Posts Tagged ‘learning’
Ready if I want it now, Danger Boy…
It’s 1:30am on Thanksgiving Day. I’m wide awake, Johnny Cash is fitfully playing from some show on the Biography HD channel, and there’s a frozen turkey sitting in a blue plastic tub in the kitchen. And yet, instead of dozing off or preparing for a wonderment of victuals delicately prepared and teased, I sit here thinking about my lighting style.
I am frustrated by it.
Let’s back up a bit. I’ve been re-reading the Hotshoe Diaries again (and watching some recent McNally videos on the Nikon site) and realizing what difficulty I continue to have with my lighting style. I think I’ve been so abused of this notion that light must be grand and soft, that I find it a terribly grim notion to try something else.
Lately, I’ve been limited to using umbrellas. I know, there’s nothing quite wrong with them, really. You can shoot through them. You can bounce into them. But controlling that light is a pain. It just goes everywhere. And generally, some of it is reflecting back some place I don’t want it to go. 
I suppose I could get smart and flag out some of the light more, but in the heat of the moment I forget that I can do that. Or that I can collapse the umbrella. Or feather it. Or just take it off.
And herein lies the rub. I get wrapped up in what I’m doing that I can’t defiantly remove myself from the scene and observe what’s going on within it. Or even know what the scene should really be about. For the longest time, I’ve taken the mindset of letting things occur and reacting to it. No real foresight or planning occurs. I mean, what right-minded pirate would think of being so rigid as to stick to some photographic code! They’re guidelines, people!
But, really, they’re not even that. And I’m beginning to observe that not having some sort of reasonably gelled idea, not having some set of guidelines for what I really want out of the photo, not having some set of rules and checks that I want to purposefully constrain myself within is affecting my not very well-formed vision of the shoot from coming to fruition. A plan you must have. You can have a plan and choose not to follow it. You can’t choose to not follow a plan that doesn’t exist. Just doesn’t work very well.
Take this latest shoot, for example. The idea was simple: Aeon Flux. That’s it. I would show up with the camera, take a few photos, and be gone. I asked about what they specifically wanted but didn’t get very good direction beyond, “We’re going to suspend her and try to recreate one or two shots from the original TV show.” Ok. Didn’t know that until I got there so I had no idea what those shots would have or should have resembled.
I’m fond of the phrase, “a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.” Only, in this case, it was my lack of planning that made it a struggle. We tried a few positions, took some shots. 
Mostly, it was an evening of aimless fucking about until something kind-of, sort-of began to gel together if you tilted your head to the left, squinted your right eye, and covered your left with the back of an aching, sweaty palm.
And yeah, I was fighting the light the entire time. I wanted something mood-filled. Dark. Reminiscent of what I recalled the cartoon to be. Tried using two lights. One in a large umbrella, one bare to get some separation from the background. In most cases, it just did not work out the way I kept envisioning it. I’m still mulling over why. Could have been the space we were shooting, the lack of a real shooting plan, the phase of the moon. I’m not sure. Frustrating, it was.
So like any good non-plan following jack, I did what I thought best: killed the second light, pulled the first in closer, and dropped to a smaller umbrella. And this helped. I was dealing with too much light. Well, not so much that there was too much light, but that there was too much being illuminated. The walls, the ceiling, the carpet, the midget in the corner. I wanted to layer light in a pleasing manner, but I could not do it. Just wasn’t working and I was tired of bashing my head against the wall.
Lately, I’ve been playing with the idea of using smaller light sources. more controllable, more directional. And the umbrella makes it difficult for me to achieve this (or maybe it’s just that I don’t know how to do it effectively yet). So, I’m getting a small 15″ softbox for my speedlights. 
I think that’ll be a good first step to get what I want. Blast all the light forward, don’t have to worry as much about light coming from places I don’t want it (like reflecting off the beige wall behind me). And this is what I really needed for this Aeon shoot. More control.
