cole thompson photography newsletter

Issue 108 - November 23, 2019

Harbinger No. 36

Greetings! In this newsletter: New Images from my trip to Sedona New Images from Alaska How Important is your equipment? Where You Can See Me Next Print Drawing  Happy Thanksgiving!

New Images from my trip to Sedona

Harbinger No. 37

Harbinger No. 35

Harbinger No. 38

Harbinger No. 39

Harbinger No. 36 

New Images from Alaska

Alaska No. 1

Alaska No. 2

Alaska No. 8

Alaska No. 9

Alaska No. 15

Alaska No. 17

Alaska No. 18

Alaska No. 23

Self-Portrait on a Train in Alaska 

How Important Is Your Equipment?

How important is your equipment? Not nearly as important as you think! I was recently attending a photography convention and got to see the new Fuji 102mp medium-format camera. One word comes to mind: Wow! The Fuji rep let me take it outside for a spin and the images and resolution were incredibly impressive. Sharp beyond sharp! I started drooling, and calculating, and rationaling why I needed this camera. But then I heard my own words echoing in my head: great images are rarely about sharpness or technical perfection. It's about Vision, creativity, feeling and soul.

If I had to choose between the worlds best equipment and no Vision, or a Kodak Brownie and my Vision...I'll take the Brownie. Why? Because with Vision even a Brownie is enough. Of course equipment is important, but it's not the key to a great image. Ansel Adams said: "There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept." That "concept" or Vision is much more important than sharpness or technical perfection. Look at my Old Car Interior above, it was created with an 8 mp sensor. Would it have been a better image if it had been created with a 102 mp camera? It certainly would have been sharper, but I doubt it would have been better.

Harbinger No. 38

And then there is the low-quality, small-sensor cell phone. Increasingly I've incorporated iPhone images into my portfolios. Why? Because it was the camera I had at the moment of inspiration. The Harbinger image above was created with my iPhone, as were these following images:

Peterhof Trees

Deep Snow

Everybody's Got Something to Hide...

Community of Christ Temple

Snow on Steps

How good is good enough? Most of the cameras we use today, including the iPhone, is better than the equipment the great masters had in their day. Creating a great image is not about having better equipment, it takes something more. I love this quote by Edward Weston: “The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don’t know what to do with it.” Because they don't know what to do with it... It's not that I'm against better equipment, but I am against chasing better equipment with the false hope that it will improve my work. Only improving my Vision and creativity can do that. How important is your equipment? Not nearly as important as you think!

Where You Can See Me Next

Footprints of Sand Dune Here's where I'll be speaking (and holding workshops at some locations) this upcoming year: 12/3/2019 at the Lincoln Camera Club in Nebraska. You can find more information at https://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f0548a8ad2ea1ff2-cole People ask me if I do workshops and I tell them that I only do them with John "the Master" Barclay. We recently went to the Faroe Islands and this January I'll be doing two workshops with him in Death Valley. I'm trying to convince John to do Easter Island (one of my favorite trips of all-time!) To see which workshops I'll be doing in the future, check out John's schedule here: https://johnbarclayphotography.com/workshops-2/ 4/23/2020 at the Photographic Society of New Zealand in Christchurch Sometimes my friends "whom I've never met" (internet friends) will come to these events, but go away without saying hello, please don't do that!  

Print Drawing

Lone Man No. 6 The winner of my last drawing is Bill Currier w ho will be receiving a print of Dunes of Nude No. 115. Congratulations Bill! Please contact me and arrange for your print to be delivered. ____________________________

To enter the newsletter drawing for Lone Man No. 6 (above), send an email to [email protected] and put "Lone Man No. 6" in the subject line. Thanks for entering! 

Email Cole and Enter the Drawing!

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