Adam
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The fastest way to sort photos
You did it right and made too many pictures. Which ones are good? Glad you asked. Here’s the easiest way to sort your photos Folders work for this, but star rating is easier and more flexible, so you’ll want an app that does that (such as Lightroom). This works equally well for five or 5000…
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How to get a great profile picture
How do you get a truly great profile pic? Options. When you get something you’re happy with it can be tempting to stop. My advice: push through. Who cares if you make more? They’re all digital; the only cost is time. In my sessions, we might shoot 400 or more. (Which is why I developed…
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Limit your options
If your photographer sent you home with hundreds of pictures, they failed. They’re making you do their job. Staring at that many pictures is paralyzing. That’s why I developed systems to sort them. Staring at that many pictures of YOURSELF is even harder. How do you know what to choose? It’s tempting to think more…
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Accepting my strengths
I’m casually obsessed with Liquid Death. At first I was mildly horrified. It’s water in a can. That costs more than water in a bottle. Then I got it. They’re not selling water with world-class marketing. They’re selling world-class irony… with water inside. No matter how big they go, the message is the same. It’s…
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Failure is the best sauce
You have to live with being wrong. In my life, there’s a Before and After realizing what being wrong could do for me. It was a journey. Failure wasn’t just embarrassing, it was like a spark on a gasoline fuse. If I screw this up, I’ll never work again. (I may have had some imposter…
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How I make photoshoot booking easy
Between school photos, the DMV, and passports, we’ve been trained. Picture time sucks. Of COURSE it does: You wait an hour to be immortalized looking—and feeling—like a pigeon just shat in your sandwich. Awesome. Here’s how I redesigned the photoshoot booking process so it’s easy as trying and buying clothes at a luxe boutique: Decide…
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Confidence and vulnerability
Confidence is not the opposite of vulnerability. You can be both confident and willing to be wrong. In business, that combo is essential to leadership. In the arts, it’s the only way to guarantee something that works. So what is the opposite of being vulnerable? Being defensive (and cockiness, its weird, smelly twin). We can…
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Photography is empathy
When you’re out of your comfort zone and relying on someone else, how good are they at reading your needs? Doctors, mechanics, bartenders, physical therapists, plumbers, call center reps; everyone. Do they explain the how and why? Too much or too little? Are they kind? Do they even bother? Anyone can point a camera or…
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Complicating Gendered Lighting
We don’t think of light as gendered, but boy (see what I did there), do we gender it. Women should have every crease filled. (We call it “beauty light.”) Men are allowed rough texture and deep shadows (where our feelings live). There are obvious exceptions… but they’re exceptions. Every photographer I learned from set it…
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I’m So Tired of Manufactured Authenticity
Why do we keep trying to manufacture authenticity? Right now everything’s BTS: “authenticity” that has to keep proving its bona fides. When someone named the “Gen Z shake” I’d seen in so many vertical videos, all I could think was “Hurray… more performative bullshit.” Stripping away production value doesn’t make you more real, any more…
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“I hate having my picture taken”
If you’ve ever thought, “Ugh, I hate picture time,” that’s because your photographer sucked. Feeling uncomfortable is NATURAL. Humans didn’t exactly coevolve with cameras. None of us are born knowing what to do. Some people ham like they were, but even they need direction and encouragement, because they can’t see themselves. Or the photographer’s vision.…
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Who’s the expert again?
It’s telling that the headshot generators compete on accuracy. They’re racing to engineer what a camera does naturally. AI averages everything it’s seen, matches patterns, and spits out of an image of you. Mostly. Because it doesn’t actually KNOW anything, it doesn’t know if you’re you. Sometimes it just goes rogue, for reasons not even…
