What the Slides Remembered
I’ve been scanning old slide transparencies from my film days. It’s slow work: load the slide, scan, clean it up, repeat. I expected a chore. What I didn’t expect was how often I’d stop and…
AI Photo Software Is Impressive. It’s Just Not Submission-Ready Yet.
Up front: I’m not an AI skeptic. I’ve been surprised, more than once, by what this software can do. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been testing tools like Excire Foto and Aftershoot, along with…
The Storyteller’s Fiduciary Duty: Keeping Organizations Faithful to Their Mission
ABWE missionaries Steve Frerichs, Stephanie Pace, and Andy Pace talk with photographer Stanley Leary outside a home in Peru. Leary was there with Jeff Raymond to plan the Storytellers Abroad Workshop. Photo by: Jeff Raymond…
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…