Johnny Patience has a handy guide on thinking about metering with film.
His experience mirrors my own. Shooting with my Canonet and its max 1/500 shutter speed means I have to shoot at half box speed quite a bit. Negative film survives the overexposure just fine.
Patience takes a turn at black and white film, too (check out that headline).
Rick Smolan has a bunch of good tips on self-publishing your next photo book.
It’s a bit crowdfunding heavy, but has advice from a guy who has done a lot of photo publishing. I appreciate that Smolan’s first tip is on audience:
The traditional publishing model was to turn to a big publisher who would throw it into book stores and hope the book found an audience. Now photographers are able to market directly to the people who are already invested in your chosen subject.
I don’t start a photo book project unless I have an audience in mind. And because I’m seriously considering a Kickstarter campaign, I’ll take all the good tips I can.
(via Blurb on Twitter.)
Prog rock is my heart and soul, but lately I’m drifting into the “stoner metal” crowd as well. Take this lovely, 10-minute long jam by Causa Sui – perfect headphone music for tinkering, working, or photo editing.
And as often happens, one band leads to another, leads to another, leads to another…
I’ve spent the last week enjoying our new baby daughter, Riley May Lawrence.
She arrived early Tuesday morning, purple and gooey, and has been either eating or sleeping since. We got back home on Friday afternoon, and took most of the weekend getting settled: spending time with the other two kids, getting our routine down, and taking care of the baby.
This baby – the c-section, the hospital stay, our sleep cycle – has been a smooth one. We’re lucky. We’re also lucky to get lots of help from grandparents and friends. And our new house is prepped enough to make the living part easy.
I’m taking this next week off of work, too (the first time in my working life I’ve had two consecutive weeks off), to help with the kids, enjoy the new baby, and help my wife around the house. Plus photo making, of course.
Life gets really simple when you have one big (or tiny, as it were) priority. I find it surprisingly relaxing to tune out everything else and concentrate on this crying, squeaking little person.
Everything else takes a distant second.
Last summer, at our former house, we noticed something more and more: of all our neighbors, we were the only ones who spent any measurable amount of time outside.
Whether for grilling, or for playing on the swing set, or going for a simple walk around the block, our family was largely alone. We didn’t see some neighbors for weeks. Others only went outside to mow the lawn, or get in their car and leave. My wife and I would sit in the backyard, after putting the kids to bed, just to read and drink and watch the birds. Again: all alone, all by ourselves.
Granted, we lived in a rural neighborhood, and most country folks stick to themselves. But we couldn’t shake a thought: how weird that other people in our neighborhood weren’t enjoying the lovely Michigan summer. So far, it’s been the same story at our new house.
Maybe a lot has changed since I was a kid (“Go outside and play!” my mother would shout, and we did – all day long). There are a lot of new time suck options, from Netflix to Facebook, even in rural areas. Given that more people (especially children) are spending less time outside, my values probably differ from my nation’s.
On the other hand, it’s easy to fall into nature worship, and praise fresh air so much that you become annoying. I’ll admit that not everyone craves Thoreau’s “tonic of wilderness” like I do. We sent our son to a nature center for preschool, and he spent most of his school day outdoors in the woods. That’s not for everyone.
But, I do think that if you have a yard, you should spend time in it. If you live on a road, you should walk up and down it from time to time.
And if you’re a photographer, getting outside should be a part of your practice. Take your camera, grab your kids or pet, and go outside to see what the season has accomplished.
(Coincidentally, a recent Roderick On the Line podcast episode had a discussion about this subject, specifically about people playing sports outside. Good listen.)
A generous On Taking Pictures listener gifted me a copy of Sally Mann’s Immediate Family for our gift exchange during the holidays, and it has me thinking about family photos. As a parent, family photography came naturally. Is there a better way to capture your kids growing up?
Unless you’re a parent, a lot of this won’t be clear. But for those parents out there, you instinctively know how important family photography is.
In her memoir, Hold Still (which is a great read, by the way – give me a memoir over an autobiography any day) Mann tells her photography students:
Photograph what is important to you, what is closest to you, photograph the great events of your life, and let your photography live with your reality.
“Your reality” could include dreams, or emotions, or flowers by a big window. For parents, “what is closest” is often our children, especially at first. And what is photography if not to capture something before its gone?
Photographing the family has a few side benefits. For one, it’s just good practice. Think about shooting something every day, week after week, and then add in that you have a readily-available subject who more or less cooperates. Want to try out a new technique? Want to test a new piece of gear? Need to sketch out an idea? “C’mere, kiddo. Stand here.”
