Whether you find yourself in a creative rut or you’re looking to improve your creative mojo I highly recommend viewing this presentation on Creativity by John Cleese. I guarantee devoting 36 minutes to view this will be worth your while. Enjoy! Can’t watch videos where you are? Here is the transcription of his presentation
When behind the camera I often ask myself if I’m incrementally adding to an existing body of work or if I’m truly creating something new. Two pieces of work recently released bring my internal struggle to words and images. Vemödalen, embedded below, and Peter Thiel’s new book Zero To One. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines vemödalen as: n. the frustration of photographing something amazing wh
It’s late afternoon and I’m headed to a location that should have interesting subject material to photograph. Did I leave enough time to get there? Is the weather going to cooperate? Is the light going to be right? Will I even make it in time to set up before the light hits? More importantly and most unnerving in the back of my mind the biggest question hits, “Will I even be able to find something w
Theodore Sturgeon, a science fiction writer, had it right when he stated: “Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap.” One could say Sturgeon’s Law, based on the quote above, was equally observant as it was prophetic seeing that the statement is applicable at most any time or a
One of the most difficult topics to discuss about photography and many other art forms is creativity. Creativity is an intangible that often isn’t recognized until it’s seen and often unappreciated until an artist has passed. This is one of the many reasons creativity isn’t discussed as much as gear. The tangible is always easier to grasp and has finite boundaries of understanding, where as creativi
Photography is about a lot of things and other than “light” I’d say the “journey” is the most important. The fantastic thing about photography is that one’s mastery of the medium & artistic vision is a journey as much as the quest for each photo. Just as you never know what is over the next hill to photograph you never know how your view of the world might evolve. In both regar
I’ve often toiled over the archivability of digital imagery and even wrote about a close call I had in losing a drive that archived some of my work, A Happy Ending to My Drive Crash. With some regularity I have thoughts revisiting the prospect that it’s just a matter of time before I have to endure this again and deal with the loss of a drive and even worse an irrecoverable loss of a drive. While there ar
As a photographer I consider myself fortunate to be alive during an amazing time where a resurgence in photography, thanks to digital, has paralleled an unprecedented revolution in communication, thanks to the Internet. The Internet has facilitated a constant buzz and chatter relating to everything photography enabling us to learn, gain inspiration and even compete. Every moment of the day we are bombarded with phot