The Stop Down Photography Podcast

Landscape photographers often seek out the untouched landscape, visions of nature that have no human presence - the pristine landscape. When I first started with landscape photography, those are the …

Highs and lows are part of any artistic pursuit and photographers are certainly not immune. I am no stranger to emotional peaks and valleys, and I’m sure you can relate as well. In this episode of th…

Landscape photography requires patience. Yet there are things you can do in the field to streamline your workflow and be more productive. I used these techniques last week on a visit to La Jolla, Cal…

Waiting is both fact and reality for certain genres of photography. Landscape photographers wait for the light. Wildlife photographers wait for their oft-shy subjects to pose. Street photographers ma…

The end of the year is a natural point to take a moment and reflect on your photography for the past year. If you set photo goals for 2021, measure how you did, and look to what lies ahead in 2022. I…

If you have listened to my podcast for a while, you know I am a fan of The Beatles. I’ve been enjoying the three-part documentary The Beatles: Get Back and as I’ve watched I see many lessons in there…

I have a confession - I really enjoy assassin movies. You know those movies where the protagonist is a highly-skilled, ultra-focused, near infallible villain. Maybe it’s a guilty pleasure - or an exc…

A few weeks ago, I talked about how I was preparing for my trip to the Oregon Coast. My planning included brainstorming a few themes to explore with my camera while in Oregon. I also promised to talk…

When we are at home and the weather conditions are poor, we tend to talk ourselves out of stepping outside with the camera. When you are on a photo workshop, you are more inclined to go out with the …

When I talk about photography, I tend to express ideas in terms of painting. Photography shares some characteristics with painting. Both art forms can be depictive of a tangible subject or abstract, …

As a person that pursues photography as an expressive art form, how do you measure your success as a photographer? Early in our photo journey, when our skills are improving by leaps and bounds, our i…

Preparing for a photo trip has its own level of enjoyment. Picking out the gear, thinking about locations, and the growing anticipation of photographing a new place, or even a familiar favorite, I li…

In early October 2021, I hosted a group of photographers from a San Diego camera club for a sunset shoot at the beach. It was the first group outing I’ve hosted since 2019! And I gotta tell you … it …

We all start our photo journey capturing things and places. Flowers, mountains, animals, your hometown, a city you are visiting. We photograph nouns. And that’s normal and part of the process of find…

After a year plus of pandemic conditions, growing accustomed the new normal of limited interaction with the world and produced a problem for photographers – inertia. After weeks or maybe months of no…

As a content creator with a photo business, paying attention to industry news comes with the job description. A portion of my time is spent reading industry news and product announcements with a “bus…

As photographers, we often seek out specific photos. We travel to the gorgeous, breathtaking location, or the iconic city or other famous subjects to create an image we know has a good chance of bein…

Every photographer and every creative knows that inspiration strikes… it is not something that an artist just turns on. There isn’t a bucket of inspiration we dip our cup into when we want to make ph…

Captain Barbosa in the film Pirates Of The Carribbean said this about the pirate code of parlay:

The code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules.

That’s exactly what the “rules” of phot…

I took a hike in the mountains local to San Diego last weekend. I wanted to take in the sunrise in the mountains, and that meant a very early rise, an hour-plus drive to the trailhead, and then the h…