Random Observations on Art, Photography, and the Creative Process. These talks focus on the creative process in fine art photography. LensWork editor Brooks Jensen side-steps techno-talk and artspeak to offer a stimulating mix of ideas, experience, and observations from his 50 years as a fine art photographer, writer, and publisher. Topics include a wide range of subjects from finding subject matter to presenting your work, and building an audience.
Included in this RSS Feed are the LensWork Podcasts — posted weekly, typically 10-20 minutes exploring a topic a bit more deeply — and our almost daily Here's a thought… audios (extracted from the videos.) Here's a thought… are snippets, fragments, morsels, and tidbits from Brooks' fertile (and sometimes swiss-cheesy) brain. Usually just a minute or two. Always about photography and the art life.
Brooks Jensen is the publisher of LensWork, one of the world's most respected and award-winning photography publications, known for its museum-book quality printing and luxurious design. LensWork has subscribers in over 73 countries. He is the author of 13 books on photography and the creative life -- the latest books are The Best of the LensWork Interviews (2016), Photography, Art, and Media (2016), and the four annual volumes of Seeing in SIXES (2016-2019).
I suspect there aren't many camera manufacturers who regularly listen to these commentaries, but if there are here are two features I would love to see added to my camera, both of which should be fairly easy to implement.
Most pictures need an edge. Where the image meets the background, a point of delineation needs to exist in order to define what is image and what is background. A good example is an overexposed sky against the white background of the paper.
LW1392 - What Came Before
I suspect it more than a few of you who have, from time to time, been tempted to try a marriage between photography and haiku. It's a fun idea, but I rarely find it convincing. Usually, it feels like competing media that are fighting each other rather than complimenting one another. There is, however, and idea that might be useful known in Japan as a Haibun.
All previous episodes of our weekly podcast are available to members of LensWork Online. 30-day Trial Memberships are only $10. Instant access, terabytes of content, inspiration and ideas that expand daily with new content.
Every Picture Is a Compromise, a series at www.brooksjensenarts.com.
and...
"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.
HT1832 - Mastering the Medium
I've never heard of photographer Gustave Le Gray, but I saw one of his mammoth plate prints at The Clark yesterday. What an unexpected response that left me impressed for all the wrong reasons.
All previous episodes of our weekly podcast are available to members of LensWork Online. 30-day Trial Memberships are only $10. Instant access, terabytes of content, inspiration and ideas that expand daily with new content.
Every Picture Is a Compromise, a series at www.brooksjensenarts.com that looks at failures as a way to learn.
and...
"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.
From my earliest days in photography, the assumption was that anything automatic would be inferior to the trained and sophisticated decisions of a skilled photographer. Manually implemented controls would result in better pictures than any automatic decisions the camera would make on its own. Is this still true?
The purpose of poetry is not to show off our clever use of vocabulary. It is to connect us with the dance of life. Similarly, the purpose of a photograph is not to show what the surface of world looks like, but rather to reveal the invisible. The print is not the goal; the goal is the response the view has when looking at the print.
There's a fascinating philosophical question about black and white photography that pops up from time to time. If color photography had been invented first, would there have been a need to invent black and white photography at all? Set another way, what does black and white photography provide that is denied in color photography? What is your default - - color or b/w?
As a photographer, I know embarrassing little about color science. I do know that a cyan sky is just wrong. That has led me to use profiles as a better starting point.
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