Studio Sessions

75:09

82. Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't: Give...

Studio Sessions ·

2026/09/29

Once a week, a cozy bar in Omaha has jazz, and on certain nights the room feels like magic. One of us wants to make a concert film there in the spirit of Jazz on a Summer's Day and The Last Waltz, on the original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, an old Super 16 digital camera that records to one SD card. Between us we own three, and they're tougher than we expected: a 256 GB card holds about 90 minutes of raw CinemaDNG, and others have shot past an hour without overheating. The short film one...

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82:59

81. Creative Momentum and Obstacles As The Path

Studio Sessions ·

2026/09/15

Send us a message. We spend this episode bouncing between a barn in Malvern, Iowa and the question of where creative work actually comes from. It opens with the story of an 8x10 view camera pulled down from a stranger's rafters and handed over for free, then moves into what's been driving a recent stretch of creative momentum: too many scripts, a short film, a software project, and the discovery that having several unrelated things going at once beats grinding on one. From there we get into t...

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59:08

80. What Happens To Your Ideas When Algorithms Leave?

Studio Sessions ·

2026/09/01

Send us a message. madebyalex.online Last episode of "season" 3! We start with a Squarespace redesign that's been sitting untouched for over a year and end up on the case for building a site from scratch. Alex walks through his history with web design, from MySpace CSS to Adobe Portfolio to a few hundred dollars a year for templates that never did what he wanted, and what changed once LLMs made a custom build possible for someone who isn't a developer. From there we get into the IndieWeb, Neo...

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60:32

79. We've Been Sold Enough Chairs - Thoughts on The...

Studio Sessions ·

2026/08/18

Send us a message. We spend this one disagreeing about what a computer is going to be in ten years. One of us thinks the mouse and keyboard have run their course, and that whoever ships a voice-first operating system with screens spread through the house does to personal computing what the iPhone did to phones. The other thinks the appetite for that shift is gone, that people are worn out from being sold the next thing, and that whatever arrives will be software every company can copy rather ...

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77:57

78. Waiting to Talk - Conversational Narcissism, the...

Studio Sessions ·

2026/08/04

Send us a message. We open by talking about the show: why we want to own our own platform instead of relying on YouTube, and what we'd want out of having guests on. Neither of us wants to do the standard interview where someone walks through their résumé. We're more interested in how a person thinks over the course of a long conversation than in the story they've prepared to tell about themselves. That leads into a conversation about friendship and how hard it is to stay in touch as an adult,...

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71:24

77. The Camera Opens Doors

Studio Sessions ·

2026/07/21

Send us a message. We start with a chance encounter. A stop to photograph an old Dodge pickup and a chain-net basketball hoop turns into an afternoon inside a stranger's garage, looking at restored Mavericks and pulling vintage car t-shirts out of a rag drawer. From there we get into what a camera actually does when you carry one everywhere: it gives you a reason to stop, talk to people, and end up somewhere you never planned to be. We talk about portraiture, about the woman who cried handing...

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72:47

76. Matt Went to the Movies

Studio Sessions ·

2026/07/07

Send us a message. We start with a night at the movies and end up talking about why some art grabs you and some doesn't. What makes a theater different from a screen at home, why certain films only land years later, and how much of the experience is the room you're in versus the thing you're watching. From there we get into horror and what it does that other genres can't, how a story changes once your own life catches up to it, and why unfinished work feels so exposed. Mostly it's the usual: ...

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42:42

75. Leave Room for the Accident

Studio Sessions ·

2026/06/23

Send us a message. We open on what a trip does to you once you're home. Time away, then the return, where the familiar looks sharper and the work feels urgent again. That sets up the thread running through the whole episode: the difference between a trip planned down to the hour and one you make up as you go, and why the unplanned kind tends to leave the stronger memory. No itinerary, no booked room, just landing somewhere and letting it unfold. From there we get into friction: the small obst...

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75:44

74. Proof of Work or How the Floor Gets Raised

Studio Sessions ·

2026/06/09

Send us a message. We open with Daniel Arnold's new book You Are What You Do from Loose Joints — the sequencing, the blank pages, the editor's role — and end up on a harder question: what happens when you spend a decade on something and the first question someone asks is "what's next?" We talk through Josh Safdie's account of finishing Uncut Gems and why that question lands like an insult, and whether there's also something honest, even useful, about just moving on. That leads into the photo ...

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97:22

73. That's a Pretty Good Tree

Studio Sessions ·

2026/05/26

Send us a message. Matt picks up a Cartier-Bresson book at the used bookstore and we read two passages from it — one on prowling the streets, one on primitivism and the hobbyist trap. The quotes pull us into a longer conversation about what it means to make work outside commercial pressure, and whether the thrill of hunting for things to sell has become a structural parallel to street photography: the finding, the deciding, the sharing. We don't fully settle it, but the overlap is hard to ign...