Once I got to a smaller umbrella, things started to work better. I felt less and less like my clutch was slipping and more like I was making positive forward momentum (even if I was squealing tires and redlining the engine). And looking back at what I was doing before, I begin to realize that what Joe McNally is doing is second nature to him. He understands just what light mod needs to be in place to achieve a particular effect (plus a bit of magic and luck) and I’m still figuring that out.
Only, in my case it feels like “shoot, shoot some more, shoot again, and then ask questions.” Not a great way to do it.
So, some things I walk away with from this shoot:
- Get a good idea of what the shoot is about. Include a list of photos you want to get.
- Plan your shots, even if it’s only a tiny bit of ordering. This will help you know when you’ve got it … or when you should just move on.
- Don’t forget that you have control of the light. If something is broken, change it. Feather it, flag it, move it, change it, turn it into a duck. Whatever. Just try something different, but make sure it’s a positive and directed different.
- Breathe.
- Think about what you’re lighting before you get there.
- Think about what you’re NOT lighting before you get there.
- Make sure the place you’re shooting is appropriate for the subject you’re shooting. Had I fully realized what the shoot was intended to be, I would have pulled them to a much better location.
- Someone spinning around in the air really needs a tagline to hold them steady, otherwise you just cuss and frustrate yourself while attempting to get focus lock.
- Spend some time after the shoot to review what you did and what worked (or didn’t work). Just writing all this down has helped me figure out a few things to keep in my mental checklist of shooting.
My Aeon is a local friend who’s moving out of town. This was a Halloween outfit she created a year or two back and she wanted some good photos of it before she departed. She’ll be away for quite awhile and likely will only rarely return for visits. My only regret was never being able to photograph her in her Mystique costume. Damn was that thing sexy.
Blueberry, blueberry, where are you?
You ought to have seen what I saw on my wayTo the village, through Mortenson's pasture to-day:Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb,Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drumIn the cavernous pail of the first one to come! And all ripe together, not some of them greenAnd some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!"Blueberries by Robert Frost
Have you ever pulled a well-ripened blueberry from it’s comforting container and just … admired it? Hold it between your fingers. No, don’t squeeze it; it’ll burst at the seams. But, just cradle it. They have a delicate skin, a deepest of blue. Some of mine were just past the age of ripeness. You could see it in the skin, wrinkled like the skin of a well-worn man aged in the sun and retired from the orchard.
When ripened, blueberry skin becomes waxy, almost white and milky. This aging of it’s coat protects it from spoiling too quickly. But, at the same time, reveals a mottled and textured appeal for the camera. It gives life and depth to this tiny blue planet.
On one end a crater has formed from the tips of the flower petal. It resembles a miniature (yet mighty) impact of rock and ice on a planet surface. Really, go look. Tell me you don’t see it.
Anyway, I took up the idea of blueberries one evening recently after having seen a photo of this delightful little fruit falling into a bowl and leaving a trail of light in it’s wake. I wanted to recreate that image to see if I could do it. Sadly, I came to the conclusion that it’s not as easy as it looked.
I’m still mulling over why I failed here. The scientist in me could give you a hundred different technical reasons on why I couldn’t capture it, starting at “not enough ambient light” and ending somewhere around “not enough hand-eye coordination to coordinate the falling berries and the shutter”. The storyteller in me just wants to say that the idea, however much I had chased it, just wasn’t in me. Frustration set in when I wasn’t getting what I wanted.
So, like every grand experimenter, I tried something different.
A little side journey here. One of the things I’d promised myself recently was to shoot every Strobist Bootcamp II subject presented to me. I did the first. Failed on the second (but made up for it with my coffee beans). When the results were announced, I went through the entire 700+ list of entries just to see what people were doing. I declare that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants here. The one that caught my eye (before it was announced as the winner) was this one. Peppers in a well-seasoned skillet. Now this … this has character. This pan has a story to tell, of all the wonderful and comforting dinners it’s sizzled away at. You can see the scratches and dings and pock marks. A hedonistic patina built up by years and years of use.
And this is how ideas start.
