a town south of Denver named Castle Rock. I stumbled on the town, as I never knew that there was an actual downtown area beyond the outlet malls seen from the interstate. While there, I was walking with my tuxedo-grey Rollieflex T, and meeting people with...

When The Trend Is In Your Favor

I've been a photojournalist my whole photography career, starting as a staff photographer at a daily newspaper in New Jersey, The Times of Trenton, and have been working editorial assignments ever since. It's my favorite type of work, creating storytelling photographs for publication. So, to have inquiries from people about having photojournalist-style photographs made of...

Do People Still Send Postcards?

I have to admit I love postcards, those wonderful quarter-dollar mailers that at one time were a staple of any trip. I didn't go anywhere without picking up a handful of postcards and spending an evening back at my motel, usually on the last night of the trip, addressing cards to family and friends, stamping...

Robert Adams Doesn’t Make Calendar Photographs

Robert Adams is a Colorado photographer best known for his work as part of the New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape which was an International Museum of Photography (which is located at the George Eastman House) exhibit in the mid-1970s. I just watched a terrific discussion on how Adams' landscapes differ from calendar photographs,...

Getting a Better Camera Won’t Change a Thing (Maybe Get a Worse Camera!)

I have friends who keep upgrading to newer cameras, better cameras, bigger sensors, faster more expensive lenses, and their new photos look exactly the same as their older photos. All cameras are quite capable nowadays. It's the 12" behind the camera that matters most when it comes to great cameras and their ability to make...

You Don’t Have to Smile

I often tell that to my portrait subjects--no need to smile. I'd prefer they were being themselves rather than putting on the smile mask that we all learned to wear as a kid via "Say Cheese". There's nothing wrong with a genuine smile, but asking for it, or having them turn it on, I find...

My Eternal Quest to Motivate Showing Up

I talk about this a lot. The idea that we can capture magic with our cameras, but we have to show up. Have to go out and find the photographs by getting out of our easy chair and out into the world, camera at the ready. I was lying awake a couple nights ago thinking...

Golden Age of Analog Photography

We are really living in it, a new golden age of analog photography. Sometimes we can't see something while we're in it. You can either be in the mountains, or off the mountains looking at them--they're impossible to see while you're in them. But there couldn't be a better time to be an analog photographer....