In my last post (August 06), I discussed a few ways to improve the mood in our photographs, namely by finding stronger mood in the first place, usually by looking for more interesting light or more interesting weather. Just getting out there earlier and staying later helps. Some weatherproof gear and a willingness not to baby the camera so much that you never make the kinds of photographs you’d like to would also be an asset. But I think there is also work to be done in the darkroom—not necessarily to create mood where mood isn’t there in the first place, but to amplify the mood that’s there. To adjust it, maybe even maximize (or minimize) it.

Years ago, I wrote a book called Vision & Voice, and though it was based on a version of Adobe Lightroom that was so old I think it was coal-powered, the framework I articulated in that book remains the same for me to this day. When I develop an image, I rarely deviate from these four steps:

1. Identify Your Intent
2. Minimize Distractions
3. Maximize Mood
4. Draw the Eye

The first step is just taking a deep breath and giving some thought to what you want the photograph to feel like and what that means visually for you. Do you need it to be darker or lighter, warmer or cooler? Which tools might you need to use to get the image to feel more like the one in your mind?

The second step is cleaning up your canvas: eliminate sensor spots, tame wild highlights, straighten horizons, make basic fixes to the exposure, or crop it in a little—that kind of thing. You’re cleaning up the image so you can focus on the truly creative stuff: maximizing the mood and drawing the eye.

Maximizing the mood might mean making the image much darker. Sure, the exposure was correct, but could knocking it back a couple of stops make it feel more mysterious? Or do you want it to feel much lighter, even happy? That suggests adding exposure, lightening the blacks, and maybe warming up the image with colour temperature. Here are the three things I do most often to maximize the mood in my images:

Light or Dark?

Ignore the histogram at this point; there’s a whole lesson in there about not peaking your highlights or shadows, but for now, ask yourself what you want the image to feel like. Luminance is huge when it comes to how an image feels. Your Lightroom tools to accomplish this might be as simple as pulling back the exposure slider, but that affects the exposure on everything, and perhaps you want to keep those highlights a little brighter. Have you tried only darkening the shadows or the blacks? Maybe it’s worth asking not only if you want the image lighter or darker, but where you want that change made. That might mean “in which tones,” but it might also mean in which areas of the image. Perhaps pulling the exposure down globally isn’t necessary to impact the mood, and you’d be better off just darkening the sky with a gradient filter. That one mood could certainly amplify the mood created by storm clouds, for example.

Warm or Cool?

Warm and cool aren’t visual words; they are feeling words. We feel bluer/greener images to be cooler, and warmer images lean into the yellow/red end of the spectrum. One of the quickest ways to amplify the mood of an image is to change the colour temperature. I usually do this in collaboration with the changes I make to luminosity (i.e., the lightness/darkness of an image). It’s rarely one or the other but both.

Saturated or Desaturated?

Colours are not only a matter of whether they are warm or cool, light or dark, but also the intensity of the colour(s). That’s saturation. We feel differently about images that are more saturated than others. Hot pink feels different than pastel pink. They can both be exactly the same hue, but feel different because one is super intense (saturated) and the other is not. An image with heavier saturation feels livelier and more full of life than one that is really toned down.

I showed you two of the images below in the previous post. The first is the RAW image as shot. Then there are two versions, both with changes to luminance, colour temperature, and saturation. I think they all feel quite different. The mood changes from one to the next with just the three kinds of adjustments (though I’ve used various tools). Spend a few minutes trying to figure out which changes were made and how they made the images feel differently. I hope this short article nudges you to open some images in whichever development tool you use and play with refining the mood in your own work.

The last step in my development framework is drawing the eye, which mostly amounts to dodging and burning—though it’s so much more than that, and there’s no way to fully discuss it in one article. (If you’re interested in exploring that further, I have an excellent eBook called Drawing the Eye, which is available HERE for $16.) But think about how you might simplify your workflow by using this framework to provide some structure and, most especially, how you can refine the mood in an image to give it more specific impact.

My apologies for the shorter article this week; things kind of crept up on me. I’m also diverting some of my energy to short reels on Instagram, and between that and visits to my surgeon (“Everything is great with the amputation—go live your life,” she says) and my prosthetist (new leg comes on Tuesday!) and my new trainer, it’s been busy. I hope this finds you well.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David.

“How do you photograph that great light?” is one of the top three questions I’m asked about how I make my photographs. It’s a good question because the camera sees light differently than we do, and unless you know what’s possible, you’ll struggle with retaining the mood of beautiful light. That struggle is more difficult for photographers who are still chained to their histograms and using some kind of automatic mode without EV Compensation. As good as today’s cameras are, you still have to do some of the thinking, because the camera tends to average things out a bit.

Average is the enemy of mood.

I don’t do “tips & tricks” articles, but here are three ways you can think differently about light to make images with the kind of atmosphere or mood you’re hoping for.

One: Meter for What Matters

I no longer use metering in the traditional sense. I look at my histogram to see what I’m capturing and what I’m losing, and then I weigh that against what’s important to me. Sunset rhino? I want those shadows nice and dark, and I don’t want to lose the highlights. I want the image to be dark and the colours saturated, so I often underexpose by at least three stops. If you’re exposing manually, you know how to do this. If you use Shutter or Aperture Priority mode or even manual exposure with Auto ISO (as I do much of the time), you’ll want to use your EV compensation to knock the exposure down three stops (or whatever is necessary for the scene you’re photographing).

EV Compensation is your way of telling the camera, “Hey, make this scene lighter or darker by a stop or two,” and it’s probably the camera function I use most. Throughout a day of photographing, I’ll move my aperture and shutter around now and then, but I’m always moving the EV compensation up and down to save highlights or darken the scene to keep the mood. Because I tend to favour strong shadows, I’m more often forcing my camera to see the scene darker, and I’ll want to preserve highlights at the expense of detail in the shadows. Sometimes it’s the opposite. But you have to know what you want. If that means exposing manually, do that. If it means getting really comfortable with your EV Compensation while in one of your automatic modes, then do that. 

Expose for mood; don’t let the camera push you around.

Two: Know Your Light

It’s one thing to be able to say, “Wow, that light is nice!” and another to understand what you like about it, what to do with it, and how to change it. As I write this, I’m on my back porch, looking at the light streaming through the ferns. Because the light is coming in from behind, the ferns have a beautiful rim light. I know that if I got my camera out and underexposed them (or exposed for the brightest highlights), I’d have a beautiful shot with dark greens and just a lick of light revealing the contour of the leaves and their distinctive fern shape. Other ferns I’m looking at, not so much; the light is hitting them from the front, and there’s not much magic there. If I wanted to photograph those, I’d move around them and explore the possibilities. Sidelight amplifies texture. Backlight allows light to shine through the ferns, as though they’re lit from within, or it can create a beautiful rim light. But the moment the sun gets too high, the magic will be gone, and I’d have to take my cameras deeper into the woods behind my home if I wanted to chase the mood.

Three: Chase the Mood

I’ve said before that there’s no good light and no bad light, and I still believe this to be true. But some light creates a stronger possibility for mood than others, and you won’t see it if you only photograph at mid-day in great weather.

Interesting mood is found at the edges: the edges of day, the edges of weather, the edges of light and shadow.

Finding mood and magic is often as much (or more) about when as it is about where. Actually, it’s usually at the intersection of when and where, and you need to be there when it happens. If your photography is a hobby of convenience and you’re only out on blue-sky days, you can’t possibly hope for the kind of mood we’re talking about. You can make photographs that are strong for other reasons, but they won’t be especially moody. You’ve got to be there, and you’ve got to be there then. When it happens. In the fog, at dusk, in the rain and the snow.

There are other ways to make photographs with a sense of mood. Shallow depth of field and out-of-focus highlights (bokeh) can do it. Nice and dreamy. So can a slow shutter and a moving subject (or a moving camera). Multiple exposures can do it. And a fantastic moment, no matter the light, when a friend throws their head back in laughter—that too can be emotionally ladened and full of mood.

When I do portfolio or image reviews, my most common reaction is one (if not all) of these: there’s not enough mood, there’s not enough story, and there’s not enough you. If you’re looking for a new challenge, consider looking at your work and asking how you could amplify any or all of those. If it’s mood, I hope some of the ideas above will nudge you forward. As a start, look at the images in this article and ask yourself how you feel about the images, what’s the mood, and what choices did I have to make to get that mood into the photograph?

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

PS – Two More Things

In case you missed it, I’m back on Instagram and sharing not only my photographs, and my ideas, but also my progress since the amputation. I’m there @davidduchemin and if you’d like to hear from me more than once every two weeks or so, I’d love to see you there. And if you’re part of a camera club and you’d like to bring my teaching to your club, I’ve got a great evening presentation on video that’s free to any camera club that will host me. It’s a great way to bring something really meaningful to your club and I’d be so grateful if you shared this with those who plan the events and lectures. You can find more information and get the video lecture and everything you need to promote and host the event here at InspireYourCameraClub.com.

Finally, a footnote. It’s now exactly two months since the amputation surgery. I’m walking a lot, though always with crutches. I put more weight on the prosthetic leg and foot every day, and the time is coming soon when the crutches will go into the closet and I can start putting my efforts into regaining my lost muscle and figuring out how to return to the activities and adventures for which I swapped my real foot for a prosthetic one in the first place. Many of you have been cheering me on, especially since I returned to Instagram. I can’t fully express my gratitude, but thank you.

In the creative life very few things go the way we expect them to, and I suspect when they do, it’s because we’re not reaching far enough beyond our comfort zone, not risking enough. First steps into any new endeavour—whether that’s learning a new technique or beginning a new body of work—are not the steps that get you to a polished outcome; they’re the steps that get you started, and believing that they should be easier than they are, or result in quick and easy results, will only lead to frustration and the belief that something must be wrong with you or the idea you are exploring. If that belief stops you from exploring any further, then you’re trapped.

So much of the creative life happens in the mind, and what you think and believe determines everything: what your work is about, what it looks like, and how deep or personal it might be. All of this is a mind thing, not a camera thing. We know this, but it’s easy to forget it the moment things get hard, don’t go as planned, or just plain fail.

I’ve had whole trips that didn’t go well. I’ve spent thousands of dollars and weeks of my life only to come back without a single meaningful photograph.

What do you do with that, besides the inevitable self-flagellation? How you react will either teach you or trap you, depending on how you choose to think about it: is this so-called failure a trauma or a trophy? Is it something that has truly harmed you, or is it something in which you can find a valuable lesson or a raw material for new work? Does it sideline you or introduce you to a new direction, reveal a new opportunity to improve your skills, or hone your thinking for the next time you try?

Life is hard and short, and it hurts when we spend any of it doing something that doesn’t work out the way we planned. When the magazine doesn’t publish your work, the gallery isn’t interested, or the project feels like it’s going nowhere. No one would blame you for feeling hurt and confused (well, you might), but what you do next depends on how you think about it.

There is a difference between what hurts us and what harms us.

I have relearned this painfully over the last seven weeks as I’ve wrestled with phantom limb pain after the amputation; you wouldn’t believe the pain you can feel in a body part you no longer have. It would be funny were it not so truly painful. It hurts like hell. But it does not harm, and remembering that makes it a little easier. I go to a massage therapist, and what she does is often painful. It hurts, to be sure, but not only does it not harm me, it helps me heal. Keeping that in mind makes the pain more bearable, it helps to remove the sting.

If you care about your creative work, the inevitable failures, detours, and missteps, will hurt.

