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Curiosity, Kindness and the Travel Gene I have (mostly) recovered from my six weeks long Mandarin intensive in Guilin, China. I can honestly say that apart from marriage and parenthood it is the hardest thing I have done in my life. It was also exciting, energizing and totally exhausting. Unfortunately the day after I returned to Maine I was on another plane to Alabama to be with my mother who was dying. I was blessed ...

Thoughts on Making a Book of Photographs Paul Caponigro and I have both been invited to exhibit at the National Art Museum of China this year. Paul just returned from his trip and brought home the exhibit catalogue, which is actually a beautifully printed book. Each of the one hundred images in the exhibit is included in the book. The high quality reproductions give each image the vibrancy of an actual print. It is well ...

Work the problem, not the panic. My life as an athlete has been pretty sedate and no one today, or when I was a kid, would have ever confused me with a jock. However, I have participated in paragliding and scuba diving, both of which involve an element of danger. The training mantra for both sports was work the problem, not the panic. It was explained that more pilots and divers died because they panicked ...

Joie de Vivre Hearing your doctor say, “You are an interesting case” does not instill confidence of any kind. I spent three days in the hospital being poked and prodded this summer and left feeling better, but not much wiser. The good news is that all the bad stuff got ruled out. Even better, my health and energy have returned, something that had been missing since early spring. What is my great lesson from this ...

Passages We experience many passages in our lives, many marked with celebration. My family just celebrated two such milestones: Son, Andrew, graduated with Honors from Savannah College of Art and Design (BFA in Photography); his brother, Jake, just returned from completing his Air Force ROTC Field Training. In both cases, the passage from one point in life to another was marked with a conspicuous celebration. I’m home from teaching my Extraordinary Images in Ordinary Locations ...

Falling In Love Who hasn’t fallen in love with an image? You know the feeling. You’re looking through your contact sheet, your newly processed negatives, your downloaded files and you see the image. It’s the one that makes your heart beat faster, the one that makes the trip worthwhile, the one you’ve been waiting for. I fell in love with an image recently. While editing from a recent trip I found two images, a vertical ...

End-of-the-year musings… Isaac Newton, in a letter dated 1676, said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. This statement should serve to humble us all, no matter our vocation or avocation. Not one of us creates anything completely new or original. Everything we do is based on the work of those who came before. I often hear photographers and other artists say they don’t want to look at ...

The Keys to the Kingdom I’ve been asked why I choose to teach workshops in such odd and unusual places as Alabama, North Dakota, along the Erie Canal or the Orkney islands? Perhaps the best way to answer the question is to explain how a location becomes a workshop. What makes a good workshop location? First and foremost, a location has to be visually interesting to me. I have to want to make photographs there ...

Lessons from the Fuji X Pro 1 I got more feedback from my last Musing about trying the Fuji X Pro 1 than almost any other I have written. Reactions ranged from “Welcome to the 21st Century” to “You’re making me cry”. Neither viewpoint reflects what I was trying to say. I am not leaving film for digital. As I was writing the April Musing, thousands of dollars of 8x10 and special order 5x12 film ...

Adapt, Migrate or Die The only constant in life is change. Whether looking at this from the perspective of an ecosystem or a species, life forms adapt, migrate, or die in response to the changes. In a small way the same can be said about photography. Throughout the relatively short history of this medium the changes in equipment, in how a photograph can be made and in how an art form came to be have ...