The Scam Caller’s Art

Scam callers have upped their game. There’s a person I know who works for an IT company we shall not name. He works in security. Once upon a time we were talking about junk mail and his theory was that…

Zuckerberg Dreams

Say you were dumb, I mean really dumb, computer dumb, literally dumb as a rock, albeit one with some lines scratched into it. And say I showed you ten pictures of dogs–and I told you they were all dogs–and ten…

How to Teach Kids Photography, Part One

Originally published on some long-ago blog of mine on November 9, 2011, updated slightly here. There’s a sort of mythology growing in some quarters that once-upon-a-time cameras required knowledge of the craft of photography to use. That you had to…

Albrecht Dürer was a Photographer

(This is part of series looking back at posts I wrote a decade ago. First published on November 4, 2011.)  If Albrecht Dürer were alive today he would be a photographer. I’m sure of it. I’ve been a fan of…

I Feel Like Going Home

It’s a beautiful valley in an unexpected place, south of Elko, Nevada, deep in the desert, and with the mist hanging in the air it looks like some primordial morning, suggestive of a time before Man. But it’s not a…

Photography Since Yesterday

During the early years of the Depression one began to notice, here and there, young men with what appeared to be leather-cased opera glasses slung about their necks. They were the pioneers of the camera craze who had discovered that…

Listicle: Top 7 College Photo Textbooks

The Internet loves listicles—articles of the top ten this, the world’s best that. Easy to read and easy to write, they score high in Google’s search rankings because they are easy for the algorithms to parse and the search results…

The Third Van Gogh Sunflowers

The painting is by Vincent Van Gogh and depicts three sunflowers, arranged in a vase. It is twenty-four feet across, thirty-six feet high an it leans upon its easel some eighty feet in the air at the top. It is…