Category: Originals
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What the Architect Already Knew Before You Got There
An architect spends years thinking about how light will move through a building before a single stone gets laid. A photographer usually gets an afternoon to figure that same thing out from scratch. Here is what architects already know that can close that gap.
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Bring The Viewer With You
Most photographs put the viewer on the outside, looking in, the way you might look through a window at something happening on the other side of the glass. Some photographs do something different. They collapse that distance completely. Here is how to make your images do that.
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Everyone Else Is Leaving. That’s Your Cue to Stay
Rain starts, fog rolls in, or the snow finally begins, and most people pack up and head for the car. That instinct is costing you the best light of the day. Here is why the messiest part of the weather is worth staying for.
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The One Subject You’ll Never See Clearly
Every genre we’ve written about so far involves pointing a camera outward, at light, at strangers, at a place. Self portraiture reverses the entire relationship. Here is why that reversal is harder than it sounds, and why it might be worth taking seriously anyway.
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You Might Need a Fixer
Several of the strongest photo stories we have published here happened because a photographer had someone local vouching for them. A fixer is the formal version of that relationship, and it is far more accessible than most photographers assume.
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Starting Your First Project
We wrote before about why committing to a project produces depth that reactive shooting almost never reaches, and promised a follow up with somewhere to actually start. Here it is, along with a real look at how one photographer’s project came together one visit at a time.
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Learning to See: Part 5
Alex spent a week trying to find the right words, the right approach, the right script for asking a stranger to be photographed. None of it worked until Alex stopped trying to find the right words at all.
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Stop Calling Yourself Amateur
So many photographers use the word right there in their social media bio. Amateur. It’s meant as a disclaimer, a way of managing expectations before the images even speak for themselves. The word was never supposed to carry that weight, and neither should you.
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Tune Your Frame Like a Radio Dial
We already wrote about the noise inside your head, the kind that keeps you from seeing anything worth photographing in the first place. This is about the other noise. The kind sitting right there in the frame, competing with your subject for the exact same attention you’re asking a viewer to give it.
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What Rembrandt Knew About Light That Most Photographers Don’t
Long before anyone pointed a camera at a face, painters were solving the exact problem every portrait photographer still faces. How do you make a flat surface hold the weight and depth of a real human face using nothing but light and shadow. Rembrandt solved it so well that photographers are still using his name…