Organic Photography

I recently came across this piece I wrote a while back for a colleague of mine.  He has written several books and one of them was on Teaching Photography.  He asked me and some other compatriots of mine to write a brief piece about teaching and I wrote this one . That class was an amazing class.  Several of the students in that class have gone on to do amazing things - winning competitions, getting published, starting up their own businesses in San Francisco and New York.  It was truly an inspiration class.  And they're rare. I had one like that last semester, as well, and it was so amazing I am still regularly emailing several of the students about their work, their inspirations, and flat out asking them questions to help me make my classes stronger.  This is why I do what I do.  For them.  And as I start a new semester I am looking forward to having these types of classes again, though I have no idea how or when I will be that lucky.  I had an amazing workshop class at UCSD E

So, if I were to create a bucket list just for my photography, this would have been on it.  Learn how to make a Tintype and do it .  Throughout my photographic career I have gotten really good at theory and less good at practice.  Yes, that is how I scratched a name for myself - the theory of photographic practices as written in articles and books - and I do actually love the theory, but I love the creation of photography even more.  That is something I have sort of forgotten recently. Once you start teaching and keeping active with writing and raising kids, short cuts start sounding really good.  So, I have been playing around in my digital photographic world, seeing if my Silver Efex Pro can actually make an image reminiscent of my favorite Tri-X film, or trying to fake those exposed negative edges as an image frame. But a couple of important things happened to me in the last year that have brought me back to the thing I love most about photography, and that is the artifact .  I