“From what I witness almost daily, completely unrealistic and overblown expectations are the biggest problems for most photographers.” – Jörg M. Colberg
Far better, I would say, to have no expectations, and make whatever you want, when you want. Even if it fails, you learn something.
Want to publish a book yourself? Do it. Don’t ask for permission.
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A recent essay in Harper’s has me thinking about the importance of play in children’s lives, versus the demands that modern school systems are placing on them. Public education is so concerned with test scores and achievement, argues Malcolm Harris, that there’s little time to let kids be kids.
Now, take that into art and photography. What’s the balance between cramming your brain with technical information and learning by accident?
Photography education is fine. It feels like you need to learn all you can, especially at the start, to be a “good” photographer. But I would warn that too much of that leads you into birds and blooms – tricks instead of a voice and a viewpoint.
I think the balance should be like 10/90, formal technique education versus experimentation. Learn a little, but play a lot. Pick up a book, grab your camera, and try to recreate what you like. Be a photography kid.
The school system my kids are coming in to kind of terrifies me. With lower funding for music and art class, and more rote memorization and “teaching to the test,” there’s little room for kids to enjoy their time in the classroom. Summertime at school? Yuck. Adults don’t like that much pressure – why would children?
So it goes when you pick up a camera. Don’t be so burdened with learning all the technical stuff that you don’t stumble on a new (or “you”) way of doing things.
All my best techniques were picked up by accident – me just playing around, shooting for fun.
I’ve taken maybe a handful of online photography courses, mostly in speedlight training because it was so new to me. Over time, I learned most online photography courses are like online Photoshop courses: one trick ponies to only use when you really need it. And for most of those, as CJ says, there’s free videos on YouTube to learn techniques.
Seriously, just do a search on anything you need to know – from camera repair to off-camera lighting.
No, my “education” comes from the How To See end of the photography spectrum. Specifically, it’s learning how the great photographers of history have seen the world and translated it through their pictures. When I learned how Callahan and Metzker saw the world, my photography voice and vision (not techniques!) improved.
The best photography lessons come from photo books and projects, not one-off online classes. Find a photographer you like, go grab their book from a library, and spend some time with it. If you really like the book, buy it, and you’ll be able to keep it forever. You can share it with friends. You can revisit it over time and rediscover the lessons.
Libraries provide books to anyone, just about anywhere, for free. Through interlibrary loans, if they don’t have a book, they can get it for you. That’s a librarian’s job! They can’t wait to help you find a book. I’m lucky enough to work at a university where I can go online, pick a book, and it shows up at my office a few days later (one of the many reasons I love working in higher ed).
Now, if a photographer doesn’t have a book, visit the Projects section of their website and spend some time with it. Look at those images full size. Read the text. Find out the why. Hell, send them an email and start a conversation. Don’t be shy.
If you’re a professional photographer who needs to solve a difficult problem, maybe something like CreativeLive will work for you. Maybe it’s worth the money.
But for us hobbyists, a book is a better investment in time and treasure.
Nice to get a fresh photo book from England. Well, maybe not fresh – I’ve had it for a while. But I’m finally digging in.
Steve Gray’s Borderland is a small marvel. I’ve covered it before, thanks to Gray’s Q&A, but seeing it in person makes all the difference.
The first edition is sold out, but he’s taking requests for the second printing.
“Tools are easy to learn. Training your eye takes time.” – Jeff Sheldon
It’s fun to laugh at a graphic designer when they use Comic Sans. “What are they thinking?” the cry goes. “Don’t they know.”
Often, they don’t. Often, the “graphic designer” is a secretary at a church making a community dinner flyer. She doesn’t know any better.
So it goes with any art form. The inappropriate HDR, the selective color, the breaking of any “rules” of photography – it’s often a new photographer who is mimicking what he or she sees elsewhere, ignorant of the kitsch they’re putting on display. They haven’t developed good taste.
(Tangent: Go look at Flickr’s Explore page and you’ll see lots of birds, landscapes, flowers, and light painting. I wonder – because that’s what’s being put forward as popular work on Flickr, is that why so many people make photos of wildlife and macro blossoms?)
After absorbing tons of good photography (and shooting a ton), you can acquire self awareness and taste. It’s like this with any craft. The more good work that you devour, and the more you practice, the more you can season your own projects with a unique viewpoint.
My goal is always to look back at my old work and cringe. That’s how I know I’m developing my taste.
It wasn’t my pick. Honest.
No, it was the boy saying, “I want to be a bokoblin for Halloween” that got the whole train started. Now, we’re doing the Legend of Zelda costumes – the whole lot of us.
