Bill’s a poet, the author of sixteen nonfiction books, and he spent his career running the Institute for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, mostly by following photographers, artists, and scientists into places that break how humans normally process the world: Antarctica, the Atacama Desert, the Arctic. His claim is bigger than “photography is subjective.” It’s that a camera isn’t a window. It’s a prosthetic, something we bolt onto our own biology because our biology wasn’t built for this.

The brain throws almost everything away

Bill put a number on it: something like a hundred million bits of visual information hit your eyes every second, and your brain discards nearly all of it. You don’t see the world. You see whatever your evolved wiring decided was worth keeping, mostly whatever kept your ancestors from walking off a cliff or missing a predator. I learned about this stuff in graduate school but it was great to hear a writer articulate it so well.

Cresting a hill and looking into an unfamiliar valley triggers this without your permission. Your brain is already measuring distance, scanning for water, checking for shelter, before you’ve consciously registered anything. That’s the same mechanism running whether you’re on foot or driving a car into the valley, because the software is a few million years older than the vehicle. Bill calls this turning space into place: raw terrain filtered into something familiar, mostly before you’re aware it’s happening.

Where the filter breaks

In Antarctica or the Atacama, the usual cues stop working. Distance gets unreadable. Color stops meaning what it normally means. The shortcuts that work fine in a Nevada valley just fail, and you’re left disoriented in a way biology has no ready answer for. Most of us don’t actually recognize the disorientation.

That’s where Bill’s real idea shows up: cultural prostheses. Art, architecture, language, and photography are tools humans built specifically to fill the gap where perception runs out. A camera isn’t recording a place so much as constructing one, once your built-in shortcuts have nothing left to offer.

The witness story doesn’t hold up

Photographers like to describe themselves as witnesses, documenting what’s really there and letting the image speak for the place. I’ve said versions of this myself, plenty of times.

The prosthesis framing makes that harder to sit with, honestly. Every choice in a photograph, where you point the camera, when you click the shutter, what you crop out, is already downstream of your brain’s decision about what was worth noticing in the first place. You’re not passively witnessing anything. You’re building a version of the scene shaped by whatever your particular perceptual shortcuts happened to preserve.

Curiosity isn’t optional

If the camera is a prosthetic, the obvious question is: whose prosthetic, shaped by what? Bill’s answer is that the most interesting photographers aren’t the ones with the best gear. They’re the ones actively working against their own blind spots, reading outside photography, traveling with geologists or botanists, asking why a landscape got its shape instead of just pointing a lens at it.

He brought up an artist named Tristan Duke, who figured out that the brine left behind in dried desert pools contains the chemicals used to develop film, and separately built lenses out of glacial ice so a glacier could effectively photograph itself. That’s what happens when someone treats their own perceptual limits as the actual subject of the work, instead of something to route around.

What I’m doing with this

It’s changed a question I ask in the field. Instead of “did I capture what was there,” I’ve started asking what shortcut my brain took to decide this was worth photographing in the first place, and what I might be missing because of it.

That’s a harder question than it sounds, and most of the time I don’t have a good answer. But asking it consistently, rather than assuming I was seeing clearly, feels like the more interesting version of what I’m actually doing out there with a camera.

None of this makes photography less worth doing. If anything, it raises the stakes a little. You’re not just recording a place. You’re building one, out of whatever your particular blind spots let through, and the more honestly you can say that out loud, the more interesting the work tends to get.

So, what will you create with your prosthesis?

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Spend enough time around photographers and you’ll hear the same idea repeated: that mastery comes from developing your “vision,” from seeing what other people miss. There’s a quiet reverence built into that word, like photographers are wired differently from everyone else (I don’t really think we are).

My conversation with knocked that idea down for me. Her point: your brain isn’t built for beauty or meaning. It’s built for survival. It filters out almost everything by default, because noticing every color shift and shadow pattern all day would have gotten your ancestors eaten. You walk past most of the world every single day without registering it, not because you lack talent, but because your biology decided it wasn’t relevant.

So most of what gets called “capturing a moment” is really just capturing whatever slipped past your own filtering system. Photography, in Roxanne’s framing, isn’t about having a good eye. It’s about tricking your own attention into noticing things it was built to ignore.

Peripheral vision as a practice, not a metaphor

Roxanne says most of her strongest images start at the edges, in the blurry, ambiguous parts of a scene most photographers train themselves to ignore in favor of a sharp, centered subject. Our entire camera systems are built to lock focus and suppress exactly the kind of uncertainty she’s describing as valuable. Intentional camera movement, multiple exposures, working the edges of a frame instead of the center: these aren’t gimmicks. They’re a direct way of overriding a brain that’s decided most of what’s not in front of it doesn’t matter.

Shooting into the future, not the present

The idea Roxanne shared that stuck with me hardest was about time. By the moment your finger hits the shutter, you’ve already anticipated the image. The present you’re supposedly recording is already a few seconds behind you. If you’re chasing the same shot you’ve made before, you’re not capturing anything. You’re just repeating yourself from memory.

That reframes a photograph as an act of anticipation and curiosity rather than proof you were somewhere. Your best work isn’t evidence you saw more. It’s evidence you were willing to want more from your own looking. Think about that for a second!

Gear won’t fix any of this

Roxanne’s other point is one that more people really do need to hear directly: no lens or camera body will teach your brain to value the ambiguous or the in-between. Gear won’t make you a better photographer. It won’t make you more creative. That only comes from habit and humility. Ask most photographers about a strong image and they’ll recite the focal length and f-stop before they’ll tell you what they actually felt or noticed. The gear conversation is often a way of avoiding the harder one. Just saying!

