photography

Books Are Friends

Books Are Friends

Seth Godin, announcing his $159 giant-ass book of blog posts and writings:

A book is a special object, a time-tested conveyor of not just information, but emotion and connection. Some of my best friends are books.

…All the words are already online for free (it’s a collection of my online writing over the last four years). What you can’t get online, though, is the feeling of owning it and the joy of gifting it.

That’s why all the digital publishing platforms and blog posts in the world can’t replace a book: the joy of owning, giving, and experiencing.

My practice is, try to buy a photo book every month. For $20-50, I get an education and a way of seeing the world. It’s a darned good deal.

Godin’s book is $159 for writing you can read for free, right now. But it also has photos by Thomas Hawk, and is this massive monolith of thought and wit that you can take down and re-read – no batteries required. Godin’s book will sell out, surely, which says there’s a market and that the books is valued.

Craig Mod just kicked butt on a Kickstarter book project about a walk through Japan. Maybe, after all the hype about eBooks, people are realizing that physical books are just fine.

Books are humanity’s friends. Books are here to stay. They’ve been around for longer than most empires, and many will stick around for even longer.

While I love viewing photography online, and checking out blogs from my favorite artists, buying a book is a true vote of confidence for someone’s work.

 

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Begging For the Why

Why, Not How

Patrick LaRoque:

I get tired of purely technical pursuits. I get tired of how without why. I’m also afraid of repeating what’s already been said by photographers I respect, and to whom I have nothing, zero, nada to add—David Hobby, Joe McNally, Zack Arias…seriously, all the bases have been superbly covered already. If I’m to contribute anything serious, it would need to at least provide a different angle…

It’s a pursuit that has to be about emotion just as much as sharpness. It needs the how while also begging for the why in order to avoid becoming an empty shell.

This is the rub. There’s so much photography how-to material out there, how do you make it your own?

It’s the emotion part that makes what we do unique. What do we bring to the process beyond technique? What are we trying to say, and how do we say it?

LaRoque’s first post in his Process series, The Film Curve, is a goodie – about how to set the tonal range for a photo in the highlights and shadows to express your creative goals.

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Tim Kaine Comes to Campus

Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Tim Kaine came to the University of Michigan’s campus on Tuesday.

I took my lunch hour to sit on the Diag and listen to his speech. It drew quite the crowd – even a half dozen pro Trump protestors (who didn’t find much sympathy here in Ann Arbor).

In America, a lot of politics is performance and theatre, both from those on stage and  in the crowd. It was a lot of fun to walk around and see the spectacle for myself.

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Urbex, (Mostly) Abandoned

Not So Abandoned

I used to have more time to make photos.

My commute was 30 minutes, but if I left early I could stop and take a landscape, or catch a beautiful sunrise. And sometimes, I’d have enough time to explore an abandoned building or home. Beautiful country roads, lovely scenery, and no rush.

Not so much anymore. My commute is now an hour long, at minimum, and it’s mostly interstate driving. This cuts back on the time I have to get out and explore.

One of the casualties of this new setup is my abandoned photography. My commute is longer and busier, I work on a big-time college campus in a mid-sized city, and I just don’t have the time like I used to. It’s a bummer.

Part of me also feels like I’m moving on from urbexing, creatively. I want to do new things, and make different kinds of photographs.

Except when I take a new way into work, like I did last week. Instead of busy I-94 East, I ventured down US-12. It added 20-30 minutes to my drive. It was so worth it. For one, it felt like my old commute: moseying at a nice pace, lots of scenery to check out, and the fog helped make the landscape extra interesting.

For two, I noticed a few abandoned building opportunities (including my old haunts in the Irish Hills) – like this abandoned farm structure.

The itch still gets me when I see an abandoned property. It used to be a big part of who I was, creatively, and I’ve had to let some of that go. But it’s okay. I’ll try to make time for adventure when I have the time and inclination.

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Overthinking Things

Overthinking Family Photos

We photographers worry, don’t we?

We worry about what social media platform is right for us. We worry about when and where to share things. We worry our work won’t be seen, or won’t sell, or won’t make an impact.

We worry what our cameras say about us. We worry about not taking time to get out and shoot. We worry about those undone projects, or those missed opportunities.

CJ Chilvers addressed my sharing family photos conundrum on his blog:

I’m also sure we’re overthinking things a bit. I doubt professional photographers give a second thought to posting any photo they create that meets their standards.

He’s so right. I am overthinking things. The little privacy gland in my brain always vibrates when I dip into the personal. Turning that off is hard.

That’s probably true for other photographers, too. We overthink things all the time.

Maybe it’s time we just did. Instead of living in our heads, let’s live out in the world. Make things. Share things. Spend less time on “strategy,” or shots left untaken.

 

 

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Marvel At the Now

Marvel At The Now

Things used to be pretty ugly, and yet beautiful, in this country just a few decades ago.

How will our photographs record the history of today?

You don’t feel time passing as it happens so much, at least not visually. It’s just part of the everyday. But when you look back 10 or 20 years, my how things have changed.

