One of my favorite events of the year (because I’m weird, or maybe just a photographer) is the Hong Kong Flower Show, which is exactly what it sounds like – a sprawling outdoor exhibition of eleventy billion flowers. It occurs around mid-March every year, when the weather is warm but not yet oppressive, and the cost of entry is a paltry two US dollars. It was one of the things I missed the most, in fact, when it was cancelled three years running during the pandemic. According to my photographic archives, I first attended in 2017; 2026 was my seventh visit.

I don’t go for the ambience. Truth be told, like most things in Hong Kong, the flower show is overrun with people of all sorts from open ‘til close. You can, at least, pick your poison: Weekend? Domestic helpers and tourists. Weekday? School trips and the elderly. And they’re all taking photos of the flowers, with the flowers, in the flowers, with their phones. I’d love to know how many terabytes of these snaps the hordes dump onto social media platforms each day. Actually, I probably wouldn’t.

And most of those photographs are trash. I know because I watch people take them.

Look, I’m not here to argue with you if you think your iPhone 17 takes great photographs of flowers. (It doesn’t, but if you think it does, what do I know? I’m just some guy on the internet.) If you’d like to level up your flower photo game, here’s everything I’ve learned about photographing these colorful little organisms from my seven years of shooting the Hong Kong Flower Show. (All images in this article are my own, taken over those seven years.)

Section 1 – Gear

Let’s talk equipment. There is only one thing that is an absolute necessity for shooting good pictures of flowers, and that’s a macro lens*. I mean it. This is the sine quā nōn of flower photography: a true macro lens, one that does life-sized 1:1 magnification. Now, you can still get good results with something that does at least 0.5x magnification, like the Lensbaby Velvet 56, which I’ve taken to more than one flower show, but if you can get your hands on a dedicated macro lens, you do it. Y’hear?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, macro lenses are specially designed to allow extremely close focusing so you can achieve that true 1:1 subject-to-sensor ratio. This means that you can get close enough that the object you’re photographing takes up as much space in the frame as it would in real life if you put it on the camera’s image sensor. Some lenses can do even greater magnification than that, but any lens labeled “macro” should do at least 1:1. (This does not stop some unscrupulous lens manufacturers from putting the word “macro” on their lenses when they’re not capable of this kind of magnification. A pox on them.)

For the reader who doesn’t already have a macro lens, I have good news – you don’t need to spend a lot of money to get one. Yes, every lens manufacturer makes fancy ones with extra features like auto focus, weather sealing, and fast apertures, but you don’t need these things. For example, OM System makes a 90mm macro lens with image stabilization, auto focus, and 2:1 magnification. I’m sure it’s amazing, but it’s $1,499 and overkill for this assignment. I’ve shot the last two flower shows with a comically tiny (it weighs 240 grams and fits in a pants pocket) Laowa 50mm f/2.8, which doesn’t have auto focus or image stabilization but will do up to 2:1 magnification. Several of the images you’re seeing here were taken with it. It’s $399 new.

But you can spend even less than that! Find an old manual focus macro lens with a different mount, say Canon EF or Nikon F, and just use it with a cheap adapter. There are even reversing rings that allow you to mount a camera lens backwards to unlock its hidden macro capabilities. You do not need to spend a lot of money to get an appropriate tool for the job here!

Ok, with the necessity (I mean it! Go get a macro lens!) out of the way, let’s talk about some nice-to-haves. I’d recommend a current-ish mirrorless camera body over a DSLR. I only say this because most mirrorless camera bodies have extremely useful (bordering on indispensable, once you get used to them) features like viewfinder zooming and focus peaking. The first is what it sounds like – since the viewfinder on a mirrorless camera is electronic (it’s basically a live video feed of the sensor), you can zoom in on any part of the frame to get a closer look at what’s in focus. (Some DSLRs can sort of do this, like Canon’s “Live View”, but you need to use the rear LCD, not the viewfinder.) Focus peaking is a feature that shows a visual cue on the in-focus area of an image in the viewfinder, usually a high-contrast color like red. This way you can see exactly what parts of the image are in focus even if your eyes aren’t so good. Trying to do macro photography without these two things is not very fun. Not impossible, but a decidedly less-good time.

You might call me crazy for putting this last thing in the nice-to-have column, but that’s how I feel about a tripod in this situation. Nice to have. It’ll absolutely cut down on the number of shots you need to take to get good results compared to hand-holding. I almost never use one at the flower show, but that’s a personal preference more than anything else. Plenty of other photographers there do, so it’s clearly not crazy, but I tend to want to work faster and move around more to capture the whole show in one day, and a tripod slows me down too much to accomplish that. If you’ve got a good one, bring it along and try it out.

(A bonus nice-to-have – knee pads. You’re going to be doing most of this work very close to and/or on the ground.)

Section 2 – Working the Camera

Now that you’ve got yourself a macro lens (right? a real one?) and a mirrorless camera, you’re ready for action. All of the standard concerns apply here, so let’s talk about shutter speed, aperture, and focusing. (One bit of advice up front – shoot in RAW to give yourself the most headroom in Section 4 – Editing.)

Since you’re going to be taking pictures of things close-up at high magnification, you’re going to need to keep those shutter speeds up to eliminate blurriness due to camera movement. (This is, of course, assuming you’re not using a tripod.) This shouldn’t be a problem if you’re shooting outside in daylight, but pay attention if you start stopping down the aperture. (If it’s windy, just go home. It’s not worth the headache.) Watch out for the opposite problem as well – on a sunny day at wide apertures, you may exceed your camera’s maximum shutter speed. Review your images at the beginning to make sure they’re properly exposed and not blurry.

Understanding aperture is extremely important for good results here. (I generally shoot in aperture priority mode [Av on the camera dial] when I’m at the flower show.) Depth-of-field (the range of the photo that’s in focus) gets very shallow the closer you get to your subject; this is one of the biggest difficulties in macro photography. (The shallow focus effect is stronger on larger sensors, so grab an APS-C or MFT body for this job if you have one.) Play around with settings to find the look that you want. Start with the lens wide open; if the DOF is too shallow, stop the aperture down and/or move away from the subject to increase depth of field. Be careful to find the right balance – if you stop down too much, your shutter speeds may get too slow, and too much of the background will be in focus, distracting from the subject.

[For more advanced users, there is a technique to fix this problem called focus stacking, in which multiple images are taken at different focus distances and combined afterwards, but this is not the easiest thing to learn to do (and impossible without a tripod). It is a good solution to the depth of field problem and can produce amazing results, so feel free to explore it more if it interests you, but none of the images you see here are focus stacked.]

Finally, let’s talk about focusing at these high magnifications. You really do need to nail focus in this type of photography, as the tolerances are quite literally razor thin. You might be tempted to rely on auto focus if your lens has it, but in truth it’s no advantage in this case. Turn it off and focus manually instead. (There’s one exception to this, which I’ll mention at the end.)

If you’re doing this work hand-held (like me, the masochist), the best method to get shots with your desired focus is not to turn the focus ring, but to move the camera closer or further from the subject. You’re not going to be able to hold yourself perfectly still anyway, so there’s no point in trying to turn the focus ring while you’re inadvertently swaying around. (You might think that you can hold a camera perfectly still, but up close at 1:1 magnification you will discover that you are wrong.) You can turn the focus ring to get the subject close to in focus at the distance you want to shoot, but to get precise focus, just move yourself toward or away from the subject as slowly and deliberately as you can. You can use your camera’s burst mode to capture multiple images as you slightly adjust focus front to back. Be prepared to delete most of the images you capture when you shoot this way – my keeper rate this year was about 10% – but it will get the job done.