A few things worth trying

• Let your eyes go soft entering a new scene, before your brain demands a sharp subject.

• Ask what a scene might become, not just what’s already there.

• Return to a familiar place and force yourself to notice what’s changed, including in you.

• Work the edges of the frame instead of defaulting to the center.

None of this is about rules or gear. It’s about noticing more than your brain thinks is worth the effort.

If this resonates, Roxanne writes regularly about ICM, multiple exposure, and creative photography on her own Substack: Roxanne Bouché Overton.

Talking with David Lloyd on my podcast, I kept circling back to something that’s never fully settled for me. What does it actually mean for a wildlife or nature photograph to be honest? Why is that so hard to pin down for most folks?

The Pull Towards Perfection in Photography

Every photographer knows the temptation. You’ve got a strong image, and there’s a distracting branch you could clone out, a sky you could swap out, a subject you could make pop, warping to make an object look more prominent. Just enough to stop the scroll on Instagram. Post-processing is powerful. You can blur, blend, warp, heal, and erase with enough precision that almost any photograph can be pushed toward whatever standard you’re chasing.

David is a wildlife photographer who has been honored by the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition SIX times. David’s position isn’t nostalgic. It’s built from real limits he’s held to for a long time, and rewards he’s received for showing constraint. He told me processing is half the work of a good photograph, right alongside composition and exposure. Where he draws the line is adding or removing elements in a way that changes what the scene actually was. He won’t crop past a certain point, roughly 80 percent of the frame, because past that you’re not editing a photograph anymore. You’re building a different one. Now, I personally don’t have that line for myself when it comes to cropping, but I totally understand why he’s chosen it.

It’s a harder standard than most people hold themselves to, and it costs something.

The easy path is always “I’ll fix it in post.” For some, once you’re on that path, you’re constantly redrawing your own border between enhancement and invention, and the border keeps moving in one direction.

Why Is This a Problem for Photography?

This isn’t really about a stray branch or a power line. It’s about what a photograph is claiming to be. If a leopard leaping from a tree is actually a composite, or if the light on your subject was invented in post, you’re not showing someone a moment anymore. You’re advertising your own skill as a digital editor, and you’re doing it under the pretense of documentation.

Photography isn’t a solo act. We calibrate each other’s sense of what’s real and what’s possible just by what we put in front of each other.

There’s an economics term for exactly this problem: the market for lemons. George Akerlof’s original example was used cars. Buyers can’t tell a good car from a lemon just by looking at it, so they only offer an average price. That average price is too low for the honest sellers with genuinely good cars, so those sellers leave the market, and what’s left skews toward lemons. The market doesn’t just tolerate bad product. It actively pushes out the good product, because nobody can afford to prove the difference.

Photography is running the same experiment and it’s why so many people are vocal about this subject. They see how it has transformed the value of photographs. When viewers can’t tell an honest capture from a composite or something generated by AI, they stop paying a premium for the honest one. Not because they don’t value it, but because they have no reliable way to identify it. The photographer who spent three mornings in a blind waiting for real light gets the same engagement, the same print sales, the same competition placement as the one who built the scene in Photoshop over a weekend. Eventually the incentive to be the person in the blind starts to disappear, and the market fills up with exactly what you’d expect: images that look real but aren’t, because that’s what pays the same and costs less.

That’s what devalues the actual skills that make a photograph good: patience, timing, field craft, the willingness to accept an imperfect frame because that’s what was actually there. Not because anyone stopped valuing those skills, but because the market lost the ability to tell who has them.

I’m not implying everyone is just going to quit making photographs. I’m surely not; however, you can see how this problem does force people to re-evaluate their motivations for making art (maybe that’s not a bad thing).

The Disclosure Problem

Here’s the part I’ve been arguing about for ages, and it was great to hear David share his views on it. Photographers will list their camera and lens for every image without a second thought. Almost nobody discloses how much of the image was built afterward. David called that closer to cowardice than caution, and I don’t think that’s too strong. If you’d hesitate to describe exactly what you did to an image, that hesitation is telling you something, and it’s telling your audience something.

There are several psychological concepts that map perfectly onto this phenomenon and how photographers react when these questions come up. Some readers may know I’ve got a strong interest in psychology and hold a Master’s Degree in it:

Cognitive dissonance (Leon Festinger). When someone’s actions conflict with their self-image (honest photographer, credible artist), they experience real psychological discomfort. There are only two ways to resolve that discomfort: change the behavior, or change the story around it. Getting defensive is often the second path in action. It’s easier to attack the question than to sit with the gap it’s pointing at.

Moral disengagement (Albert Bandura). This describes the specific mental moves people use to keep doing something while still seeing themselves as ethical. Things like minimizing the harm (”it’s just a sky replacement, who cares”), euphemistic labeling (”I’m not fabricating, I’m interpreting”), or shifting blame onto the person asking (”you’re just jealous” or “you’re gatekeeping art”). Anger at the question is often a symptom of this machinery running, not a reasoned response to an unfair accusation.

Identity-protective cognition (Dan Kahan). This is the piece that explains why the anger can be disproportionate to the actual stakes of the question. If someone has built a public identity, and a career, around being “the guy who gets it in camera,” a question about their editing isn’t experienced as a factual challenge. It’s experienced as an attack on who they are. People defend identity threats far more fiercely than they defend factual claims, which is why the reaction can look wildly out of proportion to a fairly mild question.

