Field Notes: April 2026

April is almost always my favorite month of the year. Spring is finally here, everything is in bloom. And if you happen to be in The Netherlands it's tulip season. When I sit out on my deck with a morning cup of tea I can practically see the bright green leaves emerging on my maple trees in real time. It’s the best. Oh, and also I spent half of it in Japan. Which makes it even better. I have about a thousand thoughts on Japan (and about a billion pictures) and I'll save most of those for later posts, but for now I'm just going to say this: When I mention Japan to people I absolutely always get the same rave reaction, and now I understand why. I am simply joining the masses of people who have been to Japan and can't stop talking about how fantastic it is, so more to come. But in the meantime…

On My Desk(top)

I love Photo Mechanic for viewing, sorting, culling and importing images because it makes that front-end workflow so much easier. On "paper" the features are a bit redundant, technically anything Photo Mechanic does you can do in Lightroom. But the speed and real-time RAW previews make Photo Mechanic a game changer in my workflow. After a trip or session I'm generally going through a huge number of RAW files and I don't want to sit there waiting for Lightroom to catch up. Photo Mechanic lets me move through everything quickly and do a first-pass culling before importing images into my Lightroom catalog. I heard photographers rave about it for years before I actually tried it for myself, I'm pretty particular about adding more steps into my workflow, but it is impossible to explain just how much simpler culling is when the RAW previews load in real time. I'm still not sure why Lightroom can't do this, but until it can, Photo Mechanic has an essential place on my desk(top).

In My Camera Bag

Since I bought the Leica Q3 awhile back my Fujifilm X100v hasn't gotten nearly as much use. The two cameras are really, really similar. The Leica Q3 has a 60mp full-frame sensor and while that doesn't matter as much as most people think, the one thing it does do is give you a lot of cropping space before you really start to cut down the resolution and with a fixed focal length camera that's just nice to have, especially because I do sometimes travel with it as my only camera. But for a myriad of reasons I packed the Fujifilm instead of the Leica on a recent trip to Japan, and wow, did I forget how much I love that camera. The form factor is perfection, it's just a teeny bit smaller than the Q3 but it's enough of a difference to make it a little more convenient, and more than anything else, that rangefinder style optical viewfinder makes it feel more like using the Leica M-11 than the Q3 does. Plus, at less than half the price of the Leica, I feel a little bit better about tossing it in my bag at amusement parks and the link. The X100VI has been out for awhile, although it's still hard to track down, but I can get my hands on one I might just upgrade…

Working on:

Importing and culling those billions of Japan photos I mentioned earlier. It is always amazing to me just how long that process takes, and I feel like my workflow is pretty well streamlined, but it just takes awhile to get everything culled, imported, backed-up, keyworded, all before actually sitting down and doing the work of editing. But as of about 2 minutes ago (it was importing in the background while I wrote this), I am completely caught up on that whole process and ready to sit down and start editing those trip pics.

Listening to/Watching :

You would think with almost 40 hours this month of planes/trains/busses I would have had plenty of listening time, but since my motion sickness meds put me to sleep this is not my ideal audiobook/podcast listening month. I'm a music person on flights and one of my favorite listening "hacks" is individual trip playlists. I label them with the airport codes (eg. IAD-HND) and aim to match each list to the length of the plane trip. Admittedly, my daughter is often the one to make them for me, which is a cool

Photographing:

Japan. Obviously. Kyoto. Tokyo. I did a half-day workshop with Laurance Buchard while I was in Tokyo which was a fantastic way to spend the morning, and also a great creativity boost. Also, I'm just going to state this- vacationing with a photographer is not for the faint of heart. The only way to photograph Kyoto without crowds is to get there early. And by early I mean sunrise. And sunrise in Kyoto in April is 5:11am. So there's that. Fortunately, my kids are good sports, and they also all enjoy photography as well which makes it easier to convince them to get up and moving.

Barcelona

Field Notes: March 2026