The more personal the work is—the more it matters to you—the more it will hurt. But whether or not it harms probably depends on how you react, how you think about them. If you are taking risks with your art, you will experience many failed efforts. That’s a good thing. You learn more from failure than you will ever learn from success, but whether you learn and move forward probably depends on whether you think of those failures as trauma or trophies, the latter of which are hard-won and worthy of celebration.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

P.S.#1 – I’m Back on Instagram

I left social media three years ago for many reasons (other than needing a break from it all). But lately, I’ve felt like I’m missing something. Not followers, not likes, but connection. So for those of you on Instagram, seek me out again. I’m there. I’m approaching it differently and more playfully than I did before. If you’ve missed that connection or want to hear from me or see my work a bit more frequently, you can still find me at @davidduchemin.

PS#2 – Footnotes: A Quick Update

Thanks to so many of you for asking about my recovery since the amputation. There’s not much to tell at this point. I’m walking, though still with crutches. And though I aim to ditch the crutches by August 5th, two months since the surgery, it remains to be seen whether that’s doable (or wise). I’ll let the experts tell me that. The phantom pain seems to be slowly diminishing, and the worst of it seems to be over. Now it’s the hard work: multiple 10-minute daily walks, rehab exercises, and patience. That’s the most difficult part.

I’m also driving again. One of my biggest fears was how easily I’d take to being behind the wheel again since it was my driving foot that I gave up. I’m thrilled to have discovered my body and brain seem to remember how it all works. I can’t feel the pedals, but I know exactly where they are, and I can feel the truck’s response.

I’m still in my temporary leg, but I’ve got a very cool hydraulic foot on order, and it shouldn’t be long before we start working on something closer to my definitive leg and foot. It’s a fascinating, if not often frustrating, process. There has been trauma, but I’m keeping this experience as a trophy. Thank you for being part of that.

We are all missing something. We are all a Gordian Knot of what we are, what we have and do not have, and what we’ve both gained and lost. The blessing of some of that is easily seen, while some of it is hard not to see as a curse or a deficiency. All of it comprises the constraints within which we live. As a photographer and a teacher on matters of creativity, that word “constraint” is important to me. Easily misunderstood as a barrier to creativity, constraints are not what prevent creativity but what drive it.

Accepting this—and working with it—is the key not only to a challenging and fruitful creative life but to life. Full stop.

When I say “creative” does your mind immediately jump to painters, musicians, filmmakers or that weird neighbour who wears too much purple and makes macrame owls? It’s true, creativity thrives in the arts (though the arts is also sometimes the place true creativity goes to die). But creativity also thrives in engineering, and the sciences. It’s the realm of inventors and great teachers and struggling parents and baseball coaches. Creativity is an idea that’s fuzzy around the edges but implies making something. Creating. Whether that’s making a family, making a meal, making a photograph, or making a presentation. It might be making time for what’s important or making a difference in your community. All of these  come with their own constraints, their own challenges. They contain within them a problem to be solved, often several problems.

The creative person is the one who thinks differently about those problems and looks at them from a different angle. The creative person is the one who conjures the courage to take the risk on possible solutions and the perseverance to work through the failed first solutions.

The truly creative person is the one who isn’t confined by what they have or do not have but sees them all as possibilities, or challenges to drive them forward.

Challenge is under-rated. Too often bemoaned as distractions that keep us from our busy lives—lives in which we otherwise might be more creative if only we had the time and fewer of these challenges—it is challenge itself that primes us to be at our creative best. It is challenge that gets us into what artists and athletes have long seen as flow, or “the zone”.

Challenge is the gift given to us by our constraints. It is what fills the void opened by what we lack. Lack of time, lack of natural talent, lack of insight, lack of resources or—as I am hoping as I enter the 5th week since my amputation—lack of a foot. Challenge is not the reason our creative efforts fail but the reason we need those efforts in the first place. No one needs to “get creative” about problems they do not have. What we lack is what drives human ingenuity. It is what drives human drive. The opposite is boredom, which has been described as “the lack of a lack.” We need the challenges that arise when our constraints bump up against our desires. 

Creative people are the ones who rise to the challenge of fulfilling those desires in the face of their constraints. They are not necessarily the ones who get it right the first time, but the ones who try, and try from different angles. They are not the most flamboyant, nor necessarily even the most outwardly innovative. You can be creative without glitter and glue. You cannot be creative without a problem to solve. It is these problems, particularly problems that are new to us, that require a different approach, a different solution, one that doesn’t come from our usual way of thinking. It is exploring these problems that usually has us muttering under our breaths the long-muttered mantra of all creative people (whether they identify as such or not), “what if…?”

This is all made so much harder by how uncertain it always is. Creativity is not needed to apply a known solution to a familiar problem, but to fresh challenges for which the possible outcomes are hidden, shrouded. We ask “what if…?” because we truly don’t know. But we have a hunch. A curiosity. A suspicion that we’re on the right track. It might not be the track that leads directly to the solution and our Nobel Prize, but it might lead us to the detour that leads us to the rabbit-trail that leads us to the path. Life is labyrinthical and creativity happens in the unknown. That’s one of the lacks, one of the constraints.

Creativity isn’t one thing, it’s not one characteristic of the human soul or mind, but many traits found in aggregate. Among other things, it is a combination of curiosity, resilience, and courage – all of which, it seems to me, are responses to an obstacle, a constraint. Curiosity is a response to a lack of knowledge, resilience is a response to failure, and courage to fear. Without those counterparts they have no reason to exist.

Creativity is not only the stuff of pink pipe cleaners, and rainbow sparkles, but an imaginative response to lives that often prove harder and harder as we get older and find ourselves missing more and more, or more keenly aware of what we’ve been missing all along and that our time to respond to that is drawing short.

Being creative doesn’t happen when conditions are perfect, but in response to conditions that are far from perfect. Being creative is a leaning in to that.

What is missing in our lives becomes, in part, the stuff of the songs we sing and the art we make. We write about the hunger for the things we do not have (often love, or a dog, or if you write country music, also a truck). We photograph and paint to find the beauty we long for, and in all forms of art we ask questions to look for answers we do not have. Scientists, though not usually ones to call themselves artists do this too, and are no less creative. Engineers too, and teachers. We respond to the lack. That’s where the challenge of our days comes from. How we face those challenges becomes our chance to shine.

Our lack, and how we respond to it becomes our chance to put our unique fingerprint on our lives and those we touch. Our challenges give us the chance not only to shine, but to do so in ways unique to us. Leonard Cohen famously sang “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” I think it’s also how the light gets out.

It’s why some people shine more intensely than others. More cracks, more light.

Marcus Aurelius, if you’ll forgive one more quote, said “what stands in the way becomes the way.” He might have added the word maybe. Sometimes it does not. Our constraints do not always become possibilities; they often become excuses. They turn us around in the fear that we don’t have the resources, don’t know where the path leads, and have no guarantee of success.  In short: it might get hard. And who can blame anyone for wanting an easier path? For wishing they had what they do not, or looking over their shoulder and wishing for what others seem to have in abundance? Creativity is not found in wishing.

Art doesn’t imitate life. It responds to life.

In the same way courage is a response to fear, or faith is to doubt. It doesn’t happen only when the struggles fade and the traumas are forgotten, but as a reaction to those. A creative life is not something at which we succeed only when we’ve got all the right pieces. Everyone is missing something. That’s not a deficiency, it’s a path. A challenging path, to be sure, but stepping into that gap is what brings us meaning, and purpose and if that’s not artful living, I don’t know what is. That’s what creativity is to me. Stepping into the gap, and finding ways to fill it.

Want to be more creative? Find the gap. Find the constraints and embrace them.

It turns out, where creativity is concerned, if you are not missing something, you’re missing everything.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

Footnotes: An Update on my Amputation

On July 5, exactly one month since the surgeon removed my foot, my prosthetist gave it back. It’s only a temporary model and the foot shell that covers the carbon fibre says “Loaner” in magic marker, but for now it’s my foot—the first of many before I get my definitive prosthetic. I wish I could tell you I put this leg on and took to the parallel bars like I’d done this many times before, but it was hard. Hard to trust this thing would hold me, hard to believe my leg had the strength to do what I was asking of it, even hard to believe my surgeon had done her job well and my remaining leg bones we’re just going to jab out the bottom. The first steps were confusing, full of both hope and terror.

Now, 4 days later, I’m walking 10 minutes at a time, up and down my street. I’m partly supported by crutches, but I’m starting to see how this all might not be a total disaster, how one day I might not only walk but run. I’m also allowing myself to dream again, to look at the 2024 calendar that has been sitting empty, and wonder what adventures I might fill it with.

I want to thank you all again for the truly overwhelming blog comments and emails. Forgive me for not replying, all my energy has been going into getting back on my feet, but I read every one of them and I am so grateful. Thank you!

I’m back into the prosthetic clinic tomorrow to be re-assessed and get my new marching orders.

3 New Monographs, 1 Prosthetic Leg, and a Huge Thank You! 

When I had my foot amputated I released a bundle of monographs and desktop wallpapers for whatever you’d like to pay. Creating these kept my mind of the coming surgery and something new to offer you, as well as a way to chip away at the costs of my prosthetic leg and foot. The response has been incredible and when I’m back to traveling you’ll be part of every footstep I take on every adventure. Thank you so much for your support. These brand new monographs and collection of desktop wallpapers are still available here.

There is a scene in the 2023 Netflix series Kaleidoscope in which the lead character, played by the inimitable Giancarlo Esposito, says to his young daughter, “Show me where you’re brave.” She responds by putting her finger to her head. “Now show me where you’re strong,” he says, and in response, she puts her finger on her heart.

I am feeling neither brave nor strong right now. This has all been so much harder than I had the capacity to expect.

A month ago, I was staring into the darkness of this amputation, so much of it unknown. It was easy then, to be brave in those moments of doubt, easy to talk myself into believing that whatever monsters lurked in the shadows would be manageable. Now, in the light of day, I see some of the enormity of them, and it leaves me trembling. The phantom pains were especially bad last week—absolutely crazy-making.

And I had my stitches taken out, the nurse going on and on about what a great job the surgeon had done. “This incision is gorgeous,” she said. I couldn’t help wondering if we were looking at the same thing because all I could see was the stuff of horror films, and it took everything in me to fight back the tears and the fear that Cynthia, and even I, would forever turn our heads to avoid looking at it.

I don’t want to turn my gaze from my own body; the thought of it makes me tremendously sad.

I know a time will come when the phantom pain subsides; it already feels like it has calmed down a bit. I named the worst of it “Vlad the Impaler” for the sensation of being stabbed over and over in the sole of a foot I don’t have. He seems to be losing interest in coming by quite so frequently, however; he’s a little less stabby now. And I know (more honestly, I hope) the time will come, probably not so long from now, when I will see in these scars something more than what I see now. But that doesn’t make now much easier.

What makes it a little easier is that being strong or being brave is not a matter of feeling. Strength and courage are what we conjure from deep places within us to override the feelings and to take whatever next step is necessary and not give up.

Twelve years ago, I spent 40 nights in the hospital, waiting for my body to heal from the accident that set all these shenanigans in motion. The constant drip of painkillers had a constipating effect on my body, and because I could neither get to a toilet nor (because of my broken pelvis) sit on it if I could, I had a nightly date with a nurse, an enema, and a bedpan, above which I would hover by holding onto the bars suspended above my bed—and I would do this in a room with three other patients. The nurse would pull the curtains and joke about giving me my privacy, knowing there are things a curtain can’t possibly conceal. It was hell. It’s funny now, but at the time, I gritted my teeth and wept, knowing there was no way I could ever do this. Until I did. What choice did I have?

