3 Ways To Enjoy Antarctica
Now there are three ways to enjoy my images of Antarctica.
Listen to my online Viewing Rooms.
Enjoy my videos.
Read my ebooks.
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Find out about new images with my newsletter Collectors Alert.
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Join Me During The Belfast Poetry Festival – Oct 15 6pm EST
Oct 15 6pm EST
Join me for collaborative poetry readings with Maine poets.
Meg Weston and I will explore our shared passions for volcanoes and polar regions.
Join Us! Young Poets Read – New Voices Rising – Sun Oct 9 / 4 EST
I’ll be cohosting a special event with poet Kathleen Ellis.
Young Maine poets read and discuss their unique perspectives.
Come hear the voices of young poets as they express their views of our world. The poets are University of Maine students active in campus creative writing activities and the campus literary magazine, The Open Field. Readings will be followed by a conversation among the poets facilitated by Kathleen Ellis and John Paul Caponigro, and Q&A from the audience. Poets reading will include Samuel Mills, Iris Lecates, Paige McHatten, Starla Straub, and Rachel Ouellette.
Why It’s Important To Remember Your Dreams & How To Do It
Do you remember your dreams?
If so, are you actively working with them?
Benefits
Throughout history, countless cultures have developed practices to cultivate their dreams and help people increase awareness, connect and clarify thoughts and feelings, recognize opportunities and issues, solve problems, optimize performance, and many other things. Never mind predicting the future, though that can happen too. As an artist, dreams help me imagine images, both realistic and surreal. As a writer, dreams help me write – letters, technical articles, aesthetic statements, nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. As a musician, dreams help me imagine new melodies, rhythms, and even sounds. Still, the biggest reason to remember your dreams is they’re fascinating. Dreams feel more real and are usually more entertaining, emotional, and insightful than movies or virtual reality.
Dreaming
All people (and many animals) dream. Scientists haven’t figured out all the reasons why dreams are so important for our mental and physical health. But they know we spend just under 10% of our lives dreaming. (That’s approximately 750 hours a year.) On average, we dream 2 hours a night in REM bursts lasting 10 minutes early in the night and gradually extending to as long as an hour.
Remembering
It’s common not to remember dreams. But there are many things you can do to improve your recall. The number one thing I’ve done to boost my recall is write down my dreams, not just first thing when I wake up, not just in the morning, but also when I wake up in the middle of the night. I do this using Notes on my iPhone; it’s always with me. During the pandemic, I’ve been more consistent than ever, and over 80% of the time I remember at least one dream. I found that when I traveled, I often let my routine slip, and my recall went down. When I reestablished this daily ritual, my recall went back up. Extending my dream practices from notation to journalling reflections and creating things in response to them has made dreams and my life much richer. I wish this for you too.
Resources
Many books have been written on dreams. I offer the following list of resources as a way to reinvigorate the journey you started long ago. These resources are not the classic academic books of great historians, anthropologists, scientists, and psychologists. I’ve chosen them because as well as being grounded in this long tradition, they’re also approachable and practical.
Sweet dreams!
Unlock The Secrets Of Your Dreams – Stephen Aizenstat – Free eBook
Photoshop Has 5 Instant AI Cutouts – Including The Hidden One.
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“See the 5 different algorithms Photoshop uses to make cutouts and remove backgrounds.”
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Use The 8 Classic Shots Of Photo Essays To Tell Better Stories
Every picture tells a story. Combine pictures to form an essay, and your storytelling options multiply. This is one way to tell a more complete story, add depth, complexity, counterpoint, nuance, show change over time, and so much more. A photo essay transcends a single lucky shot. It demonstrates commitment, focus, versatility, and skills of another order.
Essays have definite structures, with a clear beginning, middle, and end – often with standard components that flesh out and advance a story in critical ways. Journalists excel at this type of storytelling. Sometimes they even use cinematic conventions, components, and strategies. Moviemakers storyboard their creations before filming commences. Cinematographers and film editors ultimately develop their own styles with how they handle these devices, and they can also become a part of your style.
Identifying the necessary components of an essay is the first step. Once you know the types of images you need to tell your story, you’ll know what to shoot while you’re on location and maybe even when you need to be there. If you don’t identify these elements beforehand and make sure you come back with each of them, you may find you lack critical pieces. There will be holes in your story. And you may have to return to finish it – if you can.
Even if your work isn’t narrative, learning these skills will help you create more images, be more versatile, make stronger comparisons and contrasts, and create more effective continuity and transitions between images.
These are the classic elements used to structure a photo essay presented in order of appearance.
1 Introduction
2 Set the Stage
3 Identify the Main Character
4 Significant Detail
5 Human Interest
6 Decisive Moment
7 Outcome
8 Conclusion
You could say all other images included in an essay are just variations of these few types of images. I’d be surprised if exceptions couldn’t be found, but they would be exceptions. These are worth committing to memory and ultimately making second nature. If you do, you’ll become a more capable and versatile photographer.
What is the function of each image type?
3 Great Books On Photographic Contact Sheets
You can learn a lot about looking by looking at photographers’ contact sheets. (Today, it’s digital collections.) It’s the closest any of us will get to see how another person goes through searching for an image. Warm-ups, near misses, fine-tuning compositions, and the decision of when to stop or move on to something someplace else entirely; they’re all significant and informative. It’s rare to be able to see photographers other than ourselves at work like this.
You can enjoy the search for great images by great photographers in these three books.
(Click on the images for links to the books.) You can even purchase select Magnum Contact Sheets for display.
View my digital contact sheets here.
Learn more with my Visual Storytelling resources.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
Use The Power Of Storyboarding To Structure Your Photographic Explorations
The first time I went to Namibia I used this storyboard to find more ideas and structure my thinking.
Find out how it worked out at the end of this article.
Movies are rarely shot without storyboarding them. Consider storyboarding your still photography projects too.
A storyboard is a hand-drawn map or timeline that identifies the various types of images needed to advance a story and the transitions between them. They identify the beginning, middle, and end of a story and the shots needed to move from one to the other. Storyboards create a guiding structure or framework that can help focus and strengthen your work.
You can use storyboards to structure your thinking when you’re developing still photography projects. Storyboards can help you do many different things, including finding out what your story is, generating ideas, identifying the shots you need, creating stronger relationships between separate images, and telling your story in more compelling ways.
Creating a storyboard doesn’t take long. You can create a simple storyboard in as few as two sketches – before and after or beginning and end. Then you can continue adding more frames to develop your story further.
Seven Tips for Making Basic Selections in Photoshop
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“In this video, you’ll learn seven helpful tips, tricks, and shortcuts for making basic selections in Photoshop.”
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How To Break The Rules & Unlock New Creative Possibilities
Stuck? Experiment! How? Try this.
List all of the rules of photography. Then break them.
Doing this will offer two profound benefits.
One, you'll develop a better understanding of and versatility with the medium.
Two, you’ll deepen your understanding of your personal goals and voice (vision and style).
If an experiment fails to produce interesting results, you’ll have proven confirmation that what you’re doing is working for you. If an experiment succeeds by producing results that are exciting to you, you’ll develop a new relationship with the medium and maybe even find a personal breakthrough.
Often you’ll need to try an experiment more than once. Try each experiment long enough to see whether they’re working or not; many of these things won’t feel natural at first.
I recommend making this kind of experimentation a lifelong practice. No matter how accomplished you are, discoveries await you.
Here’s a list to get you started …