by Daniel Gregory | Mar 18, 2019 | Podcast
Watching the bees get to work in the garden reminded me of the importance of inspiration AND the work to get inspired. Inspiration is a topic that comes up a lot among my artist friends. We talk about how we get it, find it, avoid it and respond to it. As I sit and listen to them talk, it occurred to me that inspiration is a process; not the actual inspiration, but the rituals that lead up to your inspiration. In this week’s podcast, I talk about the importance of recognizing the things that you do before you feel inspired. Maybe it is writing with a favorite pen or drinking your morning coffee in a special cup. By noticing what you do before you feel inspired can help you understand what you need to do again to feel inspired. Your challenge this week is to spend the time to recognize what happens in the days, hours and moments before your inspiration moving you to create.
by Daniel Gregory | Mar 11, 2019 | Podcast
In this week’s podcast we talk about how our attitude towards our photography, subject, learning and viewing photographs can make a huge difference in our ability to view and see through the camera. Waking up on the wrong side of the bed or starting the day off great can make a huge difference in how you process the days events. My challenge to you during and after listening to the podcast is to find a way to check your attitude all the time and make sure that you really putting into your work the experience, ideas and feelings you want to have with the work. If you want sad, angry or bland work for some reason then do so with intention. Make sure that no matter what you are doing in your creative life it is with the approach and passion you want.
by Daniel Gregory | Mar 4, 2019 | Podcast
This week’s podcast is a free form rant of sorts about how we talk about seeing in photography. While there are skills necessary to understand how and why a photograph might be seen as a good photograph, that doesn’t mean it was well seen. Knowing that using the rule of thirds and a blue shirt in an image makes people respond to it more doesn’t say it was well seen. Seeing a photograph is about more than having a good composition or technical skill set. It is about something more and more profound that has to come from inside each of us. So this week, I spent a lot of time thinking about how we see and view images and why is it that seeing well is so hard. Without much of an outline or script, I spent the time in front of the mic riffing on so of the randomness that comes to mind.
by Daniel Gregory | Feb 25, 2019 | Podcast
If you have ever taken or seen a pole coming out of someone’s head in a photograph, you know the problem with making a 3D world appear on a 2D medium.
When we compress three-dimensional space into two, things that should have distance between them are reduced or disappear. In some cases, they might even seem farther apart than they are. Either way, as photographers our goal is to be able to understand better how to tell the story we want in our image and use the spatial effect to our advantage.
In this week’s podcast, I talk about how to think about and approach foreground, mid-ground and background areas of your photograph. Starting by focusing on where the subject or subject matter is in the picture and how to make sure the elements of light, tone, color, and shape all help separate the subject from the environment or place it in the environment. I also talk about how to make sure each object in the frame has the appropriate space around them so the can breathe and allow for a movement of light, tone, and texture to build depth into the image.
Finally, I have an exercise for you to do that should hopefully help you see and separate objects and the various background and foreground objects.
Don’t forget if you are a fan of the podcast, you can always leave a review or drop me a line with any topics you might be interested in hearing about.
by Daniel Gregory | Feb 18, 2019 | Podcast
This week’s podcast is thanks and tribute to the Opportunity rover, JPL and NASA. Opportunity was designed to run for 90 days and cover 1000 meters on Mars. Rather than just meeting mission objectives, Opportunity ran for 15 years and covered more than 28 miles on the red planet.
As I got to thinking about how Opportunity didn’t shy away from being more than a set of mission objectives, I began to wonder what lessons from Opportunity could be applied to photography and creative living. So in honor of Opportunity and the Opportunity team, I decided to think about how what Opportunity did could make a difference in my photography.