Hesitation is often the mark of someone whose internal compass is still working, even if they’re not proud of what it’s telling them. Anger and defensiveness, especially when the question itself was reasonable, more often mark someone who’s already resolved the dissonance in their own favor and experiences any reopening of that question as a threat.

None of this means composite or generative work is wrong or worse. It means it has to be labeled as what it is, not passed off as documentary record, especially when it is made to look documentary in nature. What actually damages the whole community is the refusal to say so. And yet photographers choose this path every single day. Why? See above.

AI Has Raised the Stakes

We’re now at the point where AI-generated wildlife images occasionally slip into competitions, and to an untrained eye, they’re indistinguishable from photographs. That’s a different problem than a heavy-handed edit. Once claims like “on location” or “in camera” stop being trustworthy at face value, the incentive to participate honestly starts to erode for everyone, not just the people cutting corners.

There’s an irony here I can’t quite look away from. Some of the loudest voices condemning AI-generated imagery built entire careers on composite work they presented as authentic captures: skies swapped in, subjects lifted from other photographs, entire scenes assembled and then sold as a moment that happened in front of a camera. Now an algorithm can produce the same result in seconds, without the years of Photoshop skill that used to make that kind of fabrication feel earned, and suddenly the fabrication is a crisis. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some satisfaction in watching that. If your objection to AI imagery is really an objection to fabricated photographs pretending to be real, that objection should have applied to your own composites the whole time. The only thing that’s changed is who’s doing the fabricating, and how much work it takes.

That’s not an argument against caring about AI. It’s an argument for being consistent about why you care. The standard has to be the same regardless of which tool did the fabricating, a laptop full of blending layers or a model trained on a few billion images. Otherwise the objection was never about honesty. It was about who got to keep the advantage.

David mentioned something hopeful here too: authenticity tends to come back into fashion once a field gets flooded with manufactured images. More photographers rediscover analog processes, or start accepting imperfection again, simply because the alternative stops feeling worth it.

Five Questions Worth Asking Ourselves

David’s framework left me with a short list I come back to when this topic raises it’s head:

• Would I be proud to describe exactly how I made this image, every step, in full detail? If not, why?

• What are my motivations for digitally changing the image or presenting it without any form of disclosure? Is it in service of art and creativity, or for external validation and personal gain? Moreover, what’s the difference if the work is presented as if it were straight-out-of-camera?

• Is what I’m sharing a record of what was actually there, or a version shaped by what I wished was there? If the latter, why?

• If everyone edited and presented photographs the way I do, would that be good for photography as a craft, long-term, or would it cause harm?

• Am I willing to accept the limits of what actually happened, or am I always chasing something just past the truth? Why?

Why Care About This Dead Horse?

The value in David’s approach isn’t purism for its own sake. It’s a kind of discipline that forces you to look harder and accept what’s actually in front of you, rather than what you wish were there. It makes you a better photographer. It strengthens your field craft. That’s not nostalgia. It’s respect for the subject and the work.

What makes a nature photograph matter isn’t newness or polish. It’s how honestly the world was seen and shown. The longer I do this, the more I think the best photographs are a kind of confession: an admission that reality is messier and less cinematic than we want, and a willingness to show it anyway.

Once trust in a photograph is gone, there’s nothing left to look at but noise. That’s worth protecting, even when nobody’s checking your work.

“Better has started to read as suspicious. Too clean. Too much like AI. Too much like Photoshop. Fake.”

I took a Campsnap with me on my backpacking trip this past weekend deep into the Weminuche Wilderness Area of Colorado, alongside my Sony A7R5 and my Tamron 25-200 and my Sigma 16-28. If you don’t know, a Campsnap is a tiny, ultra-lightweight point-and-shoot camera with a fixed lens and no settings to fuss with, basically a modern take on the disposable camera, built for people who want a more simple image-making process. Analog, old-school, vintage. Along the course of my backpacking trip, I captured twenty photos with the Campsnap (which I’d nicknamed Ghetto Cam), some of them the same scenes I was photographing with the Sony minutes later. The Campsnap was fun. Genuinely.

There’s something disarming about a camera that gives you no control and asks less of you while not allowing you to see the end result. NGL - it felt fun to whip it out, point at something I thought was cool, and hope for the best. It reminded me of my early days in photography, which was… refreshing! However, when I got home and looked at the results side by side, the honest answer was that the Campsnap photos were just worse. Not charmingly worse. Worse in the way that makes you reach for the delete key, if I’m being straight about it (although not being able to see the results until I got home was super cool).

That gap between how fun it was to shoot and how little the results actually held up is what got me thinking about a trend I’ve been watching for a while: photographers deliberately choosing worse tools, worse techniques, and worse results, and calling it authenticity. I’ve been seeing it everywhere I look, Reddit photography groups filled with poorly exposed, garishly edited snapshots that proclaim a grungier aesthetic. “Content creators” on Instagram with hundreds of images created in a vintaged, thrown-back look containing grain, blown highlights, crushed shadows, and awful color-casts. What’s going on?

The article that started this

My friend sent me a piece by called “The Death of the Ordinary Photograph.” His actual argument is worth separating from the trend I’m talking about, because they’re not quite the same thing. Justin’s point is that photographers have started hiding most of what they shoot because they’ve decided every image posted online needs to be a portfolio piece, a banger (god how I despise that term), something worthy of attention. His argument is that in the process, we’ve stopped treating photographs as personal records and started treating them as performances for people to scroll past at high speed (AMEN TO THIS, BROTHER). His answer isn’t to make worse photographs on purpose. It’s to stop being embarrassed by the ordinary ones we already make: the gas station, the friend who tagged along, the fishing spot you’ve been to a hundred times.