Section 3 – Composition

Even though you’re trying a strange and novel kind of photography, there are still basic rules that you should aim to follow just as you would when you shoot anything else. There are a bunch of these, so let’s just bullet-point our way through them:

• Look for good light. Direct sunlight can be too harsh for the bright colors of flowers. An overcast day is better for shooting outdoors; if it’s sunny, shoot early in the morning or late in the afternoon to get more diffuse light. Avoid dappled light (a sharp mix of light and shadow) at all costs. If you’re stuck with bright sun, create some shade over the scene you’re photographing by blocking the light with anything you have handy.

• Consider normal rules of composition like the rule of thirds, negative space, framing, leading lines, the golden ratio, and symmetry. Your composition needs to be balanced and thoughtful in addition to in focus!

• Look for interesting subjects. For me, that means water droplets (feel free to add your own with a spray bottle – nobody will know!), bits of pollen, wonky or wilting blossoms, and little critters like insects crawling on petals.

• Sink to their level. We humans tower like feudal Lords over flowers, which, lowly creatures as they are, remain close to the soil from which they emerge. As such, we’re used to seeing flowers from the top and at some distance. To make your photographs more interesting, get down at eye level (or below!). You might need to get a little dirty or wet to get the good stuff.

• Focus on single blossoms. Photos of sprawling fields of sunflowers and tulips can be spellbinding, but you don’t need a macro lens for that. Find one flower or small cluster and focus on isolating it from the rest. Get closer and keep the frame clean and uncluttered.

• Mind the background! It’s very easy to ignore the out-of-focus areas in your composition while you’re trying to pay attention to the subject, but take a moment to look at the entire frame. Are there prominent distractions interfering with your subject? Sometimes just moving an inch or two in one direction can clear up the background so your subject can shine.

Section 4 – Editing

Now that you’re back at your house with all of these amazing RAW images of flowers, it’s time to tidy them up a bit and get them ready for public consumption. Make global corrections first, like adjusting the white balance, correcting chromatic aberration, and fixing lens distortion and vignetting. From there, try to keep your editing localized to the parts that need it.

For example, instead of grabbing the hue/saturation sliders and overcooking the entire scene, focus in on individual colors and only adjust what’s needed (Lightroom makes it very easy to do this). Same goes for sharpening – if you have a single flower subject and a blurred background, apply sharpening to the flower only, not the whole scene. Keep an eye on the histogram to make sure you’re not clipping any highlights, shadows, or bright colors. (Working with RAW files will help dramatically with this.)

Finally, don’t be too precious about the “accuracy” of the scene. I, for example, prefer my green hues nudged a bit to the blue side, so I always adjust my greens that way even though the “true” scene appeared more yellow. I also love (too much! I admit it!) to use vignettes on flower images to draw attention to the subject. I frequently remove distractions and imperfections to produce a final image of a much more perfect flower than I actually saw that day. Don’t feel bad about doing this! If somebody tries to tell you that you’re being dishonest or misrepresenting reality, poke them in the eyeball.

That one exception I mentioned before – BIF (bees in flight)

I love to try to photograph bees (and other insects, but mostly bees) at the flower show, and when I’m successful, they’re my favorite images. (I just think they’re kind of cute up-close, ok? They’re fuzzy.) Getting macro shots of live bees with a manual focus lens is difficult nearly to the point of futility. I’ve never used a macro lens with auto focus, but I have to think that it would be a very helpful feature in this situation. That said, it is possible to do this with manual focus. You’ll need to be patient and persistent. (And, like, probably not allergic to bees. Don’t sue me if you get Macaulay-Culkin-in-My-Girled.) Again, use burst mode to increase your chances of keepers, and move forward or backwards to focus instead of twisting the focus ring.

Once you’ve got a bee in your sights, follow it until it lands and sits still for a moment, get it in focus, and shoot like crazy. Yes, this is going to put you in very close and repeated contact with bees. In my experience at the flower show, the bees are like kids in a candy store, so drunk on nectar and pollen that they’re not interested in anything else, so I haven’t had any trouble. YMMV. (If you really want a buffer, use a macro lens with a longer focal length, like 100mm, or even 150 or 180. This will let you fill the frame with the stingy critters from further away.)

Most importantly, just go try it

Flowers are ubiquitous, and when you’re getting down amongst them in the macro realm, you really can do this kind of shooting wherever you encounter them. You don’t need to fly out for the Hong Kong Flower Show. Hop the fence when your green-thumbed neighbor isn’t looking and go to town on her rhododendrons. You won’t start to perfect this kind of photography until you, you know, … start.

Other photographers out there, feel free to chip in with your own tips and tricks for up-close flower photography - I’m sure there’s more that I could learn as well!

*Just to stop other veteran photographers from yelling at me in the comments, there is another equipment solution to the flower equation: a long and fast telephoto lens. There are a few reasons I’ve relegated this to a footnote. First of all, I’ve never really done any flower photography with a long tele lens, so I have no advice from experience on doing it well. Secondly, the cost of entry is much higher for this kind of lens than an old manual focus macro, so it’s not a good recommendation for someone who just wants to take pictures of flowers. If you’ve got some examples of flower photos shot with long fast tele lenses, please link or comment below!

For me, those people are Generation Z (aka Gen-Z, or Zoomers), born between 1997 and 2012, and I don’t like them very much. They display a pathological dependence on technology while having almost no practical knowledge of how it works, rely heavily on influencers and social media to decide what to consume, are crippled by FOMO and general anxiety, don’t drink very much, and like the Star Wars prequels. Utter degenerates, really.

Their stock has been rising a bit lately though, at least in my eyes, because apparently they’re ditching their smartphones for old compact digital cameras for personal photography.

Before I give these 20-something broken clocks too much credit, I should point out the simplest explanation for this, which is your average, run-of-the-mill cycle of abandonment → dormancy → revival. Counterculture, in a word. This happens most conspicuously in the fashion industry, but it’s a technological phenomenon as well. In my own lifetime I’ve experienced it with vinyl records and film photography, neither of which I grew up with but both of which I embraced when I was in my late twenties, the same age as the most mature members of Gen-Z today.

This is the most likely explanation for the Zoomers’ widespread rejection of the iPhone for their snapshots: neophilia. Neo to them, anyway - many of you reading this probably had a compact digital camera in the 2010s and don’t miss it in the slightest. (I did, and I don’t.) You might even be struggling to imagine exactly how an obsolete, plasticky little point-and-shoot with an embarrassing designation like Coolpix or Cyber-shot written on it could be appealing to anyone anno domini 2026.

After all, these things were designed for convenience, not for bleeding-edge image quality. (See above - a photo I took in 2003 with a FujiFilm FinePix 3800, a 3-megapixel camera that cost $450 at the time, or almost $800 in today’s money.) And yet, the Zoomers are gobbling them up and partying like it’s 1999.

While the novelty argument may well be the only explanation one needs to make sense of this, I’d like to offer a complementary theory, which goes like this:

Smartphone photography sucks.

Before you start angrily typing in the comments, some throat-clearing and clarification. I am not commenting on the quality of the photographs that modern smartphones produce. (I still believe that phones are technologically inferior to actual cameras and not for any serious photographic work, but we can argue about that some other time.) I’m making an observation here about the experience of using a smartphone to take photographs. That’s the thing that sucks. Not necessarily the result, but the process. Taking a photo with that shameful purple Nikon above is a more satisfying experience, I would argue, than taking the same photo with the latest iPhone.

