By Jeff Curto
A Podcast About the Creative Side of Photography
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184184 ratings
Using a quote from Janet Malcolm’s collections of essays about photography as a springboard, I talk about the relative truth of photographs and look back to our discussion about peripheral vision. Play Podcast * Camera Position on Facebook – Share your images *...
As a driver, you use your peripheral vision all the time. So, too, with photography as you need to learn how to pay attention to what’s at the edge of your visual field in order to really see the world. Play...
What’s your hobby? As a recently retired person, it’s the question I often get as people try to figure out what I “do” with the time I used to spend “working.” In this episode, we look at the interconnected aspects...
With creative work, there is often a gap between our ambitions and our ability to create work that meets our expectations. Fortunately, our “inner critic” is there to help us close the gap between our goals and the photographs we...
Human values — those emotions, beliefs, traditions, and knowledge that we understand and share as human beings are an integral part of how we come to express ourselves in photography. In fact, it may be the essence of why we...
Rollo May (1909 – 1994) was an American existential psychologist and author. Among his books was The Courage to Create. In it, May lays out some ideas about art and creativity that have important implications for the creative person; photographers...
One of the four steps of achieving true critique of a work of art is analysis and doing that analysis requires applying the elements and principles of art. In this episode, we look at what those elements and principles are...
In the last couple of episodes of Camera Position, I talked about feedback on your work and the type of feedback you typically get contrasted against the type of feedback you want, which is true, genuine critique of your work. In...
Feedback on our work usually comes in one of two forms: Reaction and Direction. Both are simple to do but don’t give us what we really want to help move our work forward. This second podcast of two parts looks...
Feedback is something that photographers always want. Regardless of their level of interest or expertise, photographers always want to hear what other people think about their work. Most of the time, though, we often get feedback that doesn’t match what...
The practice of photography shapes the way we view the world. No matter what level of involvement you have with the medium, seeing the world as a photographer enhances your vision, your life and your sense of self. Celebrate that! Play Podcast
The book The Shape of Content, by Ben Shahn, is a collection of essays based on a series of six lectures given by Shahn, an important 20th century painter, at Harvard University in the 1950s. Through the book, we get a...
In his book The Way of Zen, Alan Watts explains two different, mutually important, ways of using our minds and therefore our creativity, which helps to explain the potential of perception in photography: “For we have two types of vision—central and...
You’re the photographer, not the viewer of the photographs you make. Between the making of the image and the time that the image is put out into the world for viewing, that distinction is often lost, though it’s an important...
Every new idea is just a restatement of old ideas, or sometimes it’s several old ideas combined into a new one. Collecting ideas as you go along is a great way of mining new ways of thinking of things. I use...
My first experience using snowshoes to explore the winter landscape gave me some insight into the process of learning new things and slowing down the process of looking and photographing. Check out my free e-book The Lakeshore in Winter – Filled...
Each year, I take small groups of students to Italy for an intense week of photography and learning. Some destinations vary, but a constant is the workshop In Search of the Personal: Photographing Southern Tuscany, where my goal is to...
Watching a group of students just getting started in photography reminded me about how we reach “escape velocity” in photography. Their positive experience was based on time, concentration, idea and craft. Student Images: Links for this Episode: * University of Georgia’s Cortona Studies...
Leaving home can not only allow you to view your personal environment with new eyes, but the new experiences you find when you’re away can also help you see the world in a different way. Here I use some examples...
As a kid, returning from my summer vacation showed me my home in a different way. Trees were bigger and the house smelled both familiar and new. Leaving home and coming back again can be a great way to invigorate...
Years ago, I had a friend who was a professional chef. Sometimes, on his days off, he would come to my house and practice what he called “sport cooking” and I ended up applying the concept to my photography. Play Podcast
Be in the moment. In this episode, I encourage you to put your camera down, disconnect yourself from your devices and other distractions and embrace the Italian concept Dolce Far Niente; the sweetness of doing nothing. Play Podcast
“The medium is the message” is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. Content is king....
Content, sequence and structure matter. This episode looks at editing down your photographs to a cogent and clear set that tells your story most effectively and strengthen the work. We also look at the element of sequencing your images as an...
The Story Spine is a wonderful method of conceptualizing a story. Initially conceived by playwright Kenn Adams, it’s a great tool for anyone who wants to tell a story effectively. The Story Spine is a template, but a loose one,...
