Passport

You read this magazine. You’re reading this column right now. So I’m thinking that you’ve got your act together. You keep up with the new gear; you pick up tips and techniques, ideas and inspiration. Your skills are sharp and you know what you need to get the pictures you want to get. So when you go out to shoot this summer, you’re going to go with one camera body, maybe...

Every year my family journeys from our home in Texas to spend a few summer weeks at our house on Cape Cod. In the fall I usually return to the Cape by myself for a month. I spend half that time doing some commercial shooting, and it’s always my intention to spend the remaining two weeks just relaxing and doing pretty much nothing before the fall season of photo shows, assignments, and...

Gather 'round, guys. Right here, around the campfire. Closer...that's it. There's something we have to talk about, something I want you to do. I want you to shoot more like women.

And I want you to do it when you're photographing other men.

Because I think you have a problem photographing men.

See, I've been...

It was something I read in a magazine not too long ago that inspired this column. The writer was talking about the three levels of creativity: imitative, adaptive, and innovative. I wish I could remember the context, but I made a quick connection to photography. We're imitative at the start; we copy others. Then we're adaptive; we make what we've imitated our...

Call it instinct or intuition, but something is telling you what pictures you should be taking. I call it the quiet little voice, and when it talks, I try to listen. The problem is, as we move on in our careers, or our hobbies, other voices take over, and we often stop listening, or listening enough, to the guiding voice that comes from within.

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I consider the photographs I take of people to be environmental portraits, even though there are no elaborate props or backgrounds in the images. I suppose I define "environmental" as adding a context to the photograph, or suggesting a lifestyle, interests, or relationships.

And when I'm taking photographs of people, less is definitely more. A...

A while back I had two big production shoots, one in India, the other in Shanghai. For both, the clients were with me all day, every day, and it was interesting that when they got around to comparing me to other stock and travel shooters they'd worked with--I'd asked them, of course, just to see how my operation stacked up to others'--they told me that...