I wanted something like this, something showing off the well-used baking stone we have. Our second stone, in fact, lovingly built up through years of curing under the scorching oven heat, saturated with the oils leached out of the foods we’ve cooked on it. French fries, battered fish, bread, pizza … you name it, we’ve cooked it. This has taken years. I was crushed when, in a moment of idiocracy, I took our first stone and set it under a fountain of water coming from our kitchen sink. It was the CRACK! heard ’round the world. Yep. The sudden change of temperature from hellfire and brimstone to cold, cold river water did me in. And I remember that moment every time I’m cooking on our second stone because of the time and effort it takes to season one of these well. An unseasoned stone is no stone to cook on.
So, I had my stone. And I had my blueberries. Like chocolate and peanut butter: two great tastes tasting great together. I had the soul and depth of my background with the life and zest of my subject. So, what to do? Be like any great artist and just plop my load of tiny planets down on this dark brown thingy. Make it look not-so-arranged and neat. Order is the bane of inconsistency. I played with the light a bit combining a bit of flash with a bit of incandescent and didn’t like it all that much; the blue and the orange just didn’t work well with this. 
The orange just detracts from the color of the blueberries, warming them up too much. They’re blue. They needed to be stark and cold and inviting that way.
I labored on. I spent hours upon hours arranging each and every berry in the most articulate of ways. You know, pushing and prodding gently with a toothpick, picking them up one by one with tongs like a little berry crane, and gingerly dropping them down upon the other without a moments hesitation. Ok, not really. They were unceremoniously dumped from the bowl I was eating them out of and finger-kicked until it looked
right, I realized I was still missing something. Steel! Cold, hard steel. Everyone loves a good blade right?
I’m still debating which photo I like more: with the blade or without. I wanted to see some of the detail and striations in the knife’s makeup. It really is a pain in the ass to get that angled correctly so the detail is teased out without blowing out the stripes. I tried adding some drops of water blown on to the entire arrangement but it looked contrived. I also thought about crushing some berries but … by that point, I was just eating them before I could sufficiently place the crushed ones back on the board.
Oh well.
The lighting setup on this wasn’t too difficult. One 32″ white shoot-through umbrella on the far side of the baking stone to give me that broad northern-looking light. I had a second light on-camera but aimed directly up at the ceiling to create a large fill source. I wanted just enough light to bring up some of the shadow detail without killing it and without blowing out the detail in the knife. I think it worked well enough.
But again, I’m still not sure which picture I like more. One thing’s for sure: the berries were good. I’ll need to go and get some more before the season dies out.
A Thousand Points of Light
Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work. — Thomas A. Edison
In one of the photography forums I so frequently haunt, a new photographer threw out the age old existential question: “What makes a better photo, film or digital? Discuss.” Yikes. Let’s just lob the Holy Hand Grenade of Photographic Antioch into our midst and see what carnage we can make!
Ok, it really wasn’t that bad. The responses ranged from the obvious of “The photographer” to “it depends on what you’re shooting and it’s intended use.” But the one that caught my eye was the guy who said:
“I shoot both. I do nature with film as I love the whole process but shoot people with digital due to ease of use and most of my shoots with people are typically upward of 1000 – 2000 photos which would be ungodly expensive with film.”
I’ve never really focused on shooting film, but I do understand the expense of it. What I question about his statement is the “1000 – 2000 photos” per shoot with his digital camera. And I have to ask: why? Why would you want to do that, especially for people? Is there something I’m missing here?
I get that there’s a desire to create the perfect photo. I really get that. But what is it about digital that makes people think shooting 1000+ photos will get them perfection? Don’t get me wrong, there’s probably a time and place for it. But really, is that needed all the time? I wonder if people’s photos would improve a notch or two if they stopped taking the shotgun approach to their art (or work) and thought a bit about what exactly they were trying to create.