We can do hard things. We often choose not to, but when we must, we do. We do not do them because we’re brave enough or strong enough. We do them because we have no choice—or because not doing them is even harder—and it is doing them that makes us brave or strong enough to do it again when we have to.

It is one of those paradoxes of life: we don’t do hard things because we’re resilient; we are resilient because we do hard things.

To do otherwise is to settle. To give up on dreams and allow ourselves to fade away from being the person we are becoming and slide into the great mass of humanity that is resigned not to live artfully, not to risk the possibility that their one life could light sparks beyond what we believe ourselves capable. To live with as few bruises as possible and to get used to the slow silencing of our dreams. No one sets out to live like that, but it happens because settling is so much easier. We wake up one morning and there we are, mired in the normal and the easy. To me, that is so much harder. It’s an easier place to get to but so much harder to live with.

I fear settling for whatever version of my life lies ahead of me if I don’t do the hard things. The hard things are always temporary, and usually not as traumatic as we fear. The hard things make us more interesting.

Remember: what doesn’t kill us gives us something to blog about. It gives us a story. But more than that, it makes us resilient; it makes future hard things a little less hard, if only because we know we’ve bounced back before and we can do so again. Sadly, the opposite is also true. When we shrink away in the face of whatever obstacles block the path to our dreams, we reinforce the idea that, in fact, we can’t do hard things, and because of that limiting belief, our armour gets a little softer, the shadows get a little scarier, and our dreams get further and further away as it becomes easier and easier to settle.

The poet E.E. Cummings once observed that “unbeing dead isn’t being alive.” In my experience, unbeing deadlies on the near side of whatever hard thing blocks your dreams right now, and being alive—truly awake and vital—lies on the other side of that hard thing and whatever adventure it takes for you to get there.  

Art-making always takes risk. So does living artfully. But it’s the difference between unbeing dead and being truly alive, which has never once been for the faint of heart.

We don’t need to feel brave to act with courage, and we don’t need to feel strong to find that we are.

But we do need to step into the hard things and—if it helps—to point to your head to remember where you’re brave, and put your finger on your heart to remind you where you are strong.

For the Love of the Photograph (and those who make them),
David.

Footnotes: An Update on my Amputation

I had a cast molded for my residual limb this week, and on July 05, I’ll be fitted for my first prosthetic leg and foot and will begin walking again. It’ll be slow at first, and I suspect they’ll want me to use crutches so I’m not fully weight-bearing. And it’ll take some time to work up to the point where I can wear my prosthesis full-time, but this amazes me: I had surgery on June 05, and I will walk again on July 05. One month! This first prosthetic leg and foot will be temporary; it’ll take some time to get everything working and customized. The socket into which my residual leg fits will probably be remade a couple of times as my leg shrinks, and my choice of foot will take some time in terms of discovering the technology that is best for me, but these are all steps down a miraculous road, and I’m so grateful to all of you for your support. It gets less scary with every step. Thank you!

I regret very few things in life, if by “regret” we mean the desire to undo the past, to have done things differently.  I don’t regret loving with a full heart when my brain was nothing but red flags, and that same heart later fell broken at my feet for having taken the chance. I don’t regret the missteps I have made, even the one that got me to where I am in this moment, writing with my feet up in my office, or rather, my foot. The other, my residual limb, bandaged and buzzing with phantom pain, sits mismatched beside it. Surely if I were to regret anything it is that. But I don’t. Neither do I regret the creative risks I have taken, some of them costly, nor the hundreds of thousands of images I’ve made in my life that are now on the cutting room floor; they were the price of getting to the good stuff.

Yoda said, “There is no try, there is only do or do not.” Respectfully, Yoda is a muppet and he’s full of crap. There is plenty of try in this life and not all of it goes to plan the first time. Or even ever. But it is the trying from which we learn. The risk. The failure.

We are all becoming the people we are, not only because of the victories (may they be many) but the failures.

I don’t necessarily celebrate them—they represent loss and some of them represent great pain—but they do make us who we are. They carve the contours of our souls that make us the individuals we are. To regret these things is to wish away the tools of our own becoming. Becoming more averse to our own comfort, more suspicious of the notion of safety, more resilient, and more sensitive to the pain and loss of others as they too become who they are. And become more ourselves.

We are made by the things we do, not the things we do not do.

My father once told me, hot on the heels of a diabetes diagnosis when I was 21,  “Your problem is you let circumstances beat you.” As hurtful and insensitive as that was, he wasn’t wrong. His words alerted me to the possibility that I could push back against my circumstances, could make something from them. I didn’t see it this way then, but I’ve come to see that these circumstances, even the ones I bring upon myself, are raw materials in the creation of the person I am becoming. I’ve come to see that as the most important part of a creative life: creating the artist. Not regretting what has happened to me or even the things I have done, but using them. They are both the raw materials and the tools of our shaping. I like the man that I’ve become and I wish my father could know him now. I think he’d be proud. To regret all these rough patches and the truly painful missteps would be to wish away that man in favour of someone with smoother edges and no story to tell, a different and less interesting person making less interesting photographs.

What I have regretted are the things I have not done. Conversations with the dying reveal this to be all too common: it’s not so much that we wish at the end of our lives to undo this or that, but to have another crack at what was left undone, untried. To say what was left unsaid, to have another chance at love that was never explored. To be the people that we knew ourselves to be, and could have been more fully, were we not so held back by fear. I think when we’re dying we probably see so much more clearly (and realized so heart-breakingly late) how truly trivial some of the things we feared really were.

I am, I hope, a long way from my last days, but I do regret not peering around more corners in unfamiliar places, and I regret the times I stopped just shy of the limits of my comfort zone, when to go further would have taken me to experiences I couldn’t have possibly imagined at the time. I regret having not gone farther. Deeper. I regret not engaging in conversation with people leading lives differently than I do, people who have scared me. I’m getting better at that. Creatively, I regret the photographs I didn’t take. And it’s not even the iconic stuff, but the photographs of people no longer alive and moments that are now fading in my memory. Memories I’d give anything to revisit.

We regret what we have not done more than what we have done because there’s no way back from it when time runs out. It’s a loss. A loss of possibility and of the one chance to have lived on our terms. To do something—to (forgive me Yoda) just f*cking try—means there’s the possibility of something more. Even to try and be met with colossal failure, at least there’s a possibility of a do-over. A chance to learn, to become the person who can eventually do that thing.

To try is full of possibility. To not try is to court regret and surrender the hope that other possibilities exist, that we can create something great, if not from our first efforts, then from the wreckage of those first efforts. 

I am mistakenly considered to write about photography. It’s an easy misunderstanding. I talk about being sensitive to the quality of moments, of considering the importance of changing perspective and point of view, of making choices to amplify the emotion of things, and of being present and awake to the million intersections of light, space, and time while the shutter is open and receptive to the light. It would be a missed opportunity to look at these ideas only through the lens of making 2-dimensional photographs when the bigger possibility is making our lives more intentional and lived as fully and in as many dimensions as possible.

I want to take a moment to thank and update everyone who has been so supportive and generous since I announced the amputation of my foot. It was a decision made knowing there was a better chance I would one day regret not having done it, not having taken the chance and swung for the bleachers. I don’t know if it was courage or if it was a question of being more afraid of what would happen—and the increasingly limited life I would have to live—if I didn’t do it. Right now I’m doing well, though the phantom pain is not to be trifled with. It’s just really unpleasant, often incredibly painful. Like relentless shocks of electricity, little stabby zappy f*ckers all over the foot I no longer have. They keep me up at night.

Here’s the metaphor I’m currently working with: it’s like my brain is calling my foot. But my foot isn’t there so it keeps calling and calling and, getting no answer, it leaves an increasingly hostile series of angry voice messages. It just goes on and on and it’s hard to concentrate for any length of time, though I have found if I workout, or do my yoga, or get into flow while I’m writing as I am now, they subside some. Perhaps my brain is so busy looking for the right words that it stops looking for my foot.

On Tuesday the stitches come out and on Friday my prosthetics team will take a mold of my residual limb, and before the end of the month I should be partially weight-bearing on my first temporary prosthetic leg and foot. If that’s not miraculous I don’t know what is. Thank you for the endless encouragement, and to those of you who purchased my monographs, I owe you a special debt of gratitude.

Within the year, after we’ve worked out the bugs, I will be walking around on a prosthesis that you have helped me create. You will be part of every footstep, and every new adventure, and I have no words for that kindness. 

For the Love of the Photograph,
David.

P.S. If you haven’t purchased my series of new monographs and desktop wallpapers, you can do so here and pay whatever you would like for them.

P.P.S. If you’re wondering if these articles are going to be all amputation all the time from now on, I promise they won’t. What I’ve written for you has always been connected to the here and now and right now this is my very present reality. But it won’t be for long and before you know it I’ll be back to telling you what f/stop to use and which tripod to buy. You know me better than that. I wanted to write something this week that was more photographically helpful, but, well, I was stumped for ideas. Ha! Get it? Stumped…? It’s ok to laugh about this, my friend.

Not quite a week ago, I had my right foot amputated and dropped that news on many of you somewhat abruptly. Sorry about that. As I observed at the time, there’s just really no way of easing into a conversation like that. If you missed this and you’re wondering what’s going on, you can read the whole story here to catch up. If you caught the news the first time, keep reading because after the incredible outpouring of support you gave me, you deserve an update. I’m sorry it has taken so long.

It was an early morning for us on Monday, June 05. Neither Cynthia nor I slept very well in the hotel room, and we were up well before 5 am. By 5:45, we were at the hospital, and by 7:45, I was on a gurney being wheeled into the operating room. An IV, a chat with my surgeon (who signed the correct foot and promised to try really hard not to take the good one), and then it was, “Count down from 10, 9, 8…” and the rest got fuzzy and because of the  miracle of anesthetic, no time passed at all before I was awake and the foot was gone, cut about seven inches below my knee.

The surgery went well, and the surgeon did a great job. I was in good spirits, and all was right with the world. And then they moved me up to a room that can only be described as a total f*cking madhouse. I was the final (and youngest) patient in a room of four: two other men and one woman. The men were completely nuts, though not in the clinical way that would suggest I choose my words more carefully. Sane, but crazy, if you know what I’m saying.

Here is but one exchange in the endless cavalcade that was my shared room/frat house:

Patient One (taking a break from singing Christian hymns at the top of his lungs): “Jesus is coming!”

Nurse (God bless her): “Jesus wants you to take your meds.”

Patient One (refuses meds but resumes singing, then bursts out): “Jesus is coming!”

Patient Two(chiming in for not the first time): “Shut up!”

Nurse(ever patient, deserving sainthood): “Let’s try to be a little nicer.”

Patient Two: “Tell him to shut up.”

Patient One: “Jesus is coming!”

Patient Two: “No, He’s not! Shut up!”

(Nurse taps out, reconsiders her career choice.)

Patient Two: “If you don’t shut up, I’ll come over there and shut you up!” (ignoring for a moment his total lack of mobility, being—as he is—on a ward for the indisputably immobile).

Patient One resumes singing, which turns into him asking Jesus into his heart, not once but half a dozen times before I put my headphones on and start asking Jesus to, whatever else He’s busy with, take me now.

Patient Three, the quiet lady who keeps to herself, lies silently behind the thin curtain that separates us, wondering, I’m sure, what she did to deserve this and undoubtedly grateful these people won’t be getting out of their beds.

Patients One and Two resume dancing around their competing versions of reality. Patient Four (me) puts his headphones on and lets Pink Floyd join the party.

That was the first night, one of the longest of my life, because the outbursts went on Lionel Ritchie style: all night long. I can only praise the nurses for their patience and compassion, and the drugs for their eventual sedative effect (on me, but clearly not the others).

