Episodes

Perceptive Photographer Episode 11: Hot Sauce and Photography While having a few conversations with friends over the past few weeks, I was reminded that good photography is about great images. Those images are not great because of the way they are processed but rather the content they contain. What that means is that we can’t just take a mediocre image and hope that there is some secret sauce out there that will fix it up and make it palatable. Just like with food, when something isn’t that gre...

Perceptive Photographer Episode 10: Photography and Online Dating I was recently out to dinner with a good friend who has returned to the world of dating. Having been fortunate enough to be in a relationship since before online dating, I was fascinated to hear about his experiences. As he talked about the process of signing up for an account, finding matches online, and first dates my mind sort of drifted to how similar his experience is to some of what we do with our photography and creative p...

Perceptive Photographer Episode 9: Importance of Space As Lori and I put some finishing touches on my darkroom studio after 15 months, I got to thinking about how important the notion of space is when we are working photographers. Not just our physical space where we do our creative work from the darkroom to the computer, but also other types of space. The idea of getting our creative space established when we start to work to the use of space in the photograph to create relationships and build...

Perceptive Photographer Episode 8: Thinking about your audience In this podcast we talk about how the viewer and audience of the photographs we create is really about our relationship to our own work. It doesn’t matter if you are finding your audience or have an audience, ultimately art is about the creation of a dialog between the viewer and the photographer via the image. The audience gives us time and if we are lucky a little attention. If we are really lucky they are willing to engage in a ...

Perceptive Photographer Episode 7: Photography is about problem solving In this episode we look at how much of photography is about figuring out how and why things work. From a bad day in the darkroom resulting in some problems I had never seen before causes me to think about all some of the things that we have to figure out when working as a photographer. Learning gear, sorting out problems in the field and ultimately figuring out how to make our images better is really a lot of the day-to-day...

Perceptive Photographer Episode 5: All things are not equal In this episode of the Perceptive Photographer I am reminded by my love of movies that while not all my favorites make the AFI top 100 movies of all times doesn’t distract from my love of some films. While I think we evaluate movies that are classics and and our own favorites differently, shouldn’t we do the same with photographs. It makes sense to think about the context of the photograph, the purpose of the photograph and the intenti...

Perceptive Photographer Episode 5: Lessons in Acceptance In this episode of the Perceptive Photographer I talk about how acceptance can have an impact on your work. From acceptance of your own work, feedback from others and the subjects we photograph, acceptance is a powerful tool that can help us overcome and develop into much stronger artist. “Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.” – Minor White – Links mentioned in the podcast www.williamalbertal...

Perceptive Photographer Episode 4: Importance of working early on artist statements In this episode of the Perceptive Photographer we look at how the artist statement or writing down what your work is about can be a powerful tool in helping you create more meaningful work. I found that in my own workflow, I used to wait until the last possible second to create an artist statement. Those statements where more drivel and pontification about meaningless aspects of my work. By shifting the writing ...

the Perceptive Photographer Episode 3 In this latest version of the Perceptive Photographer I talk about why liking a photograph is not necessarily the best way to judge an image. From the misguided feedback on social media with the Like button, +1s and tweets, it is easy to believe that an image quality is based on this quick snap judgment feedback. For images to really be understood and find their value, we need to look deeper into the photographs and move beyond a simple like and move toward...

the Perceptive Photographer Episode 2 In this second episode of the Perceptive Photographer we talk about the importance of intention behind the camera in the creation of meaningful photographs. By first focusing more on intention in the creation of the work rather than on just reacting, we are able to hopefully increase the quality and satisfaction of the photographic process. We also look at the importance of changing the shotgun approach to working the scene and try to really focus in on qua...

Perceptive Photographer: Episode 1 I am excited to be releasing a new podcast focused on the more introspective side of photography called the Perceptive Photographer. In this podcast, I will be covering all sorts of topics on photography like dealing with internal struggles to create work, understanding the meaning of your own work, the role of intention and analysis in creating meaningful work and interviews with some amazing but less well know photographers. While I am sure that at times th...