Unsharp Mask

Precise sharpening can improve almost any image. It helps to know when to apply it, what type of sharpening to apply, how to apply it and where to apply it. Forget the filters Sharpen, Sharpen More and Sharpen Edges. They're just default settings of Unsharp...

Hipstamiticophilia – Ragnar Th Sigurdsson

While guiding me on my Iceland photography workshop, Ragnar Th Sigurdsson rediscovered iPhone photography. He got obsessed with the App Hipstamatic, which produces photographs with terrific lo-mo effects. He started seeing differently. In addition to making many images with higher end photography equipment, he produced...

Cartooning Our Way Through Iceland

We have a lot of fun in my workshops. Often, we use our iPhones to stimulate creativity. We try all sorts of creative experiments. This trip, one of the experiments I tried was creating cartoons of participants as superheroes or supervillains. It all started when...

Track Your Influences

Frequently, old ideas and feelings surface in the midst of our creative process. Tracking our own fixations and chains of association can be both revealing and rewarding. The paintings of Morris Graves made a big impression on me at an early age. Ever since, I...

New Images – Workshop Participants – Iceland 2011

We do lightning fast reviews of participant’s images in my digital photography workshops. We discuss what works and why and what doesn’t and why not. It’s wonderful to see how different the images are, made by individuals in the same situations using the same tools....

Use Postcards As Props

I often like to use props to make photographs. One of my favorite props to use is images. Photographing other images, in many cases, photographing other photographs, adds layers of complexity and offers many poetic opportunities. Images ask you to look and to look in...

Make Your Own Postcards

For a time, I swore off making photographs that were like postcards. I was looking for something else then. I was looking for my own unique approach to making images. My thinking was that if I took a vow of abstinence from what I knew...

Use Postcards As Quick Surveys

One of the first things I do when I arrive at a new location is look at postcards made in the area. Postcards give me a quick survey of the highlights of the region and the classic visual approaches that many other photographers have used...

Iceland – Fire From Heaven

Iceland. Seljalandsfoss. A waterfall you can walk behind. Sunset. I’m getting lost in Iceland with a great group of Focus On Nature workshop participants this week. Stay tuned for updates. Find out about my 2012 Iceland workshop with Seth Resnick here.

Music and Passion – Benjamin Zander

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections. Find out more about Benjamin Zander here. View more creativity videos here....