What are we being sold today when it comes to photographic gear? I’m including all things from cameras to lenses to post-processing software. In a nutshell, I propose we are being sold a bevy of gear that is singularly focused on all things being louder, faster, and how all this can transform photographs into something completely different from what they were when we made them.

This is clearly apparent in various Adobe marketing emails I received over the last week. Just today, I was greeted with an email from Adobe that promises ”BOOST CLARITY IN SECONDS”. It continues with showing a tiny, blurry, pixelated image magically transformed into one that’s sharp. A few days before that was a different Adobe advert that showed a very loud, colorful picture of a woman dressed in an outrageous wardrobe. It was perfectly fine but was completely transformed in terms of background, pose, and now holding an object that didn’t exist before. All of this was ostensibly done via typing words into AI.

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In last week’s regular newsletter installment I made a haphazard list of some things to try and how to go back to school while enjoying one of the greatest times of year to be out exploring your world. Some you may have taken a few of those suggestions to heart, but hey, we’re visual people, right? This week I’ll point out some photographers that I hope will inspire you to get out there and look at your world in fresh ways.

I did quite a bit of research with some particular criteria. The first criteria was to select some other’s photography work that does not require anyone to travel to far-away lands in search of some unbelievable or at least novel scenes. Instead, I wanted to find photographers that have some unique ways of interpreting their world, ways that could work with readily available scenes for just about anyone. The secret is to start exploring your world with genuine curiosity and noticing how magical the world and more importantly how magical cameras are.

The second criteria was to select photography that’s not going to require any new gear, no special gear, no lenses you don’t have. Most of this can be done with what everyone of us already has; the key is using what you have in a different way. The third criteria was to select some photographers that had a mastery of some of the list of suggestions I made in ways that were not just a one-off gimmick but a consistent and meaningful use of some of the techniques I mentioned.

Sure, a few of the techniques I brought up can be fun but can also be a unifying, and very personal way of approaching a project. Here’s the thing… There’s nothing wrong with playing. I encourage play when it comes to making pictures. It’s more than fun; in a lot of cases, that’s where creativity and inspiration meet. You may make a dozen failures your first time out, but I’ll be willing to bet there will be at least one picture you make that will spur you on and cause you to start thinking of scenes to either return to and try again or point you to subjects that will work. Before you know it, you’ll be knee-deep in a project that is compelling and drives your work forward.

Some words of advice:

• If you’re not well practiced in some of these techniques, pick just one and learn it well before you start trying all of them or, worse, trying to combine them.

• If you see something or a few things that are inspiring, save them. Again, focus on one inspiration first. If you have too many things rattling around in your head when you’re out making pictures, it can just be too much; go slow.

• Make note of the time of day and lighting situations of what inspires you. When you see that outside, it’s time to make pictures. Don’t try to make pictures in light that is completely different than what you chose as inspiration. Huge mistake.

Anna Lilleengen

If you like simple, uncluttered landscape and nature, this might be right up your alley. Note the broad use of dark shadows completely lacking in detail rather than ratcheting things up just because you can. It’s all about shape and color palette, and of course, some tasteful multiple exposures. Nothing complicated here; in fact, a lot of this work is using the same scene or scenes over and over. Take your time and look, print out a page and make some notes, slow down and enjoy yourself.

Christopher Weeks

Nature, urban, any old place? This photographer uses camera motion and slow-shutter effects on just about anything. Wide scenes or tight abstractions. His technique is effective and in many cases compelling. He’s well-travelled, but I’ll bet you can find some scenes here to inspire taking a closer look right outside your own door. He seems to organize things in a way that I probably wouldn’t. Inside each of his galleries is a giant diversity of subject matter, so don’t jump to any conclusions based on the representative thumbnails. Inside each, you’ll find a vast diversity of subjects.

A big thanks to all of our readers, but especially those that help us keep the lights on with a paid subscription. These first two are just the tip of the iceberg. I have a ton more that go far deeper and are far and away not even close to the same. Let me know if you’d like me to keep on going with some more photographic inspiration .

In my talks to photographers, in all our workshops, and in our videos, we often emphasize that our work as photographers doesn’t end with the print. Yes, fine art printing itself is a worthy goal, since only a minority of photographers make prints. But there is more.

Bob and I believe that a critical step beyond the print is its presentation; how we choose to present that print on the wall. So in this DIY (Part One of a two-part DIY), I’ll introduce you to what I call a stacked display.

As I prepped for this DIY, it dawned on me that I should discuss a few points and share some tips on what you must put in place before actually attacking the stacked display. I need to point out that all the photos in this DIY were taken on my iPhone by me as I worked, so I can’t blame Bob for them being... ahem... mediocre.

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It’s that time of year, all of the young people are busy figuring out their new school year. Many of you may be heavily involved in your children returning to school and all that goes along with that. It’s also a fantastic time to get out and about with your camera no matter which hemisphere you may reside. It’s a season of change and transition everywhere, especially for those farther away from the equator. In most geographies, it’s not too hot or too cold to enjoy the outdoors for almost everyone.

I’m not going to talk exclusively about the northern hemisphere’s fall color, but that’s a fine reason to get out with your camera too. In the spirit of back to school, I really want to advocate all of us going back to school in our photographic endeavors. The back-to-school season is not typically the time of travel to far-away places; instead, it’s a time of getting back to the routines of being at home, the workday rather than the excitement of new surroundings. Rather than wanderlust daunting your photographic desires, I suggest the back-to-school season is a fantastic time to hone your skills and better prepare yourself for your next far-away adventure.

Here’s my prescription to going back to school: try it. Forget inspiration being some external force to move you. Go take a walk around your house and neighborhood. If that seems completely void (it’s not), then take a ride a mile or five miles up the road. Stop at the first thing or place that you remotely imagine has some sort of photographic opportunity. Take a picture but stop yourself right there and resist the urge to just move on to something different, stop yourself from seeking novelty. Instead, look at what you just made that one frame of, look at it as a scene and a subject that is full of possibilities…

This scene is now where you start school, the school of exploration in a different sense than moving on to a different scene. Instead, do this:

• Force yourself to make some number of completely different shots. If you need to make up a number, 5, 10, 20, even 3, it doesn’t matter, but make very different shots no matter how you felt about that first one.

• Walk into the scene, shoot from different angles, walk around it. Find some detail inside. Shoot it wide, extract details, get really far away and shoot it with a lot of compression if possible.

• Ask yourself, what is the story of this scene? The scene doesn’t have to be large or even what you would consider “a scene”. It could be your garage or your child in a particular context, or a stranger.

• I’m going to add one more piece to this that will be really challenging and supercharge your creativity and perception. No matter how many shots you decided to force yourself before venturing out, also decide how many of those to use any “special” technique.

• What special technique you ask; could be anything but decide on just one to use for a reasonable duration of this exercise. How about slow shutter speeds? Combine that with intentional camera motion if desired. How about multiple exposures (most cameras do that, and a huge number will actually bake those into a RAW file). How about shallow depth-of-field no matter what the scene is to force what is the primary actor in the scene? How about shooting out-of-focus on purpose?

Now do that over the next month with the same set of parameters over and over again. Force yourself to do at least one scene, once a week. If you are out doing that one scene and you can do another one either close by or drive another few miles, turn down a road you’ve never been on. You get the idea.

I do this exercise periodically, especially when the weather is good to be out of doors. I do it on a micro scale when it’s not so nice. When I’m brave enough and overcome my laziness, I’ll even force myself out in the rain. I wish I would do this more, but I generally do it when I am “stuck”. I may not make profound work, but I do come up with ideas, themes, and yes, scenes that eventually become projects. What’s even better when going back to school is how much better my eye and technique are no matter what I’m photographing.