I agree with all of that completely. I don’t think anyone should be ashamed of a photograph just because it isn’t extraordinary or because it has technical flaws.

But there’s a separate trend riding alongside that idea, and it’s the one I actually want to dig into: the growing appetite for images that are “unpolished” on purpose, blown highlights, crushed shadows, blurry (and not in the purposeful sense), flat point-and-shoot color, not because the photographer couldn’t do better, but because doing better has started to read as suspicious. Too clean. Too much like AI. Too much like Photoshop. Fake.

What I told Ben before I even picked up the Campsnap

When Ben sent me the article, I wrote back something that’s kind of the whole concept behind me wanting to write this article:

“I’ve noticed something about this new trend of mundane photo making, which I’m all about for sure. It seems like it’s encouraging people to get super sloppy with image-making, like, huge flaws are fine. I can’t bring myself to go there. I still value the craft.”

I wrote that before I’d taken a single photo with the Campsnap. Having now actually lived inside that experience for a weekend, I don’t think I was wrong, in the sense that if I want to really make a compelling photograph, I want the best tools and techniques available to me. After comparing the results directly against images from a camera I’ve spent years learning to use well, I understand why. I care about the craft. If I can make a better photo, I want to. If I see a subject that genuinely fills me with joy that inspires me to lift the camera, I want to give that subject justice. I want it to look the best it can given the tools I have at my disposal.

Why the appeal is real

I’m not going to pretend I don’t understand the impulse. We’re at a point where AI-generated images and heavily processed photographs are genuinely hard to distinguish from photographs that came from a person who actually stood in front of a scene and captured it authentically. There are countless large Instagram accounts in the landscape photography space that have cashed in on duping people into thinking their photographs are what they actually experienced in real life. Surprise - a huge % of images you see online are totally make-believe - cooked up in Photoshop.

Juxtaposed to that environment, a blown-out, “unpolished” snapshot functions as a kind of proof: a human took this, imperfectly, in real time, and didn’t touch it afterward. No sky was swapped in, nothing was warped, nothing was removed or added that didn’t exist. That’s not a small thing. Trust in photographs is something I care about deeply, and if this style of image making has become shorthand for “this wasn’t manufactured,” I totally understand why people are reaching for it. (Plus, did I mention that it’s fun!?) It does take you back to the old days of photography, and I think that is pretty awesome.

Where it goes wrong

Here’s my actual problem with it. We spent decades building tools, knowledge, and skills, specifically to give ourselves more control over interpreting what’s in front of us: light, color, depth, timing, emotion, impact. We spent a lot of money on education, gear, and software to help us achieve our vision of the world. A camera like the Sony A7R5 exists because photographers wanted to see and record the world with more precision, not less. Choosing to abandon that precision on purpose, not as a stylistic choice suited to a particular subject, but as a blanket rejection of technical competence, isn’t returning to something more honest. It’s discarding the actual craft in exchange for a signal that reads as honest. Again, I’m not suggesting that these are the motivations of every photographer that deliberately embraces technical imperfection, I’m simply noticing a trend.

This is the part that reminds me of hipsterism, and I mean that plainly, not as an insult. I used to live in Portland, Oregon and I was surrounded by hipsters. Good, honest people that chose restaurants, clothes, and music not because it was good, but because it was not “mainstream.” Hipsterism was never really about vinyl records or film cameras being inherently better. It was about the visible rejection of anything that looked mainstream or easy, worn as a kind of identity. Deliberately bad photography risks becoming the same move: not a genuine preference for imperfection, but a costume that signals you’re not one of the people relying on Lightroom presets, Photoshop gimmicks, or Midjourney.

Isn’t this the same thing I argued for recently?

I wrote recently about how limitation liberates photographers, using my podcast guest’s decision to shoot locally, on infrared, with a stripped-down kit, as proof that constraint is where real work gets made. A sharp reader is going to notice that a Campsnap is also a constraint. No settings. No control. Forced simplicity. So why does one count as craft and the other as costume?

Here’s the difference as I actually see it. My podcast guest’s constraints served a body of work he built over years, deliberately, in service of a vision he kept refining. The constraint was a tool aimed at something. What I’m describing in this article is different: limitation as an endpoint in itself, picked up once, performed, and put down. It’s the difference between a discipline and a gesture. It’s the intent and motivation that feel different to me.

That same distinction is why I’m not arguing against the snapshot aesthetic broadly. Photographers like Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans built serious, lasting bodies of work that look careless at a glance, and nobody serious calls that work a costume. The reason is the same one from above: it wasn’t a single manufactured image meant to signal something. It was years of consistency, with a visual language built specifically to serve what they were trying to say. The imperfection wasn’t the point. It was the byproduct of an honest way of seeing, sustained over a long time. That’s the version of “unpolished” I have no argument with at all.

So, What IS the Fix?

If manufactured imperfection isn’t the answer, the fair question is: what is? I don’t think it’s a mystery, and I’ve actually spent years working on a version of it.

When Tim Parkin, Rajesh Jyothiswaran, Alex Nail, and I started the Natural Landscape Photography Awards, we were responding to the exact problem this trend is a reaction to: photographers couldn’t trust what they were looking at anymore, and everything was unbelievably epic. We didn’t solve that by asking for worse photographs. We solved it with verification and by putting a line in the sand as to what counts as representing authentic moments. Entrants whose images reach final judging submit their raw files, and judges check them against the finished image against a simple golden rule: the integrity of the subject has to be maintained. Heavily manipulated and composited work isn’t welcome, not because manipulation is inherently dishonest, but because the competition exists specifically for photographers who want their images checked against reality and are willing to be accountable for that.

