Almost Everything with Jeffery Saddoris

Last week, we recorded the last episode of On Taking Pictures. If you’re a longtime listener, you may think you’ve heard this before, and you’re right, you have. But this time it’s different. I’ll get to why in a minute, but first I need to back up. 

In 2008, I was teaching Photoshop at Tri-Community Photo in Covina, California. One of the other instructors and I started doing photo walks with some of the students on the weekends...

The artist Richard Serra died recently, and I know he’s considered a big deal in the art world, but honestly I’ve never really gotten what all the hype is about. I suppose I can appreciate the scale and the forms of some of the work in the same way that I can appreciate the architecture of Frank Gehry, but overall, it just never really grabbed me...

After recording last week’s episode of On Taking Pictures, Bill sent me a link to a video that’s both fascinating and deeply disturbing, called “AI vs Artists: The Biggest Art Heist in History.” The video presents some of the grim facts around how images, including the 5.85 billion uncurated images in the LAION-5B dataset, are being illegally scraped and used to generate derivative work...

About a week ago, I jumped back into using Photoshop for the first time since 2018 and I’ve got to tell you, it was kind of like putting on a favorite pair of jeans. Yes, the interface has changed a little and a bunch of terrific new tools have been added—especially Object Select, which I’ll come back to in a minute...

I started this Iteration on February 29th—Leap Day—and for me it was a good day, which, frankly, I really needed. In the last Iteration, I talked about how difficult 2023 was for me and in the week or so since I shared it a lot has happened. Probably the biggest thing is that I’ve started going to therapy...

I’m not going to bury the lede—2023 was not a great year for me, especially financially. In fact, I think it was one of the worst years I’ve had since I became a solo creative, and for the most part, it was nobody’s fault but mine. One of my favorite movies is High Fidelity (get the book here) and in it, there’s a scene where Rob (played by John Cusack) is going through a particularly frustrating time and says, “I’m sick of the sight of this place...

Today is February 5th and it would have been my dad’s 83rd birthday. I normally mark the day by posting a simple message like “I miss you, Dad” on Instagram or Twitter, when Twitter was still a thing and I was still on it. Today, I want to do something a little different and tell you a story. My dad could be tough and for a big part of my adolescent life, we butted heads. A lot. At one point, it got pretty bad and we actually didn’t talk for a while...

A couple weeks ago, I finally bought a set of wireless mics. I had been wanting and maybe even needing a set for a long time as a way to record the random conversations I seem to have with people out in the world on any given day. I’d been looking at them for a while, but I saw a review that Curtis Judd did—who was one of my favorite audio YouTubers—and I thought, “I'm just gonna get these. They'll be fine...

If you’ve spent any time around me at all, you know that I have opinions—lots of them—and I have since I was a kid. Sometimes when I would offer my unsolicited thoughts on various things, my mom would respond with “Oh, there he is…my little critic.” The thing is it’s not just criticism. Not always, anyway...

Well here we are again, nearing the end of one more trip around the sun and I for one cannot wait for it to be over. Christmas used to be my favorite time of year, but that was really because of my mom. She would start decorating the house around Thanksgiving, and when I say decorating, I don’t just mean putting up lights—our house looked and smelled like a Hallmark store. Yes, there were lights, but she also had all sorts of ornaments, figurines, and little holiday town squares and villages...