The poet Goethe is credited as saying, What you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it, and the work will be completed
If only it were that easy.
In any creative effort, the beginning is the hard part, filled with fears and procrastinations, and---often most of all-the paralyzing desire to get it right on the first try (which almost never happens). Creativity is evolutionary; it begins with bad ideas and crappy first efforts and the moment we embrace this idea, not eschewing the ugly beginnings but mining them for possibilities, our everyday creativity flourishes.
Start Ugly is a celebration of the messy creative process and a call to face the obstacles of that process with mindfulness and humanity. This is a book for anyone who has ever wished they were more creative. It's a plea to stop looking for the muses and inspiration before you do your best work. Equal parts needed encouragement to dream big and practical advice for getting your hands dirty, START UGLY is a soulful, at times irreverent, reminder that creativity is more the stuff of hard work and courage than it is the stuff of magic. And if there is magic at all to be found, it's in starting.

A book about the craft of camera-using and the creative struggle of picture-making.

Learning how a camera works is not difficult. Once you understand how to focus and expose, the rest are details. So why is it such a challenge to make photographs that feel like they do what we hope for? Could it be we're asking the camera to do the work that all along has been ours to figure out? Is it possible we've been thinking too much about the camera and not enough about our own creativity? In an industry that obsesses over the gear and all too often ignores the deeper questions around creativity and expression, this should come as no surprise.

It's true, the camera sees differently than we do. As our creative collaborator it can do things that we simply cannot. It can see much faster (1/8000 of a second) and much slower (8 seconds, or 8 minutes) than we can. It can cut the light in half, or double it. It can magnify, compress, and otherwise transform our field of view through lens and aperture choices. Learning to see as the camera does is, itself, an exercise in creative thinking and imagination.

The journey of mastering this craft is not so much about bending the camera to our will, but working with the many different ways the camera is able to see the world in order to create photographs that express the way we see and feel about it. That effort is more creative than it is technical. Crucially, this journey is also about learning to give ourselves the permission to create photographs that are truly our own, to risk and experiment, and to explore and play. Too often we hold ourselves back.

In Light, Space, and Time, photographer, teacher, and author David duChemin helps you learn to look in the same way as the camera does, and to think in the same language as the camera speaks. In 20 powerful essays, and featuring more than 100 beautiful photographs, David explores the place of the human behind the camera in the act of picture making, and he does so with the same inspiring heart, soul, and voice that he has brought to his previous best-selling books. Books that teach not only how to make photographs, but how to think like a photographer. Throughout the book, David encourages you to move beyond the functions of your camera to embrace the creative choices those functions make possible. This exploration provides new frameworks for thinking about your decisions, presents new ways to see and look, raises new questions about the challenges we face in being creative, and offers new answers as you carve out your own unique path forward. Most importantly, David will inspire you to head out with your camera and play with the possibilities held by every intersection of light, space, and time that eventually becomes a photograph.

The result of all this? Freedom. Freedom to find new ways of wrestling with the challenges we all face when collaborating with the camera to make something that is truly our own. Freedom to embrace your fundamental creative nature, to overcome the fear of trying something new. Freedom to work as an artist more at ease with a process that's inherently messy. And freedom to make the kinds of photographs you've always wanted to create.

Table of Contents

01 The Mind of the Photographer

02 Light, Space, and Time

03 Interesting Perceptions

04 Repetition, Risk, and Reward

05 Reaction and Response

06 The Visual and the Visceral

07 Art and Artifice

08 The Seduction of Subject

09 The Freedom of Flow

10 We're All Missing Something

11 The Power and Possibility of Constraint

12 Comparison and Creativity

13 Beyond the Settings

14 In Praise of Luck

15 Talent or Time?

16 Ever Forward

17 Imposters and Improvisers

18 Over the Shoulders of Giants

19 Starts and Stops

20 Find Your Magic

As both an art form and a universal language, the photograph has an extraordinary ability to connect and communicate with others. But with over one trillion photos taken each year, why do so few of them truly connect? Why do so few of them grab our emotions or our imaginations? It is not because the images lack focus or proper exposure; with advances in technology, the camera does that so well these days. Photographer David duChemin believes the majority of our images fall short because they lack soul. And without soul, the images have no ability to resonate with others. They simply cannot connect with the viewer, or even--if we're being truthful--with ourselves.

