I’m honored to be a guest blogger on the International Guild of Visual Peacemaker’s website today. My post facilitates discussion surrounding cultural photography in the sense that it starts at home. This is a conversation I am continually having with colleagues, and I would venture to say that if you were to prod any successful photographer in this genre about the subject, they would have similar sentiments.

I’ll let you read the post for yourself, but I do want to take the opportunity to thank the Guild for this opportunity, as well as Mario Mattei for the generation and kind guidance for this discussion to emerge!

Hope you enjoy!

Mondays are now officially dedicated (on this site at least) to a new weekly series I’ve named Field Lighting: Working with the light and the story.

Any regular readers of this blog know that I like to shoot environmental portraits, as well as light them in a way that stresses their story. I’m not an over-the-top type of lighter, preferring more subtle uses (notice I didn’t say natural, because often times, photographers say they are lighting naturally when we know that there is nothing natural about lighting a subject when the sun has already dipped below the horizon, such as the self-portrait above).

This series will be a practical look at lighting in the field (not literally, but sometimes we’ll be in a pasture somewhere), and it is meant to highlight the story-telling aspect of using this wonderful, quickly advancing technology of throwing light at a subject! Every once in a while, you might find a gear review in the mix as well.

The first post is already up: Field Lighting: Jeff Haley, Cattleman.

Hope to see you here each week!