Category: Originals
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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…
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Learning to See: Part 4
Alex fixed the thing that went wrong in the alley, off center placement, real negative space, a frame that finally had somewhere for the eye to breathe. It worked. Then Alex tried something the camera couldn’t help with at all, walking up to a stranger and asking for a portrait. That didn’t go nearly as…
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The Label Isn’t the Cage. Forgetting You Can Leave Is.
Almost every photographer eventually picks up a label. Street photographer. Landscape photographer. Portrait photographer. There’s nothing wrong with that. The label isn’t the problem. What it quietly turns into, if you’re not paying attention, is.
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The Worst Advice You Ever Got About Photography?
Every photographer has a piece of advice they were given once, believed completely, and eventually had to unlearn the hard way. We rounded up some of the classics. Now we want to hear one from you.