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CJ Chilvers

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What You Can Learn from John Free's "3 Things"

I post this John Free video mostly to show how working, experienced photographers look at their own work. It's not the way art collectors or most art critics look the work. There's little about darkroom or camera technique here. It's all about recalling the

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Sharing Family Photos

I spent the long weekend making lots of family photos and struggling to find the proper place to post them. It reminded me of a recent post by Dave Lawrence [http://davelawrence.photo/on-sharing-family-photos/]: > "I look at other photographers’ family work, and lately it’s some of the

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The Biggest Lies You've Been Told About Photography

Earlier this week, I asked my readers to tell me about the biggest lies they've been told about photography. The responses included a lot of unexpected lies and some I'd never heard before. Feel free to keep adding to the stories and tell me about the

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Start Something Small to Build Something Great

I wrote yesterday [https://www.cjchilvers.com/why-i-wont-sell-my-books-on-amazon/] about my first real product: a well-designed hardcover book I carefully created over years and nurtured through the entire production and distribution process. It was a huge project. If I had it to do over, I would've started much smaller

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Why I Won't Sell My Books on Amazon

You can still find my books on Amazon, but it's not because I want them there. For Kindle books, it may be a necessity, but for all other formats (and especially for indie physical books), Amazon has proven to be a horrible experience for both the publisher and

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What Are the Biggest Lies You've Been Told about Photography?

Just curious. Let me know yours [https://iteratehq.com/cj-chilvers/57c5957472eb0e000100009d], I'll share mine and we'll all revisit them at the end of the week.

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The Importance of Leisure

We need a different relationship with leisure in our minds. It may be the best investment we can make. I refer over and over to this article by Maria Popova: Leisure, The Basis of Culture [https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/10/leisure-the-basis-of-culture-josef-pieper/?mc_cid=c738efb0b7&mc_eid=d012da5742]

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You Shouldn't Need to Be Forced to Respect Your Reader

This past week Google decided pop-up ads and newsletter sign-up forms are such a bad experience, they will penalize sites still using them starting in 2017 [https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-content-on.html] . I've been running newsletters since the 90s. I know they're bad for

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"Everything is a Link"

> "Everything is a link." - Andy Adams [https://twitter.com/FlakPhoto/status/730024625011183616] Every idea comes from somewhere. None of this is original. Embracing the link means rejecting the ego [http://amzn.to/2bzWxFI] and respecting the reader. It means making connections between ideas and helping people

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What Do You Have to Lose?

I was a guest on Andrew Hellmich's wonderful Photo Xperiment podcast [http://photobizx.com/photo-xperiment-episode-links/] last night (to be released next month). I was on an episode of his PhotoBizXposed podcast [http://photobizx.com/Focus+Less+on+Gear+Create+Images+that+Matter+CJ+Chilvers] last year as well.