That’s the actual fix, and it has nothing to do with how clean or messy the photograph looks. A technically flawless image that holds up against its own raw file solves the trust problem. A blown-out, poorly framed snapshot with nothing behind it to check solves nothing, it just swaps one kind of opacity for another that happens to look more sympathetic. Likewise, a fabulously composed photograph of a fascinating subject with some technical imperfections will almost always be better than one that is flawlessly executed but has no soul, no emotional impact.

Most importantly, I’m not claiming a technically rough photograph can’t matter more, can’t better convey an artistic idea, or can’t convey emotion than a technically clean one. It obviously can. What I’m objecting to is the idea that roughness itself is what makes it more honest. Those are two different claims, and the trend keeps collapsing them into one. What I think would be more useful is for photographers to be more honest with their audience about the work they create. Show the mess. Don’t be afraid to show your B-sides, the images that didn’t quite make the cut. Show the world who you are, even the messy bits. I also think this also means we need to be more judicious about who we choose to follow or find inspiration from. If we value authenticity in images, what evidence can we find to support that our favorite photographers actually are authentic? If authenticity isn’t something you value in photographs, then this probably doesn’t apply to you, and that’s fine too.

None of this means every photograph needs to be technically flawless, and it doesn’t mean the ordinary moments Justin’s writing about don’t matter. They do. Going backward for the sake of proving your photograph is more “raw” comes with significant drawbacks in my opinion. I’ll probably still bring the Campsnap next time. It’s fun, and fun isn’t nothing. I just won’t pretend the pictures it makes are better; they’re worse (in my opinion of course!)

I’ll admit the harder question is whether my own resistance to this is its own kind of limitation. I’ve spent two decades building precision into my photography practice, and it’s fair to ask whether that investment makes me structurally incapable of seeing what the “unpolished” image offers, the same way a lifelong specialist sometimes can’t see past their own training. I don’t think that’s what’s happening here; but, I’ve been wrong about my own blind spots before, and I’d rather name that possibility than pretend I’m arguing from some neutral place about the trend I’m describing. Lastly, I want to reiterate that I don’t want to “yuck anyone’s yum,” meaning, if you find that making “unpolished” images is fun, then go for it. Embrace the fun! Just don't call the result more honest than it is.

What’s your view on all of this? Am I just over-thinking the whole thing?

There’s a persistent idea in photography that finding your genre is the answer. Pick your subject, your editing style, your format, lock it in early, and you’ll ride a straight line to a sustainable career. I’ve believed some version of this myself, at different points, usually right after seeing someone else’s tightly curated portfolio and feeling like mine was a mess by comparison. Don’t get me wrong, this approach can work; however, I do think there other paths forward worth considering.

My conversation with Scott McDermott on episode 492 helped me to see how there might be other ways to think through this stuff. Scott has spent 25 years working across fashion, automotive, sports, celebrity portraiture, documentary film, and fine art, based out of New York. What he described was constant adaptation: picking up a technique in one genre, carrying it into another, dropping things that stopped working, and starting over more times than most people would admit to.

That’s the actual throughline, and it’s not specific to Scott or to me, or to photography, really. I think this can apply to any form of creativity. Talk to enough photographers who’ve stayed long enough to call it a career, landscape, portrait, commercial, documentary, whatever the label, and the same pattern shows up. Longevity doesn’t come from finding the one thing. It comes from two things: staying adaptable enough to keep working when the thing you were doing stops paying, stops interesting you, or stops existing; and, finding passion from within.

Skills Move Across Genres, Even When You Don’t Plan It

Scott mentioned something specific: a lighting technique he developed for portrait work, a ring flash producing hard, even light, eventually showed up in a still life project years later, applied for entirely different reasons. He didn’t set out to build a transferable skill. He just kept working, and the skill came along with him.

I see the same thing in my own work. Years of learning to read weather and light for mountain landscapes changed how I approach every other kind of photograph I take, portraits included, even though I never intended it as training for anything beyond the next peak. The specific subject changes. The eye you’ve trained doesn’t.

This matters because most advice aimed at photographers treats specialization as the whole game: pick a niche, stay in it, build a brand around it. That’s fine advice for marketing. It’s bad advice for a career meant to last decades, because it treats every skill as if it only applies to the genre where you learned it.

Commercial and Personal Work Aren’t Enemies

Scott’s Backline series, fine art photographs of road-worn instruments, started because he was backstage at a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert for a commercial assignment and got curious about the gear sitting around. The personal project didn’t happen instead of the commercial work. It happened because of it.

I’ve heard the opposite framed as a rule too often: that commercial work compromises the personal, that taking client money taints the art. In practice, the discipline commercial work demands, solving problems under a deadline, working with light you didn’t choose, delivering something specific to someone else’s brief, sharpens the instincts you bring to your own projects. And the personal work keeps your eye sharp enough that the commercial work doesn’t go stale.

Treating these as opposing forces is a good way to burn out on both.

Pivoting Isn’t Failure

The hardest part of Scott’s story to sit with honestly: he never had a plan B, and he also never had a fixed plan A. He moved from assisting other photographers across genres, to shooting sports and fitness, to celebrity portraiture, to fine art, adjusting each time circumstances changed rather than forcing one identity to hold.

Photographers tend to talk about this kind of pivoting like it’s an admission of failure. “I know my portfolio is unfocused.” “I know I shoot too many different things.” That anxiety usually isn’t evidence of a problem. It’s evidence of having outgrown whatever you were doing before, which is a normal thing for a career spanning decades to require.

