Random Observations on Art, Photography, and the Creative Process. These talks focus on the creative process in fine art photography. LensWork editor Brooks Jensen side-steps techno-talk and artspeak to offer a stimulating mix of ideas, experience, and observations from his 50 years as a fine art photographer, writer, and publisher. Topics include a wide range of subjects from finding subject matter to presenting your work, and building an audience.
Included in this RSS Feed are the LensWork Podcasts — posted weekly, typically 10-20 minutes exploring a topic a bit more deeply — and our almost daily Here's a thought… audios (extracted from the videos.) Here's a thought… are snippets, fragments, morsels, and tidbits from Brooks' fertile (and sometimes swiss-cheesy) brain. Usually just a minute or two. Always about photography and the art life.
Brooks Jensen is the publisher of LensWork, one of the world's most respected and award-winning photography publications, known for its museum-book quality printing and luxurious design. LensWork has subscribers in over 73 countries. He is the author of 13 books on photography and the creative life -- the latest books are The Best of the LensWork Interviews (2016), Photography, Art, and Media (2016), and the four annual volumes of Seeing in SIXES (2016-2019).
HT2162 - The Joy in Just Doing The other day at a social gathering, I was asked why I do photography. The preface of the question was that there must be some reward in spending so much time and effort to make photographs, so what did I get out of it?
HT2161 - Twenty-three Cameras, Indistinguishable Images Just for fun, the other day I did a quick mental review of all the cameras I've owned and used in my life. After 50 years in photography, I've produced artwork with 23 different cameras. Isn't it curious that I can't see any qualitative difference between all that work produced with all those cameras?
HT2160 - The Narrator A movie, a book, a play might have a narrator. The narrator is not a necessary component, but has a useful purpose in select projects. A narrator stands outside the plot and comments upon the action without being a part of it. I wonder if this technique can be used in a photography project? Has anyone done this in photography before?
HT2159 - More on the Square Format For a while, in the 1970s, I owned and used a Mamiya C330 twin lens reflex camera that produced square images. It was my first introduction to the square format in photography. These days, I rarely see square images, I suspect because square-format digital cameras are such a rarity. That's unfortunate because square format images are a very interesting way to frame the world....
HT2158 - Locked Away on Your Harddrive How many images do you have in your Lightroom database? Don't we all know there are some really good images there that we are yet to share with anyone? As irrational as it might seem, I can't help but feel sorry for those images locked away on our hard drive that will never have a chance to bring joy or depth or understanding to anyone because we never finish them....
LW1439 - Things I Wish I Had Learned in My Youth Here are five things I wish I had learned at the beginning of my photographic life. Craft is constantly changing; Fit the tool to the job; Forget about commerce with your art; Learning photography is a small part of what you will need to be an artist; and We live in The Age of Media. All previous episodes of our weekly podcast are available to members of LensWork Online . 30-day Trial Memberships are only $10. Instant access, terabytes of content,...
HT2157 - What's New? Invariably when I meet up with someone I haven't seen for a while they asked me what's new, what am I working on, what's the latest photography or project I've done? I don't ever recall anyone saying, "Let me see what you did 5 years ago."
HT2156 - The 10-percent I Use With amazing regularity, the software people and camera manufacturers are constantly upgrading their products. Hooray for the incredible engineering these people provide for us. That said, I think I only ever use about 10% of what the camera or software is capable of doing. Is all that engineering a waste or am I missing something I don't know that I need?...
HT2155 - The Unexpected Image There are times (probably most of the time) when we are photographing on purpose, intently, with a concentrated zeal of a dedicated photographer. But there are other times when we light years away from photography and nonetheless we see an image. How sad it is when we lose those ideas that bubble up from the void. Perhaps it's a good idea to have a strategy for those images that are a gift from the Photo Gods — or our subconscious creative mind....
HT2154 - To What Degree of Not Perfect Every time we press that shutter button we do so because we think we are about to capture a winner. You wouldn't press the shutter release if you thought you were about to capture a loser. And then something happens between the time we press the shutter to the time we reject the image in Lightroom or Photoshop. Where did we make a mistake?...
HT2153 - Within the Necessary Requirements - Teleconverters vs Cropping Any time we throw away pixels - - for example, in cropping an image - - we know we are limiting ourselves with that image. But, is it a problem? I was doing a little math about this and came up with some surprising results. As long as what is left is with the necessary requirements, we haven't lost a thing....
HT2152 - So-called Decorative Arts I don't often hear people use the term "decorative arts" anymore. Is photography a decorative art? Or, is photography a medium for more personal artistic expressions? Or is it both, thereby confusing both producers and consumers?
HT2151 - Making Art Is Asking Questions On the surface of things, showing our artwork feels like a declarative statement. We've addressed some subject and are presenting our audience a proposition. In all of this there are lots of statements and facts. The beginning of the process, however, that is to say the making of artwork, is always about asking questions. What can I do with this? Why is this significant? What do I want to communicate?...
LW1438 - The Target Audience If you don't have a target audience in mind when you produce your work, then how do you know what to produce and how? Of course, for most of us, our target audience is ourself. Perhaps that's as it should be for all artists, but if we are the only target audience, doesn't that seem a bit futile? All previous episodes of our weekly podcast are available to members of LensWork Online . 30-day Trial Memberships are only $10. Instant access, terabytes of content, inspira...
