Over the years I've seen a lot of photographers who claim to be storytellers. This is, of course, a great thing. People love stories and we need them. Here comes the but...but many storytellers I've seen don't actually take the time to tell stories with their images - they just tell stories in their captions. This is a critical line to be drawn, I think. In my view, you can't tell a story visually with one image. You can caption the hell out of it but it doesn't mean that a story is being told visually. In this medium, you need multiple images if you're going to visually tell a story otherwise you're merely providing part of the narrative. After all, a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, right? Unless you're Quentin Tarantino.

Sometimes it's best to put your walk on hold and photograph in just one area for just a bit. Maybe there's an interesting person. It could be a painter painting a wall or climbing up and down a ladder. Whatever it may be, there's usually a pattern unfolding or a person or thing of interest that anchors the scene, and the photographer wants to capture as many of these moments of interest as possible.

When asked what my favorite place is in Kolkata, it's an easy answer for me as a photographer: the Dhakuria Railway Colony. This settlement has been here for what I presume to be decades, having existed long before my discovery of it around 2011 or so. It took me a few years to get the courage up to go down and wander around the place and take pictures, but after doing so for the first time, I've made it a point to do so at every opportunity whenever I visit.

If you've ever visited Howrah Station and taken the bridge across to reach there, you may have noticed the intermittent but neverending stream of porters sluffing bags to and from the station. When you get up close and personal with them, you get to see how hard and tiring that kind of work is.

Was artificial intelligence and art a mistake? The question is posed to you in the past tense because to be asking this question like nothing has happened yet would be missing the point entirely: artists and non-artists alike have been experimenting with AI art generated from text prompts for several months now on platforms like Dall-E 2 and Midjourney. The question itself seems rather meaningless to those of us who’ve already indulged. And my message to my audience is that the question has already been answered by tens of thousands of people — likely to be by the millions soon enough — before the rest of the world can wrap their collective heads around it.

I’ve been experimenting with several of the AI platforms, attempting to learn all that I can about how the systems work and how to produce the best images from the prompts that I provide. My favorite platform is Midjourney, which is what I used to create the images for this poem.

Reflections are generally my friends when it comes to photography. I’m always inspecting them to see if there’s something that can be done.

Giving "Man" first billing is being gracious of me simply because if I'd provided full context, you'd easily notice that the machine part of the story is much larger than that of the human. The original image is of this gentleman sitting inside a large earth-mover at a construction site. As it is now, it looks to me as though he could be playing a video game. Even this could be an analogy for modern life.

This past weekend I went out to get some shots and to test out a faster shutter speed for using ICM. I’d been using a default of 1/4 of a second for most of my shots, sometimes slowing it down even more up to a second or more. But never any faster. I’d read on someone’s website that she had been using 1/10 and other speeds that I thought weren’t really compatible with intentional camera movement. Why not give it a go?

I’ve set the goal of incorporating painting into my fine art photography for the purpose of compositing texture and color.

So I picked up a set of acrylics, brushes, and paper to mess around with it a bit. I come from a background of zero artistic talent when it comes to drawing. And definitely don’t have any natural talent for painting. But I look forward to learning as much as I can to see how I can incorporate different elements into my work.

Once in a while, I'll bother with a name for a piece to initiate a conversation about a concept, or at least, that's my intention, however lofty. But it's funny how a word can drastically change the interpretation of a piece and even serve to destroy it. This is why I typically stay away from naming pieces unless the name truly serves my purpose.

As a few of you know, I usually don't create work without people. Though I find myself highly interested in the abstract of late, I hope to work more along these lines soon. But the odd object may attract me from time to time, like this grounded clunker of a ship. I can't call it a ghost ship because even ghosts would want something a little more seaworthy.

Photographers who practice street photography are fond of contacting one another, seemingly out of the blue, for the opportunity to break the monotony of going it alone. In my experience, many of these outings are not as productive photo sessions I conduct on my own but they fulfill other purposes, one of which is belonging to a loosely-knit community of global photographers. No matter what you like to call it, street photography is a practice. At its core is the journey. And apart from our everyday senses, a special emphasis is placed on capturing and taming countless rogue photons to produce images.

Hell is quite often, here on earth. If it's not manifesting in our external worlds, then it's a long, cresting wave internally that tends to wash over us on its way to the beyond...only to come back again, like tides caught in an amusement park tank. I often think about how different our internal worlds are from one another. Or at least, I theorize as much.

If you do a lot of portrait editing, there may be times when you want to quickly soften rough skin and wrinkles without using a lot of time-consuming techniques. I’ve got the solution for you. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to soften rough skin and wrinkles in Photoshop and how you can apply the same technique to skies in landscape photos. Let’s get started!

I thought I’d check in and share a few images that I omitted from my Facebook and Twitter feeds. I’m currently sharing individual images on Instagram (because that’s the only way to do it) but I’ve decided that I want to make better use of my own space, here on my website. I’ve preached enough about this but I no longer find it terribly helpful to me to share every single image that I post on all platforms. I’d rather have my audience come here and visit me to see what I’ve been up to. Plus, my growing weariness of social media has had the effect of wanting to reduce my footprints on all platforms.

All of my prints are on archival paper and produced locally by a professional printer who specializes in fine art prints--not from these sketchy, online print-on-demand platforms that churn out poor-quality products. This isn't to be snooty, but when you receive great prints they're works of art unto themselves. I experienced this first hand only this year which is why I'm enthusiastic about overseeing the production side of things while advocating for other photographers out there to try it for themselves.

When I first came to Mumbai and explored some of the suburbs, I thought to myself that it looked like somebody bombed the shit out of the place. Sometimes, I can't tell if buildings are going up or coming down.

I packed my umbrella and had my ziplock bag ready for my camera in case of a monsoon shower. The streets were crowded and it was business as usual on a Saturday afternoon in Mumbai.

Joking aside, this is an ICM image that was originally taken in Mumbai, 2022. I originally didn't want to share this image because the distortions in the light really made this person look like Trump, at least to my eyes. And I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. But there are characteristics of this image that I'm quite fond of and I remember the vendor lady sitting at her post waiting for a customer. Her red sari barely comes through in the straight-out-of-camera version, which I'll share here too.