LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process

HT2506 - Allocating Our Precious Time The most valuable commodity we have in our art life is not our gear, not our training, not our creative impulses, not our energy and drive. All those things might be important, but they are useless unless we have time. Without time all the potential we've banked by learning our craft and going out photographing will add up to naught. I know it can seem counterintuitive to schedule our creative activities, but in fact having a schedule to work on our art maybe the most important step we can take to make sure our creative endeavors aren't swallowed up by the trivialities of life. 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. Show your appreciation for our free weekly Podcast and our free daily Here's a Thought… with a donation Thanks!

HT2505 - Buried in Lightroom One of the most dramatic impacts of digital photography is the volume of captures that now reside on all of our hard drives. It's not uncommon at all for me to hear that a photographer has tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of images in their catalog that are, essentially, inaccessible to anyone except the photographer. So much creativity buried in our hard drives just waiting for their turn on stage! This RSS feed includes only the most recent seven Here's a Thought episodes. All of them — over 2500 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.

HT2504 - Searching for Threads You've set aside an hour to work on your photography and find yourself sitting at the computer looking at images. At such moments, it is so tempting to spend your precious creative time on a search for images that have potential and then processing them to the best of your abilities. That's not the only option. Alternatively, you might try using that precious time on a different search, a search for the threads that can bind a group of images into a project. Show your appreciation for our free weekly Podcast and our free daily Here's a Thought… with a donation Thanks!

HT2503 - Managing Results vs Managing Work Last year I became frustrated that I wasn't getting done as many photographic projects as I had hoped to finish. My old goal-directed business training kicked in and I decided to set goals for myself. It didn't help. And then I remembered one of the earliest lessons from management training: Don't manage results, manage the work. Set another way, goals are a result, not a tactic. Show your appreciation for our free weekly Podcast and our free daily Here's a Thought… with a donation Thanks!

HT2502 - Believability vs Truthfulness The other day I was looking at some of the photo essays done by W. Eugene Smith and published in Life magazine. They're fantastic examples of the integration of image and text, and as such are worth taking the time to study in some detail. In the process of looking at this work. It occurred to me that my underlying assumption in all his photo essays is that they are truthful, that is to say, documentary not fiction. But would it make a difference to my response if they were fiction? Art is full of fiction, and I see no overwhelming reason why photography should avoid the storytelling capabilities of fiction. Show your appreciation for our free weekly Podcast and our free daily Here's a Thought… with a donation Thanks!