Category: Uncategorized

Knoxville doesn’t get the street photography hype, which is exactly why it’s good. Nobody’s performing for cameras here. People are just living, and living photographs beautifully. Start at Market Square. It’s the living room of downtown, and on a Saturday it’s a conveyor belt of humanity. Work the edges, find your light, let the square…

My D810 still takes the same pictures it took ten years ago. The mirror still slaps. The files still sing. Nobody told the camera it’s obsolete. I get the mirrorless argument. Smaller, quieter, eye autofocus that could track a housefly in a hurricane. I shoot mirrorless most days. But better at some things is not…

Carrying a camera every day teaches you things no tutorial covers. It teaches you that light is everything and everything else is negotiable. A boring subject in great light beats an interesting subject in flat light, every single time, no exceptions. It teaches you that people are kinder than the internet insists. In years of…

I’ve owned three or four X100 cameras, including the VI, and every single one has shipped with a feature I have never used. Not once. It’s in the menu, it has a page in the manual, and it might as well be a rumor. Fujifilm keeps adding things because new has to mean more. But…

The film simulation recipe community is a wonderful place full of people doing good work, and I mean that. But I tried a bunch of the famous recipes side by side, and I have a confession: they kind of all look the same. Slightly warm. Slightly faded. Blacks a little crushed, greens a little moody.…

Your photos are terrible. Mine are too. Everyone’s first ten thousand photos are terrible, and most people’s next ten thousand are uneven. This is not an insult. It’s the admission price. Since the title promised ten tips and I am a man of my word, here they are, compressed: shoot every day, get closer than…

I’ll be honest: I didn’t buy the a6700 for black and white. Nobody does. You buy a Sony for the autofocus and the video specs and the sensor, and then one day you’re walking around with the Creative Look set to BW and you think, wait, what is happening here. What happened is that Sony’s…

Short answer: yes. Long answer: also yes. Cameras don’t expire. The a6700 takes the same pictures today it took on day one, because the sensor didn’t get tired and the lens didn’t forget how to be sharp. The only thing that changed is the marketing around it. Still good is a question invented by an…

When the Leica Q came out, the internet did what the internet does: it reviewed the spec sheet instead of the camera. Too expensive. Fixed lens. For that money you could buy… And then everyone moved on, confident they’d figured it out without touching one. They were wrong. I know because I shoot with one,…

Beginners think street photography is about people. It’s not. It’s about scenes. The people are just the part that moves. Work the scene means this: find a background with good light and interesting geometry, and then work it. Shoot it empty. Shoot it with one person. Wait for two people. Wait for the light to…