From what I’ve encountered, some photographers look at digital as the panacea of recording media. I get the sense that these photogs just snap and snap with wild abandon because, hey, it’s digital … it’s free! But that’s not entirely true. What you’ve gained in saved film processing costs, you’ve now lost due to increased time dealing with more photos during post. You’re now saving large amounts of data off so your archiving costs increase. There’s a larger wear-and-tear factor on your camera. You may or may not care about any of these things.
Now, I’m guilty of doing this on occasion, taking photo after photo of the exact same pose or moment … or maybe even slightly altering it to see if that changes the dynamic of the content. But … does this really help me, as a photographer? I realize I can’t shoot every thing I see (well, I can, but I won’t). I’m going to miss some things. That’s just the law of averages.
But, thousands of images at a sitting? Sounds like a bit much to me.
As for the whole digital vs. film debate? That rages on.
The model above is Scarlet. We were trying different things in the studio. This was my third attempt at this setup. I tried a few times and moved on when I thought I wasn’t getting it. Lucky me, it turned out.
Panning for Gold
Photos from the meeting mentioned in the previous posting. It was fun, hilarious, contentious, thought provoking, maddening, and occasionally filled with “WTF?!”. This is the second time I’ve done this. It’s definitely interesting to listen to the plethora of opinions that come out from the papers we have to review for this conference.
Ian
Mario
Hoon
Andrew and Paul
Adam
Narayan
Nicole, Mark, and Paul
Narayan and Doug
Bill and Mark
Cory assaulting the food
McEniry Photobomb
Cory
John, Mario, Chris, me, Nicole
We have the POWAH!
Nicole
David
Dirty Inspiration
I love Mike Rowe. Don’t know him? He hosts Dirty Jobs on Discovery. It’s a fascinating series about the dirty jobs that help make this world run. (Kind of obvious based on the title, eh?). Mike talks about the episode he did surrounding the job of a sheep herder. It’s a captivating and animated story that he tells.
A few things are impressed upon me from this video: the ideas of anagnorisis and peripeteia and the notion that your preconceptions are wrong.
Now, anagnorisis and peripeteia don’t necessarily apply directly to photography, but work with me. Anagnorisis and peripeteia are literary devices. Wikipedia, the source everyone loves to hate, notes that anagnorisis means discovery in Greek. It’s the sudden realization of a situation. In Greek tragedies, it was often preceded by a peripatetic event, a sudden reversal or turning point in the story.
With me so far? Good.
In the journey to become a photographer, one makes mistakes. A lot of mistakes. You forget to focus. You forget your batteries. You forget that larger f-stops give you smaller depth of field. You know, simple mistakes that affect how you achieve the photo you’re going for. If you’re paying attention, you learn from these mistakes. You have your “ahha!” moment. The lightbulb flicks on just above your furrowed brow right as you make the mistake and you think, “I shouldn’t have done that!”
It’s that realization that you’ve made the mistake that’s important. But, not everything is a mistake. Many times it’s understanding that what you just did failed for some particular reason outside of your control and figuring out why. Another “ahha!” moment. Discovery. Sounds so simple, right?
Yes and no.
When I started shooting, I had a brand new camera in my hands, a bunch of book learning in my head, and my personal experience amounted to a photographic hill of beans. In other words, I was fresh off the boat and I knew it all. All I had to do was get the camera off automatic, twist a few dials, and my inner magician would appear, flashing the scene with The Light Fantastic, and I’d have amazing and emotionally charged photos.
Great concept. Reality left a little bit to be desired. Ok. That’s the understatement of the day. Blast! That’s when I begun to realize that there was something more to this than whacking the Easy Button and waiting for the benjamins to roll in. As Mike put it, I had a bit of anagnorisis and peripeteia on my chin.
Mike touches upon this idea of challenging your preconceptions. He’s right: what if it really is “Safety Third”? Think about that. It goes against your nature to even consider that. Right or wrong, what’s important here is that you make the leap between what you know is correct and true to what is sheer crazy talk. It’s this leap where the interesting ideas come from. I’ve often heard this as: when shooting with other photographers, if they start shooting something to their left, you start shooting to their right … because something interesting is being missed over there.