This comes up when someone tags me in an old high school photo on Facebook. I look at what we were wearing, what our hairstyles were, how dated everything looks. It didn’t at the time, of course, because we were living it.

It’s a neat thought, to think that the photos we’re taking now will be marveled at by some future civilization.

(’70s photos via On Taking Pictures)

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Adds Up to Something New

Starting new photography projects

Todd Hido, on starting a new project:

That is how things always start for me—I will make one or two photographs that I don’t necessarily fit with my other ones and then I go out and try to build on them. Slowly it adds up into something.

So true for me as well. I’ll often get an idea, try it out a few times, and then it doesn’t pan out. But often, something catches, and I keep going.

And hey, it’s okay to have a few going at once. Few photos here, a few nibbles there, and pretty soon you have something strong.

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Lease Versus Own

Lease Vs Own

Michael Gartenberg on the iPhone 7:

All of sudden, customers like me, who prefer to buy once and hold on as long as well can become the outliers. There’s a whole new set of buyers to appeal to who will view a monthly charge for the latest phone as just another line item.

But can Apple get enough customers on the subscription model? Will the desire to always have the latest and greatest iPhone be enough of a driver?

I held on to my iPhone 3G probably a year too long. With my current iPhone 5S, it’s the same situation. And when I do upgrade, it will probably be to an iPhone SE, not a 7.

It’s the same with photography. Sony would love for you to buy the latest Alpha 7 model every year. Adobe wants you to “subscribe” to Photoshop.

Are you on the “lease” model Gartenberg talks about? Or do you purchase things for the long-haul?

I like owning things. I like relying on my purchases for the long term, and a lot of research and thought goes into each of those purchases. The same goes for music, for automobiles, for everything. It could be that I learned a lot from my grandparents, who grew up during the Depression, and invested in things that lasted. They took pride in the things they owned. And they treated those items with care and respect, and kept them running.

The problem comes when the software updates outlast the technology.

Then again, my Canon 5D is shooting just fine, 10 years later.

 

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Photographs As Language

Photography As Language

Mason Adams, from “On Visual Fluency“:

The devices we use to take pictures are also the devices we use to communicate, and that’s awesome.

Mason’s larger point is that photographs are being used as a type of language – everything from emoji to gorgeous mobile food photography. It’s never been easier to share the stuff we see. So what does that do to the marketing, branding, and stock photography industries? 

I really liked his analogy of the reason why we take photos:

Like layered dirt in a glass container, the act of photography IS the moment. Amplified, hallowed, the ultimate savoring of the things that bring us joy. Which is to say: Certain things can bring us joy, but not as much as when we take pictures of them.

So many photographers I know take photos to remember things.

That’s still true, but now we’re taking photos to say things—about ourselves, about the world around us—as well as to preserve memories.

(via Flak Photo)

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Feel Euphoria

The morning after our daughter was born.

When my daughter was born, my wife and I spent most of a week in the hospital.

Near the end of that time, I headed home to take care of a few things—the mail, the trash, clean up a bit, that kind of thing—and I realized something:

I never felt better in my life.

There was no stress. No anxiety. No worries. I felt this overwhelming sense of relaxation – of everything being right and good with the world. It was amazing.

Thinking about it later, my euphoria could be explained by a few things. For one, my entire life that week was wrapped up in caring for my newborn daughter. I rarely thought of myself, or my needs. Everything I did was for her (and, in close second, my wife). Selflessness breeds good vibes.

For two, I was severely lacking in sleep. A hospital cot is no place to get good, quality rest. So some of that stress-free feeling could have come from a profound mental tiredness. Who knows?

Also, I felt like an older version of me had passed away, and I had taken on this new role of “father.” I was a daddy. My old life, as I knew it, was gone. A new, exciting, terrifying future was in front of me. It was awesome in the old sense of the word (“full of awe”).

People often say that, facing a near-death experience, their post-experience life takes on a new shine. Their survival comes with a burden and an opportunity – a kind of second chance. It’s the only similar experience I can think of that describes what I felt on that drive home from the hospital to run some errands.

My headaches were gone. My shoulders weren’t all bunched up around my neck. Everything was rainbows and sunshine. It was weird! And it was something I’ll never forget.

That feeling is, as of today, a year old, along with my daughter. While that feeling faded, it never truly went away. It’s hung around, a quiet buzzing along the edges of everyday life, and it gets louder every time I see or hold my baby. Lots of parents know this feeling. In fact, many people tried to tell me what it’s like before I became a father.

But you don’t really know that feeling until it happens. I relay that message to fellow parents when I see them; I give them a wink and a nod of understanding.

“You know what it’s like,” I say. “And before it happened, you didn’t know.”

So I get the chance to put that feeling into the photos that I take of my daughter. She’s had a year of daddy sticking a camera in her face, as many children and many generations before her have experienced. Usually, she’s a good sport.

What she doesn’t know yet is that daddy tries to take that special feeling, from a year ago, and translate it through the photos I make of her. I hope that someday, many years from now, she’ll see the photos and understand how much I love her.

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