Last week, to get out of the house, I did the uncool thing and headed downtown to see what it looked like with our governor’s shelter-in-place order.
As Florence sings, it was a city without seasons. March is the November of spring – the weird in-between one. No leaves on the trees, no flowers blooming just yet, and streets as empty as can be.
The truth is that downtown Jackson is pretty empty on weekday nights after 5 p.m. But last week it was extra desolate. I stopped a person or two wandering around downtown, just like me.
Things really got interesting when a guy noticed me taking pictures. “Hey, want to take photos inside the theatre?” This is Jackson’s Michigan Theatre, the city’s lone operational classic theatre. The man was wearing a protective mask. I’m not sure what his role was at the theatre, but he had the whole place to himself. I got the sense, as I was taking photos inside, that the guy was simply lonely. Or he wanted to show off the place. I had to excuse myself after 10 minutes, or else the man would’ve given me the full tour of the place.
So I headed back outside, into the sunshine, to photograph our empty downtown.
With spring coming, and with more light, it’s nice to have the option to get outside and walk around.
Fresh air may be the best hope we all have of staying sane.
We have our routine down pretty well now. Wake up, eat, check-in, watch some TV, do live stream music with mom, go outside, lunch, quiet time, back outside, dinner, play, bed. Repeat.
Work is definitely challenging these days. The kids are feeling cooped up. It’s hard not to chat with the neighbors, except from a distance. And the streets are so quiet.
Every day we’re a little more anxious about everything: our health, our families, the economy, the Executive Branch’s dipshit handling of the whole situation. We feel phantom symptoms and worry. We’re trying to make the groceries we bought two weeks ago last a bit longer.
I did start a new batch of cider. I took a photo field trip that I hope to share later. The weather is warming up, so I’m sitting on the front porch listening in on conference calls while the kids dig their bikes out of the garage.
Every little thing helps us not think about every big thing.
Everything’s weird. From the power continuing the flicker, to the quiet streets, to the strange sense of calm – inside the house, you wouldn’t know the world is working its way through a pandemic crisis.
I’m working from home most days. I one of the lucky ones whose work sits on a laptop, mostly. Though I did travel in today (a Friday) just to get some fresh air and get out of the house for a bit. The parking lot is nearly empty.
At home, the kids don’t know any better. For them, it’s a longer spring break, and – strange for them – more time with dad at home. I did my best to set up a new routine that includes fresh air, some form of learning exercise (disguised as art projects), and some pick-up at the end of the day.
We’re as prepared as we can be for the long haul.
[All photos shot on my iPhone SE and edited in Filmborn.]
Now that the whole world is under quarantine, what’s a photographer to do? Especially if you’re stuck at home? I think this is a great time to work on a few photography projects, and here are a few ideas to help keep your mind off the outside world.
Photograph Your Surroundings
This time of year, the light is changing dramatically. Photograph your home, your yard, your neighborhood, and pay special attention to how the light transforms. I’ve made this a hobby inside a hobby. It’s how I explore spaces and get to know a place.
Photograph Your Family/Friends
Take advantage of being closer to the people in your life, now that most public events are canceled or on hold. Sit your significant other down next to a window and take their portrait. Photograph your kids, now home from school, at play. Invite friends over for drinks (nothing celebrates global chaos like booze) and make it a project.
Tidy Up Your Camera Gear
Now’s a great time to dust off your old gear, wipe down your lenses, empty out your memory cards, and clean out your camera bag. I know my Canon 5D has a notoriously dirty sensor. My batteries probably need a good recharge. Grab your gear, turn on some music, and get to work.
Take Care of Your Photo Files
My Lightroom catalog has folders and folders full of unedited photos. My iPhone photos could use a backup. My whole photo collection could use an external hard drive backup. It’s a great time to take care of organizing your photos, updating your metadata, and caring for the digital side of your photography.
Print Your Photos
Whether it’s individual prints or a book, now that you’ve organized your photo collection, you can put those beautiful pictures on paper for safe-keeping. Snapfish sends me an email every day talking about their photobook sales. Why not take an album full of your 2019 photos and make a photobook? You can even do it on your mobile device.
Get Online
Edit your photography website. Pre-write a bunch of blog posts with idea starters. Update your social profiles. Do some digital housecleaning.
Try a New Thing
Always wanted to try out film photography? Or take a stab at still life? Now’s the time to try something new – or, more accurately, it’s always a great time to try something new.
What’s easy for me? It’s easy to brainstorm an idea – to come up with a creative project that I want to see out in the world.
It’s also easy to ship that idea once everything finished, to cross the finish line with the idea and have it live in the world
What am I not good at? The middle. The gut check, the finer details, or thinking through the unthought-of things. The implementation of that original idea.
For example, in a photo project, coming up with my subject theme comes naturally. I want to photograph creative people in my community.
