The Perceptive Photographer

Show Note Summary and Thoughts

Thanks for joining me this week for the Perceptive Photographer podcast. Today is November 2, 2026, which is always a rough day for me. It’s the anniversary of the day I learned about my brother’s passing. It is hard to believe that it has been nine years.

The challenge of processing

So this week’s podcast is a little random because I was struggling to figure out the motivation to record anything last week. It finally hit me that I was thinking a lot about those first days. One of the things I have been learning is that while I feel like I have done lots of work to process the emotional and psychological impacts of his passing, there is always a physical toll on me this time of year. Most years, I either get really sick or have some health issues that result in ER visits. These always seem to come up in November and December. Part of what I’m learning is that there is more that needs to be taken care of where the body remembers and hasn’t processed the grief as much as my mind has.  

Depth and complexity

In learning this sum of the parts, I got to thinking about the depth of the images that resonate with me from that time in my life or anytime, for that matter. I think that’s one of the things about our photographic process that can be applied from what I’m learning every year that I go through this. That there is a depth and complexity to who we are as people and the more we are willing to understand, share and process the entirety of that complexity, the more interesting we are as individuals and therefore the more interesting we are as community members and ultimately the more interesting our art and photographs become.

Lesson we take from others.

This was all pretty interesting because part of what I wanted to talk about before starting to struggle with figuring out why I was having a hard time recording a podcast last week was that I was going to be talking about a quote from the book Photographers on Photography by Henry Carroll, from an interview he did with Ron Jude. He asked Ron what his favorite Photographic quote was and why, and the quote that he came up with was by Lewis Baltz. 

“Anyone can take pictures; what’s difficult is thinking about them, organizing them and trying to use them in some way so that some meaning can be constructed out of them. That’s really where the work begins for an artist” 

Ron then goes on to say, “What I offer as an artist doesn’t lie solely in craft or visual acrobatics. It’s in the context I create for individual images”

It is never just one thing.

What really struck me with this overlap was that so much of the meaning we create, so much of the work we create, is in the understanding of the complexity in context by which we want our work to be viewed and in the context by which it was created. So I’m thinking about the multi-layered way. Grief has impacted my life. I’m also realizing how important it is for me to recognize that when my photographs have that multi-layered complexity, the more interesting they are, the more honest they are, and the more engaging. They are so, hopefully, as we talk about that podcast this week, that it’ll be something for you to get out of it that you can enjoy and apply to your own process.

Quick notes

A couple of quick things before we jump into the podcast.

if you’re gonna be in the Seattle area on November 5, don’t forget to join me at the Photographic Center Northwest for my lecture on the landscape and language and meaning.

In the next week to 10 days, don’t forget to check out the latest In Conversation episode of the podcast. This one is with Greg Hatton, an amazing photographer from Los Angeles, who was kind enough to join me even though he was working hard for Leica down at the Formula One races in Austin, Texas.

In this week’s episode, we’re digging into both the need to say Happy Halloween and the blind spot that impacts how we critique photographs. When we critique and look at photographs, we often have a pattern or process that we like to follow. This process can often produce pretty good results. It also allows us to see and understand photographs quickly, and then move on to the next image. However, there might be times when we run into an image where the analysis is in our blind spot. And by the blind spot, I mean something that we don’t know that we need to know because we don’t know we need to know it to examine the photograph.

We need each other

Long and short of it is that I think this is a community issue. This is something that I don’t necessarily think we solve on our own because it’s hard for us to know what we don’t know. So we need to talk to other people. We need to see how they look at photographs, talk to them about how they examine photographs, look at text for people who have written about it, and see if there are things we can incorporate into our own sense of scene to evaluate the work.

It’s our job to develop the language if we want the language to be about us.

I think it’s also important for us to recognize that sometimes the things that we don’t think are important in our analysis of our work might be significant. If we start with them, we might find unique and interesting ways to critique photographs. I believe this is really important because, as we look at the number of images of her being created, both photographically, with generative AI, or hybrid. The need for us photographers to have a better language, both visually and verbally, to talk about our work is important. It’s in these conversations that we learn how to be better photographers, how to appreciate photography and how to honor the work that other photographers have done.

Wrapping it up

So I hope in this episode, you find some interesting insights and some ideas that you could use to both help see where your blind spots are and help others maybe find new and exciting ways to avoid their blind spots.

I know for me it’s always about finding somebody in the community who can help me see what I couldn’t see by myself, so don’t be afraid to ask those people in the camera club, or some photographers you might know, or maybe it’s time to find some photographer friends 🙂

Context and meaning from the outside

After getting the heat cranked up in the studio, I got to start recording some podcast episodes. Damn, it was cool in here today. Now that it warmed up, we are digging into episode 606 of the Perceptive Photographer, where we are looking at the choices we make about what not to include in the frame. While we focus a lot on what we put in the frame, I am starting to wonder if what we leave out is more interesting.