Since then, there’s been plenty more madness, including a room change that only made things worse, and then endless conversations with physiotherapists, a lot of poking, and short walks on crutches that became longer walks on crutches. Pain meds every four hours and some real moments of laughter with the ever-rotating roster of nurses and pain specialists. It’s been busy; I brought two books and a stack of magazines to pass the time, but I still haven’t opened any of them.

What I have had time for in the moments of reprieve from the chaos are the many, many comments from you. As I write this, there are almost 600 notes from you all on the blog, and most of them are not short “get well soon” notes but longer messages of compassion and kindness. All of them tell me there’s a connection between us that is not only strong but enduring.

Many of you have been walking this path with me for many years, and as much as this is an update, it is also a heartfelt thank you. You’ve brought me to tears of gratitude many times this week with your own stories of vulnerability, loss, and resiliency, and as insufficient as these words are: thank you. Thank you for showing up for me in your words and your actions. The sales of my three new monographs have deeply humbled me. Your generosity and kindness inspire me.

I won’t be able to thank you all individually, but this is very, very personal: thank you. From the bottom of my heart.

So how am I doing? I am well. Truly. Very sore, but well. All week I’ve been so relieved the surgery is over and that, yes, they removed the correct foot. So grateful to be able to begin planning and dreaming again. And after being postponed twice, I’m thrilled that the surgery is not something that can be taken away again. I’m mentally clearer now than I’ve been in months, perhaps for the last year. Even with the pain meds, I feel undistracted, like the fog and preoccupation have lifted. My words are easier to find, my sense of humour feels sharper. I realize what a weight I’ve been carrying as I’ve second/third/fourth-guessed my choice so many times since last summer. It’s been exhausting, and I am so relieved, so truly happy, to be coming out of that. I slept better last night than I have in months.

I am also amazed at how surreal my daily experience is right now. On day one, I felt my first phantom sensation, a persistent itch on the bottom of a foot I no longer have. But there it was, my right sole itching and no way to scratch it. Frustrating, but kind of fascinating. I lift my leg, now approximately five pounds lighter, and it kind of goes flying up with no control. It’s amusing, if not particularly graceful! I reach for socks and grab two, forgetting I will only need half as many for a while. I go to cross my ankles or shift my legs to move one foot over the other to find that one foot, well, isn’t. The presence of an absence.

It’ll be a long learning curve, and I know it will be painful and frustrating at times. But I have so much hope that it will also be so much more than that.

I was discharged on Friday, June 09, and I’m now settled on the couch in my home, counting down the ten days until my stitches come out and my prosthetist takes over my care to begin shaping my initial prosthesis and get me walking. It’s all happening miraculously quickly.

So now I’ll have time to rest up, heal, and to write: aside from my bi-weekly missives (which—mea culpa— I have neglected lately, ) I’m also working on a new book for you. And I’ll have time to dream and plan and, eventually, to jump with both feet back into travel, adventure, and teaching.

Thank you for being there for me. For your kindness. For your words of encouragement.  I have needed and taken comfort in all of them. It has not all been easy, though I try to downplay the struggle of it. We all have challenges; we’re all missing something. These are the constraints with which we work in any creative endeavour, and life is certainly that.

If you missed it or are reading this for the first time, I released a set of three new monographs and 18 desktop wallpapers on Monday, the day of my surgery. I’ve put them on sale for whatever you choose to pay, giving you the chance to decide what value they have to you and to participate in my recovery if you choose; the sale of these monographs will help get me into my new prosthesis and back on my feet. 

You can find the three new monographs here or by clicking the image below.

Your support of my work will get me into my first prosthetic leg in the same way your support of me has always given me purpose and a place to stand in this world. Not everyone has that, and I am so, so grateful. If you’ve already purchased this set of new monographs, thank you! I would love to hear what you think in the comments below. Questions about anything you see there? I’ve got time on my hands now and would be happy to turn this down time into teaching time. Just leave your questions in the comments below. And if this is the first you’re hearing of any of this and you want me to back the whole thing up and start from the beginning, here’s more about how I got to this point. 

For the Love of the Photograph,
David.

I had my foot amputated yesterday morning. I wrote this a couple weeks ago knowing that my head might not be in the space to do so in the days after the surgery, so I can’t tell you how it went just yet, or how I’m feeling about it all, but I can bring you up to date. I don’t often write so personally, and when I do it’s about photography. But over the years I’ve been told that I don’t only write about photography, but about life. This one’s about life.

As so many of you know, I took a fall while trying to make a photograph in Italy 12 years ago. The fall shattered my feet, broke my pelvis, and bruised my ego. But it was April and already by that point in the year three other people had fallen from the same place and none of them survived so that accident also re-calibrated my gratitude. I spent 40 nights in hospital, among them some of the longest nights of my life, filled with fear. I cried myself to sleep most nights, worried I’d never walk again. Worried my career was over. I was so, so lucky to be alive, but what if I could never again experience or photograph the things that made my life so rich and meaningful?

Months later I rolled my wheelchair into a physical rehab centre and after 4 weeks I walked out with a cane. My discharge date was set not by my doctor or physiotherapist but my travel agent: I was due in Laos and Cambodia for a workshop, and after that I had a boat to catch for Antarctica. I was a little wobbly, but I was walking, still carrying a camera to beautiful places, but this time more grateful, and taking it all a little less for granted.

On the night I had my accident I was taken to a hospital in Tuscany and eventually told I would never walk the same way again. This haunted me, and proved to be true. As the years have gone by we tried revision surgeries and eventually my surgeon fused my ankle and told me that for now this was as good as I could expect things to be. At one point a few years ago I asked about amputation and a prosthesis and she said yes, some people choose to do that but I don’t think she thought it was the right time for that conversation.

A year ago I was tired of “as good as it gets”. The pain was getting worse, the mobility was more and more limited. I had conversations with prosthetists and surgeons and all of them said a good prosthesis could give me my once active life back. They all agreed that amputation was not only one way forward but a strong option. The alternatives weren’t good and when my own surgeon said she would choose amputation over the other options, I asked her to remove my foot.

That makes it sound so matter of fact but the months leading up to this surgery have not been easy. I’ve lost sleep. I’ve never second-guessed myself so much. I’ve been distracted and foggy. I’ve worried about the complications and the phantom pain and what it’s going to be like to drive with a prosthesis, or do everyday things like taking a shower. I’ve worried about my career and my ability to put food on the table while I recover.

Unexpectedly, I’ve also worried about how I would tell you. When I was in hospital 12 years ago it was you who got me through it with your relentless encouragement and cheerleading. Total strangers sent me flowers. Some sent me books and DVDs. One day the nurse walked in with a confused look on her face and a cordless phone. “There’s an Art Wolfe on the phone for you,” she said, clearly unimpressed with her new role as my receptionist. Art, long one of my greatest heroes, had called to tell me not to give up, to keep fighting. I guess what I’m saying is you helped me get through this the first time—more than you can ever know—and it’s a little embarrassing to have to tell you I’m back here again.

I’ve re-written this so many times. It’s not an easy conversation to have. Amputation is a scary word. A couple months ago I ordered some crutches and when the Fed Ex driver dropped them off she said, “I hope no one needs these.” Without thinking I told her I was getting my foot amputated and her eyes filled with tears, and I had to later tell Cynthia I had broken our Fed Ex lady. I have struggled to find a graceful way to talk about this, and that’s part of the reason I’m telling you now, after the fact. I just didn’t know how to bring it up.

But there’s more. My surgical dates have changed a couple times, and that’s been a difficult mental and emotional rollercoaster. I just didn’t want to amplify that by announcing this and then jerking everyone around with date changes. And this is all just scary as shit and I wanted the freedom to chicken out, and avoid having to make my cowardice a matter of public record. And on top of that I was finding this all difficult and surreal and the thought of thousands of voices chiming in on my decision was truly overwhelming. Thousands of beautiful, caring, wonderful voices, but thousands all the same and the thought of it felt too much for me to handle ahead of time.

So, that brings us to now. As I head into this I’m nervous (an understatement). My family is nervous (also an understatement, maybe more so). But I’m also hopeful. I’m hopeful that once I’ve recovered and have my prosthetic leg I can hike again, that I can travel again and travel further and with less pain. I’m hopeful that this might deepen my understanding of myself and what it means to live a courageous and creative life. But right now, mostly I’m frightened. I know it’s only a foot, and it’s only getting in the way these days but I’m losing a part of myself and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I’ll update you when the fog clears and we know how the surgery went, but I’ve been told that it’ll take at least six weeks to get into an initial prosthesis for some first tentative steps. That seems astonishingly fast to me. Until then I’ve got something for you, and a request.

3 New Monographs + 18 Desktop Wallpapers
Pay What You Want

Asking for help is hard, so while I was anticipating all this I had some time to make something for you in the hopes that it would inspire you, and that it might also be a way for me to get a leg up (ha! See what I did there?) on covering the cost my new prosthesis, as well as getting me through this downtime while I’m not working and teaching in other ways. So I’ve put together 3 new monographs of my work, including my most recent series from Kenya that is mostly unpublished until now, and a beautiful new collection of desktop wallpapers in hopes that they inspire you towards adventures of your own.

My new monographs, released today are:

The Wild & The Wonder, Encounters with the Extraordinary in Kenya
Namaste, Encounters with India
Catchlight, Encounters with Humanity

All 3 digital monographs, bundled with my 2023 Wallpaper Collection, are yours for any amount you choose. I’ve never done a Pay What You Want option but this gives me a chance to offer something beautiful to you, something I hope will inspire you, and for you to be a continued part of my recovery in any way you choose. If you’d like to help me get back on my feet, this is a way you can do that. When you follow this link and choose to download this bundle, you’ll see that the price is set to $20 (we had to put something there) but you can change that to anything you like. No matter what you choose, I am so grateful for your support of me and my work.

Drop Me a Note.

The next week is going to be a lonely one in hospital and I know many of you are going to want to reach out. I would love to hear from you! But can I ask you a favour? Please leave a comment on my blog (you can do that anytime here) rather than hitting reply to this email. My emails go to Cynthia and this is a heavy load for her right now. I’ve given her permission to just ignore the emails for a while. Emails also demand replies in a way that blog comments don’t, and as you might imagine, we’re just not sure what the coming days look like in terms of our time and emotional energy. I would love to hear from you. I can’t put into words how much your support means to me, please feel free to fill the comments on my blog here. I’ll read every one of them. But I suspect I could also be heavily drugged for a while, so if the best—or the only—reply I can muster is a or a or even a , then I hope you’ll understand.

What’s next?

In the coming days, once I can manage the pain on my own, and assuming there are no complications, they should send me home. We’ll head back to Vancouver Island and wait for things to heal up before beginning the long journey of fitting and learning to live with a prosthesis. As someone who watched The Six-Million Dollar Man as a kid I admit I might have unreasonable expectations for my new bionic leg. I’ve got months to go before anything remotely normal, I think, but you know where to find me until then. For almost 12 years you’ve been the reason I write what I write and create what I do, and that won’t stop. The moment I can be back to writing and reminding you that you’re not alone on this wonderful  creative journey, I will. Thank you for your love.

To get the bundle of my new monographs and the 2023 wallpaper collection, click this link. This collection is yours for whatever you choose to pay. I’ve always tried to inspire you in my teaching, to light a fire rather than just filling a bucket. I created these in hopes of continuing to do that for you while I’m waiting to get back on my feet again.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David.

