Category: Originals
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Watch Their Eyes, Not Their Words
Canon tracked three people looking at one print and buried the useful finding. Learning to photograph does not sharpen your attention so much as move it, away from where your audience is actually looking.
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Nothing Is Best Everything Is a Trade
Best camera, best lens, best tips, best photograph of the year. The word is not subjective so much as unfinished, and finishing the sentence changes what you ask for.
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Ansel Adams Was Fifty Five Years Late And Why It Matters
Carleton Watkins photographed Yosemite in 1861. Ansel Adams arrived fifty five years later and nobody told him the valley had been done. Why it has been done is the laziest judgement in photography.
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Ask The Collective, Where the Answers Come From People
A new page where you can ask anything about black and white photography. Every answer comes from a photographer, because the point is the conversation and not just the information. An answer to almost any photography question is a few keystrokes away. Type it into a search box and something will tell you, very confidently,…
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Liminal Photography, and Why It Works
A corridor with nobody in it is not an empty photograph, it is a photograph of an absence. What liminal photography is, why it unsettles people, and how to make one in black and white.
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Photography Is Carving, Not Painting
A carver starts with a block that already contains every possible figure and removes what is not the one they want. A photographer in a busy scene has exactly the same job, and usually does it in the wrong order.
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The Print Is the Point
A good black and white photograph printed well becomes a different object. What scale, light and surface do to an image, and a look at Fotoviva, a Worcestershire print collective now in its twentieth year. Readers get 10% off with the code EXCLUSIVE10.
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Don’t Chase Your Style, Let It Emerge
Three quarters of American schoolchildren were once taught to write identically, and every one of them ended up with their own hand. Photographic style forms the same way, which is why it cannot be chosen.
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Roy DeCarava, the Poet of Mid-Century Harlem
Roy DeCarava photographed the Harlem he was born in, printed darker than anyone expected, and insisted he was an artist, not a documentarian. Here is why his black and white work still matters.
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Photographing Autumn When the Color Is the Point
Red and green foliage sit at almost the same brightness, so autumn collapses into gray mush the moment you convert it. Here are five decisions that give the season back its separation.