Recently, photographers who have an Adobe subscription of various types, including the lowly Photography Plan, have received a few new goodies from the unending, constant updates. I’m specifically referring to Generative Expand for the crop/rotate tool/geometry tool and the new Glow section in the effects tool. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about either of these new goodies. If you’re not already familiar with them, go take a look at a few helpful introductions.

Camera RAW effects Generative Expand

This is the first time in a long time, if ever, I can remember that Adobe has released fairly significant new capabilities into Adobe Camera RAW, aka ACR, that is the base code for all of Adobe’s RAW image processing capabilities that are not included in the Lightroom Classic Development Module. Maybe some of you might be able to list a few, but I’ll bet they are not ACR base features. In fact, it has been the reverse for a very long time. For example, Lightroom Classic has the print module. There is no such thing in Lightroom CC or mobile or whatever the proper designation is; Lightroom, not classic if you will.

When I see things like this, it’s very unsettling to me. Maybe it’s just a delay? Maybe the Classic time is old and tired? Maybe Adobe just wants to see if anyone notices??? I’ve been around long enough to at least suspect this is a small but forceful nudge, pushing everyone into the Adobe Cloud storage platform. I hope not, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more and more of this feature non-parity. Please let Adobe know how displeased you are if you’re a Lightroom Classic user.

Moving on, about these new tools…

Let’s start with the one that probably has too many people, too excited, Generative Expand. I’ve played with it a little. I’m not an expert but know enough to test “easy” cases and “this will be a horror show” cases. What did I learn through a few tests? The answer is unsurprisingly that it behaved exactly how I expected it to.

• The simple case at the top of the post I expanded both the top and bottom of this original landscape-oriented image. The top was easy and the free “content-aware” option did an okay job. The pay-as-you-go “firefly AI generative” performed similarly. The bottom of the image was a disaster using “content-aware” and did way better but still a tiny bit of uncanny valley with manufacturing a forearm. Little bit of anatomical bizarr-ity but at least it kinda knew it was an arm.

• How did it do on full blast “Firefly Generative AI” manufacturing prints of people with various pieces cut off? You tell me? I immediately cancelled saving that new edit in ACR as I think it might cause me nightmares down the road if I forgot it was testing the “expand” functionality. It obviously has no idea what a color checker looks like either.

• How about a middle of the road where I had no clue what it would do image... well, I’d say that lands square inside uncanny valley. Yes, I used the least disturbing version of what it produced but still…

Is it cool? Maybe? There’s a reason I am tempering people’s excitement about it. Please don’t comment on how much better AI is going to get. I don’t care, and it’s not really what this tool is for. Instead of being something for generating complex content for things that don’t exist, I can be a real-time saver for commercial types of work and image purposing in specific scenarios but only if you take the final presentation into account prior to making the image. Typical when you are making pictures for a specific purpose.

This will make short work of typical scenarios of a very specific individual in a specific context and then after the fact expanding a tighter shot into a much wider shot with nobody, and no distractions in the scene. Let’s take a cliché example we’ve seen a hundred times. Beautiful woman sitting on the edge of a pool with a pristine summer sky behind and bold blue pool water in the foreground. Make that shot but in a crowded pool. Now expand the living crap out of it up, sideways, and down. No set costs and a ton of time spent on clever and error-prone cloning, etc.

Another thought; Most people will want to do this after the fact. Take a wide shot, crop it, then expand it. I am sure you can jump through the hoops of maybe doing this, but that’s not at all how the interface is designed, and I’d suggest it probably doesn’t do that well in reverse like I would see most people (based on how heavily I see people crop). If it does work well, I’ll bet that’s the exception.

The last thing to consider is the money-grab aspect. I really don’t like that this is pay-as-you-go and the cost and how much you are using are not right up in your face as you click the button. Also realize that this needs to be re-done like most AI-related features after many adjustments. Is there a cost? Will there be? How about “upgrading your processing version”? Hmmm… There are a ton of other concerns I have, but that’s a philosophical discussion for another day. Bottom line, things turn out better if you have your intent from the very start. Use the tool but realize that when you make the picture in the first place. Post-processing is not a rescue tool, or it shouldn’t be as a matter of workflow.

Oh yeah, there’s the glow thing…

I’ll bet you think I’m about to dump all over this, right? Well, I’m not. It’s cool, it seems well done for the little bit of experiments I’ve done with it. Will I plaster it all over every photo? Nope. I did joke with Les that we’re going to see a heck of a lot of work with this new tool overdone in the next two years. In fact, I’ll jokingly call it “The return of Glamor Glow”. An effect that was like crack for a few years when the OG Nik effects came out.

It’s not the return of Glamor Glow. It does a decent job of things I do all the time and have since I was shooting film. I regularly shoot with old crappy lenses, crappy in the sense that they are sharp but produce these effects on highlights to varying degrees. I bought a camera not too long ago that has a dedicated HDF filter to do exactly this. I also regularly mess with the color of that diffusion (sometimes via WB, sometimes it’s built into the lens). This just extends my options to match up different cameras and lenses to that look in the same project. Hats off to Adobe, good job. Now let’s get some much-needed attention to the grain effect… Hmmm...

Until next time, thank you to all our paid subscribers helping us to keep the lights on. Have a great week, make the most of these amazing days before winter sets in, and please get outside to enjoy the fall transition if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere.

A brief introduction

In today’s newsletter we have a wonderful guest, Bastiaan Woudt, who describes a longer term project he’s titled Henro. You may recall Bastiaan from another occasion as guest writer for a newsletter back in June, The Print As The Work. If you are interested in seeing the Project Henro as it is meant to be seen there is a list at the end of Galleries where the original prints can be seen at the end of this newsletter.

If your not lucky enough to be located close enough to the scheduled exhibitions to experience them in person, Bastiaan’s publishing house has a number of beautifully rendered editions of the Henro project in book form. Some of these very special editions also contain original prints. Take a look and for a limited time he’s been gracious enough to provide our readers with a discount using the code PAC10.

Enjoy…

A fascinating walk-through of the project Henro written by its creator Bastiaan Woudt

A photograph made in Japan should end on Japanese paper. That was the easiest decision in this project, and it still took two years to act on. Last time I wrote that the paper, the technique and the studio behind them deserved their own piece. This is it.

In March 2024 my brother and I went to Shikoku to cycle the Henro, one of the oldest pilgrimage routes in the world, a circle of 88 Buddhist temples strung across more than 1,200 kilometres of mountains, forests and coastal roads. The route crosses four prefectures, each standing for a stage of the pilgrimage, from awakening to nirvana. People have been walking it for over a thousand years, and we cycled it, which sounds like a shortcut and is not. Cycling put us in a rhythm between speed and stillness, fast enough to cover the distance, slow enough to stay exposed to the weather, the fatigue, the silence and the people who stopped us along the way. There was no plan and no shot list. I did not go to Japan to make photographs. I went to move through a landscape that asks nothing of you except attention, and I took a camera because I always do.

What came back with me was not a record of the trip but a set of fragments. The ride was over in a matter of weeks. Working out what the work actually was took two years, and that time went into two things. First the selection, sitting with the images, laying them next to each other, deciding which ones belonged together and letting the rest go. Then the paper. Before Henro there was Echo From Beyond. That work is made with AI, which puts it about as far from a pilgrimage in Japan as anything I have made, and it exists as a single one-of- one print. Luc Brefeld printed it with piezography on Awagami Bizan White Medium Handmade.