What actually kills careers or our passion in photography isn’t an inconsistent portfolio. It’s stasis: refusing to adapt when the work that used to sustain you stops sustaining you. Self-awareness of these forces inside of us is what we should pay attention to while finding new sources of inspiration.

What This Means Practically

If you’re worried your work looks scattered across genres, or that you haven’t landed on “your thing” yet, here are a few things worth thinking about instead of chasing a tidier niche:

• Every skill you build in one genre is available to you in the next one. None of it is wasted (this goes beyond photography too!)

• Personal and commercial work can feed each other rather than compete, if you let them.

• A portfolio that looks inconsistent might just mean you’re still growing. That’s not the same as being unfocused.

• The photographers who last decades aren’t the ones who found the perfect specialty. They’re the ones who kept adapting or trying new things when the thing they were doing stopped working or feeding their passion.

None of this is a reason to avoid developing a voice, or to shoot everything indiscriminately just to prove a point. It’s a reason to stop treating specialization as the only path to a sustainable creative life, when the evidence, from Scott’s career and from most photographers who’ve stuck around long enough to know, points the other way.

Stay curious. Stay adaptable. That’s the actual throughline.

Almost nobody asks the better question: what if the endless pursuit of more, more gear, more exotic locations, more options, isn’t just a distraction? What if it’s the very thing strangling your creative growth? What if the path to original, honest work starts with imposing limits instead of trying to shatter them?

That’s the idea running through my conversation on F-Stop Collaborate and Listen with Mark Scheffer: limitation isn’t the enemy of creativity. It’s an invitation to it.

If there’s one thing I wish more photographers would sit with this week, it’s this: you won’t be able to make your best work until you stop believing more gear and more locations are what you need to get there.

How We Built Trap of More

The myth that “more” will solve our problems lives at the intersection of marketing, peer pressure, and our own insecurity. Real photographers, the story goes, go to epic locations, use expensive gear, and never stop upgrading. Social media reinforces this daily; the reward structure elevates algorithm-friendly images, epic sunsets, distant peaks, compositions we’ve all seen a thousand times.

On my podcast, Mark pointed out something worth sitting with: plenty of photographers who’ve reached those destinations, captured those shots, checked those boxes, feel a surprising emptiness once the thrill fades. The creative high dissipates fast, replaced by an itch for the next place, the next gear upgrade, the next trick to rekindle the spark.

We chase freedom, creative, financial, geographic, as if it’s one purchase or passport stamp away. But chasing all the options tends to shackle us to a cycle of dissatisfaction. This is all part of the vicious cycle that is the hedonic treadmill.

Why Fewer Choices Breed Better Photographs

Here’s the harder claim: limitation isn’t an obstacle, it’s the actual medium of progress in art. Remove choice and you’re forced to engage intent. Work within boundaries and you find depth where you used to see only restriction.

This isn’t wishful thinking or minimalism-as-performance. There’s solid psychological research showing that too much choice breeds paralysis and anxiety. In creative practice, limits become the ground style and voice are built on.

Ask any experienced photographer about their real breakthroughs, and you’ll often hear some version of this: “I left most of the gear at home. I got tired of missing the moment while swapping lenses. I kept returning to the same park down the street, not because it was epic, but because it was accessible. That’s when the real work started.”

In Mark’s case, strict boundaries, shooting locally, working in infrared black and white, favoring square crops, paring down equipment, produced a body of work that’s unmistakably his. Instead of endless temptation, there’s narrowing of focus. Instead of the chaos of possibility, there’s the clarity of necessity.

Practicing Under Constraint: Routine Over Romance

There’s another myth worth retiring: the worship of inspiration, the idea that artistry depends on a sudden flood of muse-blessed energy, that flow only arrives when the stars align. It’s a comfortable fantasy that lets us off the hook and allows us to blame external variables for our lack of progress.

The truth, as Mark put it, is that photographic progress depends on daily engagement with the work. Consistency breeds flow, not the reverse. Simple gear and subject matter close at hand make showing up easier, and practice accumulates. Over months and years, skill replaces luck, and style coheres, almost without you noticing.

This reframes our relationship with time itself. If you’re only waiting for the rare trip to a famous location, the muscle of seeing atrophies. If you’re willing to work with what’s in front of you, deep seeing can happen daily. The more your photography’s value depends on rarity, the more you’re forcing your own creativity into hibernation (and arguably, the more you’re depending on conditions and locations to dictate your photographic body of work).

The Fetish of Originality

Plenty of people bristle at constraint, worried it leads to cliché or stasis. Look at the endless parade of identical images from the same honeypot locations; hasn’t limitation led us there? Actually, the opposite is closer to true. The most formulaic images come from photographers who are tourists in their own process, following a script written by someone else, somewhere else, under more dramatic conditions.

Originality comes from introspection - honest, inner work that most of us avoid. It comes from leaning hard into what makes us tick and why we’re drawn to certain subjects that others aren’t. It also comes from embracing constraint, which can take on any number of forms from lens choices, focal lengths, places you visit, etc. When you can’t rely on a dozen lenses, when you’re not chasing the pull of iconic landscapes, you’re forced to look harder, compose more deliberately, and find stories that are unique to your way of seeing the world.

Ansel Adams is the obvious example. His landscapes often sat in celebrated places, but the work itself was forged through repetition, deep familiarity, and a narrowing toward what obsessed him. For every celebrated Yosemite print, there were hundreds of hours spent returning to the same bend in a river, composing with discipline and intent.