To understand why smartphone photography is so dissatisfying an experience, we need to zoom out a bit and talk about touchscreens in general. Crudely described, a phone is really just a slab of glass, plastic, and metal with a giant touchscreen on one side and a camera bump on the other. While touchscreens offer a lot in the way of accessibility and space saving over other input devices, they’re also hopelessly imprecise and exhausting to use extensively, even with haptic feedback or a stylus. If you have to type a long string of text, for example, doing that with your thumbs on a flat piece of glass is a vastly inferior experience to doing the same with ten fingers on a physical keyboard. Hell, even typing with your thumbs on a little plastic keyboard à la Blackberry was preferable, and many people lamented the death of the those devices for that reason alone.

I was a relatively late adopter of the smartphone, but when I did finally hop on the trend, my choice was the Samsung Epic 4G (above), which featured a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard. If any major manufacturer offered something like this right now, I’d probably buy it. Perhaps this isn’t as crazy as it sounds: there’s a company called Clicks that is taking preorders for an external physical keyboard attachment for MagSafe-equipped phones and is also cooking up a bespoke Android phone with a Blackberry-style physical keyboard.

But phone tech isn’t the only domain in which touchscreens are being seen for the limited and imperfect technology that they are - automotive interior design is now moving away from screens in favor of physical stalks, switches, toggles, sliders - anything we humans can wrap our little jointed digits around. This has gone beyond simple preferences based on user feedback; the EU New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) says that new car models will need to use physical controls instead of touchscreens in order to earn their highest rating. Even Jony Ive, who worked at Apple and was instrumental in bringing touchscreens to all of our palms, has called them “the wrong technology” to use in cars because they can’t be operated safely (i.e. without the driver looking away from the road).

I think you can see where this critique is going, vis-à-vis smartphone cameras. Just to run down the list quickly, here are the biggest problems with the experience of taking photographs with a touchscreen slab, from my own perspective:

• The screen doubles as the viewfinder, but outside in bright light it can be too hard to see clearly.

• The screen doesn’t articulate in any direction, so if you want to take a photo of something at some angle, you can’t see what you’re photographing.

• Trying to adjust individual settings in some kind of pro/manual mode is difficult to access in a camera app and awkward to use (at least on my Pixel 8 Pro).

• Phone cameras do not have adjustable apertures, eliminating one of the key elements of control and creativity in photography. That’s one third of the exposure triangle gone. If you want to adjust the other two elements (ISO and shutter speed) manually, you have to do so by flipping through menus within a piece of software - not something you can be doing constantly if you actually want to take some pictures. Manual mode on a phone camera is impractical, bordering on pointless.

• There’s not a predictable and consistent relationship between pressing the shutter button (which isn’t even a button at all if you’re touching the screen) and the camera taking a photo, making photography of moving objects a total crapshoot.

• Distractions! There’s nothing to stop notifications from other apps interrupting the moment and stealing your attention when you’re trying to take a picture.

• Software lag. If I set my phone to take photos in its highest resolution, there’s a significant processing time between pressing the shutter and having the image be finished and viewable. If I take multiple photos too quickly, the phone doesn’t allow me to take more photos until it’s caught up.

• No interchangeable lenses. Most high end cameras now have something like a three lens loadout (wide, standard, tele) to cover most things. That’s all you get. (Companies have been trying to get people to buy external lenses to attach to their phone cameras for years, but they never seem to catch on.)

In short, despite my phone being a fairly capable photographic device from a technical standpoint, the practical limitations of using it for anything other than casual snapshots when I don’t have an actual camera with me or for quick sharing on social media render it less useful than its specs suggest it should be. To put a finer point on it, I would never reach for a smartphone if I were going on a photo walk. If photos are the point, my phone is demoted to navigation tool, and I grab the OM-1.

It should be clearer now how even a plasticky purple point-and-shoot like that Nikon atrocity above would offer a much more satisfying experience of photography to the user, even if the photos it produces are underwhelming technically. (For Gen-Z, incidentally, this is also a feature rather than a bug - they find the imperfect, low-res renderings charmingly retro without the need for filters.)

Furthermore, a touchscreen fails to take advantage of the fact that a typical human has two fully articulating arms and hands with ten fingers, all independently operable for controlling, adjusting, and actuating. While that little Coolpix gadget doesn’t have all of the fancy dials and buttons that an SLR has, you can at least hold it up in front of you in your right hand and operate it deftly, thumb on the back controls and index finger on the shutter. You can scroll through your photos without distraction and show them to friends without the interruption of immediately having to send them to everyone (because you can’t). These are all positive things for taking photographs.

If you remain skeptical, remind yourself of how taking a photograph with your phone works:

1. Retrieve the device from your pocket or bag.

2. Go through whatever unlocking procedure is required to gain access to it.

3. Get distracted by notifications and spend 17 minutes scrolling an app before you remember why you unlocked your phone.

4. Open the camera app.

5. Hold your phone out in front of you, probably with two hands so you don’t drop it, which you will often anyway, possibly into water or a ravine.

6. Swipe away more notifications so that you can actually see the screen and frame your shot.

7. Press the shutter on the screen and hope that you didn’t miss the button, which you can’t feel because it isn’t actually a button but a designated area of pixels in the shape of a button.

8. Post the photo on social media and wait for validation that it’s good and that you therefore have value as a person.

Now compare this with the same process on the purple Nikon from the Bush (GW) administration:

1. Retrieve camera (if it’s not already in your hand or hanging on a wrist strap).

2. Press the shutter button to wake it up.

3. Take a picture.

I don’t know… one of those just seems a lot more straightforwardly pleasant than the other if you’re just trying to take a picture. The most shocking part of all of this is that I can see myself moving into a new stage of life. Having passed through old man yells at cloud, I’ve settled into the kids are alright. So it goes.

I read a great article last week by Cedric at “I May Be Wrong” and wanted to use it as a jumping-off point to add my own commentary. I’m largely in agreement with his thesis and framing, even down to most of the details. His chronology absolutely describes my development as a photographer over the last 20+ years. I do have the occasional moment of departure from his assertions, though, so let’s get into it. I’ll quote from Cedric’s piece where appropriate and then add my two cents.

To begin, his thesis:

It seems that the majority of amateur photographers go through the same predictable journey that you can track through their gear. They begin their journey convinced that better gear will make them better photographers. Some end it knowing the opposite is true.

The last line is catchy, but I fear it’s a bit overstated – “the opposite” of the thought that better gear will make an amateur photographer better would be that better gear makes an amateur photographer worse, and I’m not sure I’d go that far. But let’s track though the four stages, as Cedric describes them:

Stage 1. Fresh-faced photographers start with whatever they can afford, which sometimes means second-hand gear that’s seen better decades, or the cheapest of the range.

This was absolutely my experience. My first two digital cameras were early compact point-and-shoot models – a Sony Cybershot and later a Fujifilm with a slightly higher megapixel count and optical zoom. My first DSLR kit was a Canon EOS Digital Rebel (probably the cheapest new model one could buy at the time) and two Sigma zoom lenses bought as a “starter” kit on eBay. I couldn’t afford anything better at the time, nor would I have known what to do with better stuff if I had it.