But what then? Where do I start? How do I find subjects? What do I do when things get difficult?
Once I have that figured out, it’s easy for me to take the outputs and put them together in a finished product. I get a deep thrill out of that final crunch to ship something on a self-imposed deadline.
In the middle, I know I need help and guidance on getting something started. Imagine pushing a car that’s standing still. It’s easy to figure out I need to move it, and once it’s in motion I know where I want to go. But getting past inertia? It’s tough for me.
What works in that middle is to find a person – a colleague, or a family member, or friend – who provides good, honest feedback and advice. I’m humble enough to know when I need help, and humble enough to ask for it when I’m having trouble getting going.
My wife’s family is Disney Crazy – movies, merchandise, housewares, everything. And that includes a bi-annual trip to Disney World in Orlando, Florida.
I skipped the last trip, in 2018, but went along this year. That seems sensible to me – once every four years. Two years is a bit much.
This time, though, my wife brought the whole family: cousins, in-laws, brothers and sisters. In all, 14 of our people spent a week in the most Magical Place on Earth™.
And while I’m cynical about the whole thing, when you’re there, the magic really does affect you. Well, that and the 80-degree weather and sunshine. You do get swept up in the excitement. Having small children sure helps.
We found new things to do, and filled our schedules. There was the new Star Wars park to explore, and new rides, and a few days off just to relax, swim, and shop a bit. Us grown-ups even got a chance to leave the kids with the grandparents and go out for a night of adult fun.
I first came to Disney World when I was five years old, and visited again in high school and my young professional life. Last time I took the trip, in 2016, I explored the parks photographically, with my family, seeing these wonderlands with new eyes.
This year, I mainly focused on the kids and creating memories for them, but I did find a few opportunities to see the park as a photographer, looking for those little quiet moments in all the hub-bub.
Our local art and history museum has an annual summer event, the Art, Beer, & Wine Festival, which features those three things on a (usually) beautiful June day. I often wonder about participating in the festival – maybe as a way to get some of my photography out there, promote my books and projects, and meet more people around town.
But then I think about the whole art fair crowd, and what you need to do to appeal to a mass audience like that, and I wonder if my work is the kind of stuff that would be interesting. My portrait projects might be good conversation starters because they feature local creatives doing interesting things – many of whom are usually at the fair.
The cost is fairly minimal, but you do have to devote an entire day to standing out in the sun. It’s a fun event, one of the big draws on Jackson’s summertime event calendar. And there’s always the try-it-out-and-see-how-it-goes philosophy, where if it goes well, great, and if it doesn’t, I wouldn’t do it again.
The benefit would be spreading the word about my latest musicians project, as well as reminding people about my artists project. I might sell a few books, and get some subscribers to my email list. Would I make some photo prints to sell as well? If so, how many, and how much do I sell them for? Do I want a bunch of inventory sitting around after this festival is over?
When I approach a project like this, it’s best to keep a clear goal in mind.
This year, it would be to promote Musicians In Jackson, and remind people about Artists In Jackson. In conversation, I could ask for suggestions on my next project, too. Have some photos of the musicians and artists on hand to see the final products, and offer the book for purchase.
Keep it narrow. Keep it focused.
Many artists are fine with making their work and leaving it at that. For my projects, since they are about the community I live in, part of my job has to be to let people know about the work. A bit of that is personal outreach, a bit is letting the musicians and artists promote the project to people they know, a bit is local media efforts.
The festival could be a new way to get the word out: taking my photography directly to the community, in person, where I can talk about my goals and spark discussions.
The art fair-type approach to selling my photography is not appealing; I don’t think I’m that type of photographer. But if I look at the festival as a public relations tactic, I can keep the whole experience in focus with clear goals.
I’ve always been more of a doodler. I tried drawing comic book characters and realistic sketches of my favorite heroes growing up, but I didn’t have a natural talent. Maybe I could have practiced enough to get good, but I didn’t have the patience.
Instead, I came up with a doodle style that’s all my own. My drawing style and abilities haven’t changed all that much since the fourth grade. I can draw a decent newspaper cartoon character, ala Peanuts or The Far Side, but Erik Larsen-style Spider-Man is a step too far.
And that’s fine. I worked hard to get where I am, and I’m comfortable with where I landed.
We can’t be good at everything. Some of it is down to practice, and some of it involves our natural talent. The combo of practice and talent can lead to expertly-developed skills. Think Eddie Van Halen on guitar, or Ann Patchett with writing – skills take both an innate ability and an obsessive habit.
For hobbies, I think that the doodle mentality is just fine. It’s okay to work up to a certain level of skill, and then learn anything extra if needed, but only if needed.
Writing non-fiction, a writer is basically organizing information (facts, data, analysis, observations) for your audience. It’s creative filtering, using words, sentences, and paragraphs to make sense of the world.
