Oakland, April 2025.
From the video Running out of time.
Oakland, April 2025.
From the video Running out of time.
Utah, April 2025.
My last days in the Bay Area.
San Francisco, April 2025.
San Francisco, April 2025.
From the video How wide is too wide?
My experiments with the ultra wide angle Laowa 10-18mm (Amazon link).
San Francisco, April 2025.
San Francisco, April 2025.
Yosemite National Park, California, March 2025.
From the video It finally happened.
Vestland, Norway, October 2022.
Oregon, November 2020.
Colorado, September 2020.
A collection of photographs I've made over the last few weeks here in the city.
A compilation of photos of Scottish roads from 2023.
San Francisco, February 2025.
In 1977, on the sidewalk outside his loft on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan, the fifty-eight-year-old W. Eugene Smith watched from a wheelchair as some two dozen volunteers—mostly young photography students paying homage—loaded his life’s work into two shipping trucks.
When the shipment arrived in Tucson, it filled a high school gymnasium and spilled into outlying rooms.
Included in the shipment were three thousand matted and unmatted master prints; hundreds of thousands of meticulous 5 x 7 work prints; hundreds of thousands of negatives and contact sheets. There were hundreds of pocket spiral notebooks and thousands of 3 x 5 note cards with scribbled notes; maps and diagrams from all over the world; and hundreds of boxes of clipped magazine and newspaper articles. Smith wrote hundreds of fifteen-page single-spaced letters to family, friends, and people he barely knew, and he mimeographed copies before mailing them. There were dozens of cameras, various pieces of darkroom equipment, trash cans and boxes full of loose lens caps, rubber bands, and paper clips. Smith also had 25,000 vinyl records and 3,750 books.
[Smith’s] death certificate read “stroke” but, as was said of the immortal jazzman Charlie Parker, Smith died of “everything.” He was flat worn out. He’d given up. He left eighteen dollars in the bank, and forty-four thousand pounds of materials.
Gene Smith's Sink: A wide-angle view
I’ve long argued that you need to be obsessed if you want to become great at something. But Eugene Smith took this to extreme.
We have to commit to our art with either intensity or longevity. They are almost mutually exclusive, as ferocious intensity can’t be maintained for too long. Even if your mind can hold, your body will eventually fail, as happened to Smith. He died at 58, leaving many years of potential growth and work on the table.
Consistency and a healthier balance over a long period of time are usually the wiser choice.
More megapixels doesn't mean better photographs... but in many ways, high resolution sensors can make our lives as photographers much easier, and enable us to do things we couldn't do with fewer pixels.
Yosemite National Park, California, March 2025.
From the video It finally happened.
Fuji is getting a lot of attention thanks to the recently announced GFX100RF. What caught my attention from that camera wasn’t the fixed-lens, the medium format sensor, or the $5,000 price tag. It was the new “aspect ratio dial”.
This seems to be part of a new trend with Fuji cameras. Just a few months earlier, the X-T50 was the first to introduce a dedicated “film simulation dial”.
I celebrate when a manufacturer tries something new, but I can’t help but wonder what these new dials might be revealing about the times we live in.
Are photographers nowadays switching aspect ratios and film simulations so often that they need a dial for quick access?
It feels like a reflection of the modern creative mindset: constantly changing things, never sticking with something long enough to master it. There’s always a new, shiny trick that promises to change the game. Except it never does.
I’m starting to feel old-school when I advocate for consistency: the value of committing to a tool, a format, or an aesthetic for some time.
If one photo is 3:2 and color while the next is 1:1 and black and white, our work might end up feeling cluttered and directionless. It’s not just about cohesion in a portfolio, it’s about developing a personal vision.
A style doesn’t emerge from constantly switching things. It comes from working within some boundaries, constraints that force us to solve problems through creativity, instead of avoiding them.
Experimentation is good. But there’s a difference between thoughtful evolution and constant indecision. Sometimes, we just need to commit to something.
San Diego, December 2024.