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PODCAST

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process

Random Observations on Art, Photography, and the Creative Process. These talks focus on the creative process in fine art photography. LensWork editor Brooks Jensen side-steps techno-talk and artspeak to offer a stimulating mix of ideas, experience, and observations from his 50 years as a fine art photographer, writer, and publisher. Topics include a wide range of subjects from finding subject matter to presenting your work, and building an audience. Included in this RSS Feed are the LensWork

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HT2695 - Creative Possibilities for Two-sided Inkjet...

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/07/27

HT2695 - Creative Possibilities for Two-sided Inkjet Paper The availability of two-sided inkjet paper has opened up fascinating doors of creativity. With two-sided paper we can do folded paper books like chapbooks, or three-fold brochure-like presentations. Another idea is to use two-sided paper for a significantly expanded provenance to a print. This RSS feed includes only the most recentseven Here's a Thought episodes. All of them — over 2600 and counting! — are available to members of LensWork

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LW1515 - On Your Walls at Home

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/07/27

LW1515 - On Your Walls at Home What artwork do you have hanging on the walls at your house? What photographic artwork do you have hanging in your house? Let's consider this more deeply: What percentage of the work you have hanging in your house is yours and what percentage is photography by others? Most photographers I know own lots of work by others, but display in their house mostly their own work. Does that make them egotistical or just proud? Do we display our own work to share or to brag? How

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2:43

HT2694 - Motivating the Viewer

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/07/26

HT2694 - Motivating the ViewerImagine that I wanted you to read Tolstoy's War and Peace. What would your reaction be? On the other hand, what if I suggested you read today's funny papers because they were hilarious. What would your reaction be? I use these examples to illustrate the relationship between motivation and required effort. A large and complicated thing requires more effort and motivation than a humble and simple thing. Human nature being what it is, doesn't this pertain equally to

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2:43

HT2693 - Every Picture Is a Story, or Should Be

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/07/25

HT2693 - Every Picture Is a Story, or Should Be It's probably silly of me to make such a definitive statement, but I can't help but think for the vast majority of images the story told through the visuals is more important than the characteristics of the visuals. Story is more important than tones, more important than composition, more important than the medium itself. Photography is more powerful than to limit itself to a "show" medium; it's a "show and tell" medium. Tones, composition, medium are

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2:43

HT2692 - Lessons from My EPIC Series

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/07/24

HT2692 - Lessons from My EPIC SeriesI've just posted episode #1600 in my series Every Picture is a Compromise. I started this project with the idea of being helpful, but interestingly enough it's turned out to be an educational opportunity for me, too. Looking at 1600 of my failures and thinking about them more deeply has been an incredible learning opportunity I hadn't fully anticipated. I think the deepest lesson here is that thinking about photography can be almost as valuable as doing

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2:43

HT2691 - Art As a Shortcut

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/07/23

HT2691 - Art As a Shortcut Hopefully without sounding too hedonistic, I would propose that life is experience. Mortality, however, being what it is, prevents us from unlimited experience. One of the purposes of art is that it allows us to expand our experience of life beyond the personally experiential. You can feel through my art just as I can feel through yours. There is a difference, however, between seeing through your eyes and feeling through your heart. Show your appreciation for our free

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2:43

HT2690 - Start Anywhere

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/07/22

HT2690 - Start Anywhere Don't have an idea for a project? Pick an image at random and spend some time processing it. It's less important that you're processing that image than it is to be aware of ideas and hints that pop into mind while you're processing. If nothing occurs to you with that first image, pick another image at random and process it. Eventually, without fail, I've found an idea will come to mind even if it is a bit indistinct and fuzzy with the first glimpse. Ideas come from pictures

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HT2689 - New Software Capabilities vs Convenience...

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/07/21

HT2689 - New Software Capabilities vs Convenience Features Software updates have become a part of every digital photographers routine. Every time a new software update is announced, I look forward to new capabilities that will open up new ways to improve my images. So many times, however, the so-called "update" has more to do with making things easier than with making things possible. Show your appreciation for our free weekly Podcast and our free daily Here's a Thought… with a donation

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LW1514 - Where You Draw the Line

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/07/20

LW1514 - Where You Draw the Line We are fast approaching that point where each of us need to draw the line about our involvement with AI and photography. Come to think of it, we may have already passed the line, at least for some of us. At what point do you call an AI generated image a fake? At what point does the involvement of AI mean the image is no longer artwork? No longer photography, no longer yours? What amount of AI are you willing to accept as you create your work? Culturally we are

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HT2688 - Outside the Box

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/07/20

HT2688 - Outside the Box We've all heard that age-old maxim about creativity and "thinking outside the box." We are supposed to hear this exhortation relative to our unconscious habits. I would propose that the box we are supposed to get outside of is the camera itself. When I find myself thinking I've made a nice photograph, I know I need to let go of photography and remember that art is about LIFE, not our chosen medium of expression. This RSS feed includes only the most recentseven Here's a

