I want to start with four photographers whose work astounds me, not just with what that work contains, but because of the sense of humanity their images carry. And that drives me to do better, to try to come closer to what they are doing. You won’t find any of their images here, not because I fear the copyright police, but because I want you to go look.

In no particular order:

Tatiana Cardeal

On her web site, Tatiana calls herself a “photographer, visual artist and a dreamer.” She has shot around the world, and produced a body of work that is rich in detail, colour and meaning. I can spend hours exploring the images at her site.

From her About page: “Tatiana’s photography is in search of a visual language to enhance human development, a photography that seeks the humanity existing through different socio-cultural identities, with emphasis on inequality, human rights and environment.”

For me, the key words are “a photography that seeks the humanity.” As well as being wonderful images, her light-drenched, rich photographs, in the tradition of countryman Sebastião Salgado, she allows the dignity of those she photographs to shine through, an idea and approach that resonates.

John Lehmann

John is a Vancouver-based visual journalist for the Globe & Mail. He’s spoken to a couple of my classes and I’ve had a beer or two with him, but even if I’d never met him, I’d still consider him an inspiration.

There are a number of galleries at his website (which, unfortunately opens with some autoplay music). I’d suggest you start with People to see a photojournalist at the top of his powers. (Go look; I’ll still be here if you come back.)

What inspires me are two different aspects of his work: closeness and space. He works close, close, close to subjects, sometimes brutally close, by which I mean the reality is sometimes brutal and unflinching; and he works, too, with photographs that use space as an element that invites a long exploration of the stories he is telling.

Take a look, too, at 2011 in focus: Best B.C. photos of the year at the Globe & Mail site, which features nine of John’s photos from last year and his stories that go with them.

Melissa Lyttle

Melissa is a photojournalist who toils for print and online for the Tampa Bay Times (which was the St. Petersburg Times until yesterday). Her portfolio is rich with images that get inside the lives of her subjects.

A lot of her work is black and white, in the fine tradition of documentary storytelling, but look at her images from Haiti and Mexico: her use of colour ranks, for me, with the likes of William Albert Allard. Her vision is clear and sharp.

In her work, I see someone paying full attention to the story she is telling. Her long-form documentary work is as real as life gets.

We’ve never met, but we’ve exchanged occasional e-mails and tweets and, this semester, she sent me a detailed e-mail on her approach to storytelling after I used her piece Motel Families in a storytelling class I taught. Through her blog, The Life of M, and her work with A Photo a Day, she shares constantly, and promotes the discovery of other photographers. (By the way, “He discovered and shared,” would not be a bad inscription for a gravestone.)

Mihailo Radičevič

I’ve only recently come across the work of Mihailo Radičevič, on Google+, which, I’ve discovered is chock-a-block with great photographers. Mihailo, who calls himself an holistic photographer, shoots in Serbia. And, man, does he shoot.

Take a look at any of his galleries. I like his Nature and Bricks and Portals collections, which are wonderful explorations of shape, space, mood and tone, images worth exploring in depth.

I find four of the galleries special: Faces 1 & 2 and Street 1 & 2. All of these images bubble with life. Some feature humour, some speak of pride, all speak of the everyday. And, again, they treat subject and viewer with honour and respect.

That’s inspirational: to take on daily life in a straight-forward way that rises to the level of art through respect.

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I could go on: there are dozen of people who inspire me and push me every time I pick up a camera. And then there are the writers…

More, as they say, later.

Robson Square skating rink

Over the past year, I’ve aimed to shoot a good photo a day. I’ve missed five or so along the way for a variety of reasons – illness, too many other demands, laziness – and the photos have not always been good, but many are.

I’ve shot with two different iPhones, three different Canons and, most recently, an Olympus. There have been phases: exploring the effects of Hipstamatic and other iPhone apps, for instances, or shooting exclusively with a very wide angle lens. My camera has been to concerts and other events, but mostly it’s been on the streets, capturing people, architecture, signs, abstracts and whatever else caught my eye.

Shooting every day has been an incredibly good, and relatively painless, way to learn how my various cameras really work (and how digital photography really works). Exploring each of them has made all those dials and menus more or less fade into the background – most of the time, but not always –, so that I can concentrate on making the image.

It’s also been an adventure in seeing. Not just looking, but seeing what’s there. (This is the argument I have with those who mutter, “Put the camera down and pay attention to real life.” This is how I pay attention to real life.) I’ve come to enjoy walking around seeing juxtapositions, patterns, colours, people, scenes. Some days, it seems as though the pictures are presenting themselves. All I have to do is snap.

There are pictures I’ve missed, sometimes because I wasn’t ready when I should have been. And sometimes it was because my ability to shoot from the hip needs a lot of work, and I still quail at the idea of staring down a stranger through a camera lens. I’ve learned that about myself.

I don’t know if I’m a better photographer than I was at the start of the year, although the act of seeing and snapping over and over again, day after day, suggests I may be. Practice rarely makes perfect, but it does make better.