In the end, what it comes down to is this: we spend our moments looking at what we’re doing and testing ourselves in order figure out a better way to do it. If you’re good, you question yourself and your routines. If you’re better, you listen to those questions and do something with the answers.
Me? I’m going to go wipe these bloody bits of anagnorisis and peripeteia off my chin and find something right to shoot.
New Rules: How to shoot a datacenter
[Ed. note: I wrote this years ago while after encountering a photog at a day job in a datacenter. I recently came across it again and thought it would be fitting here. Enjoy!]
Today I was tasked with the job of being the grand overseer of the pretty people and the magic picture box trolls who were rummaging around in one of our datacenters. (read: corporate used one of our datacenters for a photoshoot. They had a professional photographer and a bunch of “pretty people” who were trying to act like sysadmins, scampering hither and thither in our room).
If you’re a photographer taking marketing shots of a technical area, I’m going to give you a short guide on do’s and don’ts that you and your models should follow.
- Do show up on time and listen to the rules the nice sysadmin gives you.
- Don’t be put off when the nice sysadmin tells you that you can’t shoot in the room he has to work in while he’s overseeing you.
- Do ask questions about what you can and can’t do.
- Don’t just start touching the pretty lights.
- Do ask for assistance touching the equipment.
- Don’t look for a wall of monitors in the datacenter. The datacenter is for computers that are remotely managed. We don’t like the datacenter. It’s cold, loud, and obnoxious. We therefor spend as little time as possible in there to save our hearing and keep our butts from freezing off.
- Do pick models that look like they’re sysadminish geek types. I’ve been a sysadmin for almost a decade. The number of pretty people you brought in to act as sysadmins equals the number of pretty sysadmins in the continental US. It just doesn’t happen.
- Don’t ooh and aaah at the pretty lights and have your models make fake poses pointing at them. It looks silly.
- Don’t have your models squat on the floor, looking down the length of a cold isle. It looks stupid.
- Contrary to popular opinion, sandals are not usually worn in a datacenter. We don’t like how our feet hurt when we accidently drop computers on them.
- No matter how much you think she is, the gorgeous blonde with the lime green, mid-thigh flowing skirt is not a sysadmin. No. Not ever.
- In raised floor data centers, air moves from the floor up to the ceiling. It generally moves pretty fast. We move alot of air. Things have to keep cool. Why does this matter? Unless you want a Marilyn Monroe moment, your models should not be wearing lime green, mid-thigh skirts. No matter how much the overseer wishes she would just walk back and forth over the perf tiles.
- Don’t pester the sysadmin about what he thinks should be shot. He’s a sysadmin. He’s not a photographer. If he was a photographer, he’d be doing your job, not his, and likely be getting paid just as well, if not better, than you.
- Do complete your research before the shoot. This will help you compose your shots appropriately.
- Don’t ask the sysadmin how he would best show “virtualization” in a datacenter. How would he do it? He’d do it like IBM. One big fucking empty datacenter. One rack. Right in the center. Nothing else around. No, it’s not sexy. Get over it.
- Sysadmins don’t generally walk around in high dollar clothing from the Gap, Ambercrombie and Fitch, or Banana Republic. That shit’s expensive. We work in dirty environments. The last thing we want to do is waste our precious money on getting expensive clothing dirty because we’re doing our jobs.
- No, we will not stop doing the regular work in the datacenter so you have a “cleaner” shot. It’s a working production environment. Completing our jobs is worth more to the company than your pictures.
- Do thank the sysadmin for all his help.
- Don’t call the sysadmin “dude” or “buddy” or “pal”. He has a name. He told it to you when he introduced himself to you.
- Don’t get pissy when the sysadmin can’t remember your name. His only concern is that you’re not fucking up his environment while you’re getting your shots.
- When the sysadmin tells you to stop doing what you’re doing, you will stop. You will cease and desist. You will move into a place not immediately connected with what you were doing. If you don’t, he will get pissed and likely remove you forcibly from the room. Why? Because you just fucked something up and he’s realized it.
