One Unintentional Benefit of the Magazine Mindset

An unintentional benefit of the magazine mindset.

The most powerful mindset in street photography.

No, I just made that up.

It is powerful for me, though.

So every time I go out and I do this, and then I click the shutter, I have a goal of putting one of those photos in the magazine.

Yo, keep spraying that water.

Just the water here.

So every time I go out, I want to put one of my photos in the magazine, right?

And I follow this simple rule. It’s called the 100-5-1 rule. I made it up.

Actually, ChatGPT helped me make it up, but who cares?

The 100-5-1 rule.

For every 100 photos I take, I keep 5% and I publish one.

So I delete the vast majority of my photos. I’ll never see them again.

Basically, one out of every 100 photos I take, I’m in the mindset that I’m going to put one of those in the magazine.

Right now, the 5% rule is pretty accurate. The 1% is not as accurate.

I would say it’s more like half a percent or even a quarter of a percent that I put in the magazine.

If I shoot 500 photos a day, I might only put two photos in the magazine, which is fine by me because I take 500 photos a day.

So I can do a full spread every single day, which is awesome.

All right, so what is the unintentional benefit of the magazine mindset?

It’s this:

I never want to share my work online again, ever, because nothing compares to the magazine experience.

I’m using an 8.5-by-11 Blurb magazine. Super high quality.

The tactile feeling of the magazine is just so nice.

And if you’re just putting your images vertically on one page, that’s an 8.5-by-11 photo.

That’s a big-ass photo.

If that’s on the wall, that’s a big photo on the wall, right?

But if I’m doing a full bleed on both pages, what is that?

17 by 11.

Full bleed, both pages, horizontal photo.

That is a massive photo.

If you were just going to go to a print shop, print out a high-quality photo and put it on your wall, how much would that cost?

Probably be like a $25 photo, right?

So it’s just a massive photo.

And once you’re flipping through the magazine pages and you’ve got this massive photo right in front of your face, because you’re holding a magazine fairly close, it’s just such a great experience.

And it’s very, very gratifying when you’re flipping through your work.

It is so gratifying that I never want to share my work online.

Even when I work, I have all my photos uploaded to the cloud, and I’ll just go through them very quickly on Amazon Photos.

It looks cool and all, but it’s nowhere even close to the same ballpark as looking at them in the magazine.

And also, it’s all about the sequencing, too, and the images you place in front of your sequences.

So if I have two vertical frames, right? Two pages.

The images on the pages before and after mean something, too.

It’s just this whole different way of viewing.

I almost think of it as like watching a movie.

You’re watching an action movie, and when you’re watching an action movie, you don’t just want shit blowing up the whole time.

You want a little slow moment.

Maybe get a little romance in there. Get a little romantic moment before some shit blows up.

Maybe you’ve got a little love scene.

That’s how I look at the magazine.

I might put, I don’t know, a macro shot of some texture, a nice little photo of a flower, before some chaotic street scene.

So yeah, it just really opens up your world to a whole different way of viewing your own photography.

So much so that I never want to share my work online again.

Even if I just share a couple photos and send them to a friend or something, it just doesn’t feel good anymore.

It only feels good when I put it in the magazine.

So yeah.

Unintentional benefit of the magazine mindset.

Highly recommend it.