PixelatedImage Blog

The sun setting over Piazza San Marco, Venice. 2012

I dragged my bags across the cobbles of Venice just after 4am yesterday morning, the wheels bumping and echoing, exaggerating the surreal emptiness of the place. Just Venice and I, which is how goodbyes should be. Around the corner a taxi waited for me, a long, sleek wooden boat, the low rumble of the engine the only competition for my clacking wheels. The driver took my bags, pulled my aluminum suitcase in after me, and we headed slowly though the winding canals that bisect the city and take us toward the open waters on the north side of the island, past the cemetery, and towards the Marco Polo airport. The morning still lit only by a half moon and the headlight of the boat shimmering off the waves. Cool night breeze, scented once in a while by unseen flowering trees. Pure magic. If you have to take a cab to the airport, you can do worse than this.

I’m home now, met at the curb at YVR by my best friend and Emily, my Jeep. We made dinner (which is to say he cooked pasta and shrimp and I slumped in a chair and tried my best to look conscious,) and Corwin’s wife came by and helped us through a couple bottles of wine, and I crashed early. A long perfect day. Sometimes the best part of travel is the coming home. I’ve now got almost 2 months before I travel again. 2 months to spend with my girl, to get my work done, do some physical therapy, get my gallbladder pulled, start a portrait project, print some photographs, and write a book.

Thanks to those who traveled with Jeffrey and I on the latest Within The Frame Adventures. Lots of great memories. Thank you. The time we spent together talking, learning about the photographic language, always teaches me so much. We’ve got a couple announcements coming soon about a few more 2012 destinations, one in Europe, a couple in Asia. We’ll keep you posted. If you’re wanting to travel with us, act quick once the announcement goes up.

Good to be home. Oggi e una bella giornata…

Venice, Italy, 2012

Good morning from Venice. We’re now two days into this year’s Venice Within The Frame and it is so good to be back here. Venice is a mixed bag. People either love it or hate it. I both love it and hate it. I love the light, the architecture, the possibilities. I love the food, the wine, and the restaurants we’ve come to call our own. But by day Venice, packed with tourists (of which I am one, I know,)  holds little photographic pull for me. I wander streets and make notes, stop in at cafes and bars for espresso, prosecco, or a glass of Valpolicella depending on the time of day, waiting for evening to come and usher the tourist hordes and kiosks selling masks and keychains off the cobbled streets. Venice in the evenings is magic, full of gorgeous light and dramatic skies, and lovers coming from their daytime hiding places. In the back streets the kids play soccer, until one by one mom calls them in for dinners. We eat late, the wine and laughter and shared stories taking us almost to midnight before heading back to the hotel.

Today we’ll wander, go take in the Elliot Erwitt exhibit, and wait for evening to fall, punctuating the day with pasta and seafood and a little window shopping.  Somewhere in there we’ll gather for a couple hours to talk about the visual language and the ways we have to fit the magic of this place into our photographs. And then we go out for more, to get lost in the alleys and the light.

A quick desktop wallpaper from last month’s trip to Sweden.

This is a 2560 x 1600 wallpaper and will fit anything up to a 27? iMac or LED cinema display. Click it to open the full resolution file in a new window. Enjoy!

Monterosso al Mare, Italy, 2012

Hello from the Italian Riviera and the lovely seaside town of Monterosso al Mare. This town is special to me; I fell in love here last year, not with the town so much as a beautiful woman. We’ve spent the last year traveling much of the world together, sharing some beautiful adventures, but we started our story here. I guess it’s why I like this town so much more than Pisa. If you’re going to fall, it may as well be in love. So it’s a romantic place, but it’s also really beautiful, especially when the light gets interesting. We’ve had a couple days of really amazing skies on these first days of the Liguria Within The Frame Adventure, though yesterday we paid for it in spades after getting stuck in the pouring rain for 40 minutes waiting for a delayed train.