I don’t have the artistic vision of a Richard Koci Hernandez, whose challenge to photographers everywhere was the inspiration for my 2011 vision quest. But shooting every day has been inspiring, challenging and, above all, fun. As an exercise in creating, I highly recommend it.

Final note: My photos from the past year – not all of them, but the chosen many – are online at my Tumblr blog. There are 490 of them so far.

First impressions are that while it appears to record nice audio, it’s a bit of a hassle to use and the included “manual” isn’t helpful. It didn’t, for instance, make any reference to the downloadable Tascam app.

I had to remove the case from my iPhone 4S in order to seat the mic. The phone needed to be in Airplane mode before it would record and, because I didn’t change my settings, the iPhone kept going to sleep in mid-recording. I was able to monitor the recording through earbuds, but not Apple’s earbuds which have a built-in mic.

Recording with the Tascam app was easy: press the record button once and set the levels and then once more to start the recording. Files were automatically saved.

Once the recordings were done, the only option under sharing in the Tascam app was to send the files to Soundcloud; I had to plug the iPhone in to my laptop and download the audio files to get them into an editor. I was, however, able to record directly into Monle, an audio-editing app on the phone, and then use a wireless connection to download that file.

The audio quality of the recordings is good, although there were differences in the volume of all three files I recorded (embedded below): the first one was relatively quiet, the second started much louder and distorted, and the third, recorded with Monle, was the the quietest of all. As much as anything, that may have been a problem of my mic technique. Handling noise was a problem, as it is with all handhelds.

The only changes I’ve made to these files was to open them in Amadeus Pro and normalize them. The first two, recorded in the Tascam app, were normalized to 0db; the third was normalized to -3db, because the 0db setting caused it to clip. (Warning: there are volume differences in the three: there first is very quiet and there is some distortion at the start of the second.) One note about the files: the low level hum at the start of the third clip is from the hot air duct that was about three feet away and that started pumping air when I started recording.
First test

Download audio file ()

Download audio file ()

Download audio file ()

Final thoughts: The iM2 is something I’ll throw into my bag for spur-of-the-moment use. If I set out to do serious audio recording, I’ll pack my Zoom H4. Given the set-up hassles, I’m not sure I would recommend it, especially for students. For about the same price, you can pick up a fairly capable low-end Olympus digital recorder which, while it doesn’t produce quite the quality of the iM2, does well enough with a little massaging in an audio editing program.

Product link: Tascam website; details on the Tascam app.

Find inspiration: There are many people, blogs and tweet streams I follow for the inspiration they provide. Brainpickings, by Maria Popova, is one. Richard Koci Hernandez is another, and I love Melissa Lyttle’s life of m. Find your own sources: websites with RSS feed, on Twitter, Google+, Tumblr or Facebook. Visit often. Have fun.

Write every day: Blog. Tweet. Play (write bad metaphors). Write a scene, a description, a snatch of dialogue. Write a poem or a song. Set a goal and hit it. Write it, read it, make it better. Have fun.

Read every day: Read critically, for style, for content, for structure, for use of quotes and dialogue, for language, for rhythm. Save the pieces you really like so you can go back to them. Have fun.

Take a photograph a day: Not just a snapshot, something that gets you more familiar with your camera and your image-making. Push yourself. Try low light, flash, silhouettes, more. Set a goal or a challenge before you head out. Have fun.

Once a week: Take your digital recorder out and record the world: snatches of conversation, sounds of the street, a merchant at a farmer’s market, anything. Learn how your recorder works best, learn about isolating sound, learn about handling. Have fun.

Once a month: Interview someone (friend, family, neighbourhood grocer, etc.). Have a subject and a goal so it’s a real interview aimed at getting real information. Record it and then transcribe it. What worked? What didn’t? What questions could/should you have asked? Which type of questions garnered the best responses? How was the flow? Have fun.

Once a month: Shoot some video. Work on gathering scenes that will work together. Work close, work medium, work far. Pick a topic — harbour ferries, Yaletown dogs, a day at the beach — and shoot to tell a coherent story. Have fun.

Publish often: Get your stuff out where people can see it and, more importantly, react to it. Promote yourself on social media to get feedback. Listen to and weigh the feedback. Don’t publish everything: be tough on yourself and only publish what you consider the best, or the stuff that’s giving you problems. Give yourself deadlines and practice hitting them. Have fun.

Now it’s almost 2012 and time for a new challenge. I’d like to get back to storytelling and make it my year for journalism.

Among the projects I’d like to tackle in 2012:

• A long-form audio piece, something I’ve wanted to do since the early ’80s and never had the chance to.
• A longish (5-8 minute) video doc. Up until now I’ve played with video; it’s time to do something serious.
• At least one piece of long-form narrative journalism.
• A serious photo-essay, possibly self-published as an iPad “book.”

All of this will take work and energy and, as I repeatedly tell my students, journalism is a young person’s game. I’m out, in part, to prove myself wrong.

Posting this is a way of handing myself a to-do note. Putting out in public may produce the occasional so-how’s-it-going comment during the year to further goad me along.