When I developed the idea of folios and started producing them in 1990s, I experienced a most unexpected bit of feedback. With almost perfect statistical distribution, each image in a folio would become someone's favorite. At first I thought this was a curiosity, but I've come to realize it's more significant than that.

Photography has, for very dubious reasons, established itself as a truthful medium. Photographs can be used as evidence, and its objectivity is legend. But of course we photographers know that photography can easily be untrue, too. As an art medium, do we care? Don't we all know that all other media of art are fictions? Do any of us worry about the truthfulness of a painting, a sculpture, a novel, a poem, a song, a bit of theater?

I love simple solutions to pesky problems. One of the odd advantages of digital photography is that we can capture as many images as we want and then discard the bad ones later. We don't have to worry about the cost of film and processing like we did in the old days. This opens the door to a statistical advantage that is worth exploiting.

An almost unsolvable problem exists with the challenge of including panorama images in books. On a single page, they are so small. Splitting the image onto facing pages implies that awkward jump in the gutter. A folded so-called "gate fold" is expensive.

I know that some of you have been listening to my musings on photography for years, but I also know there are a lot of you who are new listeners. Allow me a moment here to draw your attention to the archive that is available to LensWork Online members of every podcast and every Here's a Thought going back to the earliest days. There are currently over 1,400 long-form podcasts and over 2,100 short Here's A Thought commentaries. Have fun exploring them!

I've been revisiting the work of some of my photographic heroes. This is the work I loved, cherished and emulated in my youth. Lots of that work (and some of those masters) have not aged well. It's clear to me with the passage of time that they and their photographs were a product of their times. By today's standard, their accomplishments seem, well, quaint and/or primitive. Is it fair to judge their work by today's standards?

Before I went to China for the first time in 2009, I developed a deep-seated fear that I would discover my camera was broken and that my trip to that far off land would result in no photographs. To reduce that risk, I purchased a second camera, thus beginning my two-camera strategy. More recently, I've added a third camera to my basics, but for a different reason entirely.

There's always more to learn in photography, but if we're not careful learning can become our primary if not sole activity. I've said for years that the best way to approach a photographic life is by finishing work. That means doing — and ironically the more you do the more you will learn without the focus being on learning. Said another way, workshops are great but not as a diet

LW1437 - It Takes Time

So much in photography these days takes place at breakneck speed. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Think of how many hours it takes for a pianist to be prepared for performance. Think how many hours it takes a poet to get each word and phrase just right. Why do we photographers think we can snap a picture and upload it to Instagram and that it will be lasting and meaningful artwork?

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Every Picture Is a Compromise, a series at www.brooksjensenarts.com.

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"How to" tutorials and camera reviews are everywhere on YouTube, but if you're interested in photography and the creative life, you need to know about the incredible resources you can access as a member of LensWork Online.

I'm sure there are people who make a living selling their fine art photographs. I know two such individuals. Period. You see, there is a fundamental economic reality that can't be avoided and that is that the buyer determines what sells. We may want to make personally motivated, personally expressive photography, but if that's not what buyers want to acquire, we have little chance of selling work. So what do we do? We find ancillary ways to pay the bills. Come to think of it, has the art life ever been different than this?