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On Photography, Art, And The Creative Life
Welcome to the place affectionately known as my "writings on the walls", where you will find images, thoughts, and discussions on Photography, Art, and The Creative Life... or so I'm told.
Autumn's Focus
This time of season, many of us turn reflective and look back over the year, contemplating accomplishments and thinking about what is yet to be done. It can be a time to celebrate, as well as a time to refocus on things that matter to us in a deep way. It's a time to "get our house in order" so to speak, and make ready for new beginnings.
So, what...
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In Photography, It's No Contest
Do you enter your work in photography competitions? Do you answer " calls for entry " to prestigious venues and galleries? Are you drawn to the fame and recognition that comes with winning a competition? Don't be. I hear from a number of photographers who regularly enter photography contests, who wonder what the "winning formula" is.
I ask, "what...
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Dead Photographers Society
Taking inspiration, and ripping out a page from the Peter Weir film "Dead Poets Society ", this is a follow up to my previous post. Sadly, there are so many photographers these days, both pro and amateur, who have little or no knowledge of just how incredibly rich we are as an artform. Mention the word history in mixed company, and you can almost h...
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An Open Letter To A Young Photographer
Photography is an art that captures all of us at some time in our life. Whether we are six or sixty when it happens is not important. What is important is that sensation we feel when we are bitten by it. We are all young to the field at one point, and this post is for you, as well as a call for those who have been photographing for a long time to r...
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Aperture 3.3 :: Reports Of My Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated!
With apologies to Mark Twain for the title, I'm here to say that Apple's pro photography application Aperture is very much alive and well. It seems whenever a new iteration or version of Aperture is released, the internet lights up with comments, reviews, and blog posts proclaiming it to be dead-in-the-water, soon to be abandoned by Apple, less a p...
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Create Something! :: Notes From The Unknown Lens
Shell Study I
Every once in a while, hopefully not too often, we creative folks find ourselves in a place of deep funk, the blues, melancholy, depression. It comes with the territory of being creative, they say. Lately I've been there, and truth be told, there is only one way I know out of it. One thing that will shed some light in the shadows: "C...
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On Blogs, Bling, And Big Jazz :: A Rant
Believe it or not, there are people who bristle at the term Jazz. To them it is nothing more than a noisy mix of incongruous sounds that is anything but music. I'm not one of those people. I adore jazz. I happen to think Miles Davis' "Kind Of Blue" is the quintessential jazz album of all-time. I dig Miles, and jazz in all of its iterations is just...
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Zen And Creativity :: An Homage To A Mentor
I recently created a small series of composited photographs, collectively called " The Bodhi Lands" that were originally made in homage to the passing of a great Zen teacher and master photographer, Roshi John Daido Loori who passed from us October 9th, 2009. These four images were my simple way of conveying the significance of one's life who had t...
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The Photo Blog :: A Gallery With Benefits
Palm Study II
What are you going to do with new images, or a series of images that in themselves are every bit as compelling as what is in your portfolio? Sometimes adding a new gallery, or even adding more images to an existing gallery on your portfolio site is not the best option. You could rotate images by occasionally replacing what is in a ga...
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Ten Polaroids :: Creating Images With Malleable Materials
The Navigation Legend:: Polaroid SX-70 Film
I've created a new, one-off series called Ten Polaroids to showcase work created over the years with this incredibly versatile film material, and as a bit of an antidote to the totally digital world of photography we all swim in. Sometimes, for those photographers with a background that straddles the ana...
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10,000 Hours or 10,000 Photographs?
Ever wonder what 10,000 hours really looks like? In terms of days, weeks, months, etc.? How about in terms of actual artwork created? The now well known saying that it takes at least 10,000 hours to "master" something, in our case photography, has been quoted far and wide. That is, hours spent concentrated solely on the task, not multi-tasking othe...
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Note To Self #1
Ever wish you could meet up with your younger self and offer some sage advice at a crucial point in growing up? Aside from the awkward introductions, how very cool that would be. There I am in the middle at nine-years-old, washing my diving mask in the Mediterranean Sea in the South of France, pretending I'm Jacques Cousteau. Didn't we all want to...
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It's A Horizont World
When it comes to images today (and let's face it, written content too), we live in a horizontal world. You'd be hard pressed to find a computer monitor, tablet device, big screen tv, or mobile phone that doesn't favor the horizontal orientation. In photography parlance, we call it "landscape" mode, as opposed to the vertical "portrait" mode, both t...
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Writings On The Walls
When I started exploring the fine art aspect of photography, and imagined my first solo show of photographs, I liked thinking of titling the exhibit, "Works On The Walls". It struck a chord with me in an imaginative, ironic way, and so that is why I like to refer to this blog as "Writings On The Walls". It plays so nicely with the idea of images be...
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