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95:53

72. The Critic Problem: Why Great Art Resists Easy...

Studio Sessions ·

2026/05/12

Send us a message. We open with a letter — Rilke's first letter to a young poet, written in 1903 — and the question at the center of it: must I write? Not do I want to, not is it going well, but must I. We talk about what it means to look outward for reassurance while making something, how that search for validation reshapes work before it's even finished, and what happens when you're writing toward an external voice instead of your own. That leads us into a broader conversation about photogr...

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79:47

71. What If Success Is The Unmeasurable Part?

Studio Sessions ·

2026/04/28

Send us a message. We open with a 93-year-old woman who ran an oil pump valve repair business and a boutique until she was nearly 100, and what her life says about the post-WWII metrics we've organized our sense of security around — the 401k, the house, the college fund, the car in the driveway. We dig into EM Forster's observation that the novel is sogged with humanity, and what happens to a life when the humanity gets exercised out of it in favor of the spreadsheet. That leads us to a visit...

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55:26

70. You Output What You Input

Studio Sessions ·

2026/04/14

Send us a message. We spend a lot of time thinking about what we make, and not enough thinking about what we take in. What we listen to, what we read, what we let interrupt us, what we hand our attention to without really deciding to — all of it shapes the output, whether we're conscious of it or not. This episode starts there. From that we get into the systems designed to keep you feeding them — platforms, algorithms, companies that started with a mission and ended with an optimization — and...

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75:24

69. What If Your Best Work Needs Less Sharing

Studio Sessions ·

2026/03/31

This week we got into something we'd been circling for a while: what happens to the work when the work and the content share the same camera, the same hours, the same brain. We used the image of food coloring dropped into water — once it's in, you can't pull it back out — and followed that wherever it went. Which turned out to be pretty far: the scarcity feeling that keeps you posting, the fantasy that a YouTube channel is a path to an artistic life, whether conflict and economic pressure are...

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66:56

68. Protect The Work At All Costs

Studio Sessions ·

2026/03/17

We started this one talking about whether building a content ecosystem around photography risks turning the work into content, and how the pressure to produce on a content timeline can collapse the space that photographs actually need. When you're operating from scarcity, you grab the recognizable brand for cheap instead of holding out for the thing that represents what you're building. That tension between immediacy and long-term identity ran through most of the conversation, how we each rel...

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72:48

67. Leica Luck

Studio Sessions ·

2026/03/03

More of a fun for us one here. What started as a pretty standard phone call turned into one of the most unexpected camera days we've had. Matt found a Leica M11 and Q2 listed on Facebook Marketplace by a woman selling her dad's collection to cover nursing care costs — and after some back-and-forth, both cameras came home with us. We talk through the full story, the legitimacy paranoia, trading a Zeiss 35mm for a 28mm viewfinder, the philosophy of owning things you actually use, and why paring...

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65:56

66. Back to Square One

Studio Sessions ·

2026/02/17

We catch up on the gallery space that didn't come together — not because of conflict, but because the arrangement shifted enough that the original vision no longer fit. What stings isn't the logistics, it's the built-in community that came with that particular spot, and the version of things we'd already started imagining. From there the conversation turns inward. We're both feeling the gap between talking about making work and actually making it — the pull to get back out with a camera, the ...

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57:51

65. Attempting A Low-Stakes Space For Photography And...

Studio Sessions ·

2026/02/03

WE STILL HAVE NO NAME... We spend most of this episode wrestling with what to name our new gallery space. The conversation moves through dozens of possibilities—from "Synchronicity" to "Room" to "Keyframe"—trying to find something that isn't pretentious, that wears well over time, and that captures the intersection between a photography gallery, Josh's furniture showroom, and a functional creative space. We talk about Star Wars naming, city names, and why the best names feel obvious once you ...

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49:52

64. Attempting A Low-Stakes Space For Photography And...

Studio Sessions ·

2026/01/20

We talk through the unexpected opportunity to create a photography exhibition space in Omaha's Old Market. The conversation covers how a casual connection through vintage reselling led to subletting a space for three months—low financial risk, no formal contracts, just the chance to experiment. We discuss rejecting the traditional gallery model entirely: no price tags, no sales pressure, just a place for photographers to gather, show work, and build community. The episode explores the tension...

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81:24

63. Build The Foundation, Lose The Costume, Keep Your...

Studio Sessions ·

2026/01/06

We sit down for our annual year-end conversation, reflecting on 2025 and mapping out intentions for 2026. The discussion moves between practical revenue planning and deeper questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to build a creative life without losing yourself in the process. We explore the tension between chasing grandiose visions of success and learning to be present with who we actually are—people who source vintage records, make photographs, create videos, and build web...

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