In The Soul of the Camera: The Photographer's Place in Picture-Making, David explores what it means to make better photographs. Illustrated with a collection of beautiful black-and-white images, the book's essays address topics such as craft, mastery, vision, audience, discipline, story, and authenticity. The Soul of the Camera is a personal and deeply pragmatic book that quietly yet forcefully challenges the idea that our cameras, lenses, and settings are anything more than dumb and mute tools. It is the photographer, not the camera, that can and must learn to make better photographs--photographs that convey our vision, connect with others, and, at their core, contain our humanity. The Soul of the Camera helps us do that.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
The Place of Craft
The Discovery of Vision
Mindfulness of Language
A Willingness to Interpret
The Need for Openness
Patience
Capturing the Moment
Respect for the Creative Process
A Willingness to Surrender
Obedience to Curiosity
Improvisation
Abandon Perfection
The Search for Story
The Role of Audience
The Rejection of Comparisons
Authenticity
Critique
The Need for Love
Courage
The Rejection of Rules
A (Changing) Eye for Beauty
Discipline
After the Camera
The Pursuit of Mastery
Conclusion

Learn to ask better, more helpful questions of your work so that you can create stronger and more powerful photographs.

Photographers often look at an image--one they've either already created or are in the process of making--and ask themselves a simple question: Is this a good photograph? It's an understandable question, but it's really not very helpful. How are you supposed to answer that? What does good even mean? Is it the same for everyone?

What if you were equipped to ask better, more constructive questions of your work so that you could think more intentionally and creatively, and in doing so, bring more specific action and vision to the act of creating photographs? What if asking stronger questions allowed you to establish a more effective approach to your image-making? In The Heart of the Photograph: 100 Questions for Making Stronger, More Expressive Photographs, photographer and author David duChemin helps you learn to ask better questions of your work in order to craft more successful photographs--photographs that express and connect, photographs that are strong and, above all, photographs that are truly yours.

From the big-picture questions--What do I want this image to accomplish?--to the more detail-oriented questions that help you get there--What is the light doing? Where do the lines lead? What can I do about it?--David walks you through his thought process so that you can establish your own. Along the way, he discusses the building blocks from which compelling photographs are made, such as gesture, balance, scale, contrast, perspective, story, memory, symbolism, and much more. The Heart of the Photograph is not a theoretical book. It is a practical and useful book that equips you to think more intentionally as a photographer and empowers you to ask more helpful questions of you and your work, so that you can produce images that are not only better than good, but as powerful and authentic as you hope them to be.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Better Questions

PART ONE: A GOOD PHOTOGRAPH?
Is It Good?
The Audience's Good
The Photographer's Good

PART TWO: BETTER THAN GOOD
Better Subjects

PART THREE: BETTER EXPRESSION
Exploration and Expression
What Is the Light Doing?
What Does Colour Contribute?
What Role Do the Lines and Shapes Play?
What's Your Point of View?
What Is the Quality of the Moment?
Where Is the Story?
Where Is the Contrast?
What About Balance and Tension?
What Is the Energy?
How Can I Use Space and Scale?
Can I Go Deeper?
What About the Frame?
Do the Elements Repeat?
Harmony
Can I Exclude More?
Where Does the Eye Go?
How Does It Feel?
Where's the Mystery?
Remember When?
Can I Use Symbols?
Am I Being Too Literal?

PART FOUR: BETTER PHOTOGRAPHS
The Heart of the Photograph
Index

When Within the Frame was first published in 2009, it received high praise for both its practical teaching and its humanity. Ten years later, it is a best-selling modern classic and a must-read.

Author David duChemin's masterful and balanced emphasis on both the head and the heart--craft and technique on the one hand, passion and vision on the other--mirror the process of creating compelling, meaningful photographs that convey your vision. Filled with engaging photography, thought-provoking text, actionable takeaways, and creative exercises, the book's message continues to resonate strongly with readers across the globe.

Celebrating a decade since its original publication, this 10th Anniversary Edition of Within the Frame has been given a hardcover treatment and an updated, refined design, but retains everything that has made it so well received in over a dozen languages.

Whether you're encountering this classic for the first time or revisiting its universal themes, you'll find the book inspirational and instructional in its real-world wisdom and beautiful photography. David continues to encourage you to reach beyond the usual shortcuts and search for what matters to you, not giving up until you convey it through your photography: I'm chasing my vision, and you will chase yours in the places best suited to that. What's important is that you chase that vision intentionally and with passion, refusing to let it be anything but yours and yours alone.

Through a genuine and soulful discussion about creating photographs of people, places, cultures, and the discovery of a personal point of view that makes those stories compelling and authentic, David teaches how to seek and serve your creative vision through the art of photography. He shares the nuances of approaching different subjects, the value of scouting locations (and wandering in unfamiliar places), techniques for photographing landscapes, how to capture a sense of place and culture with sensitivity through images of food, festivals, art, faith, and more. Most importantly, David maintains the crucial theme of vision and helps you find, cultivate, and pursue your own--and then fit it within the frame.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Chapter 1: It's About Vision
• Chapter 2: Within the Frame
• Chapter 3: The Artist and the Geek
• Chapter 4: Storytelling
• Chapter 5: Photographing People
• Chapter 6: Photographing Places
• Chapter 7: Photographing Culture
• Final Thoughts

A Beautiful Anarchy is a vulnerable, honest, and insightful book about the human longing to create, whether you're creating a family, a business, a book, or a photograph. Your greatest creation can be an intentional life lived on your own terms. What is our life but a chance to make the greatest art of all?

