What this 40¢ postcard taught me about photography

There's so much to learn from the work of other photographers, and you just never know what the next source of inspiration is going to be. Like a souvenir shop.

Summers are hard

It's hot, very hot. It was even hotter in Valencia, in SE Spain, where I spent a few days with my family. I got to do some photography, but I was happy to be back in the fog!

3 creative editing techniques in Lightroom

I forgot to share this video here, one I published last week while dealing with the heat. The perfect time to sit down and edit some photos, especially when using these creative editing techniques in Lightroom.

A local photography adventure

I've spent many years photographing my hometown and the landscapes around it. There's not much else to find, I would think. Wrong. There's so much more out there, waiting for me to find it. So I take my bike and go on a 18-mile ride on trails I had not explored before.

Live with FRAMES magazine

I'll be the guest in today's FRAMES magazine live event, to be held at 5pm (CEST) / 11am (EDT) / 8am (PDT).

I'll be talking a bit about my photography and there will be time for questions and photography talk. Join us here (it's free!).

Conversation with Dimitris Kotakos

I had the pleasure of chatting with Greek photographer Dimitros Kotakos on his YouTube channel. Watch our conversation here.

Creative B&W Editing in Elements Magazine

I'm honored to have contributed an article on Creative B&W Editing to the latest issue (#52) of Elements Magazine, a publication about landscape photography.

Check it out!

Some images are gone forever... and new ones appeared

Change is the only constant in life, and photography. Every photo we take might be the last one we can make of that subject, or location. They change, we change. Some images are gone forever... but there are new ones replacing them.

This trip demanded everything

If dealing with snow, mud, wind and rain wasn't enough, the Upper Peninsula gifted me with some thunderstorms. It was a constant struggle against the conditions, but the images I made there were well worth the fight.

Photography Plans vs Reality (from the Upper Peninsula, Michigan)

I continue my road trip across Michigan as I enter the Upper Peninsula. My first time up here, and so many things don't go according to plan. If not covered in snow, roads are flooded; many parks and spots I want to visit are closed; trails are full of mud. But the good thing is, I have the whole place (or whatever is accessible) for myself.

The practice of seeing

Some ways a daily photography practice can improve your photography.

The first days are the hardest

A photography road trip is a big change from our everyday life. New routines (or the lack of one), habits, motions, and mindset. It takes a while getting used to it, and that's why the first days are the hardest. As I hit the road again, I try to make it easy on myself by visiting a location I'm familiar with, in Northern Michigan.

Goodbye, SF

My last days in the Bay Area.

How wide is *too* wide?

My experiments with the ultra wide angle Laowa 10-18mm (Amazon link).

Obsessed

In 1977, on the sidewalk outside his loft on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan, the fifty-eight-year-old W. Eugene Smith watched from a wheelchair as some two dozen volunteers—mostly young photography students paying homage—loaded his life’s work into two shipping trucks.

When the shipment arrived in Tucson, it filled a high school gymnasium and spilled into outlying rooms.

Included in the shipment were three thousand matted and unmatted master prints; hundreds of thousands of meticulous 5 x 7 work prints; hundreds of thousands of negatives and contact sheets. There were hundreds of pocket spiral notebooks and thousands of 3 x 5 note cards with scribbled notes; maps and diagrams from all over the world; and hundreds of boxes of clipped magazine and newspaper articles. Smith wrote hundreds of fifteen-page single-spaced letters to family, friends, and people he barely knew, and he mimeographed copies before mailing them. There were dozens of cameras, various pieces of darkroom equipment, trash cans and boxes full of loose lens caps, rubber bands, and paper clips. Smith also had 25,000 vinyl records and 3,750 books.

[Smith’s] death certificate read “stroke” but, as was said of the immortal jazzman Charlie Parker, Smith died of “everything.” He was flat worn out. He’d given up. He left eighteen dollars in the bank, and forty-four thousand pounds of materials.

Gene Smith's Sink: A wide-angle view

I’ve long argued that you need to be obsessed if you want to become great at something. But Eugene Smith took this to extreme.

We have to commit to our art with either intensity or longevity. They are almost mutually exclusive, as ferocious intensity can’t be maintained for too long. Even if your mind can hold, your body will eventually fail, as happened to Smith. He died at 58, leaving many years of potential growth and work on the table.

Consistency and a healthier balance over a long period of time are usually the wiser choice.

6 unexpected ways more megapixels help my photography

More megapixels doesn't mean better photographs... but in many ways, high resolution sensors can make our lives as photographers much easier, and enable us to do things we couldn't do with fewer pixels.

