Tsparks asked: “Do you still photograph the party...

Tsparks asked:

“Do you still photograph the party scene for media outlets (sites or magazines)? Would you ever share your secrets for taking great event photos?”

I don’t — I pretty much stopped doing it two years ago, for reasons mentioned earlier, posted a bitchy goodbye on my nightlife site, and burned a few bridges just to make sure I’m not too tempted to go back to it.

As for sharing secrets, yeah, gladly: here’s a post on Flickr that started as a discussion of my nightlife technique — my reply is about midway through, and it covers just about every technical aspect of my nightlife photography. There’s really not that much to it!

But what’s much more important than how is what. American Suburb X has an interview with Jürgen Teller up today, and he touches on this quite a bit:

“You have to know why you want to take a picture in the first place. And that’s a hell of a difficult question. If you don’t know, don’t start. There needs to always be a reason why you take a picture in the first place. You have to think very hard before you want to take a photograph. At certain moments, if you are insecure, then it becomes exciting. You don’t know where it’s going. That’s the interesting bit. You have to push yourself where it’s unsafe. It’s very exciting.”

Ask me anything.