If you have ever tried to put together a piece of furniture from IKEA or have been pulling your hair out because your friend can’t give you good directions to their house, this week’s podcast is for you.

That is a challenge that I am asking you to take on this week. I want you to create some instructions for how you take a photograph and edit a picture. Then use those instructions to teach you about your process. What have you missed, skipped, repeated, or do for no reason you can figure out. Then examine what you can shift to try and find a new way to access your creative process. One of the most significant challenges we often face is understanding why we do something. By slowing way down and focusing on the smallest task, we might find some insight into why we make our work.

I was recently at an art opening that had several photographs of interesting abstractions. Images of plants, buildings, and objects all taken and presented as abstract objects. In listening to people talk about the work, I heard people discussing what they saw in the images or what they thought the actual object in the photograph was. I also observed that many people would tilt their head left or right to gain a new perspective. That tilting reminded me of working with a large-format camera which flips an image upside down and backwards.
In this week’s podcast, we talk about the advantages of using the power of flipping the perspective of an image to help us better understand the nature of seeing, editing, composing and creating more well-seen images. Sometimes to gain an insight into more meaningful work, we need to see the world differently.

There are many traps out there to keep us from making the types of photography that we want to create. Some of them are simple to see, while others are more complex in nature. As I was sitting in the studio watching my dog flip the pillows off the sofa she gets to sit on; it occurred to me that too much of something, even a pillow on a couch, might be a bad thing.
In this week’s podcast, we take a look at the impact of too much of something and what that can do to your photography and creative living. The two topics of gear and processing we quickly gloss over so that we can turn our attention to the impacts of talking too much, seeing too much and having too much time for our work.
Each of those areas can be useful and helpful in our photography, but when we have too much of any of them, it can cause us to derail our work. So let’s take a look at those three areas and how we can avoid getting snared in their traps.