LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process

HT2225 - A Selective Literacy

There are so many photographers, so many books, so many exhibitions, that it's virtually impossible to achieve anything even close to visual literacy in photography. Instead, we each have our own understanding of photography based on a fractional appreciation of what's being and been...

HT2224 - Printing Monochrome with a CMYK Press

Most commercial printing presses that you might employ to print your book will use the four-ink process that is the standard in the industry. Simply said, these presses use a combination of cyan ink, magenta ink, yellow ink, and black ink to achieve a sufficient simu...

HT2223 - The Annual Best Of Series

Because I love reading short stories so much, over the years I've collected a number of anthology books that are "the best short stories of the year." This could be a pretty good idea for our photographs too, don't you think? What were your best images from, say, last year? What...

HT2222 - Explore More Deeply

Starting in 2009, I produced a series of annual projects under the title, Winter Trees. Each year for seven years, I produced a new five-image project for the series which was produced as a folio and as a PDF. To date, this remains one of the most difficult projects I've ever done for...

HT2221 - Shadow Writing

I've always thought it was curious that photography is defined by its very nomenclature to be "light writing," but what we actually do is write the shadows onto white paper. If we think about what actually happens when we make our photographs, it helps make better decisions about how we co...

HT2220 - The Lasting Impression

Someone has taken time out of their busy life to attend your gallery exhibition, visit your website, or look at your book. What is it you want them to take with them when they leave the gallery, move to new website, or put your book back on the bookshelf? What is the lasting impres...

LW1448 - Project Photography

Some thoughts on why we publish what we publish in LensWork. In particular, our emphasis on project-oriented photograph versus "greatest hits" images.

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LW1282 - Photography Needs to Be Hard

Has photography become too easy? Or has the technology of photography become so easy that the challenge has shifted. Making a visually interesting, emotionally powerful, meaningful piece of artwork is as difficult as it has ever been. That's becoming more and more obvious as the challenges of the craft parts of photography evaporate with the ever more sophisticated technology.

I gave up using pre-visualization years ago for two specific reasons. First, pre-visualization in the analog darkroom is primarily a means of controlling tonalities and contrast with the limitations of film and chemical development. Second, I tend not to do my Creative Vision in the field, because I don't think in terms of the individual image. But more importantly, previsualization is about how to make a subject look more lik...