Last Sunday I posted a photograph on the blog, and in The Contact Sheet email, inviting you to consider how I made one of my photographs. The exercise was a simple one, and I know some of you have seen it before but you can still learn from it. Look at the image and ask yourself what decisions I made to get the final photograph. What lens might I have used, what point of view, what settings, even what changes I might have made in development. I promised I’d walk you through it from my perspective and the video below does that. This video is also episode 1 from my ImageWork course which opens again for purchase/enrollment this Sunday.

I’ve had some really great feedback from many of you about the videos I’ve been putting out lately and if you liked them I think you’re going to love this series.

This coming Sunday (assuming you’re a subscriber to my emails) I’ll send you more details about the remaining 17 video lessons that make up the ImageWork course and introduce you to the bonus resources. This is the best valued course I’ve made to date, and I think probably the best-reviewed. I hope you’ll give it your consideration when I show you all the details this Sunday.

Oh! One last thing – I promised I’d draw a random winner from those who participated in the discussion about the image on the last post. The prize is a full enrollment in ImageWork (and ImageStory, too, but more on that later) and that winner is Steve Carey. I’ll be reaching out to enroll Steve in the both ImageWork and ImageStory on Sunday. 

Questions? I’d love to hear from you.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

As a child, my cousin James had a reputation for taking things apart. I recall one Christmas when he dismantled down to the wiring every gift he was given. Remote-control cars? Give him 20 minutes, and there would be nothing left but a pile of tiny screws, little motors, and the tears of his mother who probably should have known better than to give him such an expensive present.

But the extraordinary thing is, he learned to put them back together again, and it didn’t surprise any of us when he became one of those people who could rebuild or fix anything as an adult.

Taking things apart and figuring out why they work is probably one of the best ways to learn something, and while I don’t recommend it with your cameras since there’s a certain amount of trial and error involved, it’s probably the most powerful way to learn to make photographs.

I was told that the best way to learn to make photographs is to make a lot of them, and that’s impossible to argue with. But I made thousands of photographs for years before they became good photographs. One of the things that turned it around for me was a simple exercise. Now a habit, it’s simple, can be done anywhere, and will change the way you look at—and make—photographs.

Take them apart. Layer by layer, strip them down. And as you do, ask yourself this one big question:

What makes the image work? Maybe you don’t think it works, but you can still ask: what makes it look the way it does?

It’s simple reverse engineering (though not always easy). Begin by just looking at an image for a bit. Let your eyes wander the frame. Be aware of what you think or feel. Are there hidden surprises the longer you look? Most images can’t be fully enjoyed with the kind of quick glance we give them. Where does your eye go? What’s it about?

Now ask what decisions the photographer made that lead to it looking like this? Did the shutter speed contribute anything to the image? What about the chosen aperture or where the focus was placed? Did the overall choice of exposure, either brighter or darker, make the image feel a certain way? Where was the camera when the image was made? Does that contribute something? Can you tell which kind of focal length was used? What does that choice add to the image?

Just a few simple questions, but asking them can help us become more visually literate. And the more deeply you go with it, the more you’ll learn. Now ask why: Why did the photographer make those choices and not others? Sometimes they won’t matter; sometimes it’s one big decision that makes the image work. Other times it’s a combination of choices without which the photograph would fall apart.

And you can do this with darkroom work too, though there is a bit more guesswork involved. What do you think the photographer might have chosen to do with brightness or contrast? Is it bright or dark? High contrast or low? What about saturation or the way the colours work? If it’s black and white, why do you think that decision was made? Do you think it would be as powerful in colour? Where does your eye go in the frame?

I want to try an interactive exercise with you, and there’s a $400 prize on the line.

I’m going to show you one of my photographs, and for the darkroom portion, I’ll make it easier by showing you what my RAW file looks like. You can choose to do the exercise on your own, or you can play along with the rest of us in the comments below, where you can leave your answers and look at the answers of others.

I’ll play as well, and on Wednesday, I’ll post a link to a video of me unpacking the image from start to finish. And to give you a little motivation, I’ll put a prize on the line and draw the name of one person who plays along to give it to. I’ll tell you more about that on Wednesday.

Here’s that image, both before and after:

So, what choices made this image look the way it does?

What decisions both in-camera and in the digital darkroom do you think I made? Guesses are fine. But for each of them, because there’s no magic in specific shutter speeds or focal lengths, the big question remains: Why did I choose that? What does that choice accomplish?

What effect does it have in the image? How would the image be different if I’d made a different choice about shutter speed or aperture, focal length, or my point of view (where I put the camera)? What if I’d used the light differently? What about the darkroom? Can you tell which overall changes I made? Don’t worry about how for now. Is it brighter? More contrast? Saturation? And if so, did I change the saturation everywhere? What about dodging and burning, can you see how I might have gently nudged your eye away from some elements in order to draw it toward others?

I’m going somewhere with this, and on Wednesday, I’ll send you that video I promised and talk more about how this approach can forever change your photography as it has done for me. For now, take a look at the images, and if you want to play along, leave your own thoughts and answers to these questions in the comments below. The winner will be chosen randomly and it’s just for fun, but the prize is a good one—it’s worth about $400. Just be sure to reply before Wednesday because that’s when I’ll announce the winner and the prize.

The best thing about this is there are no secrets. Every image in the world is there to be unpacked and learned from, and I want to teach you how to do that because if you can learn to do it with the photographs of others, you can learn to make those decisions and understand the effect of them when you’re holding your camera and making your own photographs.

See you on Wednesday!

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

Being able to dissect an image is a helpful skill. Looking at a photograph and identifying the various choices that led to the look and feel of that image, even when it’s your own (maybe especially when it’s your own) makes us stronger photographers that are more fluent in the visual language.

I’ve been talking a lot lately about the choices we make, and how our photographs are a result of the combinations of all those choices and what they contribute to the image. I though perhaps walking you through some of my photographs, beginning with this one, might be helpful (even if you never photograph giraffes).

The video below is about 17 minutes long and walks through my in-camera and development decisions in the making of a photograph from Kenya back in January. I thought video might just be a better medium for this than writing it all out. I hope it’s helpful to you.

Questions? Leave them in the comments. There’s a wonderfully thoughtful community of photographers that gather here every couple of weeks and the comments are often as helpful as my own contributions, so even if you’ve got nothing to add, don’t miss the comments below.

Thanks, as always, for being here. Do me a favour? If you find my writing or my teaching valuable, would you take a moment to tell other photographers in your life? This is my life’s work and it means the world to me but it’s the people that make it possible (and so rewarding). Please feel free to share my articles and videos in any way that makes sense to you. Just point people to my blog here at davidduchemin.com or if you like the convenience of getting these articles by email and think your friends would too, just point them to MyContactSheet.com

I hope you enjoy the video.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

PS – Want more like this? I send these articles out every two weeks to photographers around the world who want to improve their craft and explore their creativity and I’d love to include you. Tell me where to send it and I’ll send you a copy of my best-selling eBook Make Better Photographs, as well bi-weekly articles, first-glimpse monographs of my new work, and very occasional news of resources to help you keep moving forward in this craft we love.

“Each and every one of your emails inspire and motivate me to want to jump right out of my chair away from my computer and shoot for the love of it . Thank you David.” – Millie Brown

Ask photographers (or God help you, the internet) what makes a good photograph and it won’t be long before someone says, “a good photograph tells a story.” I don’t think that’s true. Not always. I think there are spectacular photographs that tell no story at all. They leave an impression. They elicit an emotional response. Others provide information. And if you’re not one of those photographers with “visual storyteller” printed on your business card, you need to know that your work is no less important. A lot of poems don’t tell stories, but it would be absurd for all the poets out there to feel like they should instead be short story writers or novelists.
 
An article from CameraWorld U.K. asserts, “Photographs tell a story when they incite an emotional response.” But many photographs do this well without telling a story. Abstracts. Expressionism. Impressionism. The article went on to say, “the best photos tell stories by prompting viewers to question what happens next.” This is partly true; photos that prompt viewers to question what happens next can be powerful, but not all photographs are about a happening.
 
Good photographs don’t necessarily tell a story any more than good writing must always tell a story. But storytelling is powerful, and the photographer who understands what makes stories powerful can use those same elements in photographs that don’t necessarily tell a story but leverage some of the same powerful elements to create powerful responses in us.
 
The question worth asking is, “how do we experience stories?” and then applying that to the kind of photographs we make. So stop reading and take a moment to ask yourself what makes a good story for you. What hooks you?
 
It’s important because even if the best photographs told a story (which, to be clear, I believe is untrue), we have to remember not all stories are good stories. Not every story connects or resonates.
 
So what makes a good story for you? This matters because if you can’t say what makes a good story, then there’s no hope of putting those elements into a photograph. Even if you don’t make “storytelling photographs,” you owe it to yourself to understand why stories are so important to humans that we’ve been called “the storytelling animal” because if you know why we resonate with stories, you can make photographs that press the same buttons.
 
This is not about how to tell stories with your photographs; it’s about how to make photographs that press the same buttons as good stories. Though if you understand these ideas, you’ll probably tell better stories as well.
 
Stories Have a Point of View.

All stories are told from a point of view—most of them by a narrator—and there are all kinds of ways a narrator might tell that story. How interesting the story is can be strongly influenced by how interesting you find the narrator. Sure, they tell you what’s happening, but the choices they make—what they leave in, what they leave out, the order in which they tell the events, and more—help determine whether you like the narrator, trust them, connect with them, and ultimately whether you enjoy the story.

A photograph with an interesting point of view can also pull us in. That point of view might be conveyed by where the photographer stands, which lens they opt to use, or the moment they choose. It could be a choice of shutter speed or the careful use of depth of field. But there were choices made, and the more interesting those choices are, the more likely it is that a particular point of view is put forward, as in “look at this, and look at it in this way.”
 
Are you being intentional about your point of view? Not only where you place the camera (though that’s huge) but also in your other choices.
 
Stories Have Characters We Connect With.

Not every image has a person or an animal in it, but many do, and the photograph will connect better when you make choices that allow the person responding to the image to connect with the characters. That doesn’t mean we have to like them, but you have to tell us something about them. I don’t need to know their whole life story, but the details you choose matter. What do the clothes tell me about the life they live and where they live it? What are they holding in their hands that tells me what they do or what might be about to happen? What does the look on their face tell me about who they are and what’s important to them? Individually these might not “tell a story,” but they might hint at one and make me care or, better yet, make me wonder.

Stories Have Mystery.

Wonder comes from mystery, from not knowing everything. A good storyteller knows that if everything is buttoned up and nothing is left unresolved, then there’s no work left for the imagination—and the imagination is too powerful to ignore.

Leave me something to wonder about, and I’ll remain more engaged than if you tell me everything.

 
Generally speaking, the more you include in your photograph beyond what is absolutely necessary, the more diluted it becomes. More information does not mean more impact. Often, it’s the opposite. So let elements of your image remain in shadow, allow a hand to enter the frame with no suggestion of who it belongs to, choose moments when the person in the frame looks out of frame and make me wonder what they’re looking at. Will it “tell a better story?” Not necessarily, but the same technique used in good storytelling can work for the same reasons in good photographs: mystery hooks us. It engages the imagination. 

Stories Have Setting.

Stories take place somewhere and usually somewhen, to coin a word; stories with a strong sense of place and time pull us in. Yes, they help the story make more sense in an informational way, but they can also establish mood. They can pique our interest because the way the narrator describes the place we feel like we’re there. We feel immersed in it or that we want to be immersed in it. A photograph of Venice might not tell a story, but it can still be powerful because we resonate with the way the photograph shows us the place. We feel it. We long for it. For those of us who have been there, you’ll be tapping into all the memories we have of the place, and memories, as science tells us, are just the stories we tell ourselves about events in our past.
 
