So you’re finally on your way to figuring out this whole photography thing. You already know you should have your camera with you; you’ve shot photos by the hundreds, if not the thousands, always working to hone your craft; and you’ve trained your eye to look for a photo opportunity in nearly everything you see. All well and good, right?

I got to thinking recently about many religions’ prohibition against idol worship. Judaism and, by extension, Christianity both caution against idolatry (the Ten Commandments explicitly warn against graven images. Islam takes the prohibition so far that neither Allah nor Muhammad may even be depicted in art. What’s this got to do with photography? Well, hold on a second. I’m getting there. The

A short post for today, since this is a pretty self-explanatory rule. I’m going to repeat myself (which I hate doing), since this bears repeating: photography is a social activity, and a social medium. Yes, there are plenty of times that it’s solitary, especially at those times when it’s just you, your thoughts, your camera, and a bunch of inanimate

If you asked me twenty-five years ago whether I thought of myself as a photographer, I’d have looked at you funny. If you asked me now whether I could see myself on stage, giving a speech, or sitting behind a mic on the radio, I’d probably look at you just as funny. My interests have changed over time, and I’d wager

When I came to teach, I was obliged to make precisely clear what I did for the most part unconsciously. –Paul Klee It might be years since you’ve set foot in a classroom. You may not have given as much as a second thought to education, much less being an educator. But one of the best ways to do something

Wow, that’s a mouthful. It’s also the reason that The First 10,000 has been on something of a hiatus. Between the winter months, and life just being what it is, I haven’t been doing as much photography as I had been when the weather was warmer and I wasn’t quite as busy with… well, stuff. Which brings me to a

Whether you view photography as art, craft, or some mix of the two, it’s useful to bear in mind that it does follow certain rules. As with the rules that apply to any other part of life, some will view them as inviolable while some will swear that each one’s made only to be broken. The truth probably lies somewhere in between;

The quotation in the title exists in many forms, and dates at least as far back as Roman times. The rhetorician Quintilian (35 CE – 100 CE) said,  ”The perfection of art is to conceal art.” Another quotation — unattributed, but probably contemporary — says, ars est celare artem (“True art is to conceal art.”) Centuries later, Oscar Wilde said, “To reveal

Be honest, now. How good are your photos, really? It can be hard to be objective about your own work. We’ve already discussed what happens at one extreme, where we can be our own worst critics, refusing to acknowledge when we’ve done some of our best work. It’s easy to be so focused on how far we’ve yet to go that

There’s nothing like space limitations to impose a little discipline. Your camera’s memory card, your computer’s hard drive, and even an external hard drive are each capable of storing quite a number of photos, but in each case, the amount of storage available to you is finite. What that means, of course, is that sooner or later, you’re going to