Photostory

What’s my intention?

Photostory ·

2026/10/03

The other day I found myself in the Rijks Museum looking at a 1614 painting entitled “Fishing for Souls” by Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne. Talk about being non pc ! At least in today’s world. It’s hard to imagine posting a photograph these days that so blatantly chose one religion over another, and getting away with it.. Essentially it’s a painting depicting the religious and political situation in the Netherlands in the early 17th century. The 80 Year’s War between the Netherlands and Spain

en

Expectations of Myself…

Photostory ·

2026/09/15

Writer, photographer and YouTuber Sean Tucker posted a video recently in which he shared all the photos he took (200+) during a day-long street walk in Amsterdam. Sharing these photos, he described his thoughts behind them, what he was trying to achieve and ultimately - whether (m)any of these actually worked out to the extent that he would be happy sharing them on social - or indeed on his website etc. What really got my attention though was a part in his video where he talked about setting

en

Echoes of Hope, Shadows of Dreams

Photostory ·

2026/08/15

From "Where the Streets Have No Name" to "Street of Dreams", my former classmates U2 (yes!) - have journeyed. I'd like to think, I have, in my own way of course - also journeyed. Where Bono, Edge, Adam and Larry have written and played about social division, poverty, and religious conflict, I've photographed. Not literally in the same places they sing about, but in places like Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Bosnia. On hearing their latest track "Street of Dreams" - and the background to the

en

Being true…

Photostory ·

2026/08/06

Lightroom has recently released a new update (15.5 for LRC etc) with Generative Expand now available. For more details on this update, follow this link. For the last few weeks - maybe more in reality - I’ve started to yearn for simplicity in my photography. Harkening back to film days - where for me at least, the most I could do with a B&W photo I took with my ageing Praktica, was cropping and some dodging and burning (selectively lighten (dodging) or darken (burning) specific areas of an

en

Ed van der Elsken Exhibition - my takeaways…

Photostory ·

2026/07/04

The Rijks Museum currently have an exhibition featuring the Dutch photographer, Ed van der Elsken which I went to see a few days ago. If you haven’t heard, or come across this photographer (1925-1990), you can read more about him through these links above. I resonated with many things in the exhibition. Mainly because of the era he was born into and photographed. Born just a few months before my own father, he lived in the era of B&W film photography before colour came into being in a major

en

My “Who & Why” Journey

Photostory ·

2026/06/26

A couple of years after the “Arab Spring” (2011), my photography changed. I moved from Morocco where I was running a mountain tourism company, to the UK where I did a MSc in Post-Conflict Development. I stopped guiding and started working in the humanitarian NGO sector, initially in Sudan, then Iraq, then Afghanistan. Photographing mountains, pretty much exclusively, quickly became a thing of the past. Now my context was war, displaced people and misery. One in which I was initially reticent

en

Visual Clarity (2)

Photostory ·

2026/06/20

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece entitled “Visual Clarity”. This was using the word of the Lightroom (and other image processing software platforms) tool “Clarity” in combination with examining the normal English word, it's usage, and exploring how and where the two intersected. It was obviously playing in my subconscious since then, as one of the questions I asked in that piece was “how can we - with clarity - communicate complexities through our images?” Perhaps the answer lies not

en

A small recent photo dump…

Photostory ·

2026/06/18

I’ve been remiss for the past few months in sharing many images. Not that I’ve taken bucket loads but even those few that I have, have been sleeping silently on my hard drive. A couple I’ve printed which I’ll mention below, and that process always gives definition and reality to the images I’ve shot more than the others. Enjoy!

en

Visual Clarity

Photostory ·

2026/05/01

Of all the tools and tweaks you get on photo editing software, whether it be Lightroom, Capture One or Snapseed (ok Snapseed calls it something different), Clarity has to be one of the most divisive ones out there in terms of opinion, methods and applicability. YouTubers, photographers and digital creators out there all offer a wide range of opinions on this particular tool. A film title about good, bad and ugly comes to mind… It’s the mere name of the photo editing tool, Clarity, as well as

en

Transitions

Photostory ·

2026/04/04

Every time I think of a title to a post, I immediately think of what image I have that would, graphically, describe that post. Trouble is, I don’t index or tag my images…. Duh. So I’m relying on an ageing hard-drive. My brain as well as my LaCie. When I think of this word, my mind immediately goes caterpillars to butterflies. Not, expensive photochromic sunglasses. (it’s a super domain name isn’t it? transitions dot com. Boy do I wish I had bought that way back…$$) When I don’t have a

en

Creativity in Chaos

Photostory ·

2026/03/05

As with Picasso’s Guernica, and evidenced by children that lived in Mosul during the entire time of ISIS, conflict changes the subjects depicted but creativity lives on. Indeed during the siege of Sarajevo in the mid 90's, artists continued to create underground whilst musicians performed concerts with the background noise of sniperfire. In this context, art becomes a tool for survival.

