Photography Today: Paint-By-Numbers Easy?

I was having a beer with a friend last night and he mentioned how easy it is nowadays to be a photographer, what with all the great gear and how everything looks good, even on a phone camera. Which of course got me thinking, "Is it that easy?" Has the tech made everyone great photographers?...

Do The Work For The Art, Not For Fame Or Likes

Do the work. Make your art. Not for likes. Or thumbs up. Or fame. But because you have to do it, you have no choice in the matter, the work has to exist. It's the kind of work that if you put it out and didn't get a "Like", you'd still do it. That's how...

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...

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...

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,...

Some Things You Just Do

Some things you do for money To make a living, to eat, to keep the lights on. Some things you do for the art of it. Not everything has to be monetized. That’s why I make portraits of folks 70+ on Mondays In my Longmont photo studio at no cost. Because I can. Because it’s...

Photography, Time Travel and Forgotten Memories Remembered & Relived

Photography used to be time travel. We took photographs, and then forgot them. That magic roll of film held the memory safe, tucked away in the dark to be revealed and relived at another time. A trip to the Fotomat was highly anticipated--the roll finished and developed, it offered wonderful surprises, time travel, remembering and...

The Hard Work of Publishing Four Photo Books: Follow-up

A short while ago, I published this post: Publishing Four Very Important Photo Books in 2019 Since then, I've completed three of the books (one person couldn't get it together) and they're on their way. In the process, here's what I learned. 1. People don't know where their photos are. 2. They don't know how to...

The Homogenization of Wedding Photos

To me, all wedding photos look alike right now. It feels like advertising for the art director. Whenever I see wedding photos in magazines or people's posts, it seems like a lot of the same photographs of the decor and flowers and table settings like still life/product shots, like the bride and groom are more...

Publishing Four Very Important Photo Books in 2019

It started with a social media post. And it was an idea that would change the world. See, these four books for four friends are the most significant photo books I'll publish this year. And they're not even my photos. Because those folks weren't going to make photo books. They weren't going to print any...