- When the sysadmin tells you to leave, you will. Have a problem with that? Please go talk to your contact, who will talk to his boss, who will then talk to the sysadmin, at which point the sysadmin will give justifiable reasons for the decision. Boss will side with the sysadmin. Get over it.
- When the time comes for your photoshoot to end, you will pack up and leave. You will not go over your time. The sysadmin has been stuck in this room with you for several hours. He’s tired, cold, hungry, and probably has to take a leak because he’s been unable to leave the room unattended while you’re in there. Also, it’s probably quitting time and he wants to go home.
- Do take the sysadmin’s rules as law. He has been given final say about your existence in his world. You’re there as a guest. Don’t fuck it up.
- When you fuck something up you will have your models leave the room and a representive from the photo shoot will stand out of the way and be present when things are being fixed. Your rep will be respectful and quiet. The sysadmin’s job is to fix this visit from the fuckup fairy and then convey to you what damage has been done and what it has cost the company.
- Stay away from the networking gear.
- Stay away from the networking gear.
- If there’s networking gear, stay away from it.
- The thing that has all the blinky lights and the pretty tentacled masses of cables coming out of it. Yeah, stay away from it.
- No, the sysadmin won’t turn his music off. He’s using it to help protect his hearing from all the loud noises. Yes, those pink and purple things in his ears are ear plugs. He’s using them to cut out the white noise in the room so he can hear his music.
- Don’t freak out when the sysadmin whips out a knife to work on something. He’s a professional. He’s not going to bloody his tools with the likes of you. Well, as long as you don’t cause a visit from the fuckup fairy.
- No matter how sexy you think the other room is, you’re not going in there. The last photoshoot that happened there is the cause of rules 26 through 29.
- Be nice to the sysadmin. He might take bribes. Offer him food and drinks. He likes free things, especially if they’re highly caffienated.
I will say, though, the young lady in the lime green skirt … damn.
[Ed. note: The model in the photo is Hayley. She is not a sysadmin.]
Thievery gets you everywhere.
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery–celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from–it’s where you take them to.”
– Jim Jarmusch
By way of Wizwow’s blog.
This sort of dovetails back into a conversation I had with Morgan a month or so back about certain photos being done already. We were talking about pinup art at the time, but it really translates into many other realms in photography. Take The Red Cloth as an example. My inspiration for that came from an ad within Instyle … or some other women’s magazine. I forget.
As a photographer I look all over the place for ideas and suggestions on what to do next. Heck, at one point I was going through every single photo that came across the Strobist Flickr group stream to see what other people were doing. Alas, I can’t do that any longer because of the sheer amount of stuff that comes across the stream now. But the point is, I gather my creativity from seeing what else is out there. Or what isn’t out there. You have to pay attention to both.
I take the bits and pieces I like, remix them, and throw them against the wall like spaghetti to see what sticks. Quite a lot doesn’t.
I think Jarmusch had it right. Nothing is original. But, the way we cut and whack at those things we pilfer makes them original long enough for someone else to steal. It’s the nature of the art.
25 things.
There’s a meme going around on various social websites where you tell 25 things about yourself that someone might not know. You’re supposed to tag 25 people who you want the same thing from but I really don’t care to go that deeply into the meme.
- My first camera was one of those a 110 film camera. I think it was from kodak, but I don’t remember. I recall it having one of those flash cartridges that had 4 or 8 uses on it.
- I quietly lust after new camera equipment. It’s not uncommon for me to sit with a B&H catalog for hours.
- I’ve shot digital cameras for the last few years but I want to get a Holga just so I can experience film and have fun with it.
- I have a hard time remembering that I’m supposed to talk to the people I’m photographing. I zone too easily and have to constantly remind myself to not do that.
- I know it’s been a good evening shooting in the studio when I have to lay down and pop my back. Sometimes you just have to lay there and relax.
- I get an adrenaline rush when I’m shooting for a long time.
- I love Ansel Adams and his photography, but I don’t think I could ever be a landscape photographer. I absolutely hated his autobiography. I thought it was dry.
