Craft
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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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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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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.…
