HT2665 - Recovering Shadows Is Easier Than Recovering Highlights
27/06/2026 | 2min
HT2665 - Recovering Shadows Is Easier Than Recovering Highlights
When determining exposure, especially in high-contrast scenes, we often need to bias our settings to protect either the shadows or the highlights. With my cameras and the way I tend to process images, I'd much rather underexpose and protect the highlights after which I can always pull up enough in the shadows give a hint of life in the darkest tones.
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HT2664 - Our Attachment to Stuff
26/06/2026 | 2min
HT2664 - Our Attachment to Stuff
In the early 1980s, I fumbled a lens swap and dropped an expensive view camera lens into the Pacific Ocean. I grieved then and still grieve to this day. Why is stuff so important? Every photographer I know has a piece of gear they lament selling — or losing. Isn't it silly that we can be so attached to stuff? I used to think this had something to do with the loss of potential, but now I'm not so sure. I once had a client who owned a Western store and I learned a great deal about stuff and our sense of self-identity from that experience.
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HT2663 - How Each Image Contributes
25/06/2026 | 2min
HT2663 - How Each Image Contributes
Although they are both forms of music, listening to a piano recital is a completely different experience than listening to a fully orchestrated symphony. The same can be said when comparing the single, standalone image and the multiple-image project. In the orchestra, each instrument contributes its part to the whole. In the multi-image project, each image contributes its uniqueness yet still exists in harmony with all the others. This is the key to selecting the images to be included in the project.
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HT2662 - One Grain of Sand
24/06/2026 | 2min
HT2662 - One Grain of Sand
It's difficult to admire one grain of sand while we are standing on the beach. I offer this as a metaphor for photography today. You and I sweat bullets to make a photograph we can be proud of, but if we look about a bit, we see trillions of photographs being made every year here in the digital age. Even if our masterpiece is spectacular, it is difficult to get it noticed in the tsunami of images being produced every day.
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HT2661 - Images That Changed My Life
23/06/2026 | 2min
HT2661 - Images That Changed My Life
Knowing my love for photography, a non-photographer friend of mine recently asked if there were images that literally changed my life. I fumbled an answer at the time, but I've thought a lot about this in the recent weeks. I realized I have two sets of answers: images I produced that changed my creative life, and images others produced that have had an enormous impact on me. The most interesting part of this thought experiment is to compare the two sets of images.
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Sobre LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process
Sobre LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process
Sobre LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process
Random Observations on Art, Photography, and the Creative Process. These talks focus on the creative process in fine art photography. LensWork editor Brooks Jensen side-steps techno-talk and artspeak to offer a stimulating mix of ideas, experience, and observations from his 50 years as a fine art photographer, writer, and publisher. Topics include a wide range of subjects from finding subject matter to presenting your work, and building an audience.
Included in this RSS Feed are the LensWork Podcasts — posted weekly, typically 10-20 minutes exploring a topic a bit more deeply — and our almost daily Here's a thought… audios (extracted from the videos.) Here's a thought… are snippets, fragments, morsels, and tidbits from Brooks' fertile (and sometimes swiss-cheesy) brain. Usually just a minute or two. Always about photography and the art life.
Brooks Jensen is the publisher of LensWork, one of the world's most respected and award-winning photography publications, known for its museum-book quality printing and luxurious design. LensWork has subscribers in over 73 countries. He is the author of 13 books on photography and the creative life -- the latest books are The Best of the LensWork Interviews (2016), Photography, Art, and Media (2016), and the four annual volumes of Seeing in SIXES (2016-2019).
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