Photography excels at storytelling. While a single image can tell a story, we can tell much more complex stories with sets or series of images. If we set out to create those images with a story idea in mind, it’s much...
While Camera Position has been quiet for a while, a whole lot has been going on in my life as a photographer, a teacher and a traveler. This episode is an update on the past, the present and the future...
Photographer Olivia Parker has been an influential and prolific photographer for more than 40 years. We look at Parker’s work, her background, her persistence and the way our networks can help inspire us and help us move us forward in...
In this episode, we take a third look at how we can get our work “off the wall” by creating digital stories. Using iMovie, Final Cut Pro, ProShow Gold or similar software to combine image, motion and audio, we can...
This episode offers a second look at how we can get our work “off the wall” by creating ebooks using iBooks Author to get our photographs under viewer’s eyes. You can download the free book The Lakeshore in Winter from the...
As photographers, we translate our ideas into objects. In this episode, we look at how we can get our work “off the wall” by using the print on demand service MagCloud to get our photographs under viewer’s eyes. * MagCloud –...
Learning photography is like learning a language. As we assimilate photographic vocabulary, nuance and the like, we wind up being interpreters or translators of our ideas, interpreting those ideas into objects. I’ve realized that as I progress, my interest in photography...
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is a phrase attributed to psychologist Abraham Maslow, but I’ve always thought it had application to photography and its practice, too. In this episode, I discuss how the...
Not long ago, I saw an article by Nicholas Day on Slate.com about babies and pointing. The article discussed how babies point at things to help them create meaning in their world and to share their experiences with someone else....
I’ve long loved the detail image; the photograph that shows just a snippet of the larger world. In this episode, I look at an image of mine that has that sense of detail and also look at the historical referent...
Photographer Carol Golemboski has taken the idea of an electronic book – or any sort of electronic presentation of photography, farther than any I’ve yet seen. Her iPad app Psychometry combines images, text, video, interactive panoramas, extensive background on how...
I had lots and lots of great ideas from podcast listeners about Camera Position 125, “Thinking in Monochrome.” Several listeners suggested a digital tool that I’d not thought of before and that was to set the camera for B&W;, but...
We all try to spend time with photographs by photographers whose work we admire. We spend time trying to figure out how to emulate their work, then produce work that is similar in style to what they do. But here...
I grew up making black and white photographs. It’s what I love the most about photography and the way I have long thought about the photographic image. But the digital revolution has spawned a dilemma; the digital camera sees in...
The word “photography” comes from a combination of two Greek words; “photos” (light) and “graphos” (writing or marking). So, “photography” means to “write with light” and light has a counterpart, shadow, something for light to play off of. I’m giving Camera...
When’s the last time you printed a photograph of your best friend, your child or your parents? Now that the holiday season is concluded, we all likely have a lot of photographs of friends and family and places we visited....
Photographer Jerry Uelsmann once said something like, “while you can memorize the dictionary, it doesn’t mean you have anything to say afterwards.” The idea of course is that craft is not content. While the mechanics of photography can be a...
At what point do photographers manipulate their images? Does it happen when we choose a camera, lens and field of view or does it happen afterwards, in post-production? When it comes to manipulating your photographs, is there such a thing...
As the greatest photographer of Modernist architecture, Julius Shulman’s images stand as icons of the architectural boom in mid-20th Century America. This podcast is a quick and enthusiastic review of a wonderful movie entitled Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman,...
A photographic project is a wonderful thing, but a single image is powerful too in a wide variety of ways. Single photographs can be fulfilling all by themselves and they can also be harbingers of bodies of...
How much do you know about the subjects you photograph? Granted, you may just be encountering them for the first time when you first make pictures, but for a body of work, knowing the “backstory” about a subject and what...
In their book The Color of Hay, photographer Kathleen Laraia McLaughlin and her author husband H. Woods McLaughlin take us to a little known part of the world and show it to us with extraordinary grace and care. Many of...
Turn it upside-down! Turning your photographs upside-down is a great way to help you evaluate the composition of your photographs by helping to remove the importance of the subject of the photograph and concentrate more on its structure.
Although I have been giving assignments to students for years and years, I sometimes forget that I can give myself an assignment, too. So, this summer, I gave myself the task of photographing a stretch of lakeshore 150 feet long...
Feeding yourself with as many photographs as you can possibly see is one of the great ways to stay fresh in photography. The more you see, the more full your visual history becomes and the more you can take with...