Stage 2. The tragedy is that most photographers are desperate to escape [Stage 1]. They spend hours scrolling through gear forums, convincing themselves that their limitations come from their equipment rather than their inexperience. They’re only partially right. Eventually, photographers scrape together enough money for their first “good” camera. Usually, it’s the most expensive thing they can justify buying. The bigger and more professional it looks, the better. … I remember the day I bought my first full-frame camera. It was the newly released 5D in 2007.

Check! I was on those forums, looking at images and reading other photographers’ experiences with different camera bodies and lenses. I upgraded from the amateur Digital Rebel to the prosumer 40D and some better EF-S lenses. Then, just like Cedric, I got a Canon 5D. I wasn’t able to get one when it came out (I think it was extremely expensive, probably more than double what the 40D cost), so I had to wait a couple years and get one second hand.

I felt like a proper photographer for the first time. The weight of it hanging around my neck was a badge of honour. This phase is about signalling as much as shooting. You want other photographers to know you’ve arrived. You want people to take you seriously. You want to belong to the club of people who own expensive things.

Because it was so long ago, it’s hard for me to remember just how much of the mythical lore surrounding full-frame sensors influenced my lust for the 5D. I’d love to think that I was above that sort of thing, but there’s no credible reason to think that I was – many of us did see the 5D as the aspirational (but mostly attainable, eventually) full-frame digital SLR. And I was elated when I finally got my hands on one. I also started pairing it with Canon L glass (a must for such a great camera sensor, surely!) and reveled in belonging to “the club of people who own expensive things.”

The irony is that this gear actually does improve your photographs, but not for the reasons you think. Better dynamic range and cleaner high ISO performance give you more technical flexibility. However, the real improvement comes from finally having equipment that doesn’t fight you at every turn.

I just want to mention one funny and contrarian quirk here about my move from the 40D to the 5D. (If you’re not familiar with Canon’s naming conventions and feel like 40 should be better than 5, they do it backwards: the cheapest models have 3 digits, the prosumer ones two, and the professional cameras just one.) Although the 5D had a much more capable sensor than the 40D, the latter was a much newer model and had some features that the 5D didn’t, most notably automatic sensor cleaning. The worst thing about the 5D (by a country mile) was that it was up to the user to keep the sensor free from dust, and, well, good luck. It was such a butt-pain that I can’t recommend picking up an original 5D to anyone – get the updated mark II version!

Stage 3. After a few years of lugging around professional equipment, photographers often pivot to vintage gear. Film cameras become particularly attractive.

Guilty! 😬 Medium format film cameras, no less! I had a few different Mamiya 645 models before I settled on the 645AF and a couple different lenses. I also had a Bronica RF645 rangefinder. I’ve now “downgraded” from 120mm to 35mm and have a Canon EOS 30V.

For some film photography suggests you understand the fundamentals. Vintage equipment implies you care more about craft than convenience. The photography community encourages this behaviour. Film photography is fetishised to an absurd degree. There’s an entire industry built around convincing photographers that digital is somehow inferior to analogue processes. It’s mostly nonsense, but compelling nonsense.

Generally defensible, in my experience. When I got into film I was already quite a mature digital photographer, so my reasons were much more my own than the result of external influences. Still, I am also the sort of person who loves a mechanical watch and has a record player, so I appear to be very susceptible to this compelling nonsense.

Stage 4. The final stage is when photographers stop caring about gear entirely. They realise that the best camera is the one you have with you, and the lightest camera is the one you’re most likely to carry. This realisation usually comes after years of missed shots because your camera was too heavy to bring along, or too conspicuous to use discreetly.

I can sign off on most of this. I certainly have not stopped caring about gear entirely, but I have doubtless slowed my pace of replacing or upgrading it compared to ten or fifteen years ago. I could write a thousand words agreeing with Cedric on the lightest camera being the one I’m most likely to carry: I’m the guy who sold all of his full-frame Canon gear over ten years ago to shoot with the comparatively dwarfish micro four-thirds system. I had the experience of having an amazing but expensive and heavy camera that I took to fewer and fewer places, and that eventually became too obvious an absurdity to ignore. Nor have I budged an iota on this conviction – I look at the size and weight of some of Canon’s new RF zooms and wonder who in the hell is lugging those bastards around. (And paying those prices!)

At this stage, The equipment becomes invisible. You stop thinking about aperture rings and focus peaking and start thinking about light and composition and timing. This is when you actually become a photographer rather than someone who owns cameras.

I do look for equipment that can become invisible – gear that does what I need it to do so that I can concentrate on the business of getting the compositions I want in the light that I need. But again, Cedric goes for the provocative soundbite when he invokes “actually becom[ing] a photographer”. I don’t think it’s possible (or useful to try) to tease out the necessary and sufficient conditions of photographer-hood. Yet I think I know what he means – it’s a meaningful distinction despite resisting definition.

It can take a very long time to reach this final stage. … Camera manufacturers release new models every year, each promising revolutionary improvements. Photography forums are filled with pixel-peeping comparisons and upgrade discussions. YouTube channels generate millions of views reviewing equipment that’s functionally identical to last year’s models. … The dirty secret is that cameras stopped getting meaningfully better 10 years ago. A ten-year-old camera can produce images that are indistinguishable from the latest models in most real-world situations (I defy you to find meaningful differences between a photo taken with a 15 year old 6D and one taken with a R6). The improvements are incremental and largely irrelevant to the actual practice of photography.

Ok, I think I have the most to quibble with in this section, but I’ll start off by reinforcing what is probably the most important point Cedric makes in his post, which is that a “ten-year-old camera can produce images that are indistinguishable from the latest models in most real-word situations.” I will happily stand next to him and shout this in the town square. In fact I’ll even go a step further and say that there’s little meaningful difference in quality among the major manufacturers. Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, OM System, hell, throw Pentax in there – they’re all producing amazing overengineered equipment. Everyone’s lenses are tack-sharp, even those from third party manufacturers like Sigma and Tamron. Just pick one and go with it – it really doesn’t matter!

However, this does not mean that, on the whole, cameras “stopped getting meaningfully better 10 years ago” in my experience. This could be true in the full-frame market; I’ve never owned any full-frame mirrorless gear, so I can’t scrutinize Cedric’s assertion in that domain. In the micro four-thirds arena, camera bodies now include a whole heap of new features, most of which I would not voluntarily live without. Just off the top of my head: computational photography modes (hand-held high resolution, live neutral density filters, live composite), improved AF modes (automatic eye-focusing, starry sky autofocus, AI subject detection and tracking), stacked CMOS sensors, 4K cinematic video, pro capture burst mode… these are all things that I find extremely useful and that meaningfully expand the types of photos I can take with just a camera and lens. I would not settle for a 10-year-old micro four-thirds camera body; in fact I wouldn’t even work with more recent models that lack some of the aforementioned features. Perhaps this is micro four-thirds specific, but there’s still plenty of meaningful innovation in this format.

But there is of course a case for the necessity of going through these stages: what you learn at each stage is a prerequisite of successfully moving on to the next. If you don’t go through the gear buying stage, no matter how many times other people tell you buying stuff is pointless, you won’t believe it. You need to discover it for yourself.

Sad but true. Most people can’t be told not to do something they’ve already convinced themselves that they need to do, least of all a photographer with severe GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome – this is a real term that we use! 😅) I once tried to talk a very close friend out of buying an expensive Sony alpha camera and lens combo as his first “real” photo gear. He bought it anyway, and he’s only used it a handful of times in half a decade. Too heavy, valuable, and complicated to use most of the time, it was a giant waste of money, just as I told him it’d be. And yet! As Cedric says, some things we just need to discover for ourselves.