HT2150 - This Moment Will Never Repeat The older I get, the more I realize that my photography is an accumulation of unique moments. The Japanese have a phrase that captures this spirit: Ichi-go, ichi-e . Photography provides us, no, it seduces us to become one with the moment. With this in mind, the purpose of our photography is not the product, but rather the experience....
HT2149 - Learning from Our Failures, The EPIC Series With every press of the shutter release, with every processing step in Photoshop, with every action we take, we aim toward making a significant image. We strive for success. But curiously enough, an even better way to learn is to pay close attention to our failures.
HT2148 - Post-exposure Chimping vs Focus Peaking One of my frustrations with current cameras has to do with checking the focus once I've captured the image. When I magnify the image in the viewfinder or on the screen, the image degrades to the point I cannot determine whether or not the image is sharp. The blue "focus peaking" markers are a much better gauge, but are not available on all cameras....
HT2147 - Completely Manual Mode Just as a curiosity, I set my camera to completely Manual Mode to remember what it was like to be a photographer in my youth. Manual focus, manual aperture, manual shutter speed. I have no idea how we ever succeeded with all-manual cameras. I think "f/8 and be there" was not just a strategy, it was a survival mechanism.
HT2146 - George Tice, RIP I think because I grew up in Oregon on the West Coast, my introduction to photography was the grand landscape and those photographers who emphasized the beauty of nature. Somewhat later, discovering the work of George Tice became a crucially important step in my personal development. Tice made images that were just as exquisite as the landscape crowd, but his subject was very East Coast, yet mesmerizing....
HT2145 - A Thousand and One Diversions There is a scene in the 1991 movie City Slickers when the cowboy, Curly, is asked the secret of life. He holds up his index finger and says do one thing. Great advice, but very difficult to accomplish in this age of multitasking and a thousand diversions
HT2144 - The Chosen One When I developed the idea of folios and started producing them in 1990s, I experienced a most unexpected bit of feedback. With almost perfect statistical distribution, each image in a folio would become someone's favorite. At first I thought this was a curiosity, but I've come to realize it's more significant than that.
HT2143 - Truth Photography has, for very dubious reasons, established itself as a truthful medium. Photographs can be used as evidence, and its objectivity is legend. But of course we photographers know that photography can easily be untrue, too. As an art medium, do we care? Don't we all know that all other media of art are fictions? Do any of us worry about the truthfulness of a painting, a sculpture, a novel, a poem, a song, a bit of theater?...
HT2142 - Increasing Your Odds of a Sharp Image with a Slow Shutter Speed I love simple solutions to pesky problems. One of the odd advantages of digital photography is that we can capture as many images as we want and then discard the bad ones later. We don't have to worry about the cost of film and processing like we did in the old days. This opens the door to a statistical advantage that is worth exploiting....
HT2141 - Panorama Images in Books An almost unsolvable problem exists with the challenge of including panorama images in books. On a single page, they are so small. Splitting the image onto facing pages implies that awkward jump in the gutter. A folded so-called "gate fold" is expensive.
HT2140 - The Audio Archive I know that some of you have been listening to my musings on photography for years, but I also know there are a lot of you who are new listeners. Allow me a moment here to draw your attention to the archive that is available to LensWork Online members of every podcast and every Here's a Thought going back to the earliest days. There are currently over 1,400 long-form podcasts and over 2,100 short Here's A Thought commentaries. Have fun exploring them!...
HT2139 - Lost Glory I've been revisiting the work of some of my photographic heroes. This is the work I loved, cherished and emulated in my youth. Lots of that work (and some of those masters) have not aged well. It's clear to me with the passage of time that they and their photographs were a product of their times. By today's standard, their accomplishments seem, well, quaint and/or primitive. Is it fair to judge their work by today's standards?...
HT2138 - Three Cameras Are Better Than One Before I went to China for the first time in 2009, I developed a deep-seated fear that I would discover my camera was broken and that my trip to that far off land would result in no photographs. To reduce that risk, I purchased a second camera, thus beginning my two-camera strategy. More recently, I've added a third camera to my basics, but for a different reason entirely....
HT2137 - Stop Learning and Start Doing There's always more to learn in photography, but if we're not careful learning can become our primary if not sole activity. I've said for years that the best way to approach a photographic life is by finishing work. That means doing — and ironically the more you do the more you will learn without the focus being on learning. Said another way, workshops are great but not as a diet...
=LW1436 - Until There Is a Print There's a school of photography that maintains the idea that digital images are not really fine art photographs. These photographers insist that a photograph has to be physical, but is that true? Music isn't physical, it's merely auditory, but it's considered art. Poetry need not be physical, but it's considered art. Why is it so hard to accept the idea that a digital image is art? Could this be related to our attempts to sell or images which need to be produced ...
HT2136 - Earning a Living with Fine Art Photography I'm sure there are people who make a living selling their fine art photographs. I know two such individuals. Period. You see, there is a fundamental economic reality that can't be avoided and that is that the buyer determines what sells. We may want to make personally motivated, personally expressive photography, but if that's not what buyers want to acquire, we have little chance of selling work. So what do we do? We find ancillary ways to pay...
