Oh, News Biz, How Ye Have Changed

When I was a photojournalist at a daily newspaper in New Jersey in the 1980s and 1990s, we had an editorial board and certainly a point of view politically--we were the conservative broadsheet in town compared to the tabloid-sized competitor with their "Page 7 Bikini Girl". There's an old newspaper line, "If it bleeds, it...

First and Foremost

There needs to be something that is at the top of our goals list. Something that we want to do more than anything else. The biggest goal of our lives. What is it? What is yours? What is mine? I feel fortunate for having an answer. I meet a lot of people who say they...

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 The Leica M11 Might Be the Best Career Move

I was thinking about this latest iteration of the Leica M, the M11 (not an affiliate link, just one to B&H) and that, despite how expensive it is at $9k, if you can afford it, it might be a wise move for your career. Or mine. See, Leica needs to support their photographers and they...

Projects, Self-Assignments and Games – The Need to Create

We all get motivation from various places. For some it's self-generated. (That would be me.) I have an insatiable need to create work, which I've written about many times. It makes it easy to be prolific. My way is to create goals--projects, self-assignments, games even. Whatever it takes. I have been working on the Roy...

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...

Getting More Time for Photography (by Getting Away from my Phone)

If we knew what amount of time we spent each day hitting refresh and checking Facebook and Twitter and the myriad other social media apps that pop up with red-numbered alerts, plus email, plus "your favorite time-waster here," we'd realize that's enough time to do quite a bit. I want to get away from my...