I’m posting this just after sending our students off to make photographs, fresh out of a 90-minute image discussion. I don’t think I will ever tire of seeing students get ignited by photographs, and hearing them talk more excitedly about the thing which we create than about the tools we use to create them. Thrills me every time. And to see their work and the places we’re exploring, through eyes other than my own is a gift. Even if those eyes are a little blurrier this morning. I think we started dinner around 9pm, and got back to the hotel just after midnight, full of wine, seafood risotto, grilled calamari, and other wonders.

Tonight we go back to Manarollo, one of the 5 cinque terre, and tomorrow we take a train north for three days in Camogli, one of my favourite little places in the world.

I’m just wrapping up an amazing week in Sweden. Spent part of it pubbing and exploring Stockholm, which is an incredible city, and so easy to travel. It’s got great public transport, and it’s small, and extremely friendly. English is so widely spoken I never once had that familiar dread of knowing I needed to mime my way through ordering lunch. I spent the last few days of my time here in a rented Volvo heading up the coast and exploring little fishing villages and forests, and the weather complied with banks of gorgeous fog and mist. Not unlike Iceland, I froze my little fingertips off most days here, but that’s my own fault – I packed for the next two weeks in the Italian Riviera and Venice, not Scandinavia. I’ll be back and next time I’ll head as far north as I can get, likely heading into Norway as well. Next time I’m bringing mittens.

A couple days ago Craft & Vision released an eBook about sharing our images. I’m more passionate than ever about sharing – getting our photographs out into the world, through various media. I can’t print these until I’m home, but I can still give you a peek at them. If you haven’t checked out Stuart Sipahigil’s latest: Shoot + Share, Getting Your Photographs out into the World, it’s well worth a look, and it’s still only $4 if you use the coupon code in this link. It’s full of great ideas and starting points about sharing, and should light a fire under you to give your work a life beyond your harddrives. In the meantime, enjoy the postcards. It’s more than I usually share, but I’m feeling share-y. And it’s been a while since I posted one of these. The one above is a favourite. I couldn’t believe the intensity of the colours from the oxidizing rocks, and ended up shooting this piece of coastline for a couple cold hours filled with wonder. (Click any of them to see them larger)

I’ve been on a tear about sharing lately. Earlier this month I did a webinar with the Manfrotto School of Excellence and while my topic concerned so-called Going Pro issues, I still managed to get hung up on the idea that the most foundational concerns of the photographer are creating and sharing photographs. The rest is peripheral. And yet somehow we (and by that I mean, I) tend to lose sight of this at times. So last month I began my own renaissance of sharing, renewing my own resolve to use my camera more, and to finally curate and print collections of my work.

Sharing our work is not only about keeping the gift moving, it’s about creation itself, because the way we create and the reasons we do so, are affected by the sharing. There’s a critical feedback loop that happens and the more we share, the more that feedback allows us to grow in our craft, and in our art. So when Stuart Sipahigil, author of Close To Home, asked me about a book on the whys and hows of sharing our photography, I was pumped. If you know Stu, you know he’s practical and down-to-earth, and he’s a great teacher.

SHOOT + SHARE is about the creative process, but specifically the sharing. Stuart talks about sharing across all kinds of media, including social media, self-published books, prints, canvas and more. I was already excited about sharing my work, but reading Stuart’s ideas and suggestions gave me a bunch of new ideas, which I’ll be working into my own process and output.

There is something about the digital world, and the lack of prints we once had almost automatically with film, that makes it a little too easy not to share our work, but the flip-side is an opportunity like never before to share in new ways, faster ways, cheaper ways, and in ways that give us far more creative control than ever before. Like all the books in the Craft & Vision library, SHOOT + SHARE is beautifully laid out and full of great content and inspiration, and if you buy it in the next few days, it’s only $4.

For the next five days use the promotional code SHARE4 when you checkout so you can have the PDF version of SHOOT + SHARE for only $4 OR use the code SHARE20 to get 20% off when you buy 5+ PDF eBooks from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm (PST) April 28, 2012.