That name is misleading if you have never held the sheet. Medium describes the surface, not the substance, and the 200 grams tells you nothing you would want to know. A Western paper at that weight is a stiff card. This is not that. It has bulk without hardness, it gives a little when you pick it up, and the four deckle edges are not trimmed but the boundary where the sheet simply ended when it was made. Hold it against a low light and the surface is never flat. You can see the fibres lying in it.

Piezography uses carbon pigment inks only and every print is made by hand, which means the paper is never just the surface the ink lands on. It is half the result. That print was the first time I saw what these two things do to each other, an image made with the newest tools I have, sitting on one of the oldest surfaces available for one. I did not know it then, but it was the test case for Henro before Henro existed.

So when the Henro images finally needed paper, we tested anyway. Many papers, several rounds, sheets laid beside each other until the differences stopped being theoretical. And we came back to the Bizan. Everything we tried was measured against the thing I already had, and nothing beat it. I wrote last time that I barely test anymore, and that when I do it is because I am pushing into something new. This was that, and the pushing sent me back to where I started.

Printed full bleed at 21 by 32 centimetres, with the edges left intact, the print stops behaving like a print. It becomes an object you hold.

The large works were the open question, because that paper does not exist at the sizes I needed. So we kept looking for something that would sit beside it without arguing with it, and ended up with Haini Tosa Kozo, 40 grams, made from kozo fibres, mulberry bark, in the Tosa region of what is now Kochi prefecture. Haini means ash boiled. The fibres are cooked in lye made from wood ash, the way it has been done there for centuries. Kochi is one of the four prefectures we cycled through.

What the paper does to the image starts before the paper. I shoot digitally, and the coarse grain and heavy texture in these files are put there by me. That is worth being clear about, because it is not borrowed from an older process and it is not nostalgia.

It is subtraction. I work in black and white, and I push grain and texture on top of that, and both do the same thing. They take away description. The sharpness that would tell you exactly which tree this is, the fine detail that would let you find the spot on a map, the clean surface that invites you to identify things instead of looking at them. All of that goes, and what is left moves away from the place and toward what I actually came back with. I did not return from Shikoku with a record of a route. I came back with fragments that behave the way memory behaves: certain about one shape, vague about everything around it. Grain is how I get an image to do that. It is not there to obscure the subject. It clears away what was competing with it.

Then the paper adds a structure of its own, almost like linen, with a coarse fibre running through everything, refusing to lie flat and neutral under the picture. Between the two, the image drifts out of photography altogether and begins to read as an etching, or something painted, or a charcoal drawing. The carbon ink finishes it. These prints are matte in a way I had not seen before, almost unreal, and of everything I have shown in the studio nothing has drawn a response like them.

The book was a different challenge. HENRO is published by 1605 Collective, designed with Janneke Schrey, in an edition of 750, and printing a run that size on washi was never realistic. Rather than chase the same paper I went looking for a connection in structure, and the inner paper became Munken Lynx Rough, 150 grams, rough under the hand and warm in colour, close enough to the paper on the wall that the two feel related without pretending to be the same. Both carry the images well, and I mean that. The book is not a compromise. On the Japanese paper, printed with carbon ink, the work is simply at its best, and no press will ever reach that. It is a different craft with a different ceiling.

They are not doing the same job, and I would not want them to. The book is a sequence. You hold it and turn, and the images arrive in the order I chose, which is the closest I can get to the rhythm of the ride. A print does the opposite. It stops you in front of one image, at a size that will not fit in your hands, on a surface you can read from across a room. I do not think of the book as a lesser version of the print. It is a different reading of the same images, and it is the only one of the two that can be in 750 places at once.

The work is on view at my studio in Alkmaar until 20 September, and a room makes the argument better than an essay can. These are framed in smoked walnut instead of the black frames I normally use, the large works set straight into the frame behind a shadow gap with no mat, the small ones floating in a shadow box against dark wood. Matte paper gives almost nothing back to the light, so the print never competes with the window or the lamp above it. People end up standing closer than they meant to.

From there the work travels on. Part of the series goes to Milan for a solo exhibition at MC2 Gallery opening on 10 September, and the work is now also at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta. The paper under the largest prints comes from Kochi, and we cycled through Kochi without knowing what it would later give the work. It took two years to arrive there, and I do not think it could have gone any faster.

WHERE TO SEE THE WORK HENRO

Studio Woudt, Alkmaar, until 20 September 2026
THE SHAPE OF ABSENCE solo exhibition, MC2 Gallery, Via Maroncelli 7, Milan, opening 10 September 2026
Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta

If there has been one revolutionary change in traditional fine art glazing it is the introduction and subsequent evolution of acrylics. Acrylic glazing has become a viable alternative to glass in many venues, including galleries.

Acrylic offers advantages to glass. Good acrylic is lighter and stronger than good glass and does not break into hazardous shards, except under extreme conditions that I have read about but have never experienced (Do you really want to exhibit your work in an unheated igloo in winter??). It’s easy to custom cut, although it does take more time to cut than glass. Acrylic can be cut to angles and even circles. Also, if you are using acrylic from the best manufacturers, the difference between glass and acrylic on the wall is nearly impossible to detect. Like glass, acrylic options for reflection and UV protection vary.

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For almost two decades all of our workshops, and this newsletter have focused exclusively on photography in print. We’ve been on this mission as we believe that producing that physical manifestation is central to photographic art, a nessesary part of our shared human experience.

We’ve recently completed the latest installment of our hands-on Advanced Awagami workshop. One of the participants, John Shaw, wrote an essay on his website that elegantly expresses how his own photography has been influenced by our philosophy and mission. I believe all of you will be interested in this well-written description of his photographic journey and encourage all of you to take a few minites and read his essay.

There is an idea that has followed me through each of the workshops I have taken with fine art photographer Les Picker: a photograph is not truly finished until it becomes a print.

That idea may sound almost old-fashioned in a world where most photographs are viewed for a few seconds on a phone or computer screen. But the more seriously I have approached photography and printing, the more strongly I have come to believe it myself.

— John Shaw

Quite a while ago we committed to update you once a month regarding the status of openings in our workshop schedule. You may have noticed those updates seem to be few and far between. I promise that is not us slacking off or forgetting to provide those updates. Even expanding the number of our most popular workshops has not provided adequate openings for the demand. The entire 2026 schedule sold out within a week of availablity. The same is true of our early 2027 workshops.

We are currently looking at the 2027 calendar and opportunity to expand the number of workshops scheduled. Keep a look out for more 2027 workshop dates coming but we’ll start with an additional Advanced Awagami workshop scheduled for May 15-16, 2027. More info and registration is at the LPFA website now.

I’ve briefly discussed a couple of personal projects on the newsletter before. Watercolors: Subversions is the working title for a project that grew naturally out of my Watercolors project. At first, I thought they were the same project, but I was quite wrong as I finished the original project. The photographs that started me on the road were rejects from the original project. Not all of those rejects stayed in the new endeavor.

I thought I was done months and months ago. I was wrong. As I approached, and even insisted the final number of 10 prints was my constraining factor, I found that constraint was not serving me well. I opened my editorial process back up, not starting from scratch but rather I reexamined two rounds of “rejects” to each other. I did this knowing that those “10” were definitely to be included. Knowing what was in allowed me to look at both sets again in a new light. Those rejects that were mere duplicates, or practical duplicates, were now very apparent.

