Jeff Curto's Camera Position

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. Make sure you spend some time printing those photographs of the things that matter to … Continue reading Camera Position 123 : Print The Small Stuff →

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 point of refuge for many image makers, photography’s power exists in an image’s message.Ansel Adams … Continue reading Camera Position 122 : Craft Is Not Content →

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 “too much”? This episode of Camera Position looks at one photographer’s confession of “over … Continue reading Camera Position 121 : The Raw and The (over)Cooked? →

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, which is available as a DVD or as streaming video at the locations linked … Continue reading Camera Position 120 : Visual Acoustics →

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 work yet to come. JM Colberg’s Conscientious Blog Post: The Single Photograph Jeff’s Italy Photography Workshops: Full for … Continue reading Camera Position 119 : The Power of the Single Photograph →

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 makes it significant can be an important part of investing yourself in the image.

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 my photo book recommendations have been old classics, but this one is what you might … Continue reading Camera Position 117 : Photographer’s Bookshelf – “The Color Of Hay” →

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 and 10 feet in either direction from where the water meets the land. It was … Continue reading Camera Position 115 : The Self-Assignment →

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 you to make your own new statements about the world. Links for this podcast: Greg … Continue reading Camera Position 114 : Feed Your Eyes →