Make sure to give Cedric a follow if you enjoyed reading this, and I’ll see you all next week for another model writeup and photo post.

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The change was announced in a note by Chris Best, CEO and co-founder of Substack, in which he gave his explanation for the change. It’s not a long note, so I can just quote the entirety of the relevant part here:

Part of why Substack is good is that it’s full of wonderful people who take out paid subscriptions to support work they value, and the people who produce it.

It also has other positive effects in the ecosystem. When people see you subscribe, you are creating a valuable signal that you are a real human and not a bot, and aiding in the fight against spam, trolls, and other problems that plague internet platforms. When you see someone who subscribes to the same thing as you, you have an instant connection.

That’s not a whole lot of explanation for what amounts to a fairly significant change, so Substack’s motivation for adding the badges needs to be extrapolated from what little official documentation there has been. One need not look much further than Substack’s business model, though - its sole revenue source is a 10% cut from paid subscriptions. (I think you can make the logical leap from there.)

I can’t speak to the validity of the “real human and not a bot” motivation, as I haven’t personally had any experience with bot troubles on Substack. It seems reasonable to assume, however, that Substack will not escape the proliferation of bots on its platform that is plaguing places like X (née Twitter), so perhaps it is useful to have a reliable visual cue that an account is not a bot. Of course, if this were the main goal, it could be accomplished without overtly referencing a user’s paid subscription status, so that’s clearly an ancillary benefit of the change at best.

The actual point of the badges, obviously, is to normalize paying for content on Substack. Less charitable commentators might say it’s to guilt, shame, or otherwise coerce people to pay for content, but I think this is a distinction without a difference. The platform can’t exist without paid users; this is how Substack avoids the well-established (and well-hated) ad-supported and algorithmic models of other large platforms.

And paid users are a tiny minority on Substack. To wit: according to SEO consultation firm AtOnce, only about 5% of the approximately 35 million active subscriptions on the platform are paid. Substack doesn’t release data at the level of individual users, but it’s reasonable to assume that the percentage of people who pay for at least one subscription is within shouting distance of that 5% figure.

What do I think about all of this?

Firstly, I am sympathetic to the privacy concerns. At the moment, there’s no way for users to control the display of the flower icon - if you have paid subscriptions, the icon will appear and indicate how many paid subscriptions you have. You can hide the names of your paid subscriptions from public view, but there is currently no option for users to hide the fact that they pay for content on the platform. (I don’t know why anyone would want to do that, but I’m generally for giving users more control over their public-facing information rather than less.)

I also think it’s obvious that the change is meant to reward paid subscribers and shame those who don’t pay. I don’t know why this one little detail bothers me so much, but when you click on the profile of a paying subscriber, it says [username] subscribes. In italics. That italicization strikes me as a weirdly aggressive design choice, one that does more than declare something factually true about the user. I can easily see a non-paying subscriber reading it as, “[username] subscribes, why don’t you?”

This brings us to the accusations of classism, which I have to admit I have a hard time sympathizing with completely. It’s true that this new system deliberately creates an in-group/out-group dichotomy, and that’s always going to bother the people who get out-grouped. It’s also true that you need to pay to be a member of the in-group, and that will certainly make some people uncomfortable ipsō factō. (You can sense there’s a but coming…)

BUT!

To get the little flower next to your name, to be in the vaunted, celebrated, coveted in-group, all you have to do is be a paid subscriber to one Substack publication. The most common asking price for a paid Substack subscription at the time of writing is around $5 per month. Five American dollars. That’s about 1.3 gallons of gas (30-40 miles’ worth), or one fancy Starbucks drink. It’s less than a McDonald’s cheeseburger meal, or a month of Spotify Premium, or the cheapest Netflix subscription. Most of my readers are accessing Substack via the mobile app, which means they have a smartphone. The average monthly cell service bill in the US is around $70, so five bucks is about two days’ worth of service for the device you’re using to read this.

So what’s really going on?

Surely there are some people in America (where most of Substack’s audience resides) who legitimately do not have $5 in disposable income a month for discretionary spending. Thankfully, most Americans’ financial situation is not that dire; I suspect that many (most?) of the people denouncing the badge system (on the grounds that it discriminates against people who do not have $5 to spend on Substack every month) absolutely do have $5 a month to spend here, even if they say that they don’t.

While I do think that many people are being disingenuous and distorting the picture of Substack readers’ financial health, I also suspect that there is a legitimate cause underlying the backlash, even if it’s not being articulated: subscription fatigue. People have to pay monthly for too many things that they want to have access to, and there’s a tipping point for everyone, beyond which it becomes too much to add yet another monthly charge. I can absolutely see individual Substack subscriptions falling into that category. Most people could not afford to pay for all, or even most, of the content they subscribe to and read regularly on Substack.

If I may, the actual problem…

At the heart of this little tempest in a teacup, I believe, is a profound misunderstanding (and concomitant misuse) of Substack as a platform. For Substack is not a social media platform.

I’ll say it again for the ones who fell asleep (fair enough!) six paragraphs ago: Substack is not a social media platform. Nor is it a blogging site.

Many users, however, treat it like one, and that is a recipe for having a bad time on Substack. I have plenty of sympathy for people who make this error; after all, Substack sure looks like a social media platform sometimes. It has a ‘follow’ feature (à la X), a ‘subscribe’ button (à la YouTube), a personalized content feed, ‘like’ hearts, ‘restacking’ (i.e. retweeting), et cetera. “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck…”

But Substack is designed to be fundamentally different from social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok in one very important way - monetization. Substack’s business model circumscribes the most basic aspects of the platform, from how users get paid to who the platform is for. The creators of the site could not be more clear about this: Substack is a marketplace for creators who are encouraged to treat their work as a business and create content that their audience is willing to pay for. Paid subscriptions are the point. When you create a Substack publication, it is very clear from the beginning that the site expects you to turn on paid subscriptions at some point, because the site simply cannot exist without them.

Explicit comparisons to ad-supported models like Instagram and TikTok are important to hammer this point home. Instagram and TikTok need your eyeballs on their apps so that they can put targeted ads in front of them. This is why simple engagement with the app is currency on those platforms - they make money by selling your attention to advertisers. Individual creators can get paid based on how much of this engagement - likes, shares, comments - their content drives on the site. This incentivizes creators to post regularly, keep up with the algorithm, and make content that can go viral.

On Substack, the only currency is currency. As in fiat - you know, that $5 we spoke about earlier. Publishers do not get paid a penny from the platform for likes, restacks, comments, or reading time. A Substack publication with 100,000 free subscribers and millions of views would earn precisely zero dollars for the publisher and Substack. The only source of revenue for publishers through Substack is you, the person reading this. I hope you understand just how different that makes the place you’re hanging out in right now.

When I get a new free subscriber (which is all of my subscribers at the moment, since I haven’t yet enabled paid subscriptions - it’s coming!), I do smile and feel grateful, but I also worry a bit. Substack shows me what other publications each new subscriber also subscribes to, and in some cases it’s not just dozens, but over 100. If you’re subscribed to over 100 publications on here and not paying for any of them, dear reader, you have mistaken Substack for Instagram!

