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).
HT2135 - Opacity and Bleed Through All physical prints exist on a substrate, usually paper. It's a good idea to know a bit about paper and to pay close attention to the way it affects your image. Especially important for books are the two characteristics known as opacity and bleed through.
HT2134 - Nude Workshops In 1998 when we announced a series of LensWork workshops, we received a call from a famous workshop instructor who complimented us on our offerings but advised that if we wanted to make money with a workshop program we had to offer nude workshops. By that I assume he meant nudes as models, not nude photographers. I thought about his suggestion for three nanoseconds and rejected it....
HT2133 - There Is No Bad Light You've probably all heard that old outdoorsman's canard that there is no such thing as bad weather, there's just bad clothing. I think the same logic can apply to light and photography. There is no such thing as bad light, there are, however, subjects that look better in one kind of light compared to another.
HT2132 - Focus and Sharpness Are Not the Same Thing Perhaps there are technical definitions for focus and sharpness I should know, but my intuition tells me there is a difference. Focus is an optical relationship between the lens and the sensor or film plane. Sharpness is a visual sensation about the smallest details.
HT2131 - Framing Is a Decor Decision There was a period in my creative life in which I sold prints matted and framed, ready for the wall. I regularly received the most curious feedback, however, that people would unframe my print and put it in a frame of their choice, a frame that matched the decor of their room. I've even had people removed my print from the mat board and re-mat it in a style and color of their choosing....
HT2130 - The One Perfect Size I've witnessed numerous discussions in which a photographer has proposed the idea that there is one perfect size for every image. Making that image smaller or larger somehow diminishes it. I don't bring this topic up to attack or defend it, but rather to ask the simple question how do they know? In order to determine that there's one perfect size for a given image we would need to make it in every possible size to determine which one is the best! I don't ever recall...
HT2129 - All the Gray Hair Is Worrisome In the 1970s and '80s, there was a huge uptick of people engaging fine art photography. I suspect this was the result of luminaries like Ansel Adams bringing photography to the masses, but also a result of the increased quality of image reproduction in books. I never attended an Ansel Adam's workshop, but I've seen lots of pictures of those enthusiastic youngsters at Adams workshops....
There is a distinct difference between photography that shows us the world and photography that shows us the artist's conception of the ideal world. The digital age has magnified Utopian Photography. I just watched a YouTube video in which a Photoshop guru improved a picture of a beautiful woman by brightening her teeth, deepening the color of her eyes, and removing all blemishes from her skin. He made a lovely photograph of a beautiful woman, but a thoroughly idealized one. All previous episode...
HT2128 - Irrelevant Information Every artist who knows their craft can explain it with some amount of detail. Does knowing how they do it make our appreciation of their accomplishment any deeper? Or is it better to be amazed and let go of our questions about how it was done?
HT2127 - Tiny Prints I remember visiting the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1980s and seeing on display a collection of tiny prints in very large frames. As I recall, they were 35mm contact prints presented and framed in 16x20 matboard. The exhibition was unusual, but watching people view these prints was especially interesting. I noticed that everyone got very close to see the images, probably as close as they were comfortable focusing....
HT2126 - About Backgrounds, Sort Of We need a new word other than "background" to describe what I want to discuss in today's commentary. We normally think of the background of a photograph as that part that's not the subject but is still inside the borders of the image. But every photograph has another background that is either the mat board of a framed print, or the margins around the image in a book....
HT2125 - The Stunning Image Has Been Replaced If we look back at the history of photography and concentrate on what we now call "fine art photograph," we see that a great deal of the success of a photograph was its technological accomplishment. We'd look at a print and say, "Wowee, how did they do that?" In my youth, that question launched a pursuit of knowledge and craft that consumed many hours of my young photographic life. These days, I rarely see anyone receiving accolades for their print q...
HT2124 - Montage In 2016, we launched the idea of six-image projects we called Seeing in SIXES . We presented them in book format with one image per page in a six-page sequence. A variation of that idea has intrigued me of late. Why not place six images into a montage layout on a single sheet of paper?
HT2123 - Over and Over and Over Leads to Boredom We all appreciate an amazing and wonderful photograph. We strive to produce them and collect them. If we are lucky and productive, we may someday produce a book of our very best. Here is my odd observation about a book filled with all breathtaking images: I get bored very quickly with winner after winner.
HT2122 - A Picture OF, or a Picture ABOUT From time to time, someone will ask me a definition for the term "fine art photography." It's a difficult question. I often find it useful, however, to divide the images I see into pictures that are of something and pictures that are about something. The ones about something seem to my mind to be closer to art than the pictures that are just showing us what something looks like....
