Perhaps you've heard the advice, "There is no bad weather, there is only bad clothing." When I woke up this morning, it was -2° F outside. For reasons I assume are obvious, this has me thinking about cold weather photography. One of the most useful tools for hands and batteries are reusable hand warmers. I swear by them.

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I had a water leak that dripped into a couple of portfolio cases where I housed artwork from other photographers. I lost 13 pieces of wonderful work that were completely destroyed. Forever. I feel a double sadness in this in that not only did I lose some work that was important to me, but also lost that work to any future it might have had after I'm gone. Owning artwork implies a responsibility to protect it, preserve it, care for it. This is one of the reasons I never give away my prints unsolicited. I don't want to impose that burden on anyone without their consent.

This RSS feed includes only the most recent seven Here's a Thought episodes. All of them — over 2400 and counting! — are available to members of LensWork Online. Try a 30-day membership for only $10 and discover the literally terabytes of content about photography and the creative process.

My old phone finally gave up the ghost when its battery wouldn't hold a charge anymore. So off to the phone store and a new phone, and that sizable project of getting the new phone and its settings adapted to my needs. Unfortunately, with this new phone, I was unaware of an "improvement" that Android calls Adaptive Display. Now that I've turned off adaptive display, my images look so much better.

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I'm a fan of Sergei Rachmaninoff's piano compositions. I was not aware, however, until last night, of a composition he wrote titled Variations on a Theme of Corelli. The backstory of this work is simple. Corelli wrote a short piece of music in which there is a central tune. That tune captured Rachmaninoff's imagination. Rachmaninoff then took this short musical theme and composed 20 variations that are different in every regard, but still identifiable because of the basic tune. As I listened last night, I couldn't help but think how we could use this idea in our creative photographic expressions.

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I'm certainly not the only photographer who looks back at their earlier work and feels a sense of embarrassment. What was I thinking? Of all the negatives or digital captures I had to choose from, why did I think this one was worth printing, matting, and (God forbid) framing? Isn't it equally odd that a few images from those early years seem to have held up pretty well? Can I trust my own aesthetic judgments? Will the images I'm producing today seem ridiculous 5 or 10 years from now? Each finished artwork is a product of its time.

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When we say that one photograph is better than another, how do we arrive at that conclusion? When we are processing our images, what is the criteria we use to take the next step in processing? As I've thought about this, one answer keeps reoccurring: all of the decisions we make have the intention of revealing an ideal. What do we mean by "the ideal"? Why is our goal not the truth? When did photography change from a sensitive pursuit of truth into a technological and aesthetic pursuit of a fictional ideal? Now that AI makes the ideal so accessible, will that change our aesthetic objectives?

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The core of artmaking is the twin fusion of learning and producing. It's easy to see that if there is no producing there is no artwork. It's not so obvious that if there is no learning there is no artwork. Learning comes from many sources, One of the most important is our past decisions. Here is a simple exercise that can amplify the importance of learning with every capture.

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LW1482 - The Importance of Momentum

Borrowing a phrase from Carl Chiarenza and his book, Pictures Come from Pictures, I'd like to propose that "projects come from projects." We may not be aware of the threads that run through our creative life as we are living it, but in retrospect we can often see how one artistic effort begets another. This is precisely why preserving creative momentum is so important. But, how to do it?

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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.

In 1989, I commissioned a metal shop expert to create an adapter for my Arca Swiss monorail view camera that would allow me to use Polaroid 3¼ by 4¼ film packs. This led to a summer-long project that today exists as a box of matted Polaroid originals that are all unique prints. I recently found this box of prints and reviewed that 37-year-old work, completed half a life ago when I was 34. A lot of those prints are wonderful, but what do I do with them?

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Time has a way of filtering out the unimportant. Think back 500 years ago. We don't remember local politics, but we do remember the great art from that era. What will people, 500 years from now, look back at our era and find most remarkable? I'll guarantee you it won't be your work or my work, nor even the photographs of the masters like Ansel Adams or Edward Weston. No, they will look back at the images the astronauts captured while on the moon, the Voyager, Cassini, and Juno expeditions to the distant planets, the Hubble and Webb telescope images of distant galaxies.

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