In my first book, Within The Frame , before all of this blew up and I became a writer (and just how exactly did that happen, anyway?) I wrote that “there was no Un-Suck filter in our photography” and since I didn’t get a flood of emails asking me what on God’s green earth I was talking about, I assumed people knew what I meant. That it’s easy to take photographs that suck, and to make many of them, and that there was no filter you could put on the camera or apply in Photoshop that would absent the suck from the image once it was there.
I still believe there is no Un-Suck filter, and there’s little to be gained by polishing our turds in post-production when we’ve mucked things up in-camera.
But in the years since I’ve found a set of my own (please forgive this horrible play on words) Un- Stuck filters. They are the techniques to which I return when I’m stuck. When I’m standing there looking at the scene in front of me and can’t for the life of me figure out where to start, how to make my first sketch images a little less, well, sucky, or how to get myself un-stuck.
