When I first started making photographs on my iPhone, I found it incredibly liberating. I didn’t take my images very seriously and that gave me the freedom to play and try new things. In fact, for a number of years, I deliberately used the camera phone as a way to exercise my creative vision, posting three images of a single scene, theme, or idea on Instagram on an (almost) daily basis.
In remembrance of Winston Hendrickson, vice president of digital imaging at Adobe.
Over the holiday break, I happened to be looking through my journal, thinking about the goals and objectives that I want to achieve this year when I came across this note that I had taken in a seminar with Jay Maisel: “If you want to make more interesting pictures, become a more interesting person.”
One could say that my Window Seat book (and ongoing aerial projects) are a byproduct of my position at Adobe. As an evangelist, I spend a great deal of time on airplanes and shooting photographs allows me to stay sane during those long flights.
For the past 7 years, I’ve created a slideshow as a simple way to review the images I’ve posted using Lightroom mobile to my Instagram account (instagram.com/jkost/). I find this yearly exercise yields interesting insights about where I am in my life and allows me to reflect upon the places that I’ve gone and the experiences that I’ve had.
I had time over the weekend to sit down and retouch some images from Tasmania and thought it might be interesting to write up a quick overview of the workflow. In a nutshell, the majority of edits were done in Lightroom Classic CC with a bit of retouching done in Photoshop CC. On the left are the original raw captures, the final images on the right.
I had the opportunity to visit Tasmania last month and spent the last weekend creating an Adobe Spark Page.
I really appreciate how easy it is to create a collection of photographs in Lightroom, sync it across my mobile devices, and use a beautifully designed Spark theme (template) to tell my story.
I found myself in Singapore last week with an afternoon free to make photographs. It’s a beautiful city, and I was staying near the Marina Bay – an area filled with modern architecture. Although this isn’t my typical subject matter, I decided to follow my own advice and give myself an assignment to photograph the surrounding buildings.
I’m super excited to announce that my aerial photography is being featured on CNN travel today: “Beauty of the Everyday – Photos of Earth from a Window Seat”. : )
One of my favorite things to do it make photographs of things that are invisible to the naked eye. Whether it’s capturing a split-second, or compressing multiple seconds into a single photograph, the camera can help us to see what, under normal circumstances, we can not observe.
Project creep gets me every time.
1) I broke a pot that had a succulent in it.
2) I went to the nursery to replace the pot.
3) I ended up buying 12 more succulents (I mean seriously, how do you decide on just one, when they’re all so unique!)
I often hear people complain that photographers with digital cameras tend to overshoot their subjects. While that might be true if you’re taking fifty image of the same subject without changing anything, I’ve always been one to make a lot of photographs, and make them often.
I have finally embraced the fact that I’m an introvert. Not only do I like spending time alone, I need to spend time alone. If you surround me with people day after day, eventually, I will run out of “nice”. I enjoy nature. And silence. Put the two together and that’s when I do my best creative work. So, when I had the opportunity to spend an afternoon driving through a national park by myself, I packed my camera gear, jumped in the car, and off I went.
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to take a day trip around the Salton Sea area in California. Knowing that I would only have a single afternoon to photograph, my goal was to return with 8-10 images that would work together to convey not only what I saw, but what I felt as I drove through the area.