The big deal was removing that maximum number and really, seriously, which of those rejects would contribute to the project in a significant way. Which ones would add balance and add coherence visually when viewed together? The two I’ve included in this post are very much compositional connective tissue to other images in that original hard “10”. They are both similarly connective tissue in terms of color palette to images that seemed a bit lonely in my original selection.

The funny part is I originally rejected them both not because I didn’t like them but I viewed them in terms of being too repetitive. This was only due to similar subject matter - literally. The intent with my hard-line “10” as maximum was to focus on diversity of literal subject matter and visual similarities.

Easing off that hard-line number completely changed my view. I am looking at the project very differently. I don’t have one editorial slice but multiple, depending on how many images I have space to show them and what feel I’d like to portray. I could maximize diversity in smaller subsets or double down on extremely consistent subject matter. I can harmonize color palettes or contrast them. I’ll probably codify those collection subsets so I remember them. This is exactly what you need to do anyway if you were doing something as large as a book. You’ll always need subsets to show to various audiences in various venues.

The other hold up is sort of an editorial decision that manifests itself as an editorial decision. My own particular photographic taste is almost puritanical. I almost never reach for the clone or healing brush, let alone that new really slow generative AI brush. In other words, if it was in the picture, it stays in the picture. Here’s the rub…

I plan on the vast majority of prints to be shown in small-ish sizes, which presents an issue. Those prints sometimes render debris floating in the water as print flaws. If they are super bright, they look like the ink flaked off. If they are super dark, they look like a print-head strike or a blob of ink from a printer issue. What to do? What to do? Do I sacrifice my photographic integrity to the false pursuit of artifice of some committee version of “perfect” or do I say “don’t care, let them eat cake”?

I decided on a middle road. My intent was to leave that floating debris as reality anchors in sharp contrast to the dreaminess of the overall abstract effect. I did just that except for those that really looked like print flaws on close inspection of an 11x14 print or smaller. I did not go hog wild eliminating every piece of floating debris just because I “could” or serving some unknown photo-perfect-thru-tech-capabilities committee that wouldn’t be my audience anyway.

Am I done now? I think so, but there’s one more thing, a surprise to me, a complete surprise at that. It’s a subset of this project I never saw coming, a happy accident. I’ll share that soon. Thank you to all of our generous paid subscribers that help us keep the lights on.

Let’s start with what Wabi-sabi is.

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese worldview centered on the acceptance of imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness. It combines wabi (rustic simplicity or living humbly) and sabi (the beauty and patina that comes with age).

Core Principles - Impermanence: Recognizing that all things grow, decay, and change over time.

• Imperfection: Valuing asymmetry, roughness, and flaws over rigid perfection.

• Simplicity: Stripping away the unnecessary to focus on what is essential and modest.

—Wikipedia

As with almost any general philosophy, the principles are subject to interpretation when applied to a given specific endeavor. When applying wabi-sabi to photography there are a few ways you might apply the underlying principles. The first way might be looking at what subject matter you approach, literally using the principles as a guide to what you photograph. The next obvious application could be how you approach any particular subject. The last one could be some mix of both subject and approach.

If you do a search of something like “wabi-sabi photography” or “wabi-sabi photographer” the results will produce a giant diversity of work that represents all of the applications of those principles in various interpretations just enumerated. In a sense it is those core principles at play, or one particular interpretation of them, when I use my oft repeated phrase; “plain old pictures”.

Tuning out the virtual world in favor of the physical world

With all things in our modern world there’s a push to eliminate constraints. This is easy to see across the spectrum of photography starting with the gear we use. It’s all designed to eliminate every photographic constraint one could imagine. We’re sold any shutter speed, any aperture, any angle of view, with no constraints imposed. That’s not enough, in fact, the frame-rates, and codecs, and even RAW footage are captured before we even decide to release the shutter.

Forget that now, shutters and the notion of releasing them is passé, let there be open-gate and ultra-unimaginable-readout-speed. Let there be 120FPS capture all the time with AI flagging the “best captures” at whatever frequency you choose. Let AI decide which ones are best, then let AI pump out a bunch of versions to “fix” the light, the “problems”, and eliminate “distractions”, fix up all the unsterile reality, and homogenize the output to the “ideal”. You don’t even need to be there just send out roving drones and use some “agentic” stuff to sort and publish the “feed”. Have that automation figure out what’s trending on the “algorithm”…

Sounds a bit dystopian. Ah, modernism and the market driven commoditization of all things driving everything to the “virtual”. In the virtual world, all things are possible. In the physical world, ummmm, not so much. The virtual world doesn’t exits, it’s not really anything, it’s a lot like an idea, it’s nothing until that idea is implemented to produce a real thing manifested in the physical world.

My use of “plain old pictures” is all about leaning into constraints of the physical world. That’s what I mean when I say plain old pictures. I mean making decisions up front and living with those decisions. Simple things like what ISO to use as if you’re loading a roll of film.

It’s surprising how much that one decision will lead down an unexpected road. The next one is what focal length you will use, the whole day or the whole project. Next up would be a single treatment, again akin to choosing that ISO and particular film you chose from the start. That treatment will be what is applied no matter what. Then take the picture anyway, even when it seems like it won’t work. This is what I mean when I use the expression “plain old pictures”. It’s also one way to apply wabi-sabi principles to photography. Constraints are actually freedom in artistically important ways.

Give it a try, free yourself from all those things you could do and embrace the freedom of limitations. Last but not least free yourself from the dizzying infinity of the virtual and manifest your work in the physical. Make a print, it’s done, you can touch it and forget all the virtual options that it could be, embrace the what it now is.

Some inspiration

A few selected photographers that caught my eye when searching for wabi-sabi photographers and photography. Use some of them for inspiration the next time you pick up your camera. Maybe even figure out your own interpretation of wabi-sabi and how that might help you as a photographic artist.

Daido Moriyama
Lee Chang Ming
Shinichi Maruyama
Rinko Kawauchi
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Sonia Melnikova-Raich
Valda Bailey
Chris Friel
Shomei Tomatsu

Dollars to doughnuts when you purchased your sheet-fed printer, you received a letter size sample pack of the manufacturer’s paper. Many paper brands sell various sample packs of their offerings. All of them are letter size. If you’re not in the US, those samples are probably A4. Stop buying that size of paper. There’s a much better choice. Today’s newsletter is to tell you what to buy instead and why.

Read more

This is a follow-up to last week’s newsletter describing my process in choosing the last photograph to be included in a collection of three. That group of three prints had a specific purpose, intent, and audience that guided my choices. Specifically, a gift destined for a neighbor and long-term resident of the neighborhood.

The big missing pieces were the other two prints that were already selected. Beyond that, I didn’t include the entire collection of photographs under consideration. Above are the final three selections that I printed and framed, including that final picture I was waffling on.

The collection under consideration

A total of six pictures, what I would consider a mini-project. I tend to work in groups of pictures rather than single photographs. I work this way from start to finish, from the moment I pick up my camera all the way to presenting the resulting pictures as prints. Yes, I expose a lot more frames than make it through the editorial process. In this particular case, I took about a roll of 35mm film’s worth, somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-six.

All of those thirty-something photos were made with a 28mm equivalent on a Ricoh GR III. I’m super comfortable with that angle of view. It’s one of my desert island lenses along with a 50mm. Much of my photographic life was spent making portraits in one form or another. In a way, that’s how I approach every photographic scene.

Six photographs, six prints, a great number for a mini-project. In any given space, six is a great number. Even prints of a modest size can make a bold statement when presented on a wall as a cohesive whole. There’s an immense flexibility with small collections like this.