On Fuji cameras, dials, and the lost art of consistency

Fuji is getting a lot of attention thanks to the recently announced GFX100RF. What caught my attention from that camera wasn’t the fixed-lens, the medium format sensor, or the $5,000 price tag. It was the new “aspect ratio dial”.

This seems to be part of a new trend with Fuji cameras. Just a few months earlier, the X-T50 was the first to introduce a dedicated “film simulation dial”.

I celebrate when a manufacturer tries something new, but I can’t help but wonder what these new dials might be revealing about the times we live in.

Are photographers nowadays switching aspect ratios and film simulations so often that they need a dial for quick access?

It feels like a reflection of the modern creative mindset: constantly changing things, never sticking with something long enough to master it. There’s always a new, shiny trick that promises to change the game. Except it never does.

I’m starting to feel old-school when I advocate for consistency: the value of committing to a tool, a format, or an aesthetic for some time.

If one photo is 3:2 and color while the next is 1:1 and black and white, our work might end up feeling cluttered and directionless. It’s not just about cohesion in a portfolio, it’s about developing a personal vision.

A style doesn’t emerge from constantly switching things. It comes from working within some boundaries, constraints that force us to solve problems through creativity, instead of avoiding them.

Experimentation is good. But there’s a difference between thoughtful evolution and constant indecision. Sometimes, we just need to commit to something.

Chase what moves you

After months of absence, the fog finally returned to San Francisco last night. One of my favorite subjects in these conditions is the Golden Gate bridge, especially after sunset when the lights glow through the mist. So of course, I grabbed my camera and headed that way.

Oh, how I missed it!

The combination of fog, lights, and the low hum of fog horns echoing through the bay create an atmosphere that gives me goosebumps.

Standing there in those conditions felt similar to last week’s snowstorm in Yosemite, or to the time when Arches National Park became an otherworldly landscape, or to the fairy tale place that is Fanal in the island of Madeira. Those are the times that I live for, the ones that make photography so rewarding.

I’ve photographed the bridge in the fog many times before, and hopefully, I’ll do it many more times. These images never get much traction or attention, but that doesn’t matter: I love making them, being there makes me feel alive, and when I look at them later, the feelings rush back.

I’ll never get tired of photographing scenes that make me feel something. We have to chase what moves us.

Photography is not a recipe

I’m currently reading a photography book where the author lists their settings for every image. Normally, I’m skeptical about sharing that information, but an educational book seems like the one place where it might be justified to do so.

Many photographers seem obsessed with this kind of technical data, though. Not just the settings used but camera, lens, film stock, developing recipe, even the paper used for the final print. It’s not uncommon to see this information attached to photographs on social media; and even worse, in photo books.

The usual argument made for this is that it helps others learn how the image was made. But what do we really gain from knowing that a heavily compressed Instagram photo of a distant mountain was taken at f/7.1 and 1/250s?

If we truly want to offer insight into how an image was made, there are far more useful details we could share instead: Where and when was the image taken? Do those conditions happen often, or was it a rare occurrence? Tell me more about the story behind the shot: Why did you go there? Did you hike for hours, or did you pull over on the side of the road? If it was a hike, was it easy, or hard? What about the crowds? Seeing the original, unedited RAW file alongside the final image would also provide far more value. And most importantly: how did you feel when you were shooting your subject?

If the goal is to teach and inspire, this kind of information is infinitely more valuable than a list of settings.

Don’t get me wrong: settings matter. But most photographs could have been taken with different settings and they’d still look nearly the same. Because what truly shapes an image isn’t the aperture or shutter speed--it’s the light, the conditions, and the story told in the frame.

So why do we fixate on the settings?

I think it comes down to photography’s eternal struggle to be seen as an art. Some photographers might believe that sharing technical choices makes their work look more intentional, more serious, especially to those who don’t even know what they mean. The settings are the “secret ingredients” that the artist came up with to make the final result possible.

But photography isn’t a recipe. Greatness isn’t defined by the choice of ISO or shutter speed. A great photographer is insanely curious about the world. They notice what others overlook. They recognize beauty in front of them and know how to translate it into an image. They anticipate a moment unfolding and are ready to capture it.

You can recognize a great photographer not by what they say about their camera gear or settings, but by the passion in their eyes when they talk about their subjects.

Shoot wider than you need

Whenever I have a composition I like framed in my camera, before pressing the shutter I like to either zoom out, or take a step back.

While you can always crop in post (especially with a high-resolution camera), you can never “zoom out” after the fact.

By shooting wider than I need, I give myself room to fine-tune the framing later. Sometimes, I realize the composition needs more negative space; other times, a slight shift left/right, or up/down, makes for a stronger image.

Whenever possible, give your future self some wiggle room to experiment in post. They’ll thank you.