The photographer who can wrap their mind around the idea of showing a sense of place or time in a way that has mood, in a way that feels a certain way (which might be as simple as getting out of bed a little earlier to photograph in beautiful light or seeking fog or rain) will not necessarily tell a full story but can create an image that resonates with the viewer in ways that great stories do.
 
Stories Have Conflict.

Something happens in a story. It’s one reason still photographs are so limited in what they tell in one frame, and it’s why I’m more comfortable saying a single frame can probably imply (or suggest) a story than really tell it. A story has a beginning, middle, and end, and most still photographs do not. But it’s more than just “something happens.” No one makes a movie of a person walking across the street. But make it hard for that person to cross the street, give them a challenge or an obstacle, and might become a story. Make it a challenge we identify with, make the stakes high enough, and we’ll really get into it.
 
Most still photographs don’t have conflict. But they do have contrast. Or, rather, they can. And when you make that contrast clear enough, we lean into the image in the same way we do with conflict in a movie. We notice contrasts and juxtapositions. They imply something. And if you make choices that amplify those juxtapositions—really make them clear, perhaps with your framing or choice of moment or a lens that makes background elements seem as large as foreground elements against which you are comparing them—then you’ll engage my attention.

Human beings notice differences. We compare and contrast, so do this well in your photograph, and though you may not tell a full story, you’ll be using a tool that storytellers have used for thousands of years.

 There’s a reason so many stories are about opposites: love and solitude, rich and poor, good and evil. We know that something’s gotta give, and one will prevail. But which one?

Storytelling is powerful, not only for the photographer hoping to “tell stories” but for any picture-maker. If you want your work to connect to the human being who will experience it, then you need to be aware of how that human being might experience it and which tools you might use to make that experience stronger. Choose a bolder point of view. Give us stronger characters, better yet give us characters with character. Don’t only give us a setting, give us a real feeling of place and time. Resist the urge to show us everything, leave something to the imagination. And become more aware of contrasts and juxtapositions. We resonate with these elements of storytelling. They aren’t the only things we resonate with, but they are powerful.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

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 experience, it’s different thinking that explains the different results. Two photographers making different choices for different reasons will create different photographs, often very different photographs.

Photographs are made: they are created from a long series of choices that differ from one photographer to another. In the scenario above, it would be easy for the less experienced photographer to look at his image and say, “I made the same photograph, so why are they so different?” But that’s just it. They aren’t the same photograph; they’re different photographs of the same scene, and there is often a world of difference between the two.

In the same way that a great meal is rarely amazing only because of the ingredients, subject matter alone (our ingredients) rarely makes a photograph good or compelling.

A photograph is made of much more than the stuff you choose to include in the frame. Sure, you stood in roughly the same place, but what focal length did you use, and why? Did your faster shutter speed get in the way of representing the clouds in a way that a longer, slower shutter speed might have resulted in? Were your choices of aperture and the resulting depth of field the same? What about the moment you chose, or even the time of day? Did you underexpose it a bit? Use a filter, or introduce motion in the camera itself? Still not sure why the two photographs are so different?

And then, you pull the images into your chosen development tool, and one photographer brightens and warms their image while another does nothing. One might dodge and burn a little to lead the eye more effectively around the frame, or perhaps add contrast and selectively adjust saturation, while the other does nothing more than hitting Auto-tone and moving on.

Choices make the photograph, and it’s often a combination of many smaller choices rather than one big decision. It is often subtle, and subtlety comes from experience.

For example, it takes experience (perhaps I should say mindful experience) to learn that cranking the saturation up on the whole image is often less effective than raising it slightly in some areas while lowering it in others. That choice alone can reduce the visual competition created by too many colours at play and make a much stronger photograph without changing the basic ingredients. The same is true of sharpening or adding exposure or contrast. It takes experience to know that it’s not about getting the correct exposure but about getting the most expressive exposure.

Photography is not unlike cooking, though I don’t know many cooks who would say, “You know, I had the same ingredients and the same skillet, so I just can’t explain why the other meal tastes so much better.” Of course they can explain it. Cooking is their craft, and they know the end result comes down to the choices they made.

Cooking is not only about having ingredients and the tools to cook them. It’s about flavour profiles and textures and presentation and probably a million things I don’t understand because I’m not a chef, yet I do know a great meal isn’t made by a skillet but by a chef making great decisions. Interesting decisions. Unexpected, nuanced, and creative decisions that come not only from a deep knowledge of ingredients, tools, and techniques but also from how people experience flavour and texture: they know what makes a great meal.

Photographers are often too preoccupied with making “correct” decisions. Doing it by the book will get you “by the book” photographs, but is that all we want?

At the beginning, perhaps. Hell, when I started out, I would have been thrilled with “by the book.” But surely not as we mature in our craft. I hope that as we grow, we pay less attention to being merely correct, and spend more time being more creative in the combinations of our choices. Growth offers us the chance to start thinking less about the subject matter and the tools and more about how we might combine them in new ways to create certain feelings and tell specific stories, to make very different photographs with very similar tools and ingredients.

It’s in our choices, and choices come from thinking. Specifically, different choices come from thinking differently, and that leads to different results. Better results? Sometimes. But not always, though in those moments when the different choices lead to rubbish results, then you learn something, and you discover those particular ingredients don’t go so well together—at least not the way you put them together. Maybe the proportions were wrong. Maybe you seared when you should have baked. And yes, maybe it’s just that you just didn’t the right tool because sometimes that’s what makes the difference. I mean, there’s no way you’re going to make a great crème brulée using a hair dryer instead of a butane torch. (Of course a great chef who knows he’s missing a crucial tool will pivot and make something spectacular without it. Something different, sure, but something great. A great chef won’t make something mediocre and then blame his tools.)

So how do you learn to do this? I bet a great chef can sit down to a meal anywhere in the world—a meal that someone else cooked—and tell you more about it than you might ever guess. They’d talk about the ingredients, for sure, and how the potatoes in Peru are unlike potatoes anywhere else, but I bet the conversation would quickly become more interesting. What choices were made with those ingredients? What combinations of ingredients, in what proportions, and using which techniques resulted in those specific flavours? Which flavours and textures balance with, contrast with, or amplify each other to create the final result?

And maybe, if you’re sitting with a chef who truly loves their craft, they’ll tell you how they might have done it differently and to what effect, or which ideas this meal brings to mind for some hybrid dish they’ve only now just conceived. It’s highly unlikely they’ll rush home and buy a better skillet.

So I wonder, can you do the same with photographs? Can you look at another photographer’s work and let it wash over you and stir your emotions and imagination and then reverse engineer it to decode the choices made by that photographer? What did they do with their tools to mix the basic universal ingredients of every photograph: light, space, and time? Which combination of choices with gear, technique, and the elements in the frame resulted in this one photograph that makes you feel a certain way? And how might it all have been different had other choices been made? Think about it, because if you can do that when looking at the photograph, you’ll be better able to do it when making one.

This is a long, circuitous way of reminding you to study photographs. To reverse engineer them. To figure out why the photographs of others make you feel a certain way and how that was accomplished. Which choices did that photographer make? What was included and excluded? Does the focal length add something? What about shutter speed? The aperture, the placement of the camera? Is there mystery or mood in the image? Which choice or choices are responsible for that?  Is it all down to the choice of moment or use of colour?

We should be doing this all the time, not only to learn our craft but to revel in it. We create photographs. That’s what we do. Shouldn’t we have a deep and growing sensitivity to what makes one image a compelling visual experience while another might fall short? Shouldn’t we be thinking a little less about what makes a great camera and much more about what makes a great photograph?

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

Want to explore this more? I wrote The Heart of the Photograph to explore the choices we make, specifically as they relate to how our photographs will be experienced. If you’re looking for your next challenge as a photographer or the spark of new inspiration, you can get The Heart of the Photograph here on Amazon, or from your favourite bookseller.

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 second video (it’s only 10 minutes long) is below.

If you enjoy this kind of shorter video, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Even better, I’d love to hear from you if you’ve got ideas about topics you’d like covered, or if you have specific questions. Just leave them here!

New to the idea of dodging and burning or using selective adjustments to draw the eye? A few years ago I wrote Drawing The Eye, an eBook about this very thing. It became one of my most popular books. You can get it on Craft & Vision for only $16. If you get just one idea from this book I think it could the way you do your development, and how you feel about your final images.

Are you new to the idea of dodging and burning or using selective adjustments to draw the eye? A few years ago I wrote Drawing The Eye, an eBook about this very thing. It became one of my most popular books. You can get it here on Craft & Vision for only $16. If you get just one idea from this book I think it could the way you do your development, and how you feel about your final images.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David.

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 for you. You can watch that below.

I hope this is helpful to you. If you’ve got questions that I can take a shot at answering, leave them in the comments.

PS – Want more like this? I send these articles out every two weeks to photographers around the world who want to improve their craft and explore their creativity and I’d love to include you. Tell me where to send it and I’ll send you a copy of my best-selling eBook Make Better Photographs, as well bi-weekly articles, first-glimpse monographs of my new work, and very occasional news of resources to help you keep moving forward in this craft we love.

“Each and every one of your emails inspire and motivate me to want to jump right out of my chair away from my computer and shoot for the love of it . Thank you David.” – Millie Brown

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 any pursuit at which one begins to find some level of comfort or success?

I didn’t go to Kenya to make larger, sharper versions of the photographs I’ve made before. I went to make photographs that were, well, see, that’s the problem; I had no idea. I’ve grown in the last year, and creatively, I’m almost unrecognizable since I did my first safari in 2009. I wanted photographs that were more, I don’t know . . . visceral. Photographs that evoked more, if to no one else but me. In the back of my head, I heard the echo of something Jay Maisel once said: if you want more interesting pictures, then be a more interesting person.

My slightly adjusted version goes like this: if you want more interesting photographs, have more interesting experiences. Try something new.

Fortunately for me, I’d planned an itinerary that gave me some options where new and interesting experiences were concerned. For one, I’d planned for three nights at a rhino conservancy in the north, a place suggested to me by my guide in Nairobi the year before because I’d be allowed to get my cameras closer to the rhino than ever before. I’d also planned for four nights in Amboseli, known for large tuskers walking daily across the lake bed in front of Mt. Kilimanjaro, and then two nights in the south, where I’d booked some helicopter time to get me over the soda lakes known for colourful swirls of algae blooms and flocks of bright pink greater flamingos.

I had a blast. It was the most fun I’ve had with cameras in my hand in a while. But it was also (and here I’m coming around to my point) really hard. It was so outside my comfort zone that I felt like I was starting over. The helicopter especially had a way of making me stupid, like I’d never held a camera in my hand before. But it was all different. Walking with a wild elephant and then (somewhat counterintuitively) lying down in front of him as he approached is not a skill I’ve already learned. There’s no eBook for that; you just do it. You figure it out (mostly, what you figure out is how to hold the camera still and not soil your pants while still composing your shot).

The rhinos were different. One doesn’t (I am told) lie down in front of rhinos. But back in Nairobi, a friend had given me a metal cage that was just large enough to put my camera in—a contraption designed exactly for this purpose, and he suggested I give it a whirl. “Your guides will help you get it where you need it,” he said, and then I ran off to download a remote app to connect my Sony A1 to my iPhone, giggling like a little boy at the thought of getting my cameras so close to something so large.

