By slowing down as we look at photographs – ours or someone else’s – we can more easily bring ourselves to the photograph, and by doing that, learn more about the medium and ourselves. Play Podcast: Links for this Episode: * My Instagram Feed – Follow me and I’ll follow back * Sign up for the Workshops Mailing List – Planning is underway for the 2020 Italy Photography Workshops A couple of images from my winter in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan

Musicians warm up before they make music, but what about visual artists? Do photographers need to warm up before they create photographs? I think yes, and with the help of a podcast listener, we posit some ideas for getting warmed up visually. Play Podcast:   Links for this Episode: * University of Georgia’s Cortona Studies Abroad – a great opportunity for any arts-oriented college student – young or old! * Tuscany: In Search of The Personal – a couple of spots are left in my 2019...

Some thoughts on living an artful life, led off by poet Mary Oliver’s “Instructions on Living a Life” Pay attention Be Astonished Tell about it. Play Podcast:   Links for this Episode: * Mary Oliver– The American poet at the Poetry Foundation * Twyla Tharp – a brief video of some of Tharp’s choreography * Samuel Beckett – Some information about the poet & playwright * Pablo Picasso – A collection of paintings, quotes and a bio

Rather than trying to make art your life, work instead on trying to make every day of your life into art. “You just have to live and life will give you pictures.” -Henri Cartier Bresson Play Podcast:  

The act of making photographs connects me to the world, to my medium and to myself. When I make photographs, there is always a reward. Play Podcast:   Links for this Episode: Places you can find and listen to Camera Position: * iTunes Podcasts * Player FM * Stitcher * iHeart Radio * Short Orange

Many people think of a wide lens as a way to get farther away from a subject, but I think of a wide lens as a way for us to get closer… a wide lens is really a close-up lens, allowing us to create a dominant subject in the frame by emphasizing the difference in distance from near to far. Play Podcast:   Links for this Episode: Evidence of Hands on Stone – Jeff’s Italian architectural photographs The Curtometer – An Aid To Seeing – a deceptively simple device to help you sort out camera...

Podcast listener Tracy wrote: “Photography comes from the depths of who we are. It is not only an exploration of our world, it is also an exploration of ourselves.” This episode is a “part 2” of self-exploration and its relationship to our photography, utilizing a worksheet that you can download called “Passion and Mission” to help you think through not only what you care about, but how you can take those things and transform them into a body of photographic work. Play...

What is your story? What are you curious about? What do you care about? How can your photographs express those interests? Making stronger photographs often depends on digging deep to determine your passion and then translating those passions into images. Play Podcast:   Links for this Episode: * Morton Arboretum Photographic Society – Where I’ll be speaking on the Creative Process on Monday, April 9, 2018 * Got a minute? Leave a review of this podcast on iTunes  

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes and art is knowing which mistakes to keep. Instead of living in fear of “getting it wrong,”  a better, more useful strategy is to keep moving – plowing through the things that don’t work and slowly refining the process to get to the things that resonate for you and with viewers of your work. “Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your...

“Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” -Miles Davis One of the most consistent questions I get from students is this one: “how do I develop my own style?” Miles Davis helps with an answer. Play Podcast:   Links for this Episode: * Miles Davis Interview on YouTube * Got a minute? Leave a review of this podcast on iTunes * Sign up for the Italy Photography Workshops Mailing List – The 2018 workshops are sold out, but planning is underway for the...

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” – Thomas Merton How can we use the art we make with the camera to grow, learn and provide ourselves with a way of saying new things… to, as Merton says, “find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time”? I’m asking listeners to help steer the future direction of Camera Position by letting me know what you’d like to hear. Play Podcast:   Links for this Episode: * Help steer the future direction of Camera...

When the subject takes precedence – when you point your camera at things that are the most interesting thing to you – you are on your way to developing a personal style – the sense that these subjects are the most important things and can only be pointed out in this way by you. “To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care.” Anne Lamott – Bird by Bird Play Podcast: Links for this Episode: * Sign up for the Workshops Mailing List – Planning is...

How do we go beyond a record of a place and begin to make photographs that convey a real sense of place? The objective is not just to show  what your destination looks like, but rather to convey, in photographs, what it felt like to be there. Play Podcast: Links for this Episode: * Exhibition: WANDERLUST: Travel as Muse in the 21st Century * Stony Brook Camera Club: Talk on May 11, 2017 * Sign up for the Workshops Mailing List – Planning is underway for the 2018 Italy Photography...

This episode is a little meditation on the importance of aligning ourselves with the messages around us, using Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird as inspiration. “The Gulf Stream will flow through a straw provided the straw is aligned to the Gulf Stream, and not at cross purposes with it.” -Anne Lamott Play Podcast: Links for this Episode: * Sign up for the Workshops Mailing List – Planning is underway for the 2018 Italy Photography Workshops * Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott on Amazon

“But the art in an artwork might not be located precisely where you thought it was. Perhaps it was just as much in the damage and decay as it was in the intact original. Perhaps it was in the gaps – in contemplating and rending those insults and injuries – that we find ourselves, by compassion; by bandaging, however imperfectly, those wounds. Art may be a species of faith, the assurance of things hoped for. It contains nothing so much as our wish that we persist.” -Robert Clark Play...

As photographers, we know that there is a fairly wide range of options available to us that change what was to what we show the world in our images. Every photograph is a composite of the choices we make as the person who eventually presents the image. Every photograph is an interpretation of the way the world really looks. Play Podcast: * Italy Photography Workshops, 2017 – Late Registration May Be Possible: * Sicily: Photographing a Sense of Place – May 26 to June 2, 2017 *...

An early influence on my ways of thinking about photography on a deeper level was the great writer John Berger.  A poet, novelist, artist screenwriter and more, Berger,  born in 1926, and died just a few weeks ago, in January of 2017 at the age of 90. A read of Berger’s work gives great insight into what meaning we derive from looking, seeing and photographing. Play Podcast: Links for this Episode: * Books by John Berger: * Ways of Seeing – 1972 * About Looking – 1980 *...

Walt Whitman’s poems in his opus Leaves of Grass mirror the actions of the photographer by beginning with facts and transforming those facts into ideas. I explore how both photography and Whitman’s poetry use simple language to convey complex ideas, giving any object or experience new importance by recording it on a previously blank page. Play Podcast: Links for this Episode: * Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass on Amazon * Edward Weston’s photographs for Leaves of Grass * The Italy...

“You can observe a lot just by watching.” – Yogi Berra I like to see photographers out in the world and watch them photograph. Observing how photographers photograph can be a great aid in helping us make better, more informed, more personal photographs. Play Podcast: There are still a few spaces left in 2 of my Italy Photography Workshops for 2017: * Sicily: Photographing A Sense of Place – May 26 to June 2, 2017 * Tuscany: Exploring The Eternal Moment – June 17 to 24, 2017