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HT2687 - You Must Have a Really Good Camera

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/07/19

HT2687 - You Must Have a Really Good Camera How do these kinds of notions become so wide spread? If I owned a Steinway, would that make me an accomplished pianist? Would a fancier fountain pen make me a better novelist? Of course not. But then we often think a better camera might be the answer to improving our photographs — perpetuating the myth that the tool makes the image. If not a new camera, what should we do to improve our art? Answer: Finish more projects and study the history of art. This

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2:43

HT2686 - How We Want to See the World

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/07/18

HT2686 - How We Want to See the World In their candid moments, most any landscape photographer will admit that most of the world is not very photogenic. That's why we run off to the exotic locations of extraordinary beauty to make our photographs. We'll drive mile after boring mile to get to that national park scene or that overlook of majestic wonder. Why? Could it be that we photograph what we wish the world to be rather than the world as we find it all around us? Show your appreciation for our

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HT2659 - Perfection or Enthusiasm

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/06/21

HT2659 - Perfection or EnthusiasmDeep in the heart of an artist is the pursuit of perfection. It goes with the territory. Creating artwork is the one thing we do in our life without regard to time, expense, or even effort. We pursue perfection because we have faith that achieving perfection is a possibility with each creation we make. Is it? I'm not sure pursuit of perfection is the healthiest option. What if we change the measurement of success? What happens if we pursue enthusiasm, curiosity,

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HT2658 - Seducing The Eye of the Beholder

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/06/20

HT2658 - Seducing The Eye of the Beholder Said another way, a way that can bypass the numb response to a cliché, art appreciation is an act of free will. Extending that thought even further, people look at your artwork because they've made a decision to do so in anticipation of some rewarding or beneficial experience. Where does that anticipation come from? What is our responsibility as art makers to build that anticipation so they are motivated to spend the time to see what we've produced? Show

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HT2657 - Guiding Their Consumption

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/06/19

HT2657 - Guiding Their ConsumptionI know, that's sort of an odd title for this thought, but there's an important issue that demands our attention. Imagine you want to assemble sizable project of 100 or so images for a book or PDF. Selecting images is one challenge, but not the biggest one. How do you organize those images in the finished presentation? Sequential by date? Alphabetically? Location? Subject? Genre of photography? By which camera you used? Time of day? Time of year? Weather

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HT2656 - Big Things Are Made from Little Things

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/06/18

HT2656 - Big Things Are Made from Little ThingsOne of the great lessons from my dad who was also my coach, is an approach to making progress. He used to say that "inch by inch is a cinch, yard by yard is hard." Doesn't this equally well apply to art making? If you want to create a big thing like a book, an exhibition, a digital publication, a lifetime of creative output, the path to do so is one capture at a time, one processed image at a time, step by step, accumulating little successes one at a

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2:43

HT2655 - Do It Again and Again and Again

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/06/17

HT2655 - Do It Again and Again and AgainThe difference between a hobbyist and a professional is that a hobbyist practices until they get it right. A professional practices until they can't get it wrong. For some reason that advice seems to make sense for athletics, but in creative endeavors we often assume that all we need is the initial effort. This shows up particularly, I think, in travel photography. It's easy to assume that once we've visited a location and photographed it we don't need to go

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2:43

HT2654 - Those Delicate Highlights

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/06/16

HT2654 - Those Delicate Highlights I remember a workshop instructor once suggesting that photographs live in Zone VIII. I'm not sure a definitive statement like this is universally accurate, but it definitely points in a direction I've found true more often than not. If we lose those delicate highlights, we end up with a gray smudge or an invisible blankness. I've found that the best images have, like us humans, a dependence on respiration. If a print doesn't breathe, it isn't alive. And that

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Remembering Duane Michals

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/06/15

As a remembrance of Michal's life and work, we're taking a hiatus today from our regular podcast to bring you two archive audios of Duane Michals, recorded in Portland in 1995. Duane MichalsLensWorkinterview from 1995(61 minutes) Duane Michals, 1995 - A talk at the Portland Art Institute(83 minutes)

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2:43

HT2653 - There Are No Bad Lenses, There Are No...

LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process ·

2026/06/14

HT2653 - There Are No Bad Lenses, There Are No Perfect Lenses The other day I was working on some images in Lightroom and realized that one of them was a fantastically sharp image that I had made with a notoriously bad lens. Looking more closely at the EXIF data I realized this image had been shot in the middle of the zoom range and stopped down a bit. My "bad lens" performed beautifully. Wide open at maximum zoom this lens was just crap. Do I blame the lens for making bad pictures, or do I blame

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