Beyond the Frame

When I started in photography, I was focused on the frame. The composition, the point of view, the angle of view and such, but
composition isn’t random; we pick and choose what to include. What if what we don’t include tells us more about the photographer than what is in the frame?

What We Leave Out Changes the Story

In this context, what we exclude can alter the interpretation of an image. We actually rely on this and want viewers to fill in the blanks. This ambiguity provides curiosity and intrigue, or does it offer up a deception? For me, the more interesting question is: are we as the photographer even in on the deception?

Photographic Blind Spots

I know for a fact that I often do the same things over and over again. I have learned that these concepts work in my images. But these habits might actually become blind spots. I don’t see what I am doing, and what I am leaving out of the frame might be the very things I need to make a more meaningful image.

Expand the frame exercise.

Photograph a place you have photographed before, changing your position, perspective, composition (habitual actions), or framing. Go home, process them and then really spend some time comparing the image’s meaning. You might find that a simple change results in a completely different narrative.

Wrap it up already

Don’t just think about your photography as what you see and include in the frame, but also what you see that you don’t. It’s not only about what we photograph but also about what remains unseen. Maybe there is some mystery and storytelling that you can use when you open the story up a little.

Quotes from the end

I used to think I was the strangest person in the world, but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this, you know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.
— Frida Kahlo8

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.

— Joan Miro

If I already have a vision, my work is almost done. The rest is just a technical problem.
— Hiroshi Sugimoto

What do you want me to look at and notice?

It is amazing how much this concept of audience, meaning and what an audience has to know about your work comes up. This podcast is a revisit of an oft-discussed topic in our episodes, but nonetheless, the conversation about what we should tell an audience about our work and what we shouldn’t keeps coming up for me again and again. 

So in this episode of the podcast, we return to look at what we should share and why we should share information about our work with our audience. I mean, I do get the point that some artist make that they don’t want to “taint” the audience into not having their own experience of the work. That idea comes with some big assumptions, like your audience has enough language to experience the work. So many times I hear photographers say that they like a photograph and can say no more than /i like it. It’s good. The reason for that feedback is that it is all they have in their language set to speak about an image. 

I feel that the more we can understand how to help the viewer see the work, the better. This can lead to a different set of questions and considerations that we should make as the photographer to help the viewer. Questions like: What is this? can offer a simple entry point to an image, but by asking more complex questions when we make the work, we might open the door to more meaning. 

Questions like:

What do you want me to feel?

What do you want me to consider?

What are you asking me to do?

These types of more open-ended questions that go beyond what is just in the frame open up a deeper conversation between the viewer and the image. As I said, this isn’t a new topic on the podcast, but one that is always worth revisiting if you are interested in deeper connections with your work behind the camera, processing, printing and sharing the work. 

Also, don’t forget: if you are in Seattle, save the date for my lecture at the Photographic Center Northwest on November 5th—more details to come.

Intro

Welcome to episode 604 of the Perceptive Photographer podcast. Before we jump into today’s topic, how long should your project take to finish? Just a couple of quick reminders. First, if you are in the Seattle area on November 5, make sure you save that date to come down and check out my lecture on landscape, meaning and identity at the Photographic Center Northwest. Also, if you are in the central Oregon area on October 17, I’ll be doing a one-day workshop with the Cascade Camera Club on workflow and editing in Lightroom. In the afternoon, I’ll help with image triage on the photos you bring in, focusing on editing and processing. Should be a lot of fun.

Today we’re talking about how long it should take to complete a project, which is a really interesting question. The short answer is it takes as long as it takes; however, a few things can impact our thoughts and approaches to working with projects.

Single Image or Projects

I think one of the first things that’s important is for you to decide if you’re working on single images or you’re actually working on a project. I think when we do single image photography, it’s fun. We enjoy it. It’s super interesting. But at some point, we realize we have a lot of the same sort of thing happening over and over again, and we think about how those images might relate. Thus, we start a project; even if we aren’t doing a project, we start one.

Clarity of Purpose

And I think as we start those projects, it’s important for us to consider the clarity of purpose around that project. Are we doing this for technical, artistic, narrative purposes? What do we need to do when the project’s done? What does it mean when we have work that we return to over and over again? Because the essence of a project is determined not by how much time it takes, but whether or not the project communicates what we want.

And as I mentioned in the podcast, sometimes what we end up with is a series of small projects that roll up into a larger project a project that might take a very short amount of time or a project that might take our entire life. There is no right length of time for a project. What there is is the right amount of time for us to get what we need out of a project. That might be something as simple as how the camera works or as complex as our identity as it evolves.

Conclusion

As I mentioned, in the beginning, it takes as long as it takes, but what matters is recognizing when a project is actually done, versus when we’re walking away because it’s hard, or that it probably never should’ve been a project at all.

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