- I don’t have any formal training in photography. Everything I’ve done has been self-taught and gleaned out of many mistakes.
- I find it funny that people are surprised when I tell them I’m only shooting with a Nikon D40. For a consumer-grade camera, you can really do a lot with it.
- I suck at photoshop.
- I understand the meaning of the word “deviant”. Unlike a few photographers I know. ;-)
- I’m not big on shooting models. I like photographing people I’ve met. I find they have more character, even if they may not be considered “pretty.”
- After working on Strobist techniques for the last year and a half, I can no longer look at porn because I spend more time figuring out the lighting setup than I do looking at what’s really in the photo. Sad, isn’t it?
- Photography has been the longest hobby that I’ve ever been able to consistently follow through on. This surprised my wife because I have a bad habit of getting bored with something in midstream.
- I prefer low key photography to high key. I like the moodiness and darkness of shadow.
- I have a long term goal of changing careers and becoming a full-time photographer. Another 6-8 years of hard work and I might have a shot at it.
- I like the look of leather and latex in photos. I don’t know why. I just like the shiny highlights.
- I plan on going back to school and getting a degree in photography. Or, at the very least, getting some college-level classes done. I think it will help out my abilities going forward.
- One of the best things that has happened to my photography is gaining access to a studio. I’ve had such an improvement in the last six months because of that. It’s been a great source of learning and practice.
- My next home will have a 20×30 studio. Mostly because I’m lazy and want to be within walking distance of it whenever I’m at the house.
- Joe McNally rocks my socks. He does things with light that I find positively amazing.
- Why, yes, I do look at women’s magazines for ideas. Why do you ask?
- While I shoot a lot, I have no earthly idea on how to print photos so they look good. Ironic.
- There’s a pair of hawks that lives on a road near my house. Every time I see them I think about taking a photo of them, but … it’s hard to do when you pass them doing 60mph. I think they sit there taunting me and laughing loudly in a shrill hawkish way. One of these days I will stop and get that photo.
- Getting bored with photography is my biggest fear and something I constantly struggle with. There have been times where I’ve gone a month without taking a photo and I have to kick myself in the ass to do something about it.
The young lady at the top of this post is Donica. This was from our first shoot in January. I love how this blue turned out in the light. Heck, I just love how all of the photos turned out.
Learning from Chase.
Back in 2007, Chase Jarvis gave a keynote address for the Photoshelter Town Hall describing some of the reasoning why he shoots what he does and some ideals that up and coming pros should strive for. I know the video is somewhat dated, Internet time-wise, but I still go back to this on occasion and review it.
Things I took away from this:
- I think one of the most interesting facts that I took away from this is that he often does entire shoots just for himself to keep building on his portfolio.
- Shoot things that you’ve never seen before. Chase watches the marketplace for the patterns being developed and then tries to step outside the pattern. Whether it’s using props in ways you normally wouldn’t see in marketing (like aiming a gun to someone’s head) or finding a different angle to shoot from, it’s something that differentiates you from everyone else.
- It takes lots of hard work to be successful at this. I couldn’t shoot to the degree that Chase does (20 hour days), but I can certainly do more than what I’m doing now.
- You have to have passion for what you’re shooting. If you don’t, it’s going to be difficult to be your best creatively. Make your own style. You need to carve out time to shoot those photos you have a passion for.
- One of the best and fastest ways to get a subject to do what you want is to show them exactly how it’s done by doing it yourself. You can see Chase doing this in the Ninja clip.
- Smoke machines add a weird, almost mystical, dimension to photos, especially when they’re used in conjunction with a strong back light. I need to get a smoke machine and play with that idea some.
- You need to be a part of the community. Networking. Collaborating. Photos don’t get made by one person.
- Nothing can replace the power of word-of-mouth when trying to get business.
It’s an interesting video no matter what. I encourage you to check it out, if only to watch the video clips within it. Or, just check out his youtube channel. I believe he has the individual ones posted there.