Each year on Christmas day I’ve published a letter that I originally received year ago from a reader who was concerned about how the events of 9/11 would have on her personal photography that I think is just as meaningful today. My response to that reader has grown into what I like to think of as my “Dear Patricia” letter and it’s shared with you today in the hope of drawing some hope maybe inspiration on how to approach your own photography during 2025

“Christmas is the spirit of giving without a thought of getting. It is happiness because we see joy in people. It is forgetting self and finding time for others. It is discarding the meaningless and stressing the true values.”— Thomas S. Monson

“Don’t get me wrong, I admire elegance and have an appreciation of the finer things in life. But to me, beauty lies in simplicity.”—Mark Hyman

Photoshop’s Channel Mixer (Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer) lets you produce grayscale images by letting you choose the percentage of contribution from each color channel. It modifies output using a mix of the existing image’s color channels allowing you to add or subtract data from a source channel to the output channel.

One of Farace’s Law’s is that there’s never enough space indoors to shoot a portrait and I’ll often find myself pressed up against a wall opposite the subject when shooting. This translates into having to use shorter lenses than I might normally prefer but that doesn’t mean you can’t make great portraits no matter what lens you have available.