Self Portrait, iPhone.

There are rules for engineering bridges, and flying airplanes. There are laws about how you drive a car and file your taxes. There are no rules or laws in art. Art is a beautiful anarchy, a place wherein we express – or try to – the inexpressible, to “eff the ineffable” as author Nick Hornby once wrote.  Art is a place where we play and do and create, and share, according to our will, our whim, and our stubborn determination. It is the one place in which we can ask the question “What if?” with near total abandon, and (mostly) free from consequence. There are no art police, and no authorities, and those who would be should be eyed with suspicion or torn from their high places.

Your art, the thing that stirs from your heart, mind, and soul, the thing that moves you, and I hope, moves others, is a free agent, and the moment you begin to ask “What should I do? or “How should I do this?” you allow you art to teeter, to lean towards conformity and away from authentic expression. Unless it’s the muse herself to whom you direct the question. The same is true of your path in the creative arts if you make your living there; why do we do this at all if not for the freedom to beat that path into whatever direction that suits our fancy, or to paint the cobblestones any damn colour we please? To do what we should in art is bondage. To tell others, with our art, what they should think or feel or do, is propaganda. And to tell other artists how they should do their art is presumptuous, and unkind, and tells the muse we’ve learned nothing at all under her influence.

We need more anarchists in photography, more people willing to abandon the stupidity of megapixels and brands and red stripes on their lenses and get back to making beauty for the sake of its joy. We need more people that make photographs that surprise us, not mimic others, and more people creating simply to create, and to share their work as a gift, not a request for praise. We need a resurgence in pinholes, film, wet plates, and any damn technique that makes you happy and in which you find your muse. We need to scrap the word “professional” because it implies authority, and simply allow everyone to be an artist, their work judged by its own merits not the camera used to create it or the clients that paid for it. We need people who understand how composition and light makes us feel, not which third of the frame to use, or which light is “bad light.”

Photography is still young. As an art it is still in its awkward, beautiful, childhood, but we stunt its growth, and our own, when we seek and follow the so-called rules, instead of just getting on with it and doing our work: making and sharing photographs that please our eyes and our hearts, that say – even imperfectly – the things we can’t find words for.

I’m about to get on a flight to Milan, via Frankfurt. 3 days of private lectures in Switzerland, a week with an old friend and my camera in Stockholm, then to Italy for 2 weeks of Within The Frame Adventures. If I’m quiet, that’s why. Maybe just sign out of Facebook, close the browser, embrace your inner anarchist, and go make some photographs…  See you soon!

Ladakh, India, 2008.

A year ago, on Easter weekend, I fell 30′ from a wall in Pisa, Italy. Most of you know that. I shattered both feet, cracked my pelvis and was told I would never walk the same again, and would “always have a limp, though you’ll limp with both feet, so it won’t look like a limp.” Whatever that means. A year later, after a couple surgeries, extensive rehab, and now the help of my chiropractor and trainer, I walked to dinner last night without the trace of a limp. It comes and goes, to be sure. Some days are better than others, and some days I need my cane. But through this year I’ve learned that I can do damn-near anything. So can you. The human spirit is a remarkable force.

I hit 40 this year. In those 40 years I’ve hit the ground more than once. Among other shining moments, I was diagnosed with diabetes when I was 20. I’ve divorced twice. I’ve gone bankrupt once. Each time I thought I’d never survive, would never live the life I wanted, would end up living in a box under a bridge, would wither from the shame of failure. But we bounce. We don’t have to, of course; we can choose to wallow, allow ourselves to be victims. Or we can say, F*ck it, take a deep breath, lean into the pain, and the fear, and move forward.

Have you seen the Honey Badger video on YouTube? (warning: NSF, rough language.) If I had a spirit guide, it’d be the honey badger.  We don’t all have bodies that do what we need them to, can’t all lean on good looks, or have above-average intelligence. But we can choose to endure, to persevere. I don’t want a perfect life; I want the courage to keep going, to sleep off the venom, to keep going, to bounce back. What’s Easter if not a celebration of the possibility of resurrection, and return from the darkest life has to offer?