A couple of weeks later, I was working with two guides whose skill was matched only by their patience as we worked to get the cage into the path of southern white rhinoceroses while fighting the very buggy remote software and trying at the same time to pay attention to composition and moment and keep my fingers crossed that at some point it would all come together. Most of the time, it didn’t. The connection between camera and iPhone would drop, the rhinos would go the other way, or they’d walk past it, tipping it over as they went. But I didn’t need it to work all of the time; the times it all goes wrong don’t matter (though they teach good lessons)—I only needed it to work sometimes, and it did. Brilliantly.

I had three nights to get the rhinos right. That meant focusing. It meant saying no when the radio was buzzing with news of a leopard or pride of lions. It meant going out each morning before dawn and returning after sunset, and skipping the traditional cocktail as the sun went down. It meant the answer was always yes when one of my wonderful guides smiled at me and said, “Shall we try just one more time?” (knowing he’d be saying it again and again until the light was long gone).

There’s an opportunity cost involved in being focused. What if the lion or leopard sighting was amazing? It takes some discipline to stick to the task, especially when the rhinos (and the remote software) have a strong mind of their own and the task isn’t looking promising. This was well outside my comfort zone, and when things weren’t working, it meant I was missing two shots: the one I was working on (i.e., screwing up) and the one I was saying no to elsewhere—the one with the three-legged leopard juggling five warthogs in perfect light.

The aerial photography was mind-blowing. Lake Magadi is a soda lake in southern Kenya, sitting a couple of kilometres from the Tanzanian border. The pH in the lake makes it prone to incredible algae blooms, and the results are bright and shifting colourful swirls. I was there to photograph these patterns with flamingos (fingers crossed) flying over them to give scale and life. How hard could it be? Well, it turns out there’s a huge learning curve. Time of day matters. Light matters. Keeping your shit together long enough to consider composition while the helicopter banks hard enough to make you reconsider your lunch choices matters, too. It’s just not easy. It crossed my mind several times that I could be making safer photographs (and certainly a little easier) back on the ground.

The best photographs I’ve made in the last 37 years have all included an element of risk. Sometimes that risk was physical, but most often, it was creative or psychological. The risk is often that the person I want to photograph will say no, or the photographs will be crap. The risk is that taking the time try a new approach means you’ll be missing the chance to do the stuff that does work. The tried and true. Sure, you’ll be repeating yourself, but better to go home with some version of what you’ve done before than nothing at all, right?

I don’t think so. I guess there’s an argument to be made to get your safety shots but is “safe” the best we can do? Is the goal of all this the creation of a photograph that’s only slightly different than the one you made before? I mean, if you liked the last one, you’ll like the next one, right? Perhaps. But I’ve found there is a law of diminishing returns at work, and I’m generally less satisfied with the same old stuff, even if the image is technically better. It just doesn’t thrill me. More importantly, I’ve found the risks that scare me are the ones most guaranteed to teach me some new thing, a new skill, or even just give me the proof that I really can do this. They’re the opportunities for a new challenge, and challenge—risk!—is necessary for creative flow. It’s where we do our best work.

Your risk is not my risk. Some of you will never feel the need to lie down in front of an elephant (in the company of guides and spotters who knew what they were doing). Some of you have no interest in helicopters or learning to use an iPhone to control your camera. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to bother with the  remote trigger thing. Too fussy, I thought. Too unpredictable. The results were too uncertain. Of course they were uncertain! It’s all uncertain! And that’s where we learn, grow, and find ourselves face-to-face with the unexpected. That’s where we find ourselves outside the rut we’ve been in, and it’s where we find—unexpectedly—a new groove. Those are the experiences I’m after.

Science disproves the idea that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. We old dogs (some older than others) are, in fact, much more teachable. We’ve learned how to learn. We’ve got less to lose. But oh, are we timid at times. 

It’s just easier to do what we’ve done and what we know works for us. But is it still working? The same-old, same-old? Is it still challenging you? Does it bring you the same rewards or joys? Or could the same-old be a foundation on which to build something new? A launching point for new experiences?

My own version of same-old is what gave me the muscle memory to do what I needed to do with the camera when I was otherwise distracted by the huge tusker in front of me. It gave me the recall and the instinct to do what I needed to do in the helicopter without thinking so I could focus more on the art direction than not falling out or trying to remember how to change my settings.

To return to my point, the magic is outside the comfort zone. Sometimes we’re forced there, but most often, we need to choose it. New experiences, new technology, new creative challenges, and new ideas—new tricks for old dogs. Maybe for you, it’s photographing people. Ack! Are you kidding? That’s terrifying! Exactly.

Maybe it’s as simple as changing the time of day during which you photograph. What? Photograph at night? But I don’t know how! Precisely. Maybe it’s time to learn to use strobes, create multiple exposures, or explore ICM. But what if I fail? Yup. But what if you don’t? And what’s “failure,” anyway? Don’t you mean, “But what if I learn?”

A good photograph is the product of many things. Light and our choices about it. Use of space and time. What we do with colour and perspective. Our choice of optics. Yes, sometimes it’s also the gear. A good photograph happens at the intersection of so many things, to which I want to add one more: risk. Play with the light, the gear, your point of view, and the choice of moment. Play with it all, because we learn when we play. But don’t play it safe.

I’d love to answer questions about any of this. Using remote triggers or helicopters, or if you just want to say hello, you can do that on my blog here. I’d love to hear from you.

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 work, and the creative opportunities in those two areas are almost limitless. I don’t know anyone who would deny that choices made with the camera and in development have a significant role in whether the final image succeeds or not. Whether it’s poetic or iconic, or whatever you hope your photograph is or does.

But what about the edit?

What about the choice of that one final image from among many? In the case of a body of work, what about the choice of the dozen or two dozen final photographs that get pulled from what might be hundreds or thousands of sketch images or possible alternatives?

How might we be thinking about that and the other choices and processes that surround those choices? And why are so few photographers talking about it when I know so many of them are overwhelmed by it? I wonder if it’s as simple as believing that it’s just not as important. Just pick something sharp and well-exposed and move on? Pick all the images that aren’t stinkers and call it done?

I think one of the most overlooked ways to improve your photography right now—without the need to upgrade your camera or get the latest version of your favourite lens—is to get pickier. To begin thinking about the edit or choice of final frames more creatively. More intentionally.

Ansel Adams said 12 images a year was a good crop. I don’t generally think of my photographs as plants, but I like his point. And I think our work would be better if we were more selective, more creative about the ways we looked at editing and more intentional in what we did with our images. I think we’d make better, stronger photographs.

I wonder . . . when you edit or select your best work, which questions are you asking yourself? What criteria do you have for making that selection? How much do you trust that process? Are you still deleting everything that doesn’t make the cut the first time around? Are you looking for quantity or quality—and do you have a clear system for understanding what that means to you?

I’ve heard it said that photographers are their own worst editors, but I wonder if that’s only because we often don’t give the editing as much thought as we give to our gear or our camera work. 

And—because I’ve been that guy—I wonder how many are just relying on the Un-Suck filter in Photoshop to “polish a turd” rather than choosing an image that’s, ahem, not a turd in the first place.

 
I have two points to this. The first is a plea. It’s more than the nudge I might normally give you. I’m practically begging you to ask yourself what it would take for you to be pickier with the images you choose as your final selects and which ones you relegate to the archives.

Could you be giving the whole process a little more time, or actually, because my approach to editing takes less time, could you be giving it more focus and attention?

Could you be clearer about your selection criteria and more intentional about what you’re choosing those images for in the first place? What would your accumulated work look like in a year if you didn’t settle on the 3-stars but chose, instead, the ones that were an unqualified “Hell, yes!”?

Your work can be so much stronger simply by choosing stronger photographs.

In my last video, I talked about three ways we could love our photographs more. This is the big one: desire more for them. Demand more from them. Hold out for the very best of them. Never settle. But how do we do that?

In a couple days I’ll be inviting you to join me for this year’s Beyond The Shutter course, which I created to help photographers get clearer about one big question (and the others that follow when you start asking it) and that’s this:

“I just shot a bunch of photographs. Now what?”

It’s about editing down to our best work, but more than that, it’s about how we think about editing, how we can make it less overwhelming, what criteria we can use to select our best work, and how we can use the tools of Lightroom to help with that?
 
It’s about doing something beautiful and meaningful with your photographs, like monographs, multi-media presentations, or web-galleries and using the tools you already have in Adobe Lightroom to do this much more easily than you might believe possible.
 
One of my most popular courses to date, Beyond The Shutter is a video course created to help you become the strongest photographer you can be. To be less intimidated, less overwhelmed by the stuff that needs to happen once you put the camera down, in order to make stronger choices. It’s about the neglected other half of our creative process, a part of our craft that—once I engaged with it myself and stopped being so ad hoc about it all—has become one of the most rewarding parts of what I do (rather than a dreaded after-thought).

I want to help change your thinking about it. I want to show you my own process and how I make things like the monographs I send out, and so much more.
 
You’ll get all the details on Sunday. The ideas and techniques I want to share with you will change your enjoyment of this craft you love so much, and will help you take next steps toward being more creative and intentional in the work you do beyond the shutter, and be more satisfied with the final results.

Last year’s course was amazing and brought huge changes to the photographers who joined me. They said things like “I never imagined this course would so increase my joy in making photographs. This deeper understanding of the editing process makes my own camera work more creative, focused, and playful,” and “You’ve hit this one out of the ballpark! I am so impressed with this series. I’m picking up so much concrete advice.“

Keep an eye open for more details and your invitation to join me for Beyond The Shutter. I’ll see you then.

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 has also occurred to me that we seem to love the photographs we are going to make—the next ones—more than the ones we’ve just made. We so often move on to the next thing so quickly. The next project. You know the one: the one for which you need that new lens. Or tripod. Or flash. I’m the same way, and there’s nothing wrong with creative momentum or new gear.

But I think if we loved the photographs we’ve just made as much as the ones we’re about to make, we’d make stronger images and have a richer photographic life.

So how? How can we do that? That might be one of your questions. The other question might be, “What on Earth is David going on about?” That’s fair too. Let me try to answer that with three ideas, or three ways we can carry the love of the photograph and the making of photographs, a little further.

Spend More Time With Them

In my last video I suggested you consider doing smaller edits when you’re working on a project. For what I do, I like daily edits, but whatever “smaller edits” mean to you and your work, I think you’ll benefit from it. But I also think multiple edits are important, and though I suggest spending more time, this multiple-edit approach is actually more effective and, in the end, takes less time.

I never completely trust my first edits. We choose our best work by looking through all kinds of different filters. There’s no telling what I might have been looking for when I did my first edits, so it’s always worth giving my images another look—and doing so at least three times rather than doing one gigantic, mind-numbing edit session to find the best of my work.

One of the best reasons for doing this, especially if you’re doing smaller edits as the work progresses, is that what a project looks like at the end and what it looked like at the very beginning are usually very different.

Our work grows and changes, as does how we look at that work. I know we get excited by the next thing, but one of the best ways to make new photographs when you can’t be out there with the camera is to revisit older work. Do another pass. See what comes to the top now that you’re seeing it with fresh eyes. I think not being in such a hurry with finding the best of our photographs, of revisiting them and giving them a second or third chance after we’ve shot them, is a stronger way of editing than the way it’s often done: one big marathon edit session after which we call it done and never give the unselected images another glance. That’s the first way we can give our photographs a little more love, and the result is stronger final images.

Do More With Them

I used to tell anyone who would listen to “print yer damn work!” Maybe you don’t print yourself. That’s OK; I don’t anymore, either. But I have it printed by a professional print lab, and it makes me a better photographer. There’s also such joy in holding the work and sharing it in tangible ways. When’s the last time you made a book, a slideshow or a collection of prints to pore over? When’s the last time you submitted them to a magazine or swapped out the prints on your wall?

