Stories
Spend enough time around BMX riders and your definition of a reasonable afternoon starts to change. Somebody looks at a wall and sees a possibility. Somebody else starts working out the approach. I start looking for the photograph. Most people would have walked past the wall. That’s a world I enjoy being in. People doing...
I like businesses where somebody knows how to fix something. Give them a broken machine, a chimney coming apart, or a property buried in leaves, and they get to work. There’s knowledge in the hands, judgment behind the movement, and usually a fairly strong opinion about whoever did the job before them. These are my...
Friday, October 23, at one in the afternoon, I drew my square and started looking around Minneapolis. Then family trouble started. I had to step away from the event to deal with it. By the time I came back, I couldn’t pick up the camera. It was raining. The sky was gray. Those things didn’t...
Sandy Cuadra competes in the bikini class of bodybuilding. For the past year, I’ve been photographing what goes into that: training, posing practice, competition bikinis and the preparation behind the few minutes an audience eventually sees. We were in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for her competition. I’d photographed much of the preparation, but this would...
Some of Garry Winogrand’s photographs look as though the people in them are trying to pull the frame apart. Bodies turn in different directions. Faces register separate conversations. Something happens near the edge while you’re still trying to understand the people in front. He could hold all of that inside one photograph without making everyone...
You have a sharp subject and a messy photograph. Before you buy another lens or crop everything out, look at the shapes around the person. Improving your photography composition can start with moving until a column, a curve, or a diagonal helps explain the scene. I’ve been making photographs for 30 years. Reviewing my work...
How to Get More Marketing Content from One Photo Shoot You need photos for a product page, an email, a sales presentation, and the next round of social posts. Booking a separate shoot for every request gets expensive. Booking one shoot and coming home with twenty versions of the same picture doesn’t solve much either....
A Method Has to Work While Everything Is Moving Understanding why a photograph fails is useful. Understanding what happens when another person looks at it is useful too. Then the client is waiting, the athlete is moving, the worker is halfway through the job, the light changes, and somebody asks whether you can also get...
A photograph may be finished when it leaves my hands, but it is not finished being interpreted. The file stays the same. The crop does not move. Nothing inside the frame rearranges itself. What changes is the person looking at it. That person was not standing beside me when I took the photograph. They do...
The Problem: When Nothing Is Wrong and the Work Still Fails Some photographs fail politely. Nothing is obviously broken. Focus landed. Exposure worked. The color is fine. The subject is recognizable. If it was a commercial assignment, the client may have approved it without much discussion. Then you look at it a week later and...