Composition

How to Shoot a Year's Worth of Keepers: Lessons from Thomas Heaton's Behind-the-Scenes Calendar Project
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How to Shoot a Year's Worth of Keepers: Lessons from Thomas Heaton's Behind-the-Scenes Calendar Project

There’s a particular kind of pressure that comes with committing to a long-term photography project. I felt it when I challenged myself to shoot a “best of the year” collection for the first time - suddenly every outing felt like it either counted or didn’t, and I started second-guessing compositions I would have just shot freely before. What I needed wasn’t more gear advice. I needed to see how a working landscape photographer actually makes decisions in the field, across different locations, different seasons, different light.

How to Kill Decision Fatigue and Actually Go Shoot (A Lesson from Thomas Heaton)
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How to Kill Decision Fatigue and Actually Go Shoot (A Lesson from Thomas Heaton)

Every Sunday morning I grab my camera and go for a walk with no destination in mind. It’s my favorite ritual. But even with that loose structure, I still sometimes stand in my kitchen at 6am, coffee in hand, completely frozen. The weather is good, the light is coming, and I cannot decide where to go. It sounds absurd when I type it out, but decision fatigue is real, and it quietly kills more potential photo sessions than bad weather ever does.

The 4-Step Composition Process That Changed How I Read a Scene
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The 4-Step Composition Process That Changed How I Read a Scene

Every Sunday morning I do a photo walk. No agenda, no client, no pressure. Just me, whatever camera I feel like grabbing, and whatever Seattle decides to look like that day. And for years, I would show up to a location, pull out my camera within about 30 seconds, and start shooting. I thought I was being efficient. What I was actually doing was skipping the most important part. I came across a tutorial by landscape photographer Mark Denney where he breaks down his four-step process for finding and building a strong composition on location.

Karl Taylor's 5 Portrait Photography Tips (And What I'd Add From the Field)
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Karl Taylor's 5 Portrait Photography Tips (And What I'd Add From the Field)

Portrait sessions used to make me genuinely nervous — not because of the camera settings, but because of everything happening on the other side of the lens. I’d spend so much mental energy on my lighting ratios that by the time my subject arrived, I was distracted and they could feel it. The photos showed it too. Stiff expressions, guarded eyes, that unmistakable look of someone who just wants to get it over with.

How to Photograph Ice Caves: Lessons from a Glacier Overnight Trip
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How to Photograph Ice Caves: Lessons from a Glacier Overnight Trip

There’s a specific kind of photography problem I think about a lot: what do you do when the location does everything right, and you still come home with flat images? You had the dramatic setting. You had the weird, beautiful light. And somehow the photos look like a postcard someone already took. I’ve been in that exact situation more times than I’d like to admit, usually in places where I only get one shot at it.

3 Photography Fundamentals Hidden in a Deck of Cards (And Why They Still Matter)
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3 Photography Fundamentals Hidden in a Deck of Cards (And Why They Still Matter)

There’s something I’ve noticed after years of teaching photography: the basics never stop being useful. They just stop feeling exciting. Negative space, golden hour, shooting local characters. These concepts show up in every beginner’s guide, get skimmed over, and then quietly become the foundation of every great shot someone eventually takes. The problem isn’t that photographers don’t know these ideas. It’s that nobody ever slows down long enough to make them feel real and actionable.

Master Your Monochrome Portraits: The Essential Guide to Background Selection
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Master Your Monochrome Portraits: The Essential Guide to Background Selection

Master Your Monochrome Portraits: The Essential Guide to Background Selection When you remove color from a photograph, something magical happens. The viewer’s attention sharpens, emotion intensifies, and the image takes on a timeless quality that feels both nostalgic and contemporary. I’ve discovered that this transformation places significantly more responsibility on us as photographers—especially when it comes to background selection. Creating a striking black and white portrait isn’t simply about desaturating a color image.

How to Shoot Candid Street Portraits That Actually Look Like Portraits
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How to Shoot Candid Street Portraits That Actually Look Like Portraits

There’s a specific kind of street photo I used to think was just luck: a single person, sharp against a blurred background, completely unaware of the camera, yet somehow looking like a deliberate portrait. Every time I saw one I’d wonder, “How did they get that without the person posing?” I’d tried the walk-up-and-ask method before and loved it, but the results always had that slight stiffness of someone who knows a lens is pointed at them.

How to Read a Moody Landscape and Shoot It Anyway: Lessons from a Winter Scotland Road Trip
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How to Read a Moody Landscape and Shoot It Anyway: Lessons from a Winter Scotland Road Trip

There’s a specific kind of frustration I know well: you’ve driven hours to a location, the light is flat, the foreground is uninspiring, and your wide-angle lens is basically useless. I’ve stood at the edge of a beautiful lake in the Pacific Northwest and felt completely stuck, watching gorgeous mountains sit behind a shoreline that gave me absolutely nothing to work with. That feeling used to send me back to the car empty-handed.

How to Hunt Reflected Light for Stronger Street Photos (Lessons from Sean Tucker)
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How to Hunt Reflected Light for Stronger Street Photos (Lessons from Sean Tucker)

Every Sunday morning I do a photo walk through Seattle. It doesn’t matter if it’s drizzling (it usually is). What I’m always looking for, more than a good subject or an interesting corner, is light that’s doing something unexpected. For a long time I couldn’t explain why some mornings felt electric and others felt flat, even when the subjects and locations were basically the same. The answer, almost every time, came down to reflected light, and whether I’d trained my eye to see it before I raised the camera.

What Irving Penn Can Teach You About Breaking Your Own Photography Rules
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What Irving Penn Can Teach You About Breaking Your Own Photography Rules

Every few months I’ll look back at a batch of portraits and feel like something is technically correct but emotionally flat. The exposure is good, the focus is sharp, the background is clean. And yet. There’s a version of this problem I spent years trying to name before I finally landed on it: I was making photographs the way I was taught to make photographs, not the way I actually saw things.

What a 1977 Ford Truck Taught Me About Shooting with Character (And Why Your Subject's Story Is Half the Photo)
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What a 1977 Ford Truck Taught Me About Shooting with Character (And Why Your Subject's Story Is Half the Photo)

There’s a question I get asked constantly on my Sunday morning photo walks: “How do I make my photos feel like they mean something?” My honest answer is always the same. The feeling usually starts before you ever lift the camera. It starts with what you choose to photograph, and why that thing deserves a frame around it. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube In this Peter McKinnon video, what looks on the surface like a vlog about trading in an old truck is actually a quiet, practical lesson in something photographers struggle with all the time: identifying visual character in a subject, reading light and color under real-world conditions, and letting a subject’s imperfections become the story rather than something to work around.