If you want to love your photographs more, consider making something with them. The benefits are huge, and they’re practical. When we output our work, we spend more time with it. 




When that output is larger than what we might put on Instagram, or we have to spend money to make it happen, I think we’re more critical of that work. It keeps us honest and growing in our craft. 

I’ve found knowing what I will make with my photographs gives me an end game of sorts. It makes the edits easier when I know what I’m choosing my best images for. 

Protect Them

I also think if we love something, we protect it. Just last week I heard another story of a photographer who lost all their images because a hard drive crashed. I’ve heard stories of theft and fire or water damage as well, and I can’t for the life of me understand why photographers will spend so much money on gear and balk at buying whatever sized hard drives they need to create a simple backup of the work they’ve invested so much in. 




If your computer crashed right now or your main hard drive failed, how easy would it be to get back up and running without missing a beat or losing an image?

In case it’s been a while, this is just a reminder to consider giving your backup plan a second look. And if you aren’t current with your backups, maybe to take a moment a do that, you know, for the love of your photographs.

I’d love to hear from you on this. What do you do with your photographs once the camera goes back in the bag? You can be part of the conversation in the comments below.

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 JPEG file onto my hard drive when I was done.

I also came home with my edits mostly done. And my development work. And the monograph I sent out to the photographers in my community a week after I got home. By contrast, I have a friend who shot a safari five years ago who still hasn’t done a complete edit of his work. Five years later, his images are still sitting there begging to be seen, to be printed, or put into some form of creative output that can be shared with the world. 

Why? He gets overwhelmed by it all. And he doesn’t have a system. He looks at all those images and gets paralyzed. So while I’m excitedly making prints and sequencing monographs or web galleries, he and so many like him are doing…nothing.

It’s not a criticism. I know so many photographers who walk in the door after making a bunch of photographs and say, “Well, that was fun. Now what?” And because the edit can be so intimidating, it gets reduced to an ad hoc effort at picking a few good shots,  pushing some sliders around in Lightroom, and throwing them onto Instagram before moving on to the next thing. The reason I don’t criticize this approach (it’s really more a lack of an approach, isn’t it?) is because that’s how I used to do it, too.

Before I started doing assignment work, my editing was scattershot and intimidating. I probably still have folders of images from over 15 years ago that haven’t really had a fair shake. But client work forced me to get intentional about how I imported and organized my images, to be clear about my criteria for selecting the best of that work, and to be a little more systematic about the output.

That client work made a huge difference. Not just in my client work but also my personal work. Suddenly I was anticipating the output, and because I knew I’d be making something (a book or a monograph, for example), I started shooting more intentionally with that in mind. And I started thinking about editing much more creatively and purposefully.

By “editing,” I mean the work of selecting the best images from among the dross—or what I like to call the sketch images. It’s the work a photo editor would do if you or I had one, and it falls to us because, well, we probably don’t. In fact, I started looking at everything that needed to be done after the camera work was over as a more exciting creative opportunity and a chance to do something with my photographs.

This article is the first in a series in which I want to explore what we do after the camera goes back in the bag and the ways in which that can make us even stronger, more intentional, and more creative photographers when we take it out again.

The first question I want to ask (on your behalf) is this:

“How can I make the edit easier, less intimidating, or overwhelming?” 

I’ve got three initial ideas that I think can be really helpful, and they’re a big part of how I was able to come home with 30,000 images already mostly edited and the best of that work ready for output rather than dreading the pile of images I had yet to go through.

Just Look for the Best of the Best

We all photograph for different reasons and we all do things differently, but I think edits (especially the first edits done relatively soon after shooting) should be selections, not ratings. My own edit process goes much more quickly because I’m not looking for every single image that meets some basic minimal technical standard. I’m looking for the ones that make me lean in. The ones that make my heart sing. The ones that grab me and won’t let me not select them.

You might have a great reason for rating images, but I think trying to decide whether an image deserves 2, 3, or 4 stars slows the process. Because I’m looking for a few frames that are a decisive “Yes!”, I’ve found rating them makes me look for the wrong thing.

For me, a 3-star image isn’t a Yes! It’s a yawn.

Consider being more binary. Yes! Or no. After all, how many images do you really need? Wouldn’t it be easier just to look for the best 12 or 24? It is for me.

Do Smaller Edits

Break it down. I do daily field edits and come home with main selections already made. This makes it manageable, but it’s more than that. Doing daily edits means things don’t get away from you. It gives you a chance to spot things that aren’t working. For example, you’re more likely to notice that you accidentally shot small JPGs all day when you thought you had been shooting RAW. Or you discover your lens isn’t focusing quite right. Or your sensor needs cleaning. It’s better to discover that after one day of shooting and be able to fix it, rather than much later on when it’s just too late.

More than that, doing smaller daily edits harnesses the energy and excitement to comb through a manageable pile of images and give them your full attention, rather than later when the pile is much larger and your energy is diminished.Sure, I’ll do another pass later—usually a couple more passes—but the smaller edits make the best of my limited resources of time and attention (which wane after a few thousand images, let me tell you!).

Consider (or Choose) Your Output

Don’t just make photographs; make something with the photographs. I’ve found that knowing what I’m going to do with my images has made me a much better photographer and a much better editor. I now know what I’m choosing images for. 

My clients taught me to do this, but the biggest rewards have come in my personal work. I come home and almost always as a matter of creative habit, put my work into monographs and collections of prints. I now think in terms of bodies of work and collections and sequences, and that has also had huge payoffs in my creativity and the ongoing question of what I can do with my images rather than letting them sit on my hard drives hoping to see the light of day.

Those three ideas alone have made my editing simpler: looking only for the best and not worrying about the others, doing smaller bite-sized edit sessions, and consider your output, which allows you to think not only about which images are best, but best for what.

I’d love to hear from you about this. Where do you find your greatest challenges when it comes to choosing your best work and doing something with them, staying organized, and doing all the work that happens beyond the shutter? If you feel like talking about it, drop me a note in the comments below.

“Life is like a camera. Just focus on what’s important and capture the good times, develop from the negatives, and if things don’t work out, just take another shot.” – Anonymous

Respectfully, life is not like a camera. To assert otherwise is glib and cheesy and only shows a lack of experience in both life and photography. Life is so much more complex, and if you’ve lived a rich and deep life, you’ve probably also had your share of sorrows and times so dark, so entirely absent of light that you couldn’t possibly make a photograph even if you were inclined to pick the camera up in the first place. If life were like a camera, I’d have traded mine in many times over the years for a better model, you know what I mean? I’d also have asked for a bigger…lens.

No, life isn’t like a camera, but there’s an idea in that quote that resonates; I believe the notion that the skills it takes to become a mindful photographer are among the skills that make for a good life.

It takes an awareness of moments (not just in the big strokes but in the subtleties hardly noticed by others), the small details that give those moments their complexity and nuance. If it’s true that how we live our moments is how we live our lives, then the person who has learned to experience those moments more fully will experience life more fully. We can’t control how long we live (though we can probably lengthen our lives a little if we stop doing stupid shit), but we can choose to live with greater depth. And the camera is a gift of grace if it helps us hone our sensitivity to the quality of passing time, even slowing it, giving us the space to wonder and to remember moments that might otherwise have been forgotten or even unnoticed in the first place.

With time, photographers learn that nearly everything within the frame looks different with a change of perspective. A move to the left or right, up or down, controls how elements in the frame relate to each other. The story changes, often dramatically, when we alter the angle from which we view it. A different lens, a different filter, and it changes again. The photographer with some experience understands that vision is not only what we see but how we see, and that’s as true with the camera in our hands as it is without it. In that way, life is not at all like a camera. Life is the subject.

How we see and experience life is very much a question of where we choose to place the camera and the perspective we choose to embrace. Understanding that goes a long way to the making of an interesting photograph, not to mention an interesting life.

I’ve had a camera in my hand for so long that I don’t remember what it was like to be without it. I don’t know that the 13-year-old version of me ever looked out at the world as I am this morning, the fog dropping down from the hills behind my home, and experienced wonder at the light as the sun struggles to break through. Thirteen-year-olds often have their minds elsewhere. But the camera has persistently nudged me since then to notice. “Look at the light,” it implores us.

A photographer begins by paying attention to how much light is there and slowly gains a sensitivity to its other qualities: is it warm or cool, is it hard or soft, from what angle does it paint a subject, having come 147 million kilometres to do so? With time, a photographer learns to value the shadows, to see them not as the absence of light but as a source of mystery, and to include them as important parts of a composition. In a photograph, mood and real feeling are often created with less light (even colours become more saturated and intense) when underexposed.

It seems to me that a life well-lived is one in which we find light in unexpected places and look long enough into the shadows that we find mystery, not fear.

The photographer works in light, space, and time. Those are the raw materials, and you need a camera to make a photograph from them. But once learned, the greater gift is found beyond the camera: experiencing more fully what’s before our eyes and perceiving it with greater creativity. Being more aware of time and the moments our lives are made of, perhaps not to conjure more of them but to experience more deeply the moments we have. Becoming more sensitive to light, seeing the full spectrum, and finding something redeemable (if not downright beautiful) in the shadows.

What photography does not do and cannot do is encourage us to take another shot “if things don’t work out.” A sensitivity to time (and to the unique quality of moments that will never repeat themselves) does the opposite. It urges us to do it now. While we can. To press the shutter, to seize the moment. It’s true; you might miss it. And you might even get another crack at it. But as I turn 51 in a few days, I’m more aware than ever that there are fewer moments ahead of me than have passed me by. This doesn’t dissuade me from taking risks but the opposite. The time is now.

Moments are seldom repeatable. Not the moment the moon rises like a silver sliver under a blanket of heavy cloud over Hernandez, New Mexico (Ansel Adams, 1941), not the moment a man in a hat jumps a puddle behind the Gare Saint-Lasazre in Paris (Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1930), and not the moment you inhabit now.

To be more sensitive to time is to be more mindful of its passing. Maybe we get another chance to say “I love you”; maybe we don’t.

Maybe we get many more years to photograph the family together, put away the old tensions that have kept us distant, or make time for each other. Maybe we don’t. But we do have now, and more urgently: we might only have now. You can make a photograph in almost any light, and you can choose one of many different perspectives; what you cannot do is make a photograph of a moment that has passed. I suppose I might not have needed a camera to teach me that had my life gone in a different direction, but it has helped.

Life is not like a camera. It’s so much more. But the camera has given me a richer life, and for that, I am most grateful.

Among the many gifts it has imparted is you. And before the moment passes, I want to tell you how grateful I am for you. I make the photographs I create and write what I do not only for me but for you. I do it in the hopes of making a difference, of making your life a little fuller in some way. I couldn’t do that if you didn’t read what I write or care about what I photograph. You give me purpose and a place to put my love for this craft and those who practice it, and I am incredibly grateful. Thank you.

Cynthia joins me in wishing you a holiday filled with light, and for those of you for whom those lights cast more of a shadow this year than they did last year, we wish you love and courage.

For the Love of the Photograph,

David

PS – Want more like this? I send these articles out every two weeks to photographers around the world who want to improve their craft and explore their creativity and I’d love to include you. Tell me where to send it and I’ll send you a copy of my best-selling eBook Make Better Photographs, as well bi-weekly articles, first-glimpse monographs of my new work, and very occasional news of resources to help you keep moving forward in this craft we love.

“Each and every one of your emails inspire and motivate me to want to jump right out of my chair away from my computer and shoot for the love of it . Thank you David.” – Millie Brown