With photography, a photographer does much of the same, but uses portraits, pictures, and projects to organize visual information and tell a story to an audience.
Words are the basic units of measurement when writing. In photography, it’s the individual photograph. But for both, it takes talent and experience to make those basic units do work in an audience’s mind. What do they say when put together?
Taking photos is fun, but organizing information is where photography’s true power shines through.
After two years of work, interviews, and shooting, my newest community portrait project, Musicians In Jackson, is live and available.
The project, like my previous Artists In Jackson project, is available on the web and in book form. It features local musicians doing interesting things. Each of them represents a unique facet of Jackson’s creative community, from musical theatre to rap to folk, and many styles and media channels in between.
Together, they help make our small Midwestern city a great place to live, work, and play. They help entertain us, heal us, remind us, and connect us. Our musical scene is small, but tight-knit, and gets a ton of support thanks to local venues that value arts and culture. Jackson musicians are just as talented as anywhere else.
Musicians In Jackson took longer than I expected, and I struggled along the way to get the portraits, interviews, and stories done. Something snapped in me earlier this year, where I said to myself, “Enough is enough.” This summer, I made an arbitrary deadline – autumn 2019 – put it out into the world, and then worked like hell to finish the project.
And here it is. I’m excited to share these 14 local musicians with you, and I ask for your support: purchase the book, visit the website, and help me spread the word.
“I believe anyone can become a great founder, a great engineer, a great designer, a great concept artist, a great fine art painter, a great filmmaker, a great writer…
Not that everyone will, but that anyone can. And it’s getting easier every day.” – Sahil Lavingia, founder of Gumroad.
It’s so true. We have an infinite number of possibilities – and if there isn’t a possibility for you, you can learn something new and go create it yourself.
I needed a platform to sell my books, keep customers up to date, and collect shipping information. Gumroad was that for me during Artists In Jackson, and it’s there for me again for the new project. It’s simple, reliable, and flexible.
Not that I need another one, but I started a new hobby: cider making.
Luckily, our neighbors and the in-laws have apple trees weighed down with apples this year. That meant plenty of fruit for the juicing and fermenting I had in mind.
I’ve long been a cider fan – an apple fan in general – and consider owning an orchard one of my retirement goals. Somewhere along the line, I got the bug to try my hand and making my own hard cider, taking advantage of all the modern brew making equipment and methods. Right here in town, we have a home brewery store with all the supplies I need. That, with some online advice, and I could easily give a batch a try.
There’s a lot to do: wash the apples, juice the apples, sterilize the equipment, add the yeast, feed the yeast, etc.
But first, I had to grab six little hands to help me pick and wash apples from the neighborhood.
I’ve considered myself a writer for just about as long as I learned to read and write.
When I was a kid, one of my grandparents gave me a typewriter – one of those old, mechanical models, the kind you didn’t plug into the wall. As a kid, and with the help of a model sailing ship, I wrote out pirate adventures. Way before I knew what it meant, I was creating serialized stories.
Journalism came naturally in high school and college, and the habits I picked up from my reporting days stuck with me.
Today, most of my job, and a big part of my personal life, involves writing stories – mostly non-fictional stories, but there are protagonists and a plot, just like with those early pirate tales. To write a story, I start with good notes: what’s going on? What does a person have to say about the story? What is the order of events? What happens next?
From those handwritten notes, I type them up into a text document in the same order I wrote them down. These notes are the basic building blocks of the story – section by section, event by event, quote by quote. I use these notes to connect the dots, try to make the story more interesting, and outline a basic inverted pyramid structure: all the interesting stuff goes first.
Taking those notes and arranging them, Lego-style, into a story that makes sense is where the creativity of non-fiction writing comes in. You have the story as the person told it, but you also have to act as a go-between with the reader. What questions would they have? What info do they need to understand what’s happening? Is there a point or climax to all this?
Re-arrange the story blocks, throw in a quote or three from the subject, and start and end with something interesting – that’s how I write a story. You can see this process come to life in any of my Artists In Jackson subjects. Each of those profiles started and finished with this process.
The process has served me well, and every time I start a new story, I start with a conversation and good notes. The rest is arranging those building blocks until it’s a story worth writing.
Sony and its brethren have taken a page from the Sun playbook. They keep pushing cameras that have features, like higher megapixels, that most people don’t use or don’t care about. And the executives don’t seem to get a key fact about the market reality: what we do with cameras and photos has changed
After peaking in 2012, camera and lens sales have slid downward. Not as many people need fancy cameras when a smartphone camera will do just fine.
Cameras may not disappear entirely, but they might be sold to fewer and fewer professionals and hobbyists.
As with Om, my 2005-era Canon 5D is all I’ll probably ever require in a camera (and I’m not alone). Why upgrade when I have all that I need?