Second, while I love a good snapshot, I love making art with my family even more. I put feelings into the photos I make of my family, and that lends them a greater weight. Maybe they don’t mean anything to the casual observer. And maybe the kids, themselves, will look back and wonder why I made such a fuss. But with my family photos, I’m the audience (okay, maybe the grandparents, too).
Can I show someone that I love them by taking their photo? I believe so. That’s the ultimate reason I photograph my family. All you need is love, as John Lennon sang. It’s the ultimate personal project.
So now, I look for examples of good family photos, a genre I would never had been interested if it weren’t for exploring image making with my own kids. If I get the same sense of fondness and artistic expression – artists living with their reality, as Mann says – then the photographer has succeeded.
Frank Chimero, in “Back to the Cave“:
Making things is putting the world in your mouth.
I make things for the same reasons babies put things in their mouths: to better understand the world, to sooth ourselves, and learn what to say.
Agreed. Whether it’s a new job or a new house, I use photography as a way to explore and absorb new surroundings and situations. This makes going anywhere new a thrill, because I bring along my camera and chew the hell out of the place.
(via Craig Mod)
Maybe it’s the colors, or maybe because it’s Spring, but Easter is always one of my favorite holidays to shoot.
We had a good (and busy) one this year, full of Nintendo gear and jelly beans. And the weather was fantastic.
Birth. Rebirth. The world waking up. The birds chirping. Our collective sweet tooth, satisfied.
“How learning works: ‘you practice music scales so you can forget them when playing music.'” – Luke Wroblewski
Same goes for technique and photography, or color theory and design. Make the technical stuff muscle memory, then go out and do what you feel like doing.
(That’s The Neal Morse Band in Cleveland, Ohio. Great show, and great new double concept album.)
Back on New Year’s Day, I came down with something terrible: fever, chills, aches, and an all-encompassing drowsiness. It was so bad I had to cancel holidays plans with my family.
By day three, I was going stir-crazy, so the boy and I headed outside during an unseasonably warm January day to get some fresh air. It had to help, even a little, to take a walk around the neighborhood.
We walked our usual path down by the lake, and through the neighborhood trails – to the giant pile of concrete rubble that sits on the farm property just outside the residential zone.
The walk didn’t end up helping all that much, long-term, but to my feverish head and aching lungs, breathing that foggy Midwestern air provided a much-needed break.
John Carey at 50 Foot Shadows, after his X-Pro broke, picked up a classic Canon 5D after a long absence.
Funny thing happened in that, I found myself inspired by the change of pace. The original 5D has such a beautiful sensor, it’s like changing film. While I miss flexibility in ISO and dynamic range the photos I get from the 5D are moody, colorful, contrasty, they really have a life of their own, in fact, as some of you already know, the camera defined my style 10+ years ago when I started to shoot with it.
Carey took a look back to when he first put down his 5D. His feeling then matches my own now: “This is a still photo camera. There is no shame in that.”
No shame, indeed. In fact, I see it as a point of pride. When you want to take pictures, you pick up a picture-taking machine.
Fun look back at the history of US-12 at Concentrate Ann Arbor:
Michigan Avenue has been recognized for its significance as a Historic Heritage Route. Given the fact that it’s persisted so long and been so essential to the state, it seems more than fitting to refer to this road, which spans the entire east-west length of the state, as Michigan Avenue.
US-12 has fed a life-long fascination for me, and is becoming a long-term photography project. It’s a road, and an area, rich with history.
Parts two and three are up, too.
Maybe it’s waking up out of winter, or maybe it’s just a little more sunshine affecting my brain – but I recently splurged on some photography gear.
This year, to kick off my project, I treated myself to a new camera strap from Gordy’s. It’s not going to make my photos better, and it’s not one of those $100 artisan leather products that get all the reviews. It’s a simple leather strap that holds my Canonet around my neck. And it’s dark brown, with red and burgundy accents.
It’s half fashion, half pragmatism. My old strap was a simple nylon affair, thin and unassuming. It did the job, sure, but not well, and it wouldn’t win any beauty contests. With this new leather strap, at least I feel like human beings made it with attention and care.
I also have this thing where all my camera straps need to be brown. Whatever.
Gordy’s does this nice thing where they feature photographers’ cameras on their photo gallery. A nice way to show off gear, and their product. They have a great Instagram account, too.