• Two prints side by side or stacked

• Three prints stacked

• Four prints shown two by two

• All six two by three or three by two

• Varying the finished size a small degree and you see how flexible small groups of prints can fill any given wall area.

As mentioned a lot, I love to show small groups of related prints on any given wall together. You don’t need a ton of space to show all six; take a look back at my suggestion for a mini exhibition. This is how these mini-projects usually start out.

This particular mini-project started out as a dozen 4in x 6in prints that I whittled down to the six shown today. What about the other six I liked enough to include in my first editorial selection? I still like them but consider them alternates. I may use these alternates but not in the context of this mini-project on its own.

Approaching a subject

From a portrait photographer’s perspective, my approach with any given person is to tell that person’s story. I do that with gesture, expression, pose, wardrobe, and scene context/composition. I tend to approach everything that way. Maybe you can take some of that mindset and adapt it to your approach to whatever your preferred subject matter is. You don’t have to show all of the pictures you make. It’s fine to pick “the one” that represents all of them when you must, but it’s certainly a great thing when you want to tell more of the story having a deeper well of material.

Back in March of 2026, while on my front porch, there happened to be an unusual set of conditions one morning. Still air and fog; this manifested itself in still water. I quickly made my way down to our neighborhood harbor; these conditions are usually fleeting.

As I made my way down the long slope to the water, I started framing the scene. I adjusted my view of the main pier moderating how much of the surface was portrayed while paying close attention to the way the verticals intersected and interacted with the faint horizon line. The great thing about wide-angle lenses like the 28mm is not how much they can suck in but how little movement it takes to completely change the perspective and relationships of things in the scene.

I have eight or ten variations of this view. While on the pebbly shore, I quickly changed my elevation and framing tiny bits, maybe a few steps, and varied my height to compose a few variations of the opposite view of the harbor towards the deep-water pier as you saw in the previous newsletter.

As I made my way down the small pebbly beach towards that deep-water pier, I made a few frames of the main pier from a different point of view. What you don’t see are some of the photographs I made of detail of the beach itself. I didn’t include them in “the six” but they are flagged as alternates for potential use another day, in another context, a larger story.

I noticed a few interesting details on that main pier, some of the signage, and other combinations of horizontal and vertical features. I walked up onto the main pier and made my way closer and closer to some of those interesting details. I made a few framing and composition variations of each, which you can see in the rest of the collection of six. Note that the more abstract view of the deep-water pier at this slightly higher elevation almost hides the far pier, the one I did not select for the collection of three at the top.

Small stories lead to bigger stories

Stories don’t have to be complicated. Stories don’t have to be epic. Stories can be contained to one thing, on one day, or even one morning. The story of this particular mini-project is simply our neighborhood harbor on a calm, foggy morning one day in March.

The thing about small stories is that over time they lead to bigger stories. They connect in predictable and unpredictable ways. How you approach these on any given day will and does vary. Take a close look at a newsletter Eating Your Own Dog Food. Scroll to the bottom and you’ll see a quick snapshot of three prints on the wall of my primary workspace. These are detail shots on a sunny afternoon a couple of years ago of that same main pier. Yes, that “mini-project” has more than three pictures. It also tells a different story in a different way of that same pier, same harbor.

These are small projects and small ideas, but I can already see a much larger story and a much larger set of ideas emerging from these mini-projects. This is especially true when you start thinking of even the concept of harbor in not only a literal sense but also in terms of a figurative or metaphorical sense. You start to see larger concepts and larger bodies of work start to emerge.

What about those ”alternates” I mentioned, the ones I like but not when showing this mini-project, or other mini-projects on their own? I’ve found when curating exhibitions or collections for different audiences those alternates can serve you well. More importantly, when combining those mini-projects into larger projects, exhibitions, or stories those alternates can serve as connecting tissue in ways you’d not expect that serve the bigger narrative.

No matter if you pursue these concepts directly or not, they seep into your work and lead to new ideas and new ways of approaching subjects. They start to infuse your work consciously and unconsciously in ways that you might not realize until you are a way down the road you didn’t even realize you were on. Get out there, tell a small story of one subject. Do it today.

Often getting short shrift in discussions on matting and framing is the issue of glazing. For those of us who create our own frames or purchase them for our prints, selecting the glass is often an afterthought, frequently relegated to a big box store visit. In this series of DIYs, we’re going to address the issue of glazing in detail and most of all we’ll try to answer the question; Is specialized glass worth the cost?

Why Glaze?

For hundreds of years fine art - think of the great masters in oil and watercolor - never placed their work behind glass. Go to any major museum and you’ll enjoy the privilege of seeing the art just as the artist intended, with no glazing that might detract from the work itself.

With the advent of photography glazing became a staple. As a child I remember going to photo exhibitions with my father where virtually every print was behind glass. That is still largely true today.

The reasons for this are obvious. Prints need protection from dust, fingerprints, moisture and UV light. The simple glass available in previous generations gave basic protection, but today’s glazing offers a wider variety of protection and other benefits. So let’s take a deep dive into today’s glazing options for photographers, what features may matter most for you, and how the glazing itself can alter the look of your printed image.

Throughout the following DIYs we used Tru Vue glazing products as the standard for our assessment. Tru Vue is a high-end glazing manufacturer used by museums, galleries, private collectors and many photographers. Other than as buyers of their products, we have no business relationship with Tru Vue.

We’ve discussed a lot about mounting and framing over the past couple of years which you can find in our DIY section of the news letter archive.

Glass or Acrylic?

There are two major categories of glazing today; glass and acrylic. Within each category there are lots of choices geared to the specific needs of the artist. Each has pluses and minuses. In this DIY we’ll look at glass products. In our next DIY we’ll cover acrylic products.

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Today I wanted to share an experience with all of you that strikes terror into the hearts of many of us: curation and the final selection of any given number of photographs we choose to publish and put out there in the real world. It’s not so bad when we push them out on the infinite stream of the interwebs where they’ll immediately be blended into the stream of content barely registering to anyone. The terror comes when you’re choosing a very limited number of prints to put your name on without any recourse of “no, no, I’ve got more, I’ll show you, I have dozens of versions that you might like better…”

The three pictures I’m discussing today are the narrowed-down choices of which I needed to pick only one. Of course, they are not exactly the same but are minor variations of the same scene. The one that I need to choose will be included in a triptych, a group of three pictures meant to go together. The other two scenes are already set. I “like” all of these and have a bias towards one. Let’s call that the photograph I wanted to like the best. That desire was probably from an “intellectual bias” of thinking too much about which one was “best” rather than any sort of visceral or emotional evaluation.

Context & intent

That triptych I spoke of, it’s a gift, a 90th birthday gift for a woman that’s lived in our neighborhood for decades. She’s lived one street away, on a hill overlooking what might be considered the center of life in the community; our little harbor. I decided to make three black and white prints on 11x14 paper, framed that were small enough to be displayed anywhere she might want to, that could be displayed together or individually.

Either way, I wanted the harbor to be immediately identifiable in each of the three pictures but to be more abstract rather than documentary. I wanted those three prints to be representative overall rather than specific to a time or season. I wanted them to feel peaceful rather than turbulent; it literally is a harborand that’s the feel I wanted to portray.

I printed proofs of all three and lived with them for a few days, but that didn’t help. I still couldn’t land on one. The photograph I wanted to like the best was still asserting itself, but so was the nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right. What to do, what to do? Why were the other two so easy when I set the parameters to three, a triptych?

