Your Decline Is Inevitable. Your Misery Is Not.
I have been making pictures and telling stories for more than forty years, and I have had to reinvent how I do it more than once. Recently I listened to a podcast that gave a…
Isolate or Include? What a Black-and-White Street Photographer Taught Me About My Own Approach
I recently listened to Alan Schaller on the Pangolin Podcast. He's a London street photographer who shoots high-contrast black-and-white on a Leica Monochrome. On paper, we have little in common: he isolates a lone figure…
The Video Isn’t the Strategy
The assignment A church's leadership asked its communications team to create videos to increase engagement and giving. I was asked to help the team think it through. That sounds like a clear assignment. It isn't.…
Why the Assignment Is Only the Starting Point
Every assignment arrives with a picture already attached. An editor sends a shot list. A nonprofit asks for “a hopeful image of a mother and child.” A pitch gets written before anyone has visited the…
My Brand-New MacBook Pro Froze at Login. The Fix Was Hiding in My External SSDs
I updated my new 16" MacBook Pro with the M5 Max chip to Mac OS 27 and then Mac OS 27.0.1. The computer started acting funny when I restarted the MacBook Pro, and I typed…
Who Are You Listening To? Why Photographers Need Principles, Not Just Influencers
A podcast conversation recently got me thinking about a 1983 magazine tip. Two researchers laughed about a hair-care trick one of them still follows 40 years later because she read it in a 1983 magazine. The…
Taste the Wash Before You Fire Up the Still
The longer I shoot, the faster I get. That's the good news. The bad news is that speed has a cost: somewhere along the way, many of us stop paying attention to everything except the…
Perfect Is Cheap Now. Trust Isn’t.
Open a fashion or beauty feed today, and you'll see skin with no pores, no texture, and no history. The models are flawless because they were never real, or because software finished the job. AI…
The Visual Vocabulary You Haven’t Learned Yet
A child's first words are nouns. Dog. Ball. Mama. Labels for things that exist. It takes years before a child has the words for what's happening between things — before, because, even though, love. That's…
Photographers Are Hired for Brains, Not Gear
Gibbs Frazeur doesn't just show up and shoot — he studies the light, the water, the way a place breathes before he ever lifts the camera. And when the frame isn't quite there yet, he…
Your Team Photo Tells Me Nothing. Show Me What They Do.
A posed portrait shows what someone looks like. A photo of them working shows who they are. Here's how to introduce the people in your story. Back in March 2014, I wrote a short post…
Don’t Just Build a Network. Become Useful to Your Network.
What I learned in 2008 about professional relationships still matters in 2026. Back in December 2008, I wrote a short blog post called “Be a Joiner.” I was writing during another difficult economic period. Jobs…