We bounce, but it’s usually a choice. It’s that way in life, and it’s that way in art. And when bouncing isn’t enough, the truly blessed have friends to catch them, and you all carried me through moments this year, especially last May, that I didn’t think I’d come through. So this short post is simply to say “Thank you,” to remind you that you too will bounce back from the fall, whatever that is for you, and to wish you, from the bottom of a grateful heart, a Happy Easter.

A couple large prints would look great on these walls.

Photographers are a funny lot. So easily distracted. I just came back from the camera store where I came within an inch of buying the new Fuji X Pro 1. I resisted and had a cupcake instead. But as I drove home I thought about it. I had been working – happily printing my Antarctica series at the Loft – when I got it into my head that I needed to look at this camera. Not sure what I was thinking. I mean, it’s a nice camera, but I don’t need one. What I need to do is my work. The work. Anyone who’s read Pressfield’s book, The War of Art, will recognize this as what Pressfield calls Resistance, that self-sabotaging force that convinces us that almost anything is more important than doing our work. What is that work?

Create. Then Share. Then do it again.

Sharing is a theme I’m thinking a lot about, and you’ll hear more about it in the coming month. The truth is, I’ve neglected sharing my own work the way I want to, for a couple years. Yes, I put it in books and blog posts, and a monthly wallpaper, but I want to do more. I want to show bodies of work, I want to print large, I want to curate my own collections and, in the words of Rabbi Hillel, though I’m taking him wildly out of context, “If not now, when?”

The amazing thing about sharing our work is that it keeps the gift moving. But it does something else. It improves our craft. The feedback loop that is created when we print our work large, for example, sends us back to the negative to print it better, to be more attentive to the small things. It also makes us aware of mistakes we make chronically; in my case I routinely underexpose by a stop or more, and I pay about as much attention to the cleanliness of my sensor as I do to the Easter Bunny. The only difference is the Easter Bunny doesn’t keep showing up in my final photographs.

Sharing can also force us to heed our edits. Knowing others will see our work, though this is not true, it seems, of hundreds of thousands of people on Flickr, pushes us to be more selective. Printing does this even more. When you know each print costs you $20, you think twice about whether you need to print every one of the 100 frames of your cat that moments ago, while you were posting up a storm on Flickr, were all pure gold. A collection of a dozen well-selected photographs is usually much more powerful than a loose collection that you haven’t taken the time to edit.

Perhaps now’s the time to get your collections in order, cull out the dross, do a second edit to find missing gold, and then share them. In the past 5 years I’ve done Blurb books, put carefully curated albums on my iPad, made large canvases, and made and framed fine-art prints. I’m beginning to put new work up on Google+. Today I saw greeting cards made from MOAB fine-art papers – why not print up a dozen and give them to people as gifts, or one at a time when someone does something nice for you? My new loft has given me other options and I’ve just put a cable up to easily hang a large print on a rotating basis in my entry-way. Where can you show your work at home? I even heard of one photographer who prints up a new collection of work every couple of months, installs it in his home, and does a one-night gallery evening with wine, and invited his friends, many of whom buy and collect his work. Why not take some time to finally get that 500px account you’ve been talking about, and post a dozen images. How about looking into MOO.com to make cards showing your best work. Even if you never plan to work as a photographer, how great would it be to give people a card with your phone number and one of your photographs? Get your work out there, give it room to find a life outside your harddrives.

How do you share your work? I’d love to hear from you.

Iceland, 2010. Click either image to enlarge, then right-click to save to your computer.

Two desktop wallpapers this month, due to indecision. I’ve been printing up a storm over here at the loft and in the process I discovered a new series of black and white work from Iceland. These are 2560 x 1600 and will fit anything up to a 27″ iMac or LED cinema display. Enjoy.