LW1434 - What Kind of Photographer Are You So much of what we do is a function of how we define ourselves. What kind of photographer are you? How you answer that question may limit your creative vision in ways you do not intend. 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, inspiration and ideas that expand daily with new content. Sign up for instant access! You might also be ...
HT2121 - Failure to Launch From time to time someone will recommend a book, a song, an artist, a singer who touches their soul deeply. I take a look, read a couple of chapters, listen to a song or two — and totally fail to connect with the recommended art. I don't know how to think about this. Am I insensitive? Am I resistant? Should I try harder? Feel guilty? Apologize? What is the best response when someone's masterpiece bounces off us leaving nothing behind in its wake?...
HT2120 - Identification Is Not the Same As Understanding In my teenage years when I was so interested in protozoology and the world I could see in the microscope, I spent the majority of my time trying to identify what I was seeing. Naming creatures was paramount to me. Looking back on this, however, I realize that naming them was shallow knowledge compared to observing their behavior. In photography, photographing a thing is not as meaningful as photographing the thing and its relationships to ...
HT2119 - Night Photography As I went to bed last night, I noticed outside my bedroom window a very sizable icicle being illuminated by the lights from our deck. The icicle was seen against a night black background. It was gorgeous. I grabbed my camera and quickly photographed it before jumping into bed. As I was drifting to sleep I found myself not thinking of icicles but rather about night photography....
HT2118 - Seasonal Artwork I have a friend that changes her bath towels, dish towels, and napkins to match the season. Interestingly enough, however, that seasonal sensitivity does not motivate her to change the artwork on her walls. Why? Could it be as simple as the fact that matting and framing artwork is so cumbersome? Perhaps poster hangers might help!
HT2117 - Two Types of Photographing I may be only speaking for myself here, but I've found that I have two completely different type of sessions when I am out photographing. Most typically, I'm definitely out photographing and I find a place where I photograph purposively, extensively, intensely for a few hours or even a few days. There are other occasions, however, when I'm not really looking for photographs, but they appear without me searching for them. These two styles of photographing requi...
HT2116 - The World in Two Dimensions There are two realities about photography that are inescapable; photography compresses the world into two dimensions, while simultaneously it shrinks the world into a consumable size. Doesn't this imply an inverting expansion in our imagination whenever we look at a photograph?
LW1433 - If Not Every Day, Then at Least with Regularity Pianist Vladimir Horowitz has said that if he skips practice one day, he knows it. If he skips practice two days, his wife know it. If he skips practice three days, the world know it. I think this applies to our efforts in the photographic creative life. We can't be out photographing every day, but there are other things we can integrate with our daily life to keep our creative momentum alive. Here are 10 ideas that might help. All previou...
HT2115 - The First Thing I Do For the most part, I know how I want to use my camera in various situations. For me, the ability to memorize custom settings for different shooting scenarios is an incredibly important tool that I use with almost every capture. The first thing I do with a new camera is set the custom settings for my shooting scenarios so that whichever camera I pick up has the same identical configurations under C1, C2, and C3....
HT2114 - Find the Software that Thinks Like You Do Photography has become so intertwined with the world of computers and software that it's hard to visualize doing photography without a computer. I did, we all did, 50 years ago, but today we have alternatives galore. I use Lightroom on PC, not because of its unique virtues but rather because it thinks the way I do and presents the least amount of resistance....
HT2113 - Memorable I think there's no doubt that one of the characteristics of the best photographs is that they are memorable. Do we remember them because of their exquisite tonalities? Do we remember them because of their spectacular color? Judicious depth of field? Tack sharp details? Or does a photograph become memorable for reasons that have nothing to do with technology, but everything to do with the heart?...
HT2112 - ISO Fears No More One of the driving factors in choosing a camera format was the fear of high ISO in small sensors. I debated a long time before I settled in on micro 4/3, primarily because of ISO fears. With today's noise reduction capabilities, those fears seem so cute and quaint. I cringe now thinking about all the images I lost because of my fear of high ISO....
HT2111 - Sometimes, I Miss My View Camera I suspect a lot of you have never used a view camera, but there are certain aspects of the view camera that are just lovely. My pace was slower, which fostered a special moment with each exposure. The isolation generated by the dark cloth reduced the hubbub of the world to just me and the image. There are times when I miss that....
HT2110 - What Photography Is Like Stieglitz told us that photography is like painting because it belongs in a frame, displayed on a wall. I would propose that the actual content of photography is more like poetry. It's highest use is when the photographer observes and then comments on Life.
HT2109 - Everyday Stories So much fine art photography I see these days is about the extraordinary. Spectacular landscapes, exotic locations, beautiful models, extravagant events. Is this an attempt to offset Henry David Thoreau's idea that we live lives of quiet desperation? Perhaps there is some value and merit in everyday stories that don't require extensive travel or specialist gear....
