After shooting professionally for thirty years and billing as much as $7,500 for a single photo, it's fairly amusing that I'm excited about netting $1.20 for this photo. However, the days of big budget, large format, highly designed, heavily art-directed, intricately styled & expensively propped, commercial advertising photography are behind me.

I still shoot full-time for a living, but now it's in-house at a publishing company. The photographs that mean the most to me are along the lines of that feather in the sand; "found" scenes and objects that I happen across when I chance to have a camera in hand...

This image was found last year while on vacation with my family. I look at this shot and can still feel the sun and smell the breeze that formed the waves and ...

My favorite art director always started a project with a detailed description of our target audience. We never talked about lighting, backgrounds, models, or even budgets until it was very clear to the entire creative team who we were aiming to reach.

Although I'm presently pulling images from my existing files for submission here, I still have built an image of who I think is going to buy my photos. I'm not under the impression these shots will be the cornerstones of major ad campaigns, or that they will grace the pages of slick annual reports or corporate capabilities brochures.

Instead I imagine someone wanting to make a get-well card for a relative, someone looking for a new desktop image from a place they've never been, someone making a ...

I just blogged about something a talented art director always drilled into my head when we worked together. That got me thinking, and I remembered something else he insisted on, "Everything you DO to your photograph, do for a reason."

The first time he told me that was in response to my suggestion that we use a diffusion filter I had just purchased. He sighed and gave me the aforementioned advice. He explained it wasn't to quell creativity or spontaneity, it was to be sure the photographer was actually in control of all the elements at their disposal.

Doing something because it just looked pretty, or because you happened to like a color, or thought a shadow was cool just didn't cut it! For him, the photograph was a strong means of visual communication....