I’ve had a bit of photog-crush on Atlanta music photographer (and much more) Zack Arias, every since I watched his great Transform video.
Here he is at Photocamp Utah with an hour of funny, honest and inspiring advice to would-be photographers. Standouts for me were his commitment to being a good photographer not a good photoshopper, being good to your clients and getting over your shyness – ‘People are the only people who pay’.
Enjoy.
John Naughton retells a moving story on his blog concerning the death of Austro-British writer, wit, restauateur, politician and broadcaster Sir Clement Freud, told by his daughter Emma:
He had, she said, “a perfect death”. On the day in question, he’d been to the races (at Exeter), had won on the horses, had a good lunch with his “second best friend” (apparently he was punctilious about ranking his friendships), and was writing his column (about the Exeter meeting) for a racing newspaper when he dropped dead in mid-sentence. The next day, Emma and her Mum woke up his computer and found that the last words he’d written were “In God’s good time…”.
I’m a natural light guy. Or have been until now.
Hugely unimpressed by almost all uses of on-camera flash, and fascinated by the challenge of capturing the quality of real light in my scenes, I used to swear I’d never use a flash.
And for most of my work – on location children’s portraits – that works well, most of the time.
I choose the right time of day, and a good location in possible, and chase after the kids always trying to maximise the catch-lights in their eyes, and get some flattering natural light falling across their faces.
But sometimes that’s just not possible.
A little flash light bounced off a nearby wall or ceiling might open up their shadowy face and cut the chance for motion blur. Or used outside, it could open up some opportunities to work with the sun to get some good effects.
I like this idea. Photographers donate their time, expertise and prints around the holiday season, to give portraits to people who wouldn’t otherwise get them.
It looks like a grassroots kind of thing, with a loose central structure and real local organization. And amateurs and pros of all stripes are invited to take part.
I could certainly see how shooting and printing some children’s or babies’ portraits would be a really nice holiday gift for some folks.
I’ve just subscribed to the mailing list, so I’ll let you know if we get stuff going in Santa Fe. There are a lot of pro and serious amateur photographers around, so let’s see what we can do, shall we?
I’ve just signed up for mpixpro.com, having been a very satisfied customer of their prosumer mpix.com printing service.
I’m impressed so far. They offer a ood range of products (including prints on fine art paper, and some funky looking acrylic prints).
Their site seems to be set up so that you can direct clients there to see all the product and print options, but without showing the prices. That way, if you’re adding markup (which you should be as a pro shooter), your clients won’t see that, but they can make informed choices about what they’d like.
Mpixpro also provide white-label PDFs which describe the different product types. If you put them on your own site, it would give clients lots of useful information without getting the in way of your own branding and service. Nice.
The calibration prints are on the way, but if they’re as spot-on as my previous mpix jobs have been, I think I might have found my new printing home, after much shopping around. Turns out it’s the big brother of the place I already loved.
As we enter a new year, it’s a time for reflecting on what happened over the last 12 months, and making plans for the next.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what goals I should have for the year, and how I might reach them. Some of these are practical-sounding – like working out my budget for the photography and web design sides of my work – but once you start asking these sort of questions, they quickly end up bringing up much larger issues.
I’m in the fortunate position of working for myself, and last year I made money building and maintaining websites, taking photos, training photographers in Aperture, and writing articles. But I have to admit none of it was really based on a detailed business plan.
So I was very interested when I came across a great article by photographer Doug Menuez about how he came to redefine the work he did and enjoyed a more fulfilled (and more successful) life as a result.
When we see the finished work of talented writers, musicians and photographers, it can seem like it’s completely different from our own efforts.
It’s tempting to feel like we’ll never get there from here. And it’s quite possible we never will. But neither would they if they’d stopped trying.
Merlin Mann, who has a lot of smart things to say about creativity and productivity, is an amateur photographer looking to improve, and he’s hit on a crucial point about learning to do anything like this:
I think finding your own comfort with the process (whatever that process ends up being) might just be the whole game here — being willing to put in your time, learn the craft, and never lose the courageousness to be caught in the middle of making something you care about, even when it might be shit and you might look like an idiot fumbling to make it. What’s the worst thing that could happen?
I’ve submitted one of my photos for inclusion in the next print edition of JPG Magazine, under the Zen theme.
It seems like a good fit to me, and it’s one of the photos that will be included in my show in February (more on that later).
So feel free to give me a vote.
Not sure how they’re doing this, but B&H Photo Video have some great rebates going on Lexar pro-quality CF cards at the moment.
Like $40 rebate on the $45 4G 133x cards. That’s a 4G card for (effectively) $4.
There’s a limit of 3 rebates per person, but get over to B&H now to stock up. And no, I don’t get a cut.
Thanks to Charles Mann for the tip.
Alec Soth – the photographer who would have been perfect to accompany me on my ill-fated bike ride down the Mississippi (but that’s another story) – recently had a simple but brilliant blog post over at the Magnum Blog.
He asked 35 of his fellow Magnum photographers 2 questions:
The answers are fascinating, but one from Alex Webb really struck home:
Photograph because you love doing it, because you absolutely have to do it, because the chief reward is going to be the process of doing it. . . . Take photography on as a passion, not a career.
This view gets to the heart of the conundrum keen amateurs like me face when we start making some money from our photographs.