Sustainability, Burnout, and the Death of the Big Show

The landscape photography model built around epic journeys isn’t sustainable for most people: not financially, not emotionally, not environmentally. Social media and YouTube personalities keep selling the fantasy, but behind the curtain there’s a steady parade of burnout: talented photographers who simply vanish, no longer releasing new work, emptied out by the demand to keep outdoing themselves.

Is your practice built to last, or is it fueling a joyride on creative debt? The photographers who keep a lifetime connection to their craft are the ones who find renewal in the mundane, work with subject matter close to home or at familiar places they return to again and again, and turn practice into habit rather than a distant reward for special occasions.

A Practical Invitation: Start Small, Get Weird

Whatever you think is holding you back, money, location, gear, is probably less relevant than you imagine. The more deliberate the limitation, the more room you’ll find inside yourself to invent. Some ways to test that:

• Spend a month using only one lens, or shoot only in black and white.

• Limit yourself to photographing within walking distance of your front door.

• Pick a fixed aspect ratio as your default: square, 4:5, whatever, and see how your compositional instincts adapt.

• When you have an idea for a photograph, subtract something: an element, a tool, an expectation.

• Instead of planning the next big trip, plan to revisit the most boring, familiar local spot you can think of, over and over, until it gives up something strange or beautiful under your persistent attention. Point in case: I’ve been to Zabriske Point in Death Valley probably 20 times and every time I return I find something new that sparks something inside of me.

If you’re feeling blocked, you probably don’t need another expensive solution. You might need to close a few doors, on purpose.

Refusing the Illusion of Freedom

The hardest part to accept: believing more options will bring more creative satisfaction is a fantasy. In practice, every expansion of choice brings more friction, more indecision, more risk of drifting into borrowed, imitative seeing.

Real creative freedom is born from embracing what you already have, working at the edge of what’s available, and admitting honestly when the solution is subtraction rather than addition.

Constraint is where voice gets built. Discipline is what keeps it alive. A quiet image built on routine and limitation is a rebuke to the tyranny of the open horizon.

What will you let go of today, in order to actually see what’s in front of you? Maybe your best photographs are waiting on the other side of the next self-imposed boundary.

What Inspired This Article

Inspired by Episode 491

Spend any time in photography circles, online or otherwise, and you’ll be handed the same checklist for “success”: sharpen your technique, travel to the iconic places, imitate the pros, enter competitions, grow the audience, watch the likes stack up. The prescription repeats itself so often it starts to sound like gospel. Often this advice comes from a place with ulterior motives to sell gear, workshops, or recipes. Lame.

The message, spoken plainly or just implied, is that validation comes from outside you: a judge’s nod, a feature on someone else’s feed, the grudging approval of your peers, social media virality. Rarely are we asked to consider working from the inside out instead. “Voice” gets treated like a mystical destination, something you’ll stumble into eventually after enough external feedback, the way you might finally find your passport wedged behind the couch cushions.

It doesn’t work that way. Voice comes from years of hard (and FUN) work, and an honest look inwards.

Why We Get Stuck: The External Motivation Trap

If you’re reading this, you already know the pattern. You put in the work. You learn to expose, focus, and process correctly. The portfolio improves. You enter some competitions, maybe win a prize or two, get a small dopamine hit off a post that does better than expected. And then, somewhere in there, restlessness sets in. The images are polished, technically sound, and they sound exactly like everyone else’s. You’re still waiting for the next round of approval before you’ll trust your own read on what actually excites you. Obviously this isn’t everyone’s photography experience, but it sure was mine!

This rut is entirely predictable, and it’s been described by plenty of people who went from raw enthusiasm to technical competence and found emptiness waiting on the other side instead of satisfaction. Chasing external validation is like drinking saltwater: it never actually quenches anything, and it leaves you thirstier than before with no end in sight.

Calibrate your creative compass to photography competitions, camera clubs, or social feeds long enough, and you’ll get remarkably good at satisfying other people’s preferences while losing any real read on your own. And yes, I completely understand the irony of me including photography competitions in this as the co-founder of The Natural Landscape Photography Awards. As a quick aside, I think our approach to our competition is different and aims to strip away some of the things I’m mentioning here. I digress but welcome feedback as to how we can better do that.

The Illusion of the “Right Way”

Here’s the uncomfortable part: despite what countless YouTube personalities suggest, there is no universal “right way” to make a photograph correctly, and there is no single path to finding your voice. Most of us were raised on the same implicit story: photographic legitimacy comes from conformity. Buy the right gear, learn the checklist, learn the rules, show up to the well-known location, and produce the calibrated result that signals “I belong here.” Over time, this approach grows stale and leaves you wanting more. Trust me.

The real practice of finding a voice runs the opposite direction. It isn’t a destination someone else built and advertised to you; it’s what’s left over after you pay attention, for long enough, to what you actually keep coming back to. Ask most photographers why they shoot the same subject over and over, and you’ll get an embarrassed shrug: “I guess I just like it.” That’s usually the first honest sentence in a conversation that’s spent years tiptoeing around the truth.

Voice isn’t found. It’s noticed, the same way you’d notice a trail you’ve walked so many times you no longer need to look down. It requires internal work (yikes).

Internal Motivation: Noticing What’s Already There

The photographers whose work develops real distinction aren’t the ones who master technique and then leap forward into originality. They’re the ones paying attention to their own patterns of curiosity and obsession over a long period of time. There are no short-cuts here. Dead trees, urban lamplight, puddles, fog, whatever it is that pulls them in, often against the grain of what’s currently fashionable or scalable. Oftentimes, if others find it strange, you’re probably on to something cool! Lean in.

