I’ve bought a few hundred old film cameras on eBay over the years. I bought a lot of broken cameras in the early days! Little by little I learned what to avoid and what to look for in eBay listings. Today, I get good, working cameras the vast majority of the time. Here’s what I’ve learned.

When you travel, which cameras do you like to bring along and why? In this episode, I talk about the cameras I like to travel with, both on short trips and long vacations.

As I launch my new book, Under the Catalpa Tree, this week, I talk about iterating and retrospecting. In other words, take a flyer and try something new, and then think back about what went well and what you could have done better. Then try it again, incorporating what you’ve learned!

My book Under the Catalpa Tree is available now! It’s 52 of my photographs, with a story, essay, or history about each one. People tell me that reading my book feels like sitting around my kitchen table, sipping coffee and listening to me tell tales!

$29.99 paperback, $8.99 PDF, available here.

The conventional wisdom is that printing is not just the best, but the only viable way to preserve photographs. Printing works fine, but I don’t count out carefully preserving your work electronically.

In this episode of the Down the Road Podcast, I talk about how much of our best photographs is skill, and how much of it is luck. I was thinking about this because someone complimented a photo I made of a 1963 Corvette that I thought was only average.

This year, on Wednesdays I’m podcasting. I’ll speak about photography and creativity in messages that last no more than 5 minutes. If you’re like me, you like the idea of podcasts, but can’t commit enough time to listen to them when they run 30, 60, even 90 minutes. I’m solving that problem by making my podcast bite-sized!