Welcome to my Photography Blog

Thanks for checking out my new photography blog. Here I intend to talk about a whole range of photo issues, from aesthetics and fine art photography, to weddings and portraits, to technical and equipment issues, to travel and discoveries. I welcome responses, contributions and questions.

Rather than having separate blogs for wedding and portrait clients on one hand, and photo professional colleagues on the other, I'm taking the risk of creating a single blog for a whole range of readers. For the non-pros some of the discussions may seem abstruse, and for the pros some may seem obvious, but I hope you'll just skip over what doesn't interest you and look for what does.

Photography has given me joy practically my whole life—through at least three other careers—and I've finally ended up in photography as a profession. There's nothing I'd rather do (though I love to do a lot of other things, too), and I finally had to admit it. But I've also found that the more one knows or inquires about the world, the richer one's photography is. This sounds like a truism, but it's also my way of saying that I don't regret doing all the other things I've done—taught college English, French, Italian and jazz history; played jazz piano, recorded and made music software; written tons of reviews both in music and art, and tried to understand history and science from a gee whiz perspective.

I've also learned that, although it once tried to be, photography today is far from a transparent medium. It transforms what it captures and represents, sometimes blatently, sometimes subtlely. With the spread of good digital point-and-shoot cameras and passable cell phone cameras (the Holgas of the 21st Century, says Dan Burkholder), everybody these days takes pictures. It's no longer a big deal to record what you see. The trick is to have it resemble what you imagine, and then go from there. The perpetual fascination of photography is that it mediates that constantly shifting interface between the real and the imagined. (And now that we have computer programs that replicate manually and automatically various painting and drawing styles, we can avail ourselves of some of the most powerful tools of hand-graphic artists to move away from literal reality and toward the iconic and mythical.) We can use pieces of the real to express our imaginings, and condition our capture of a discovered piece of the real with the myriad of tools now available to bring our images closer to what we imagine.

But even remaining in the realm of the apparently literal, the obviously photographic, we still create fictional versions of reality, as French theorist Jean-Claude Lemagny points out in his probing book La Matière, l'ombre, la fiction (Matter, shadow, fiction). We work our images to draw our own meanings out of those shadows of matter that our lenses cast on our sensors. First we have to mediate the difference between a sensor with its limited range (about five stops) and the huge range of our eyes (about 20 stops—each stop being a power of two in light intensity). Add the power and limitations of the frame with its compositional principles; and then the subtle elements of contrast and detail. One could say that all this effort goes to bringing the image on paper (or on screen) closer to the reality that we notice, since noticing is an act of mind through the eye, whereas a camera is a simple though powerful eye. Perhaps 85% of the art of photography is doing just this: learning how to bring the captured image close to the noticed perception. And the more we educate our eyes, through, among other things. the study of other people's masterful images, the more we will notice and challenge ourselves to capture or create.

I'll be posting some of my best images on this blog, and I invite your comments and suggestions. Thanks for visiting!