Can art — as opposed to craft — be taught? I don’t think so, at least not directly, but artists can be taught things that allow them to find a path to making better art. There’s an analogy with creativity. I think the following statements are true of both creativity and artistic ability. Everybody’s got… [Read More]

At the CPA, we mentally divide workshops into categories, two of which are “craft” and “artistic development”. Most of the time, we have no difficulty placing a workshop in one category. Gum bichromate printing goes in the craft bucket. So does digital image editing. “Finding your Work” is artistic development. We recently had a discussion… [Read More]

In the last post, I talked about the cellphone’s impact on photographic art. In this one, I’ll return to safer ground, and tell you what I think will happen to cameras in the near future. Cameras will become ubiquitous in cellphones. Because thinness is a selling point for cellphones, lens focal length and therefore sensor… [Read More]

Recently, I’ve heard photographers decrying the rise of the cellphone camera, complaining that the pictures are terrible. “How can people do that? Don’t they care about quality? They’ll never know what a good photograph is.” It reminds me of the still-active kerfuffle in audiophile-land about music that’s undergone lossy compression – think MP3 and AAC…. [Read More]