Getting outside help

I was looking at the three choices long enough. None of them are super-fresh. I made all of them more than three months ago. I curated a collection of 10 as a mini project/portfolio a month or so after I had flagged the ones I liked and culled the ones that were too similar. In fact, I went to the “secondary” wider range of choices for these three. Yes, this last one I had already culled from the larger group.

At this point, I could flip a coin. Any of them would do, right? The other choice was to get some input. There are a lot of ways to get feedback. How you choose to do it is extremely important. All of you now have almost all the information on the context and, importantly, the intent of the collection of three image triptych I was targeting. What you don’t have is the other two selections I made. Maybe I’ll discuss those another day.

When seeking outside input, here are the things you need to bring to the table:

• The context, the project in terms of size, scope, venue, and audience. In this case, a total of three images that are intended to be shown together but also stand on their own. The audience is primarily one person but also others that may be invited into the recipient’s home. Most of whom will be familiar with the location, have seen, and can see right now our harbor.

• The intent of the collection of images, what you want to show, and how you want to show it. How you want them to feel. In this case, I want them to be abstract, minimalistic but recognizable in terms of exact place. I want to portray a hyper-specific harbor but also convey the spiritual sense of harbor.

• This one is crazy important... know who you are asking feedback of and the kind of information from them that you are looking for. It’s very different asking a forum full of “photographers” focused on technical stuff, a painter you know, a writer, someone across the world geographically and culturally, and someone across the street. You may not discuss everything I just shared with you but rather specific things to get the specific feedback you need.

What did I do? Well, I took the short, most direct, simplest route possible. I asked another person in the neighborhood. Another water person who’s spent decades seeing and looking at our harbor. I didn’t talk about all of the context in terms of how many pictures, I didn’t talk about my artistic intent, I didn’t do anything but casually show him the three pictures you see here and asked, “which one do you like best?”. That’s it.

I’ve been looking at them for months as a whole body of work. I’ve been living with the three shown here for days or weeks. The man I solicited input from answered within 10 seconds with all confidence the one he liked best. The photograph at the top of this post was his answer and the one I went with. Of course, I asked him why. In a nutshell, his answer was composition. He didn’t use that word, but that’s what he meant.

More specifically, he didn’t like “all the stuff” on the right edge of the last one shown. The one I “wanted to like best” he couldn’t really like, but now I know what was nagging me, it’s too abstract, there’s not enough context in the composition, it could be anywhere, but more importantly, it does not look like “a harbor, our harbor”. Composition isn’t just placement of something in the frame, it is far more than that.

Which one would you pick? Well, that might need the rest of the context; the other two. I’ll save that for another day. I can tell you this particular selection has given me a lot to think about if/when I show this collection as a larger body of work. I don’t share a lot of my personal work here, but I hope sharing some of the interworking of editorial thought process helps some of you with your own terrifying decisions and culling your work.

Always, always, remember that there are many modes, audiences, and venues for any given body of work of yours. Selections you make today can and will change based on venue, audience, intent, and number of prints on another occasion.

What this paper is

I’ll state one thing first: Still images do this paper no justice. Moving images can barely represent experiencing this unique paper in person. I’ll break down its properties as best I can, but to understand what this material is and what it does, please switch on your techno-photography brain while I explain.

To wrap your head around what this paper is, first understand that papers have a base characteristic and then they have a surface characteristic. The surface character is divided roughly into glossy or matte. Generally, glossy surfaces tend to reflect light sources more or less directly based on the degree of “glossiness”. Matte surfaces tend to more or less completely diffuse light sources. This paper has a glossy surface but has very little to do with understanding what this material is.

Let’s get down to what makes this paper completely different from any other matte or glossy surface paper: the base. All other papers have a white base of varying degrees of brightness/whiteness, but they are all white or very close to it. What is white? Simply put, white completely diffuses the light that it reflects; that’s what white does as compared to silver. What is silver? It’s not gray; silver as a color isn’t a color; it really means that it directly reflects whatever is in front of it rather than completely diffusing it.

The base of this paper is silver; that’s in the name: Slickrock Silver Pro 300. The base of it is a mirror. Specifically, it is a mirror that is roughed up a bit as not to reflect super-sharp edges of what is in front of it. This is why still images do it no justice. It’s like taking a picture of a mirror with no context.

How it renders images

This material is not a magic trick. This is absolutely not going to make you love a photograph you don’t already love. This is a material that might elevate a photograph you already love to another level. Slickrock Silver Pro 300 might also completely revise how you look at a photograph to be completely new compared to it rendered on a more conventional paper.

It has characteristics of other glossy papers, great dynamic range, super-black blacks, bright highlights, super-sharp, and saturated color. It does all that just more everything. Its rendering seems in motion when in person. Dark areas go really dark, then when you move, they are revealed with amazing contrast. Highlights go from normal to blazing the same way.

This paper will not rescue images that have poor rendering of either highlights or shadows. It will not tolerate areas of over-baked highlights; instead, it will probably make them more apparent. In a word, this paper is dramatic and will surprise you in both good ways and disappointing ways.

Understanding how to use it.

In my testing and opinion, Slickrock Silver Pro 300 excels at rendering photos with detailed dark/light, dark/light patterns. That’s almost automatic. Beyond that, it’s hard to say what pictures might work very well on this material.

I’ve been testing and working with Slickrock Silver Pro 300 for months as Moab has been developing it and revising it. I have many unexpected failures and amazing surprises while working with the paper. I have dozens of ideas in terms of deploying it effectively in my own work as well as other people’s work.

Here are a few things on my mind:

• It could be fantastic as a “one-off” print that is the icon of a gallery show.

• There are definitely bodies of work you may already have where most of the pictures not only work but are transformed and reimagined. Even the individual images that don’t scream “print me on that metal, mirror paper” will work when shown with pictures that do scream out for the rendering.

• Don’t try to force-fit pictures that just don’t work at all. Especially in a current body of work where a lot of them do. Just cull them for this particular rendering.

If a picture looks great on other paper but just doesn’t work on Slickrock Silver, it’s not a matter of different post-processing that will fix it. That’s not saying that a tiny bit of adjustment won’t optimize your results. I am saying that if there’s nothing that speaks to you on your first test, move on.

Stay tuned, I have much more to say about using this unique paper coming. I’m thinking we’ll also have some giveaways and contests that I hope will help all of you to learn how you might deploy the paper with your own work. I have certainly been surprised and elated at some of my own discoveries.

Moab Slickrock Silver Pro 300 is available on rolls immediately and will be available in various sheet sizes in September 2026.

Welcome to the 4th newsletter of June. Yes, June came and is about to go that quick. This week is usually a newsletter reserved for those of you that support us with a paid subscription, Thank You. Due to many constraints, travel, injury, etc., we put out the DIY newsletter in week three instead of the usual week two. So… I didn’t want to put out two paid-only newsletters in a row. Consider this one as brought-to-you by those that kindly help us keep the lights on.

There’s a little nugget that I slipped in the Camera Bags Are A Trap post a couple of weeks ago. Remember I described my own way out of the trap by venturing out camera and lens only with a few items in a pocket? Did you notice I immediately reverted to “carrying a small Domke FX5” bag too? What a back-slip so quick, huh? It happens every time…

I kinda made a self-mocking joke of myself before that with the proposed fixed-lens camera, and then all of a sudden you need a bag to fit the other-other focal length version of that fixed-lens camera. I was joking but not entirely. Looking at myself, I did that, sort of. I did the Fuji X100 fixed 35mm thing... I did a few camera-only, no-bag trips. Every single time I was happy. Then came the nagging little voice. But if I only had a little wider and a little longer, then, then, then, there would be peace on earth. Well, at least peace in my cluttered mind.