While we’re at it - we’re also not blogging here

Substack is also very much not a blogging platform like Medium or BlogSpot. Again, understandable confusion, since many publications here are individual people writing, but this ignores the fact that Substack is only actively courting people who want to curate an audience of loyal, directly-paying customers. Medium does not offer direct payments between readers and writers, and BlogSpot doesn’t have a payment system at all.

Adding to the mass confusion on both this point and the one above, I think, is the fact that many publishers are also guilty of misunderstanding and therefore misusing the platform. I want to be careful how I word this, because I can already sense some discontent with the charge of misuse. I think it’s perfectly defensible, nevertheless, to declare that writers who set up shop on Substack without any designs on the shop part have, like the readers I mentioned above, mistaken Substack for something else.

There are tangible negative impacts of misusing the platform in this way (i.e. treating it like a free blogging site). First of all, Substack foots the bill for hosting publications and delivering content via email, to say nothing of the operational and marketing costs of running the company. They pay for all of this (as far as I know) by taking 10% from paid subscription fees. If you have no paid subscribers (and have no intention of ever having any, for whatever reason), your publication generates zero revenue and is being subsidized by people (like me) who are paying for other people’s content.

Secondly, giving away all of your content for free reinforces the misconception that Substack is the place to go for unlimited free content (like Instagram), which, as I think I’ve mentioned fourteen times by now, it very much is not. This is why so many Substack users react with surprise (and consternation!) when they’re reminded by a little icon that it’s a place for paying customers.

Thirdly, and perhaps most nefariously, publishers who give all of their content away for free make it harder for others to sell their own. Readers will (fairly) ask why they should pay publisher B for her writing when publisher A writes in the same genre and offers up all of her work for free. To be clear, the lesson here is not that free content is morally reprehensible, it’s that Substack was expressly designed for people who want to sell their content. If you don’t ever want to sell your content, that’s great too - you can distribute it through other platforms that have different business models.

Substack allows free subscribers and publishers, and that’s ok too, paradoxically

One way that Substack is different from platforms like Patreon or OnlyFans is that it doesn’t ever require that anyone sell or buy content. At the risk of contradicting myself, or at least undercutting my previous points, I should point out that free subscribers and publishers are still welcome in the Substack model. It’s a good thing that publishers can decide what content they want to offer for free and what is only for paying customers. Free content is the obvious way to begin for new creators who are trying to build an audience - readers won’t be willing to pay for content that they can’t sample first.

This is precisely how I’ve been running my Substack publication since I launched it, so I completely understand and support this use of the site. I am also scheming in the background to enable paid content for those who want more, and that’s why I’ve chosen to spend most of my time here on Substack rather than trying to make money on the ad-supported social media sites.

Wow I wrote too much, sorry

In sum!

• Substack’s business model requires paid subscribers for the site to exist.

• Substack is always going to prioritize and promote its paying customers.

• Some people are pretending to be mad about the paid badges because they don’t have $5, when actually they’re mad for different (but also perfectly understandable) reasons.

• Many readers (and even publishers) treat Substack like an ad-supported social media site or blog, which leads to confusion and misuse of the platform.

• I am not good at expressing myself concisely.

After all that, would you believe that I even left some stuff out? I’ll fill in those blanks when I finally launch a paid tier for Naked Prose. As always, thank you for reading - please feel free to yell at me in the comments if something I’ve said is completely stupid or offensive to you.

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I do, nevertheless, have a favorite pictorial artist – the American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Even if you’re as aesthetically illiterate as I am, you probably know Hopper’s most famous painting, Nighthawks (1942). It’s this one:

I love this painting so much that I visited the Art Institute of Chicago to admire the original in person, and I’ve got a giant canvas print of it hanging on the wall. (And a pair of socks and a fridge magnet from the museum souvenir shop.) It’s also wholly unsurprising that I’m so captivated by Hopper’s work, because I’m a photographer, and Hopper was, to me anyway, a photographer who simply preferred pigment and paper to photons and film.

Let me explain.

First of all, Hopper was a realist – his art was strictly representational. (That’s fancy art-speak for his paintings looked like the things they were paintings of.) He had quite a distaste for abstract art, in fact, and he found it unnerving that people were praising both his art and that of Jackson Pollock, the American abstract expressionist, who was a contemporary of Hopper’s. (This makes me love Hopper even more, as someone who has struggled to appreciate non-representational art.) Photography, I think, is a predominantly representational artform. It is possible, of course, to be a bona fide non-representational (i.e. abstract) photographic artist, but this is a much more niche genre in photography than in pictorial art. Hopper’s work clearly parallels photography in the sense that both are attempting to depict a scene that is generally faithful to our observable reality.

Hopper’s works eschew any kind of otherworldliness or whimsy; rather, he pays close attention to perspective, lines and angles, light and shadow - often intending to capture a moment at a specific time of day. He routinely sketched out his paintings with Conté and paper beforehand, often going through multiple drafts with notes about minute details. He used his wife Jo as a model for scenes prominently depicting human figures. When he painted Victorian houses, he sought the angles that revealed the complexity of the building’s architecture.

Photography, by definition, precludes the capturing of an image that does not already exist in the physical world; Hopper, unbound by that constraint, was nevertheless punctilious in representing the images that emerged from the interplay between his inner self and the outer world. Not to put too fine a point on it, but photographers love Hopper’s work because so many of his paintings could be photographs.

Even more salient (to photographers) than the generally representational nature of Hopper’s work is his careful attention to the realistic portrayal of light and shadow. It’s clear that Hopper thought about light in his scenes in much the same way that photographers do. Bright summer sunlight, for example, features prominently in several of his more famous works: illuminating two figures and a white façade in Second Story Sunlight (1960), warming the faces of seated figures in People in the Sun (1960), and starkly highlighting a solitary female figure in Morning in a City (1942), Morning Sun (1952), and A Woman in the Sun (1961). His nighttime and indoor scenes (like Nighthawks above) reveal his careful attention to the placement of light and its effect on the mood of the scene - contrast Soir Bleu (1914) with Moonlight Interior (1923).

Finally, Hopper’s images often tell a story in a single frame, much like street photography does. Voyeuristic glimpses through windows invite our interpretation in Room in New York (1932), Office in a Small City (1953), and August in the City (1945). Many of his works feature solitary figures, evoking a sense of loneliness, restlessness, and separation. In interviews, Hopper was adamant that he identified very personally with his art, insisting that his paintings always convey, if not in the clearest manner to the viewer, the state of his mind at the time. His art, then, was overwhelmingly personal and private even as he revealed it to the world.

Speaking personally, I find that the most compelling thing about Hopper’s paintings is the fact that they can be recreated, however imperfectly, as photographs. I have, for example, consciously reproduced Hopper’s collection of early nude female sketches with a female model, which was a fun project. I’d love to recreate other works of his as photographs, or do a series of images overtly inspired by some aspect of his work.

What about you? Were you already familiar with Hopper? Any other photographers out there who have been as inspired and captivated by his work as I have? Are there other pictorial artists whose work is also great for photographers? I’d love to hear your perspectives.

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By the numbers, here’s how my first six months of shooting have panned out:

• 17 paid model shoots

• 14 different models (3 of whom I worked with twice) from 7 different countries

• A shoot on average once every 9 days

• 4 rolls of 35mm film (Kodak Portra 400 and 800)

• One trip abroad (Thailand) to shoot multiple sessions

• One high-five from a model (thanks @aagrus)

• Zero regrets (ok maybe that Thailand trip - five models in five days was a lot)

My experiences doing this have been overwhelmingly positive. There has been nary a moment that could be called a disaster and vanishingly few hiccups along the way. On the whole, the models have been fun and easy to work with, things have gone as planned, and I’ve been happy with the results.

