The Perceptive Photographer

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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We are up to episode 603 of the Perceptive Photographer podcast, and this week we are going all meta meta on how to make projects.

Just a quick note before we jump into the actual meat and potatoes of the podcast show notes. Save November 5 if you’re in the Pacific Northwest area to pop by the Photographic Center Northwest for my lecture on the Landscape as Language and Identity. It should be an exciting evening and will be covering a lot of different photographic concepts.

For the podcast this week, as I said, we’re going a little meta. We’re talking about project ideas that help you come up with photo projects. It’s really just brainstorming ideas, but in my brainstorming I came up with meta meta as a title :). 

The goal of this week’s podcast is to help you feel more comfortable with your work when you’re feeling creatively stuck. At times, when we are working on our various projects, we can get tired, and that leads to running out of steam. At that point, it can be hard, even when looking at a bunch of photographs that we feel are somehow connected, to actually turn them into a project. So hopefully these five ideas can help jumpstart your process.

Personal experiences. I think if we look back over our life over the past year, there’s a lot of great stories to tell. We could tell a funny, happy, sad, or difficult story, but those experiences in life offer us a rich source of interesting ways to approach our photography. 

Combine unrelated things. When you find things that, in your mind, don’t seem related, put those words together and then see what comes up. This happened really well for me when I put the words photography and music together. For you, it might be something else; groups of things like family and architecture, food and memory, movement in nature and other pairs could be great for something unique to show up.

Contradictions. We’re looking for contradictions: two words that don’t seem to fit together, and then we photograph and explore what those might be.

Structures that exist with other narratives and storytelling formats. Looking at how stories are told, or projects are created in books, movies, poems, and plays, is a rich source of materials. Spend some time with one of these other forms and then figure out how to adopt some of that storytelling methodology into our own photography. It is also worth recognizing that every genre has a set of concepts and tropes that it uses for its storytelling and that we can apply those as well.

Hypotheticals Working with a list of what might be. Even if we don’t know how they might be possible, this should be just a fun brainstorming list of all the crazy things you can come up with. If you’re not getting very many crazy things, it’s cause you’re spending too much time trying to figure out how you might do something rather than just a list of what you might possibly do one day.

Hopefully this list of five things helps you jumpstart your crazy process when you’re feeling a little stuck on your Photographic projects, or they’re feeling a little stagnant and stale. Thanks so much for joining me this week, and we’ll see you next week on episode 604.

In this week’s episode, we’re gonna be talking a little bit about questions and asking the correct questions. Before we jump into the nuts and bolts of the week, just a couple of quick reminders: first, I’ve got a book club that’s running, so you can join that by clicking on the book club link from the workshops and classes section of my website. Also, save the date: November 5 for a lecture I’ll be presenting at the Photographic Center Northwest on ” Does a Landscape Speak, and How Do We Listen? It’ll be free to anyone who registers; it will be a great time.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been circling back on this question idea and asking the right questions with several of my workshops and conversations with friends. Each time, this notion of questions versus answers keeps rearing its head. And I’ve started to think really long and hard about the impact of asking the right question at the right time and how that makes us better photographers. I think too many times we ask the wrong question, get an answer and are just happy that we have an answer, and we move on. But so many times, if we ask the right question, we get access to that part of a project that we may not even be aware of the thing that sort of sits in our blind spot.

So today on the podcast, we’re going to dive a little bit into that notion of asking the right question and what that might mean for our creative process.

Hello, everyone! Thanks for joining me for episode 601 of The Perceptive Photographer. Before we jump into this week’s show notes, I want to take a moment to say thanks to every one who reached out with kind messages and emails during our milestone of 600 episode and to all of those of you who are listening all these years. Your support is awesome and really makes me appreciate the wonderful community around this podcast.

This week’s topic is again a smash up of a few random thoughts. The first is that recently I came across an insightful essay (they all are) by Guy Tall, where he discussed the time we dedicate to viewing others’ work verse the amount of time we wished people spent looking at our work. It really stuck with me and gave me pause about how our much of our attention we want on our work and how much we actually give to other photographers’ images. I reached out to several photographers I know, asking them to compare the time they want others to spend looking at their work with how much time they actually invest in appreciating others’ art. As usual, Guy was spot on. As I thought about it more and more, I don’t think many of us take the time to immerse ourselves in the depth of others’ work. If we did, we might learn more, connect more and might even foster a little more rapid growth and inspiration in our own work. I guess what I have been thinking is that if you’re looking to make better work, spend more time looking at other’s work. Writers read, movie people watch movies, photographers should look at photographs.

Once that thought ran through it picked up on a piece of wisdom my grandmother, mom and dad and other famous people often shared: “You can tell a lot about someone by the company they keep.” It got me thinking about who we spend time with photographically, and if we are I surrounding ourselves with photographers whose, conversations and critique inspires us or does it do the opposite? When I felt I wasn’t around the right influences and it showed in my work. Not always easy to fix and give up those “friends”, but it might be something we have to do for our own growth.

Finally that led me back to a good old topic of am I doing what I should be doing or what I am meant to do. The time spent on looking at work, the company we keep and what we should do can be good or it can be bad. If we find ourselves in a community that doesn’t help us with our goals, we can wonder off true path. Staying focused on what we are meant to do and not what we should do isn’t always easy but the right support goes a long way in helping.

Quick note if you are in the Seattle area and you’re looking for an fun experience the weekend of November 6th – 8th (2027) I invite you to join my workshop called “Landscape as Language” at the Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle! We’ll dive into how our landscape photographs are intertwined with our identities and the ways we connect to the environment around us. This master class promises to be a fantastic inquiry of how we communicate through our art, and I would love for you to be a part of it!

Thank you once again for tuning in and for being such a vital part of this journey. I can’t wait to jump into the mix with you all again in episode 602 next week.

Well, this marks a special episode of the podcast. Today we release our 600th episode of The Perceptive Photographer. I wanted to take a moment to say that it has been a blast to do that many, and at the same time it’s hard to grasp the significance of that number. That is roughly 11½ years of commitment to showing up every week. There are very few things in my life that last that long, so it is pretty cool to have a relationship with this podcast that is as consistent and reliable as it is. In looking back at the past 599 episodes, I feel the more fascinating part isn’t the number of episodes but rather what I’ve learned from the journey of consistently engaging with photography and creativity over such an extended period.

So as I look back over these past 600 weeks thinking solely about the impact of the podcast, I came up with some things that I have learned over the years that I wanted to share. First, I’ve realized that you don’t have to be inspired to create something worthwhile (or at least what I think is worthwhile 😀). There have been more than a few weeks where creativity felt like it was gone, and doubts crept in, but I really wanted to have that podcast every week no matter what. The inspiration was in the showing up. So, I’ve learned that true consistency lies in the willingness to pay attention, dig in and celebrate everything that is in your life that might inspire you, no matter how small, and to show up regardless of inspiration. Second, I’ve come to understand that questions are far more meaningful than answers. Sustaining this podcast has been driven by curiosity for what it means to try and be present for my photography even when I don’t pick up a camera at all. I find that by having to show up every week for my creative practice, I find myself constantly asking myself what I see and what is interesting that might make my photos better or the podcast topic list. Lastly, I’ve discovered that paying attention transforms more than just the photographs; it enriches every aspect of my life.

As we approach the end of this episode, it’s cool to think that 600 isn’t a finish line. There’s always more to explore, and next week, I’ll be digging into episode 601, and no, I have no idea what the topic is yet. Ha ha ha.

Finally, I want to say thanks for joining me on this podcast journey. I hope that for you it continues to inspire you to look, wonder, pay attention and make more meaningful photographs.