It's a fairly common experience that when I upload images from my camera after an extensive shoot, I will frequently find images I have no memory whatsoever of having taken. I've learned, over the years, to pay a special attention to these images.

What percentage of processing time is spend exploring aesthetic alternatives versus just getting your vision manifest by processing steps? To me, one of the most fascinating aspects of digital processing is how it opens the door to experimentation. We try things that lead to a dead end, but it's easy to reverse course and try a different direction. Ultimately this expands our aesthetic decisions exponentially which is a great boon to developing creative vision.

Here's a topic I'll bet 99% of photographers have not thought much about. What instrument do you use to sign your prints? Pen? Pencil? Does it make a difference? Actually, I think it does.

I recently received a lovely email from someone who had purchased one of my chapbooks. He wasn't expecting a personalized colophon which, truth be told, is one of the reasons why I do so. A personalized colophon ads to the relationship component when sharing my artwork.

LW1441 - Sized for the Emotional Impact

A prevalent and often repeated question is how big should we make our prints? Some say that's determined by the subject. Others propose that print size is determined by the market. For what it's worth, my thoughts on this have to do with the emotional impact our image can make on the viewer.

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

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Everyone who looks at our images brings with them a suitcase full of their life experiences. I think it was Anias Nin who said, "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." We need to remember this when people are critical of or downright insulting about our images.

This is not just advice for 4-year-olds learning to cross the street. It's pretty good advice for us photographers, too. I've been thinking about this as function of how we manage the ratio of drive time to photographing time by stopping, looking, and listening.

There was a short-lived fad in the days of film when photographers would file out the negative carrier for their 35 mm film so that the edge of the film would be a part of the enlarged image. Sometimes this worked great, other times it looked like a silly gimmick. Here in the digital age, edge treatments are so easily accomplished and offer unlimited creative potential - as long as it doesn't become a gimmick.

In my film days, I did extensive research about enlargement factors for my film negatives. How much enlargement was possible before the image started to break down, soften, reveal grain, and in general turn yucky? Regardless of film size, the nature of gelatin silver was that the limits of enlargement were universally 4X. What about digital images?

For reasons I suspect are deeply held inclinations, it seems that photographers are always looking for shortcuts. The demand for plug-in, one click "treatments" grows with every generation of both software and photographers. We want to arrive without having taken a journey. What if the journey was the point? What if the art life is not a destination, but an ever-unfolding process that we engage because of the challenges and surprises we uncover along the way?