If I had to pick out a high and a low moment from all of my shoots, I’d actually highlight my first and second shoots to represent those extremes more than any of the others. My first shoot, in retrospect, was probably the worst one I’ve done. Well obviously, I hear you saying, the first one was always going to be the worst one. That’s true, and my lack of experience certainly played into it, but it was markedly different in a few ways, all of which contributed to it not going too well. I had no idea, for example, if the model would be able to pose herself without assistance (my inexperience rearing its head, to be sure), so I directed the entire shoot by showing her photos on my phone and having her approximate the poses. To be clear, this isn’t inherently a bad way to run a shoot, but it does require some careful attention and a high level of communication, which is not my strong suit. Most (all?) of the models I’ve worked with have spoken English as their second (or third, fourth…) language, so it’s always a bit of a crapshoot how easy it’ll be to talk. This shoot was one of the trickier ones, a combination of her English and my nervousness and inexperience. I also didn’t have a neutral gray card to fix my white balance, so I had to do a lot more work in post to get the colors to look right. The model also wanted more skin retouching on the final images than I thought was necessary, and I had to censor her images in my portfolio. Oh, and she was twice as expensive as any model I’ve shot since (on top of me booking a studio for the shoot).

Juxtapose that experience with my second shoot, which couldn’t have gone better. I don’t want to oversell the negative experience of my first shoot, because in the moment I had nothing to compare it to and wasn’t all that dissatisfied with how it went. Then I worked with @ana_po_mdmodel, and everything clicked. I didn’t try to run the shoot from images on my phone, if only because we were shooting in her hotel room, which I couldn’t see ahead of time, so I just let her do most of the work. She was very relaxed and chatty, so much so that we spent as much time talking about this/that/the other thing as we did shooting. She also had encouraging and helpful things to say about this new business venture, all of which left me feeling pretty great about everything when we were finished. I’m not going to say that I would have given up if the second shoot had gone more or less the same as the first one. Having a better experience so quickly, though, gave me a lot of confidence that I could actually do this.

Right, so let’s do a quick What Went Well and Even Better If.

What Went Well?

• Shooting time: I feel like I’ve pretty much maxed out on how much shooting I could reasonably be expected to do, given that I’m limited to doing this stuff on weekends while I still have a full-time job. It’s been a lot, but having a big library of content made launching the Substack site less stressful.

• Consistency: While I haven’t adhered to my predetermined posting schedule to the day exactly, I’ve kept to posting an alternating prose and photo article every week since I started. (This is only post #5, but so far so good.)

• Interactions with models: I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how easily I’ve worked with models from all over the world. The fact that some of them have connected me with other model friends of theirs and have agreed to work with me multiple times says a lot about the positive experiences they’re having.

• Confidence: I feel like I know what I’m doing now in the most basic sense, which makes me less nervous in the leadup to each shoot and helps me to concentrate on finding the best light and using the space creatively. I can tell that I’ve already grown considerably in this regard.

Even Better If?

• Posing models: While it’s true that professional models are perfectly capable of posing themselves, this is still a skill I need to develop much further, especially if I hope to work with amateur models for this website. The pros even ask for guidance sometimes, and I don’t always have a clear answer based on what I’m seeing, so this is absolutely still a weak spot.

• Social Media and Self-Promotion: I’m terrible at self-promotion, which does not bode well for starting a small business based on growing an audience of subscribers. I’m getting better at using IG to post more frequent content, like model shoots while they’re happening, but I’m surely not using social media as well as I need to.

• Creativity: I tend to rely on the workflow of showing up at the venue with the same photo gear and just letting the model dictate the rhythm and the poses, so I don’t have as much of a stamp on the final product as I’d like. I need to have some more specific and unique ideas for individual shoots to differentiate them and add some variety to my content.

In the end, then, I think I’ll give myself a B- for my performance so far. A reasonably strong performance with ample opportunity for growth.

As always, thank you for coming along for the ride, and do spread the word if you know others who would be interested in my newsletter. (See? That’s about all I can muster for self-promotion. Pathetic!)

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Despite the refreshing novelty of the question, however, I didn’t have an answer. There wasn’t a single artist I could think of whose latest work I would buy sound-unheard. You could accuse me of merely being obtuse and uncooperative (for I can surely be those things), but I think the problem was the timing of the question, not my intransigence.

Had he asked the same question a decade earlier, I would have had at least one answer to the question – Dream Theater. (If you don’t know who Dream Theater is, don’t worry – this is about something much bigger than prog-metal.) My introduction to the band (and the genre, actually) was in middle school, maybe 8^th grade, when a friend of mine gave me the band’s A Change of Seasons EP to listen to. The title track is a 23-minute prog-rock/metal epic, peppered with a kind of virtuosic musicianship that I had never heard before. I was instantly obsessed.

That obsession lasted for many years, probably reaching max intensity (in hindsight) around 2000, just after the band released Metropolis Part II: Scenes from a Memory. It’s my favorite album (from any artist), even to this day, by quite some margin. I get emotional nearly to the point of tears whenever I listen to it, still. I had it on the other day on the bus on my way home and had to turn it off because I was welling up. On some random weekday afternoon.

Alas, the good times did not last. Their very next album (Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, 2002) was hit-and-miss. There’s still some stuff that I revisit, to be sure, but not much. Then there was Train of Thought (2003) which was a little less enjoyable still. Then Octavarium (2005), which had a song or two on it that I actively disliked. Then Systematic Chaos (2007), a bit of an uptick, but only for about half of the album. Then Black Clouds & Silver Linings (2009), which the band released along with a full second CD of cover songs. The fact that I only listen to the covers these days tells you everything you need to know about that one. Then came A Dramatic Turn of Events (2011), which I think is the last album I paid to own in some format. It’s ok, probably a little better than the previous few. Then they released an album confusingly just called Dream Theater (2013), which contains a single song I like, “The Looking Glass”, written deliberately as a tribute to Canadian prog-rock trio Rush. It’s a great song.

Then, oh boy, there was 2016’s The Astonishing, a 2-CD concept album about a dystopian future, released alongside a novelization of the story. (And people say prog rock is pretentious.) I listened to the first CD and was so put off that I never subjected myself to the second one. Yikes. Then there was Distance Over Time (2019), which I’ve never listened to, and then A View from the Top of the World (2021), for which the band won its first and only Grammy award. I haven’t listened to that one either.

Why am I talking about all of this? Well, Dream Theater is back again with Parasomnia, released earlier this year. I listened to it! And… I really don’t like it very much. Shocking, I know. I mean it’s not offensive or anything, but I won’t be sad if I never hear it again. (If you’re a metalhead and desperate for music recommendations, here are three: Jinjer’s Duél, Opeth’s The Last Will and Testament, and Opera by Fleshgod Apocalypse.)

I’ve spent quite a lot of time wondering what the hell happened here. My instinct is to blame the band, of course – they used to make good music, and now they don’t, so I don’t like it anymore. I could absolutely write an 8,000-word treatise about why an old album like Images & Words (1992) is objectively superior to Parasomnia (2025), and it would be well-researched and well-argued. Don’t even tempt me.

It would also be nonsense, because I think the actual reason that I prefer 90’s Dream Theater to 2000’s and 2010’s Dream Theater has nothing at all to do with Dream Theater1 and everything to do with the fact that I was a teenager in the 90’s.