If you already identify as a creative person, this book is an invitation to more intentionally explore your creative process. If you've ever said, But I'm not really creative, it's a call to exhume a part of yourself that desperately needs to get out and breathe.

This is an honest discussion about creativity and the obstacles that stand in your way on that journey. It's an invitation to consider the creative in all of us, and to recognize that your best work will always be done when you colour outside the lines and listen first to your own voice. Truly exceptional, authentic lives have never belonged to the talented or the fearless, but to those who find the courage to do their work, and to be themselves.

The creative life used to be the domain of the muses, those astonishing Greek Goddesses responsible for inspiration and creativity. If they showed up, our work in these areas would go well, ideas would flow, and creativity would abound. Lucky us. But what if they didn't?

The Problem with Muses, one of 28 essays on the creative life from which this book gets its name, is that we could wait forever for them to appear (there were only nine of them ), and most of us have work to do. This is only one of the challenges facing anyone longing for a life of everyday creativity. The Problem with Muses is a collection of transcripts from David duChemin's podcast, A Beautiful Anarchy, pulled together for the first time for those who prefer the written word.

Candid, wise, deeply human, and speaking from a lifetime (so far) of wrestling with the muses and a creative life that has taken him from professional comedian to humanitarian photographer to best-selling author and podcaster, duChemin speaks to the prevailing, and all-too-common challenges of the creative life, including doubts and fears, imposter's syndrome, the pursuit of authenticity, the inevitability of distractions, the urge to compare ourselves with others, feelings of directionlessness, the desire for relevance, and more. If you struggle with the creative life as much as you love it, you are not alone.

Praise for the Beautiful Anarchy podcast from which this book comes.

David's superpower is his ability to tap into the stifled, screaming recesses of our minds, those hidden places where we yearn and ache and thirst for 'something more'. His words are both sage and true, a gentle but necessary reminder, a soothing salve for the chafing of the world against our creatively-starved souls. amelie__t via Apple Podcasts

I am so happy to see David's words made even more accessible for creators of every walk of life. His words will speak to your soul and free you to embrace our humanity and move proudly towards creation Passitalong69 via Apple Podcasts

David is the philosopher poet extending his hand to you to join him in being human; in creating whatever it is you create. Although his medium is photography, his encouragment, insight, and warnings apply to every creator, that is, everyone. His style is so relatable, so real, so lacking in direction as in do this, do that and so full of enlightenment as in here is where you are, whether you realize it or not, and here is the path to a better you. If you recognize that you, being human, create something every day, and if you want to be more conscious of it and more deliberate in your making, you can find no better guide than David duChemin. Lance3495 via Apple Podcasts

David drills right into the hard questions and self doubts and gives strong and obtainable suggesting to move pass those road blocks in our creative lives. Razorbolt via Apple Podcasts

Wow Inspirational and dead on. David's choice of topics is just what I needed to hear. From The Impost Syndrome to Perfectionism. Suddenly I am not alone in my creative doubts and received sound advice for getting beyond them. MikeyL22 via Apple Podcasts

Simply having a certain camera or lens isn't going to make you a better photographer. So, what will? Understanding your camera. Thinking differently. Studying photographs and knowing what they provoke in you, and why. Giving the craft time to grow. Looking to painters, designers, and others who work in two dimensions and learning from them. Relentlessly looking for light, lines, and moments. Making photographs-thousands and thousands of photographs. There's no magic bullet to achieving success, but in these pages you will learn the value of studying, practice, and remembering that your most important assets as an artist are imagination, passion, patience, receptivity, curiosity, and a dogged refusal to follow the rules.

THE VISUAL TOOLBOX is photographer David duChemin's curriculum for learning not just how to use a camera-but how to make stronger photographs. He has developed 60 lessons, each one a stepping stone to becoming more proficient with the tools of this art, and the means to create deeper visual experiences with your images. David introduces you to the technical side of the craft but quickly moves on to composition, the creative process, and the principles that have always been responsible for making great photographs; he shows you these principles and invites you to play with them, turn them on their heads, and try a different approach to create beautiful, compelling images with your camera.

• Features action-oriented micro-chapters designed to improve your photography immediately
• Includes explanations of 60 concepts with an assignment for nearly every chapter
• Covers such topics as balance, using negative space, exploring color contrast, waiting for the moment, learning to incorporate mood and motion, and much more