Light, Space, and Time Essays on Camera Craft and Creativity

A book about the craft of camera-using and the creative struggle of picture-making. Learning how a camera works is not difficult. Once you understand how to focus and expose, the rest are details. So why is it such a challenge to make photographs that feel like they do what we hope for? Could it be we're asking the camera to do the work that all along has been ours to figure out? Is it possible we've been thinking too much about the camera and not enough about our own creativity? In an industry that obsesses over the gear and all too often ignores the deeper questions around creativity and expression, this should come as no surprise. It's true, the camera sees differently than we do. As our creative collaborator it can do things that we simply cannot. It can see much faster (1/8000 of a second) and much slower (8 seconds, or 8 minutes) than we can. It can cut the light in half, or double it. It can magnify, compress, and otherwise transform our field of view through lens and aperture choices.