How is it that two photographers can stand in the same place and make two very different photographs? What accounts for the frustrating reality that, in that moment, one photographer can make something truly compelling and beautiful while the results of the other’s efforts are underwhelming? Surely it can’t be just better gear. Sometimes it’s different gear. Different gear represents different possibilities, and if one photographer uses a tripod and a polarizing filter and the other has neither, then the results will be different. But what about when the gear is similar? In my exper ..read more

What I’m about to show you is my favourite discovery of the year in terms of my workflow. I tend to do a lot of the same kinds of adjustments to similar photographs, especially when creating a body of work. I might globally add some exposure and contrast, tweak some colours, and then apply a mask to my main subject and make a few teaks there to draw the eye more effectively. Now I can do a lot of that by creating just one preset in Lightroom’s Develop module. If you missed the first video in this series, you might want to watch it first. It’s only 20 minutes long and you can find it here. The ..read more

I love the masking tool in Lightroom Classic and it has seen some changes over the last few iterations, some of them pretty significant. I was asked recently about this and it seemed like something you might be interested in if you’re a Lightroom user. If you do any dodging and burning at all, the new AI functions are game changers, and they’re super easy. In fact, they’re so easy it might convince some of you to do a little more work with local adjustments to draw the eye to what’s important in the frame. The easiest way to teach this is with video so I’ve put together a 20-minute tutorial fo ..read more

Landing in Nairobi last month, my usual fears were running amok. Would my luggage arrive with me? Would I have problems at customs? Would the bartender at the first camp be able to make me a decent Old Fashioned, of which I was desperately in need? You know the ones. But most heavy of all, the one weighing me down after so many safaris that I’ve now lost count, was this: would the work—the photographs—be good? Or would I just do what I’ve done before, unable to find a new angle or shake off the old ways? Would I end up mowing the same patch of grass over and over, which is a real risk in ..read more

Watch the short video above, or keep reading if you prefer the written word. I think a lot photographers put all their creative eggs in too few baskets. They look to the work they do with the camera as job one, which it is. But it’s not the only job. It’s the sexy job, for sure. But it’s insufficient. Some photographers lean heavily on post-processing or development; you could also call it stylization. Less sexy, perhaps, but like you, I get a lot of joy out of seeing my chosen images get refined and come to life. There are so many ways to think about both the camera work and the development ..read more

Watch the 7-minute video above, or keep reading if you prefer the written word. In my last video I resumed a conversation I’ve been dying to come back to. Specifically: Why do photographers get so intimidated by the edit and the “now what?” that comes once we put the camera down? And are we missing important creative opportunities? For years, I’ve been signing my letters to you with the words “for the love of the photograph,” and it occurred to me when I did so last week that we really do love our photographs. We must. Nothing else explains the time and money we spend on making them. But it ..read more

Take a few minutes to watch the video above or, if you’re more of a written word person, keep reading. When I came home from Kenya last year, I had a hard drive filled to busting with 30,000 images. I’d been photographing for 30 days, so that’s a daily average of 1,000 photographs which, it turns out, is really easy to do when your camera can not only do 30 frames per second but do so completely silently. Things kind of got away from me a couple of times! Combine that with my joy at just being there and making photographs, and it’s no surprise that I couldn’t have squeezed so much as a tiny J ..read more

In my last article, I suggested studying the work of others as one path toward making your own work stronger. To shoot what things feel like requires that we first have feelings about things but also to understand what possibilities exist for translating feelings into photographs themselves. It’s a conversation that could get touchy-feely really quickly, but if it gets too far from the practical nitty-gritty of how this actually happens with a camera in hand, I’m not sure it’s a helpful conversation. What makes that conversation difficult, however, is that there are no formulae. I c ..read more

I was young when I first heard some version of this advice: don’t shoot what it looks like; shoot what it feels like. That resonated with me then, and it still does, but I feel like my entire photographic journey has been spent trying to figure out what it practically means in a way that translates to my photographs. “Shoot what it feels like” is great advice, but it’s low on any real actionable kind of next steps. It leaves me asking how? In hindsight, I’m glad I had to figure it out myself (I seem to learn better that way), but a little help along the way would have been welc ..read more

There is a powerful argument to be made for photographing what intrigues you, what you love, or that by which you are obsessed. Making photographs takes time, so that curiosity, love, or obsession serves you well when your best work demands not fractions of a second or even minutes, but hours, days, or—in the case of longer projects—even years.  Bears have become a growing obsession for me. I don’t know where it comes from or what part of me these bears touch so deeply, but it’s not unlike the feeling I get in the presence of other large creatures like leopards, lions, sharks ..read more