My friends and I set our musical foundation in the 1990s. Post grunge, post groove metal, we looked back at the decade before us and wondered what everyone saw in the metal bands of the ’80s.
New Wave of British Heavy Metal, power metal, hair metal – these were dirty words to kids who rocked out to Pantera, Alice In Chains, and Rage Against the Machine. Sure, we dug the stuff from the ’70s, and it was easy to make the connection from grunge to classic rock. But “metal,” as we knew it, was so passé.
We made exceptions, of course. Dio, some Iron Maiden, Metallica was still doing interesting things. Everyone else could go to hell.
It’s only recently that I’ve started to dig up good material that we may have missed. We picked on bands like Anthrax, but maybe we were missing something. This is especially evident as these classic bands have kept going and releasing new material.
Turns out? For All Kings is pretty damned great.
Great-looking series from Steve Gray on the area between England and Wales. It’s my kind of project, full of place and time and atmosphere.
Gray made a photo book to accompany the project: 36 images and limited to 100 copies. Let’s help him sell out.
Today is my birthday. I turn 36.
Today is also the start of a project – one that I’ve thought long and hard about since the holidays. It involves taking a photograph every day for a year and not sharing it with anyone.
Then, at the end? I’m not sure. I’ll figure it out when I get there.
That number keeps circling around my brain: 36. Thirty six. More than halfway to Old Man.
An idea is brewing.
Time to break out the Canonet.
After thinking about my favorite type of camera – small, single lens, 35-45mm range – I loaded a roll of Agfa Vista 400 and hit the streets for a just-starting-to-feel-like-spring afternoon in Ann Arbor.
From loading to dropping film off at the camera store took less than an hour. I had 24-ish chances to capture something walking around an unfamiliar neighborhood. And I had 40mm to express what I saw, with a rangefinder focusing mechanism to express it.
I also had a serious limitation: the bright, sunny afternoon was killer when the Canonet’s highest shutter speed was 1/500. That, combined with a 400 ISO film speed, meant having to pull the ISO down a bit, or else the camera refused to take a photo. Chalk it up to one big learning experience.
The point is, I took the Canonet for a spin, and blew through a 24 exposure roll of film. That old saying about potato chips, that you can’t eat just one? Same rule applied to that roll of Agfa Vista. It was easy to just keep visually snacking.
Life has been a bit hectic lately, with weeks of unending illness in our house (seems to be that way for everyone this year), the move, getting the house in order.
Oh, and a new baby on the way later this month.
So yeah, thing like unpacking boxes and making decisions about decorating? We’re putting those off.
In the meantime, we’re just trying to get through a week without a late-night sickness episode or a trip to the hospital. The kids take it all in stride, of course. They’re more concerned with where their toys are, and how much of a mess they can make. They don’t know that their parents are doing lots of planning, wondering, and worrying.
Finding a new groove takes a while when you move into a house. This time, it’s taking even longer. We’re still unpacking.
Type O Negative released Dead Again, their final album, 10 years ago.
It’s hard to overstate how important this album, and Type O Negative, were to me. I remember 2007 being a big year for me, personally, and Dead Again was there through all the tumult and strife. My roommate and I went to see Type O at Harpo’s in Detroit that year. Three years after the album, lead singer Peter Steele would drop dead. I think about him a lot, and what Type O would’ve made had he been alive.
Ten years? Man. That’s a lot of time to soak in one album.
If there’s such a thing as progressive goth (14 minutes!), “These Three Things” is it. Such a sprawling, epic track – my favorite on the album.
Keep yourself busy, that’s what I say.
Last winter, off my big portrait project, I needed something to keep me entertained during these cold Michigan winter months. I needed a photo project to keep my mind and camera busy, and something that I could do inside.
When Sandhill Crane Vineyards invited me to be their featured artist for May, I felt like I needed to show some fresh work in their gallery. Wine would be fun. But what if I did more than wine still life photos? What if I made it bigger?
It ended up being my big still life project.
A few months back I was invited to speak to the Jackson Civic Art Association about the project. One of the members, Carrie Joers, dug my still life shots. More than liking them, she wanted to paint them, and figured a how-to session on setting up a still life setting would be good for her drawing and painting friends.
Here’s what I told the group in terms of restrictions and things to think about:
I’m making my slideshow (with notes) available as a download (PDF), since I can’t give my presentation to you, the reader. It should give you some background, some ideas, and some inspirational crumbs to follow.
“Making decisions about art based entirely on commerce is a recipe for regret.” – CJ Chilvers