Welcome to the genesis of the Domke FX5 that survives to this day. My security blanket that allows me to bring that extra-extra battery and of course that extra lens of any kind and focal length that assuages my anxieties. The first time it was stuffed with X100 lens adapters that after two uses proved to be a far worse, far more fiddly, solution than my Fuji X-Pro 2 with the OG 18mm f/2 and 35mm f/1.4.

Of course, that evolved into a digital Leica M and thirty-two ways to carry a 28mm and 50mm. Problem solved. Right? Heck, that little Domke bag is constantly re-imagined with a bunch of small digital and film solutions that fit the mood all the time for more than a decade now. Of course, on any given day, it’s usually a 28/50 combo, my desert island team.

If we fast forward a bit, we have a bit of a different situation that presents itself. There are two cameras, actually four, that are back to that fixed-lens no-bag dream. Of course, I’m talking about the Leica Q3 and the Ricoh GR III/IV cameras. The reason the situation is new is fueled by two interrelated technologies. The first is better, higher resolution sensors along with really good super resolution upscaling built into Lightroom. Obviously, the Q3 wins by a mile here, except for price and compactness.

Pretend you are me and 28/50 is your go-to combo for the entire world. I could ditch the bag completely, yes even the little Domke. Buy the normy 28mm Leica Q for a similar price to getting an equal quality 28mm for my M and use the in-camera crop to happily view a digital simulation of 50mm crop lines. Even without the super-resolution upscale I’d be fine shooting at the cropped 50mm. Right? I could do the same thing with the normy Ricoh and maybe be fine having that super-resolution in my back pocket. Heck I could do both GR’s, the 28mm and 43mm versions and still go no-bag for less money… but I wouldn’t. I really couldn’t live constantly with no viewfinder and fiddly little controls and I already know I really like the “full-frame” look a lot at f/2 rather than f/2.8 and half-frame.

So, in all seriousness; I want to hear from all of you that have thought this through lately. What conclusions have you come to? Have any of you pulled the trigger on the Leica Q3 with similar thoughts? How about the Q3 43? I especially want to hear from all of you landscape photographers. Is the Q3 capable? Is the Q3 43 wide enough??? It certainly has the sensor chops. The controls seem great. I know both of those fixed lenses leave very little on the table.

I guess if I end up choosing the wrong one, there’s always the trusty Domke FX5 that will come to my rescue to hold the other version. Here we go again. I hope not.

Attend A Free Webinar About Black & White Photography

Les is giving a live presentation about Black & White photography in the context of printing tomorrow night at 6:30PM EST. This is being hosted by The Maryland Photography Alliance. You can register and view for free.

Advanced Awagami Printing & Display

Awagami inkjet papers are a specialized medium for producing fine art digital prints. The range runs from subtle matte papers to highly textured dramatic papers. The papers also run the gamut from ultra-thin to extremely thick. The key to utilizing these unique and beautiful materials is matching the paper to a photograph and artistic vision that work in harmony.

This day-and-a-half hands-on workshop will result in two completed mounted Awagami fine art prints on two of Awagami’s most distinctive papers that best represent your artistic intention. More importantly, the experience with the selection, discernment, and realization of other participants’ art will be invaluable as you move forward using Awagami materials for future projects. We start preparations for this workshop before you come with a one-on-one review of images you have in mind for final mounted prints.

Details and registration are on the LPFA website. Take a look. If you have questions shoot us an email or leave a comment. You can also take a look at our first Advanced Awagami workshop.

Travel season has officially started, as anyone boarding a flight or driving down the road can attest to. For photographers, a lot of our work typically revolves around travel; iconic locations, destination photo locations, unique street iamges, portraits of indigenous people and much more.

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A photograph is nothing until it is printed.

Until then, it is data. Light captured and stored in a pattern, waiting.I am a photographer working out of a studio in Alkmaar, in the Netherlands. For about fifteen years I have built bodies of work, mostly in black and white, that end up as books, gallery shows, and prints on collectors’ walls. Portraits. Travel series. Slower studies made closer to home. The medium shifts, the geography shifts. The destination stays the same. The work ends on paper.

It has to. That is the part of the practice I have come to understand most clearly. During a shoot, I am already building the image in my head. Sometimes I know, while we are still in the studio, that we have made something that will hold. But I almost never see the work before it has been printed. I see the digital file. I edit, sit with it, sequence it next to others. And then, often months later, the prints arrive at the studio, or I walk into a gallery on the morning of an installation, and I see them for the first time.

Every time, it lands.

The depth of the print, the richness of the tonal range, the way the image suddenly has weight. None of it was in the file.

I do not print my own work. I have a print lab that has been printing for me for fifteen years, and they are masters of their craft. People have talent for what they do. My talent is making pictures. Printing is its own discipline, its own lifetime of decisions and refinements. I leave it, gratefully, to someone who has chosen it as theirs. We barely make test prints anymore. In fifteen years, it has almost always gone right the first time.

The lab itself is a small space on the second floor of a building. Sterile, deeply organized. Prints and tests laid out everywhere you look. You can feel the focus in that room, the energy of printing as a practice. When we do test, it is because we are pushing into something new.

The paper I use for almost all of my regular work is Innova Baryta. It is the digital descendant of the baryta paper used in the darkroom, the same paper that defined so many of the photographs I grew up admiring. I chose it for its structure and its tonality. The old baryta prints have something I have never stopped chasing, and Innova Baryta is, for me, the closest a modern archival pigment print can come to that feeling. Everything is printed on Epson, archival pigment, on a paper that remembers what photography used to look like in the hand.

That choice was an intention. It was one of the defining decisions in the life of the work. The image is mine, but the object the viewer eventually holds, or stands in front of, is shaped just as much by the paper as by anything I did in the studio. The paper is part of the work.

Something larger presses against all of this, and it is why print matters now. We see something like a hundred images a day that leave nothing behind. A print stays. It hangs on a wall and ages with the room. It catches the light of one particular hour, the eye of one particular person, again and again, over years.

That permanence has become rare. We live inside a culture where almost everything we look at is designed to be replaced within seconds. Images come and go in the same breath. Nothing settles. And something in us notices.

Collecting, for me, is what happens when a person decides to live with an image instead of passing through it. You hang a print on a wall and see it every morning, every evening, in a hundred different lights. You age with it, and it ages with you. The work becomes part of the architecture of your days.

That choice is, at its root, a longing. A longing for presence in a world that has run out of it, for objects that hold in a culture that throws away. Print answers that longing in a way a file cannot.

It takes up space. It carries the fingerprints of the people who made it, and becomes part of a body of work and a life.

For my recent series Henro, shot in Japan, the paper and the printing technique went somewhere more specific. The work is printed on Awagami, a handmade Japanese paper, using a process called piezography, at a different studio than the one I have worked with for fifteen years. The same paper is now also where my AI-based work Echo From Beyond lives, as a single one-of-one print on one of the oldest media we have for an image.

That paper, that technique, and the studio behind it deserve their own piece.
Next time.

I wanted to thank Bastiaan for his contribution and support of the Paper Art’s Collective newsletter. Feel free to drop him questions below and be sure to take a look at Bastiaan’s substack newsletter to learn more about him, his photographic art, prints, and books.

