Blog

Who Will You Be (Tomorrow)?

There has been so much noise about John McCain and his carefully architected departure this week. If you look at recent events with even half of a critical eye, you can see exactly what the man was at the end of his life. Not too much more to be said regarding the person. He did what he wanted, and got out of his life the fruit of all of his choices. For the most part, there are few exceptions to this rule, barring some who have early deaths. Yet even an early passing may be a harbinger of choice, as

Designing a Future

As a Creative, I spend a bit of time thinking. In fact, sometimes, possibly most instances, the bulk of the heavy lifting I do when building content, revolves around me sitting in a dimly lit room alone, in silence: thinking. Then I lay out my project with the myriad number of variables we all must juggle when building our work, and get to it. This stage is the fun-easy part. But it goes nowhere of significance without me doing the former. This blog post from Seth Godin says a lot. So off we all get to go. As a

Creative Theory

I was approached by a friend of mine about the subject of artificial waves breaking over artificial reefs. The lens being creation of such a structure in open (deep) water. As we slowly examined the concept and looked at both naturally occurring as well as man made systems, I had a few thoughts: I have long wondered about something. Is it prudent to strictly mimic nature, in creation of design? Or would we be more successful in an endeavor to approach that new design concept by taking the organic concept, and add our own input to the design? This is

Samsung NX1: We Have Lift Off

The above image and copy is a post I did to my Instagram and Facebook pages this week. This Post is the first in a series of pieces I will do on my transition from the Canon System to that of Samsung. My perception is that this one system could serve as a foundation for professional level content creation in photography, cinematography and audio production. In my career in imaging, these shifts are more like massive leaps, and occur very infrequently, but always for the same collection of reasons. Those reasons can be summed up in this statement. “I want

The Intrigue of Story

I get this with reasonable frequency. A publication or commercial client or individual will contact me regarding doing some work for them. We sit down, a back and forth ensues. They really like what I am doing, and want work which will enhance their online presence by engaging Social Media. Then the conversation inevitably takes a dark turn when they state: “We need this imagery to go viral.” The next thing that generally occurs, is a discussion of the type of work they want: stills, motion, video etc. Then the conversation turns to cost-expense. I detail those for the different

Mothering

It is Mother’s Day. Yesterday I wandered out to create an image that would be illustrative, which I could use as a thank you note through our Ocean Lovers venture site. That image is above. I thought about it prior to building it, and all through the process from design, to copy writing, finalizing, and publishing. Sunset colors. White sage buds. The blossoms unified by the setting sun. An eternal message embedded within the symbology of the compositional elements. Earth, sky, eternity. I had spoken to my friend and colleague West Cook earlier. He was at his post running the

Creativity Restoration

It happened slowly, in a seductive manner. The devil that is responsibility to project fulfillment, had worn me down creatively. I could feel it, and understood what was going on, with far greater comprehension than one knows the proverbial back of their hand. (Does anyone really spend time looking at those?) This does not happen so frequently as one might suspect. Most Creatives know how to keep themselves in the flow of energy that births new work that matters. Unfortunately, lately it seemed that the performance required of me by some projects had begun to make me feel like a

The High Value in Story

All of us as creatives, are storytellers. That is worth something. So the integrity, skill and life experience of a creator, matters very much. We function within a socio-economic system that is quite leery of the increasingly open source access to “their market”. In a conversation with two sage colleagues in Photography today, I had to point out something. Basically it was this. Just because surf publishing has deigned to not let you play, does not mean your voice is not valid. In fact, it is the opposite. Established fiscal entities do not necessarily WANT the broad market to know

Benevolent Planning

The best laid schemes of mice and men / Often go awry- John Steinbeck I shot the image above, from the deck of the Robert G Brownlee, which is the 90 foot Research vessel for the Marine Science Institute. The view was what we saw, as our crew wrapped water tests with some of the new technology developed under the authority and expertise of some remarkable people, who work as Scientists at NASA and are associates with one of the groups I am a member of: Blue Ocean Sciences. It had been a fairly wonderful day. I will write

The Collaborative Effect

Years ago, Larry Moore, aka Flame, my Photo Editor at Surfing, took me aside and told me to do something. “Find people who you like to be with, who will work with you, and together, you guys concentrate on building new work. That is how great work comes” Because of that conversation, I never became a Surf Photographer per se. I became a collaborator. The image above is a piece of Art I finished today. The surfer in it is Sean Tully. Sean is a highly developed student of Surfing and in particular, the heritage of that lifestyle driven avocation.

Blog

Categories