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How Street Photography Became My Mental Health Practice (And How It Can Become Yours)
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How Street Photography Became My Mental Health Practice (And How It Can Become Yours)

Every Sunday morning I do a photo walk. Rain, shine, or the classic Seattle grey drizzle that falls somewhere between both. I started this tradition partly for the creative practice, but I kept it going because of how I feel when I come home. Clearer. Quieter. Like something that was coiled up has been allowed to unwind. I didn’t have a good framework for explaining why that happened until I watched this interview.

Your iPhone Is Too Good at Photography (And That's the Problem)
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Your iPhone Is Too Good at Photography (And That's the Problem)

Every few months I catch myself defaulting back to my phone. Not because my mirrorless is too heavy to carry, but because the iPhone just works. It’s fast, it’s always in my pocket, and honestly, the results look good enough to post without touching them in Lightroom. That convenience, I’ve come to realize, is exactly the trap. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube In this Peter McKinnon video, he sits down with a fellow photographer and drops what he calls a hot take: the iPhone isn’t a real camera, and we should stop treating it like one.

How to Use Adobe Camera Raw as a Full Editing Suite Inside Photoshop
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How to Use Adobe Camera Raw as a Full Editing Suite Inside Photoshop

If you’ve ever felt like Lightroom and Photoshop exist in two separate universes that you have to keep shuttling between, this workflow is going to feel like a relief. For years I edited portraits in Lightroom, exported a TIFF, dragged it into Photoshop for any compositing or retouching work, then realized I needed to tweak the exposure again and had to start the whole round-trip over. It was tedious, and honestly it made me avoid certain edits just because the back-and-forth wasn’t worth it.

Why Your Bird Photos Look Crooked (And the Water-Level Fix That Changes Everything)
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Why Your Bird Photos Look Crooked (And the Water-Level Fix That Changes Everything)

Every Sunday morning I’m out walking with my camera, and shorebirds near the water are some of my favorite subjects. I’ve spent more Sunday mornings than I’d like to admit standing at the edge of Puget Sound, thrilled with a shot in the field, only to get home and feel like something is subtly off about the image. The bird is sharp. The light is good. But the whole frame feels like it’s sliding to one side.

What a 10-Year Wet Plate Photography Project Taught Me About Committing to a Vision
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What a 10-Year Wet Plate Photography Project Taught Me About Committing to a Vision

Every Sunday morning I do a photo walk. No agenda, no client, no brief. Just me, a coffee, and whatever lens feels right that day. I started the tradition because I kept noticing that my best personal work happened when I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. But even with that ritual locked in, I’ve struggled with the bigger question: what am I actually building toward? A folder of nice images isn’t a body of work.

What the Canon EOS R5 Actually Feels Like to Use - A Working Shooter's Breakdown
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What the Canon EOS R5 Actually Feels Like to Use - A Working Shooter's Breakdown

Every few years, a camera comes along that genuinely changes the conversation. I remember where I was when I first started hearing serious chatter about the Canon EOS R5 - sitting in a coffee shop in Capitol Hill, scrolling through forums on my phone, watching the photography community slowly lose its collective mind over specs that seemed almost too good to be true. For those of us who shoot professionally, upgrading bodies is never a casual decision.

Adobe's New Color Mode in Premiere Pro Changed How I Think About Video Editing
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Adobe's New Color Mode in Premiere Pro Changed How I Think About Video Editing

I have a confession that will probably resonate with anyone who edits video in Premiere Pro. My color grading workflow has always been, to put it kindly, a disaster. Adjustment layers stacked on top of adjustment layers, clips mysteriously missing color on export, then hunting through a timeline that looks like it survived an earthquake to figure out which seven clips I forgot. If you shoot travel or lifestyle content and you’re cutting together 40-plus clips from a single shoot day, that chaos compounds fast.

How I Used Claude AI to Turn Raw Footage Into a Polished Video (No Editing Experience Required)
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How I Used Claude AI to Turn Raw Footage Into a Polished Video (No Editing Experience Required)

I’ve been putting off video for years. Not because I don’t want to share my work in motion, but because every time I opened a video editor I felt like I’d wandered into someone else’s cockpit. The timelines, the render queues, the color grading panels, all of it. I’m a photographer. I know light. I do not know what a keyframe is, and until recently I didn’t particularly want to.

Why Digital Responsibility Matters: A Photography Community Perspective
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Why Digital Responsibility Matters: A Photography Community Perspective

Why Digital Responsibility Matters: A Photography Community Perspective As photographers, we rely heavily on digital platforms to share our work, connect with fellow creatives, and build our audiences. Recently, I’ve been reflecting on how the platforms we use daily are being held to higher standards of accountability—and what that means for all of us. Understanding the Bigger Picture A significant legal ruling has reinforced that digital platforms bear responsibility for how their services are used and the potential harms that can occur.

Should You Switch Cameras? How to Actually Test a New Body Before You Commit
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Should You Switch Cameras? How to Actually Test a New Body Before You Commit

There’s a particular kind of camera frustration that sneaks up on you slowly. You don’t notice it all at once. It’s the ache in your wrist after an hour of shooting. It’s the awkward angle you have to hold the camera to see the screen while you’re talking to it. It’s the workflow slowdown that means footage sits on your drive for a week because rendering takes forever. For a long time, I told myself these were just the trade-offs of shooting on serious gear.

How Pro Beverage Photographers Light a Beer Shot (Breaking Down Rob Grimm's Studio Setup)
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How Pro Beverage Photographers Light a Beer Shot (Breaking Down Rob Grimm's Studio Setup)

Product photography has humbled me more than once. I shoot lifestyle and travel almost exclusively, so when someone asks me about tabletop product work, I used to quietly change the subject. The lighting logic is different, the margins for error are smaller, and glass and liquid together are basically a nightmare for reflections. So when I came across this Aaron Nace (PHLEARN) tutorial featuring St. Louis beverage photographer Rob Grimm, I watched it three times in a row.

5 Landscape Photography Lessons I Took From William Patino's Year-End Breakdown
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5 Landscape Photography Lessons I Took From William Patino's Year-End Breakdown

There’s a specific kind of frustration I know well: standing in front of a genuinely beautiful scene, something that makes your chest feel full, and walking away with a flat, disconnected image that doesn’t come close to what your eyes saw. For me it usually happens near water. I’ll be on one of my Sunday morning photo walks here in Seattle, the light is doing something incredible over the sound, and I fumble through my settings trying to hold onto it.