Advanced Awagami Printing & Display

Awagami inkjet papers are a specialized medium for producing fine art digital prints. The range runs from subtle matte papers to highly textured dramatic papers. The papers also run the gamut from ultra-thin to extremely thick. The key to utilizing these unique and beautiful materials is matching the paper to a photograph and artistic vision that work in harmony.

This day-and-a-half hands-on workshop will result in two completed mounted Awagami fine art prints on two of Awagami’s most distinctive papers that best represent your artistic intention. More importantly, the experience with the selection, discernment, and realization of other participants’ art will be invaluable as you move forward using Awagami materials for future projects. We start preparations for this workshop before you come with a one-on-one review of images you have in mind for final mounted prints.

Details and registration are on the LPFA website. Take a look. If you have questions shoot us an email or leave a comment. You can also take a look at our first Advanced Awagami workshop.

If you’ve been involved in making photographs for more than a minute, there’s a good chance you have way more photography stuff than you need. There are many reasons for the accumulation of photo gear. Some of them are necessities. Some are aspirational. Some are to make a particular endeavor more efficient. Some might even be critical to making a specific picture at all. And yes, many of the cameras, lenses, filters, clamps, mounts, and the myriad of other stuff is just because you wanted it.

The accumulation of photography-related stuff is so common that everyone knows there’s a term for it: Gear acquisition syndrome, commonly known as G.A.S. As the pile of photography gear grows, there’s another related syndrome that’s not discussed much. It’s far worse than the cameras, lenses, tripods, tripod heads, and all the other really fun stuff. It’s camera bag bloat.

As that perfect camera bag you found after buying three other ones becomes more and more bloated, it eventually won’t fit even one more SD card. What do you do now? Why, of course, you get a bigger one, a backpack, eventually a backpack with rollers and a collapsing handle. Maybe you get a modular one that can store all your stuff with a little mini-one that can be detached from the mother ship on occasion.

Don’t worry, the camera industry has a solution for that problem. Just buy another camera. This time, buy one with a fixed lens and use that because your other one is married up with all that other stuff in the giant bag you have to haul around. You’re good now, at least for a while, except there are things you need or want for that camera, and of course, a really perfect small camera bag that’s perfect for your small, fixed-lens camera.

And then it happens, there’s a new model of that fixed-lens camera with a different focal length... you know the perfect lens those couple of times you felt a little limited. Just one more bag. A bag just a little bit bigger, a tiny bit, perfect for those two fixed-lens cameras. But what about those trips where you might want the full armada but also might want just one of your fixed-lens “simple system” cameras too?

Of course, you rearrange all your stuff in a dozen different “optimized” theoretical kits over and over and have these all prepared combinations with all different bags “ready to go”. In fact, you have more camera bags than you do cameras now... You probably have little cases and kits of storage “solutions” that go inside other storage “solutions”.

A way off this crazy train

Immediately stop combining camera cases and kits as storage and transportation. Get rid of that notion now. Instead, imagine a completely different way of doing things. Divide your photographic gear into storage; in a perfect world, that would be a big stationary, easy-to-see set of shelves and/or drawers where all of your photo-stuff lives.

Opposite that perfect-world storage and organization, you’d have a collection of great, perfect, already accumulated camera bags for transportation and use “in the field” wherever that might be today. I did this a long time ago, and something great happened.

The great thing that happened was that the vast majority of the time, I just took one camera with one lens attached to it. And of course, battery or two and a memory card in my pocket. Yep, no bag. I was far less distracted with whatever that day’s goal was. I was far less distracted with subjects out of the range of what I decided to bring. Even better, I approached subjects more creatively without all the mental clutter.

Those other times when I opted for “more stuff” and more capability, my camera bag choice was small. In fact, it more often than not turned out to be a Domke FX5. This tiny bag will not hold a typical full-frame DSLR or mirrorless camera with a lens attached. Doesn’t matter as I have and continued to use it to add a tiny bit more capability, storage, batteries, and maybe a charger. Doesn’t matter what camera or system, that tiny bag that has minimal compartments and flexible space, it does the job.

Just two examples that see a lot of use: My big-boy Canon 5DsR with attached f/4 class zoom with a fast prime in the bag and some other bits like batteries. Sometimes it’s the same with a super-wide. On other occasions, it’s the Canon R6 with a cheap RF 50/1.8 attached and a cheapy RF 35/1.8 Macro in the bag with batteries, a ColorChecker, a notebook and pencil. Sometimes a Profoto A10 and clamp is in the bag. You get the idea.

Sure, you may not want to rearrange your entire photographic life into that shelf/draw storage vs. transport. Go ahead, keep using all those camera bags as storage, but instead of grabbing that full, do-it-all, or most of it kit, grab one of those long-forgotten small bags. Better yet, just grab your camera and the lens you are going to use today.

If still photography can be defined by just one parameter, it’s about capturing the moment. That’s given me grist for thought ever since I heard it. That magic moment might be 1/4000th of a second to capture an awesome breach by a humpback whale or a seconds to show the anger of an approaching storm.

When you think about that truism, still photography is an awesome responsibility. We capture reality for a split second or so. Or that’s what some of us think, anyway. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Myth

What we capture in those fleeting moments is just a miniscule slice of reality. I recently watched a BBC nature special narrated by the inimitable Richard Attenboroug. I was totally absorbed by its videographic beauty, deep explanation of what we were seeing, and the sounds encircling that moment. Let’s face it, those video segments are ceryainly a “truer” representation of reality.

While you’re reading this I’m in the Serengeti, an astounding place of primal beauty, leading a photo tour of The Great Migration. Nothing in my career comes close to the feelings of inadequacy I experience amidst the deep joy of this mind-blowing spectacle, no matter how many times I’ve experienced it. As I lift my camera I think of what a fraud I am in those moments. How can I relay the frenetic immediacy of those millions of nature’s creatures struggling to survive? Or the sound of the wildebeests grunting, their babies crying out, the stampeding hooves, the cacophany of sound encasing us? How can I capture the earthy smells of the wildebeests, the zebras, the giraffes, the hippos and more?

When you face those moments ask yourself, as I remind myself on every photo shoot: “What is the story I want to tell? What is the essence I’m trying to convey to the viewer? What is it of this very moment I want to preserve for myself“? And, how can I reasonably do that within the confines of still photography?”

We can’t equate videography with photography. Yes, they are both artistic media, but they have different challenges. There are times I wish I could tell a fuller story, one more reflective of the reality I’m immersed in at that moment. But, I can’t. And that brings me to a final realization... for me, anyway.

When I’m in that moment, fine art printing rescues me. I understand my photographic limitations. But I also know what might make a good print; maybe even a great one. I know what not to bother shooting. I don’t want shots of biology textbook 101 of an elephant standing on the vast plains of The Serengeti. I don’t want to take the same images that I’ve seen a thousand times. I want to capture something that tells the story of their behavior, their sentience.

I shoot mainly black and white on slow, 3-5 captures-per-second, medium format cameras. I consider composition, of course, but I think of the final print, too. Does it have contrast, foreground elements, texture and patterns. But if I feel it falls short of a fine art print, I just pass the shot and look elsewhere. Will I miss some great action shots in Tanzania? Of course. But since I no longer do editorial photography, I now have the luxury of taking a few deep breaths before choosing my shot. I can be fully present in the glorious moment without restricting the experience through the viewfinder.

So capturing that special photographic moment will undoubtedly be different for me than for you. That’s ok. As a young editorial photographer capturing the moment to me meant only one thing, the frantic focus on bringing home the money shot. But I’ve evolved over the years. Capturing the moment has evolved for me. That’s my story, anyway. What’s yours?