Let’s talk about the reminiscence bump.

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A big part of how we feel about who we are as individuals comes from autobiographical memories, mental impressions of personal experiences that we can explicitly recall happening to us in specific places and at specific times. As a general principle, the strength of our memory is a function of recency. I can remember what I had for breakfast this morning but not on this same day one year ago. This is a woefully obvious assertion. Human memory, however, is not a decreasing linear function from today back to birth. Instead, for some reason, we have an outsized number of strong autobiographical memories from our teenage years. We also tend to retain our preferences in movies, music, and team sports from that period of life.

If you’re over the age of, say, 35, take a minute and test this theory for yourself. Try to remember what your life was like when you were 16, and then again when you were 26. When I was 16, I was rocking out to Rush and Dream Theater (and Smashing Pumpkins, and King Crimson, and Symphony X, and Primus, and) with my friends, playing in bands both in and out of school, trying to figure out how not to be a dweeb around girls, teaching myself HTML and web programming, watching the Special Edition re-releases of the Star Wars movies in theaters, and cheering the Yankees to their World Series victory over the Padres. When I was 26, I was… I have no fucking clue what I was doing when I was 26. Was I ever even 26?

There are competing theories about why this happens. One, for example, stipulates that our brains require more cognitive processing for novel experiences. Adolescence, then, barreling freight train of novel experiences that it is, makes up the lion’s share of our most strongly encoded memories. Another theory posits that our brains are starting to reach their peak functionality during this period, so memories that happen to form during this developmental milestone remain ever salient. Other frameworks invoke cultural explanations: we’re told that key life experiences like our first kiss, learning to drive, and graduating high school are extremely significant, so we dutifully attach outsized significance to them.

Why does this matter? Two reasons I can think of. First, it’s important that we all realize that the music and movies that we love to the very core of our being may not be as objectively great as we think they are. (This is very difficult for me to admit as someone who reached adolescence in the early 1990’s, the heart of the grunge and alternative rock era.) The next time you play one of your favorite songs from your teenage years for someone who was a teenager at a different time, remember this explanation when you don’t get the instant and total affirmation that you’re looking for.

The other is that it provides valuable context for forming relationships (or failing to do so) as we get older. When I meet a new person these days, I’m more relieved than ever to discover that we’re the same age, because I instantly know that we’re going to have a ready supply of things to talk about. Someone ten years younger? I brace for a struggle. I recently had the unsettling experience of discovering that a younger coworker had never heard of Nirvana. I’m not even being dramatic when I say that I found this deeply disturbing. So did several others within earshot. “Smells Like Teen Spirit?” we were asking, humming the riff, some of us reflexively head-banging. Crickets. Never heard it.

At least now I can take some comfort in the knowledge that my coworker is going to have the same experience in ten years with a younger colleague who doesn’t know something from the early 2000’s. What the hell was even popular then? Limp Bizkit? Justin Timberlake?

What are the most salient cultural touchstones from your adolescence? To wrap this up, I’m going to take an endorphin-inducing trip down memory lane myself and reveal some of my teenage obsessions. Feel free to play along at home!

• The following albums, in no particular order (on CD, obviously): Green Day, Dookie; Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream; Primus, Sailing the Seas of Cheese, Pearl Jam, Ten; Nirvana, Nevermind; Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magic; Rush, Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures; Dream Theater, Metropolis Part II: Scenes from a Memory; King Crimson, Discipline; Rage Against The Machine (self-titled); No Doubt, Tragic Kingdom

• Movies: The Matrix, Office Space, Gone in 60 Seconds, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Star Wars (the original trilogy), Ronin, Hackers

• Video games: Mortal Kombat, Total Annihilation, The Sims, Sim City 2000, Rollercoaster Tycoon, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, Riven, Need For Speed

• TV and the internet: The Simpsons, South Park, Futurama, SNICK, Homestar Runner, IRC, Winamp, Windows 2000

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when I started taking photographs back then. I grew up in the film photography era, but I had no shutterbug friends or family members to spark an interest in the medium; if we ever needed to take a picture of something (and most times we didn’t), we’d reach for a disposable camera and get the roll developed at the nearest 1-hour photo joint.

It was the digital part that finally piqued my interest. You mean I can take a photo, plug the camera into my computer, and download it? and then play around with it in Photoshop? and set it as my Windows wallpaper? and host it on my GeoCities website? Sold.

When I look back on those earliest days of my digital photography, two recurring subjects stick out. One of them was cars. I converted to petrol-headism towards the end of my high school years, so as soon as I had a digital camera, I started making trips to exotic car dealers in the area just to wander around the showroom taking photos, which I’d then share with other enthusiasts on online forums (as was the style at the time).

The other was my high school sweetheart, and I don’t mean her senior portraits. It was far too long ago now for me to remember the details of how we got started shooting nudes. I mean it was definitely my idea, not hers, but how did I ask her? How long had I been thinking about it before I asked? Did she take a lot of convincing? I haven’t the foggiest anymore.

We were together for many years, into our college days, and she was always a good sport about it. It wasn’t something we ever did all that often, mind you – we might have averaged one shoot a year. Looking back, I think it helped that she enjoyed it a bit. Partly she was just humoring me, surely, but I can see now that she had good modeling instincts. She moved and posed without much direction, not that I could have provided any. And some of the pictures weren’t that bad, all things considered. Even in those early days, I was trying to get it right.

Fast forward five years, ten, fifteen, twenty. I’d occasionally approach other women to pose for me, and a few of them would, and I’d get a little bit better at it. Still, that kind of photography was never more than a rounding error on my total creative output in any given year. And so it has been, even though I’ve enjoyed shooting nudes as much as anything else.

It’s time to right this historical wrong and get serious about this woefully neglected side of my photographic life.

Why now? Why not a decade ago?

I don’t know, really.

I just feel ready now in a way that I never have before. Ready to become a proper student of the artistic nude, to work with professionals, to share that work with the world. Ready to be my own boss, to control my own destiny, to create the things that I want to create.

A quick pre-mortem¹ analysis on this project, however, reveals no shortage of unignorable challenges. I am, for one, quite a serious introvert. The idea of meeting new people in most contexts leaves me in a state that’s some combination of anxious and annoyed. (I barely slept the night before my first paid shoot with a model.) I also have very limited experience and confidence in posing models. I have no idea how to run a small business. I’m trying to break into a new industry with no professional contacts or connections. I still have a full-time job that has nothing to do with any of this. I have no idea how to find and grow an audience.

I could go on.

What I can say so far, though, is that every deliberate action towards getting this project up and running – brainstorming names, hiring a logo designer, registering the domain name, getting onto Model Mayhem, shooting my first sessions – has been utterly exhilarating. The feedback, moreover, from the people I’ve shared this crazy idea with has been unanimously positive and encouraging.

It all just feels right.

So I’m going to try my damnedest to make this my life’s focus. If you’re curious to see what happens, subscribe. If you like what you see and read here, spread the word. I need all the eyeballs I can get to make this dream a reality, and I’ll be grateful for every bit of your support.

Thanks for reading.

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¹The opposite of a post-mortem would be an ante-mortem or a prae-morte. “Pre” is not a Latin preposition. We have no problem using ante in other borrowed Latin words and phrases (antebellum, antediluvian, ante meridiem…) so why not this one? By the way, expect these digressions about language; it’s a thing that I do.