Your voice isn’t a brand strategy or an editing style. It’s not how you perfect composition or nail a fabulous moment of good light. It’s a record of where your attention naturally lingers when nobody’s grading you on it. It’s a reminder of who YOU are as the photographer.

Go back through your own images. What subjects, palettes, moods, or forms keep showing up, even when you weren’t trying to make them show up? That’s the thread worth pulling, even if nobody else sees the point yet. Go deep.

A More Grounded Approach to Image-Making

If you want to build voice instead of just volume, or if you are finding your current approach to making images leaving you wanting more, a few practical habits might help:

Curate your inputs. Stop tracking what everyone else is doing. Mute, unfollow, or step back from the constant stream for a while. The less visual noise in your daily diet, the easier it is to hear your own thinking. Limit your time on social media and if you choose to stay engaged, make a concerted effort to curate your feeds so that only your favorite photographers and creators show up.

Make images before you consume them. If the first thing you do before a shoot is search “best shots” of the location, you’ve already turned the day into a scavenger hunt instead of a creative process. I purposely don’t look at photographs from places I’m going to visit in the future because I don’t want to try to emulate those scenes. I want to explore the place with my own two eyes and find ways to interpret them myself. I recognize this is an uncomfortable practice for some personality types, but I promise it will lead to more fulfilling and unique images.

Slow down the feedback loop. Share less, and slower. Let images sit before they go out into the world. Resist the urge to post multiple times a day on social media. Revisit your images once the initial excitement has worn off, and only publish what still holds up to honest scrutinty.

Start critique with intention, not outcome. Before judging your own work or seeking feedback from others, ask what you were actually trying to convey or notice. What did you want the photograph to do? Only after this should you check whether the image pulls it off. Skip that first step and you’re just chasing approval by another name.

Get comfortable with boredom. Presence isn’t a reward, it’s a skill, and one you build the same way you build fitness for a long approach: by doing the unglamorous part repeatedly until it stops feeling unglamorous. Tedium and stillness are the substrate, not an obstacle to it. Embracing this allows you to spend quality time at a place or with a subject. Get to know it. Understand how light transforms it. Become it’s friend.

Write it down. Note what actually makes you reach for the camera, and revisit those notes later. The things that keep repeating are worth taking seriously, not dismissing as too small or too strange. Take the time to go through your images and ask yourself if it still reflects where you want your work to go, or what you want it to say about you as a photographer.

Be willing to alienate people. If your strongest work confuses or even repels the mainstream, you may be closer to your own voice than you think. Approval feels good. Authenticity feeds you longer.

On Validation

None of this means external validation is inherently bad. We’re social animals, and acknowledgment feels good, sometimes it’s even necessary. I love it when people say nice things about my photographs. That’s normal. The real risk here is losing track of your own motivation because you went chasing validation before figuring out what you actually wanted to say.

Validation is an ingredient in your artistic meal plan. It's fine seasoning, and a meal without any of it tends to taste a little flat. But an ingredient is not the meal, and if you build the whole dish around it, you'll end up with a plate of nothing but salt. The photographers who last are the ones who already know what they're trying to say before the feedback ever arrives. This takes time, inward reflection, and an honest evaluation of what your relationship with photography is about. The praise might confirm it, sharpen it, or occasionally correct it. What it can't do is generate it for you.

A Few Questions Worth Sitting With

Before your next photography outing, or your next self-critique, try these:

• What subject keeps showing up in my images, even when I’m not thinking about it?

• Am I making this picture because I’m drawn to it, or because I expect someone else to approve of it?

• If I knew I’d never share another image publicly, what would I go photograph tomorrow?

• What old praise or old criticism am I still dragging into my process?

You might not love your honest answers. That usually means you’re getting somewhere.

Final Thought

Your voice isn’t waiting at the next trending location or the latest technique making the rounds online. It’s already present in whatever you keep obsessing over, the corners of your attention you’re slightly embarrassed to admit hold you. Validation isn’t the enemy, but it isn’t home either.

Look inward, slow down, and let your own seeing lead the process. The right way is whichever one keeps you honest, present, and hungry to come back. Everything else follows from that.

If you enjoyed this article, you can go right to the source of what inspired it.

I’ve never had a place to put those thoughts down. This is going to be that place.

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Who I am, briefly

I’m a full-time nature photographer based in Durango, Colorado. I lead workshops through Muench Workshops, co-founded the Natural Landscape Photography Awards and Nature First, and climbed Colorado’s highest peaks over the better part of three decades, which is also where most of my photography comes from. I finished a 500-mile hike of the Colorado Trail in 2023 and turned that into a book, The Colorado Way, which blends the trail with a background that helps inform both my podcast interviews and my photography: a master’s degree in clinical psychology.

That combination is probably why podcast conversations stick with me the way they do.

What this actually is

This is not a portfolio site, although I’ll be sharing my photography of course! It’s not a print shop, although if someone wants a print, I’d be elated! It is just a place to write about the ideas that conversations with guests spark, things about craft, discipline, failure, and why any of us keep doing this. If you’re here for the podcast, this is the overflow. If you’re here for the photography, this is the thinking behind it.

What to expect

I plan to post the things that caught my attention, the things I think other photographers should be thinking about — all inspired from the latest podcast episode. The cadence of these (ideally) will be when I release the episode early on Patreon, often 30-60 days in advance of public release. By supporting me here, you automatically are granted access to those early releases, so think of this Substack as a teaser as well.

One ask

If you subscribe, reply and tell me what got you here. I read all of it, and it’s the fastest way for me to know whether any of this is actually useful to you.