en

Not even 30 Shades of Grey

Photostory ·

2026/01/30

Rather Split-Tone Black & White!You think I’ve done a typo in the heading? Close but no cigar! Depending on which website you read, the human eye can “only” see either 30 or 500 shades of grey. So definitely not 50! Quite a difference between these two figures and I’m sure that doing a really deep dive into some scientific journal will tell you the real truth. However in terms of shades of grey, I’m not sure how many a typical dreary Dutch winter day has but 500 seems a bit over the top

en

Nostalgia

Photostory ·

2026/01/22

When I heard the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney say "Nostalgia is not a strategy" at Davos a few days ago (20th Jan) - and no, I wasn't actually in Davos myself 😉 - I immediately thought "that's a great quote" at the same time as mentally thinking about Fujifilm's Nostalgic Negative film simulation. The whole idea of nostalgia is making a lot of money these days. Everything from film for cameras which is currently seeing a revival in sales; vinyls as Gen Z calls them (albums or LP's in

en

Niches and Strengths

Photostory ·

2026/01/07

Find your niche. Play to your strengths. I'm sure we've all heard those lines, or something close. In photography terms, good principles - but do they allow you to grow creatively? I read a Q&A post from a photography blog this morning where the questioner is anxious about trying to find their niche, perceiving it - and I'm guessing here - a place to become expert in that field. Maybe even well known. The answer from a prominent pro-photographer was to the effect that niching down (is that

en

Black Friday, Ikigai and Photography

Photostory ·

2025/11/28

By the time you read this, Black Friday will be history. For 2025 that is.Maybe, because of the algorithm, that ubiquitous, intangible, digital spider-web that we are firmly entrapped into these days, it won’t be ‘till Black Friday 2026 (or even beyond!) that you get to find me and read this. In any event, writing this on Black Friday, 28th November 2025, I’ve spent a considerable amount of minutes clicking Delete on the tidal wave of emails that have been arriving into my InBox over the past

en

Zero Choice

Photostory ·

2025/10/02

Can you imagine?It did exist once. At least in my lifetime. Film photography. Ah. You loaded a film canister into your camera. Took some amazing images (you hoped as you could never tell there and then). The wind-on mechanism indicated you had come to the end of the roll. You wound the film back into the canister and then either sent it off to a lab to get processed – or in my father’s case – developed the negative in our family kitchen (yes my long-suffering mother) and then processed

en

RAW, JPEG, SOOC or something in between…

Photostory ·

2025/09/09

First things first. This is not yet another post on the merits of JPEG over RAW - or vice versa. I think we’ve all had enough of them. Rather, I’d like to develop (no pun intended) some more thoughts following my last post on the merits of taking images straight out of camera (SOOC), or processing them afterwards in Lightroom or a similar photo-editing software platform. One of the advantages that I see Fujifilm cameras having over say the likes of Sony, Nikon, Canon etc (Leica even!) is that

en

Intentional Photography

Photostory ·

2025/08/07

Search “intentional photography” and you’ll likely get a list of results all featuring Intentional Camera Movement. Which is fine if what you’re searching for is ICM. Such as this image… Except I’m not. I recently saw a YouTube by a photographer who had set himself the challenge of turning off the back screen of his digital camera and essentially manually counting the number of images he had taken up to 36. Doing his best to mimic a film camera whilst using a digital one (Fujifilm). All with

en

Daguerreotype

Photostory ·

2025/08/06

Addressing the elephant in the room - how do you even pronounce daguerreotype? Never mind what they actually are. Well for English speakers - try “duh·geh·ruh·tipe” - and you won’t be too far off. Fine. And…? What is it? Well - and this is from WikiP so it must be true - it’s a photographic process developed by Louis Daguerre (French scientist) in 1837. This process was officially announced by the French government as a gift to the world on August 19th, 1839.

en

ZORKI 4 K

Photostory ·

2025/07/24

On a night in Zagreb, Croatia during my Balkans road trip, I happened upon a bistro which used to be owned by a prominent (Yugoslavian) photographer Josip Klarica. Although born in Belgrade (currently Serbia) in 1946, he worked and lived in Zagreb. Indeed, not only featuring lovely local scenes, the bistro contains hundreds (literally!) of old (film / analogue) cameras in cabinets, on shelves and windowsills. Basically every flat surface you can find has a camera on it! One caught my eye. A

en

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Stage Whisper

Andrew Cortes and Hope Bird

Podcast Patapoe

0d0a

Choice Classic Radio Detectives | Old Time Radio

Choice Classic Radio

Wild West Tales - Old Time Radio Westerns

theaterofthemind-otr.com

Voice of the Arts

WQED Multimedia