The forecast looks chilly for trick or treating tonight. Let’s hope our mostly-homemade costumes keep us warm.
I’m a gala man, but really any apple will do.
This year, it’s easy to get positively drunk on them. And with some cider varieties, that’s entirely possible.
I’ve always been an apple guy. As a kid, my mom would get bags of red delicious, and I would have half the bag gone in the first day. As I developed an actual taste, golden delicious and gala, jonathan, and fuji were all favorites. Just this year I discovered the pinova variety – what a beautiful apple!
Here in Michigan, it’s apple season, so we packed up the family and headed out to the countryside – our old stomping grounds – for the annual pumpkin and orchard trip. It’s easy to stick to the regular old apple varieties, so this year I looked for some new kinds. Apples, and squash. There are a million squash varieties.
And like apples, I’ll try them all.
My first experience with the Tragically Hip was a memorable one. My friend Driver invited me to Pine Knob, the summer after our freshman year in college, to see this amazing Canadian rock band I had only barely heard of, with an enigmatic lead singer and bluesy vibe. I was really going to see the opening band, Guster, but the Hip were a new, added bonus. I had no expectations.
Then they opened with “Tiger the Lion,” a booming, slightly psychedelic rant on a hot July night, and I thought, “My God, where have these guys been?”
The rest is personal history. I’ve since seen the Hip more than any other band (more than a dozen concerts, easily), traveling back and forth over the Canadian border to see the North’s favorite rock and roll band. The last time, in January 2015 at the Windsor, Ontario casino, was just months before lead singer Gord Downie was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.
The news hit last week that Gord passed away. I’ve spent the last week in mourning. It’s been rough.
Last Wednesday I loaded up my Hip playlist, grabbed my camera, and hit the streets for some fresh air and therapy. It’s all I felt like doing: playing music, and making pictures. What else can one do when a music hero dies?
All of Canada mourns Gord’s death. But we sure sent him, and the guys in the band, out on a high note last summer when the Hip headed out for one more tour.
Thanks Gord, for everything: the music, the memories, and that magical summer night in 2000 that gave me 17 wonderful years of your performances.
Om Malik, on the cruddy quality of camera reviews:
All I want to know from reviews is how it feels in hand, the pictures it makes and what is the actual performance from a daily usage stand point. The sensor size, the sensor type and what kind of processors mean absolutely nothing — what matters is the photos.
Even more helpful: give me a year-out view, after you’ve spent some quality time with the camera, and really tested its capabilities.
What would make me love it more than what I already have? What are the limits of its use? Where have you taken it, and what did you see?
A few of the big photo sites take a stab at this philosophy, but I value reviews from individual photographers more than any review-heavy site.
(via CJ Chilvers)
“One must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.” – Vincent Van Gogh
As I’ve said, I don’t do weddings unless (a) I know you and (b) I like you.
That’s why I was happy to capture Jon and Amanda’s wedding a few weeks ago. Amanda and Jon are family, and their small wedding in my dad’s backyard was intimate and lovely.
Photography can be an awesome gift to give – longer lasting than cash or a toaster oven. Don’t be stingy with it.
Matt Thomas has great things to say about accepting and adjusting to seasons:
More and more, I try to live in harmony with the seasons, not the clock.
Here in the Midwest, we’re experts at seasons. And I definitely pick projects and to-do items that reflect the time of year. Winter? Get outside and shovel, and a few photographer interviews. Spring? Yard work and thinking ahead to summer projects. Fall? Finish up projects, enjoy a shit ton of apple cider, try roasting some acorns, etc.
Maybe I’m a creature of habit, but the seasonal routines are very comforting for me.
Start the crockpots full of chili, folks. It’s autumn.
With the release of my new book (thanks for all the kind comments, by the way), this might be a good time to mention that my photo print store is open – even if I don’t give it much love.
I’m on Society6. They make the whole process easy, and give you lots of good options at a reasonable price.
Photography isn’t about making money to me. It’s about making work and sharing work. I get requests often enough that my store becomes an easy way for people to buy my pictures.
Shop, and enjoy. And if there’s anything that’s not up there that you wish was, please let me know.
My Canonet is missing.
It could be stolen, or it could be lost. But it’s gone. The camera, and a roll of film with 20-ish exposures from my 365 project.
What a bummer.
That means most of September is missing. Maybe a bit of late August. Lots of sunrises and foggy mornings – those magical times when photography is so fun this time of year. The light changing, the leaves falling, the hot days and cool evenings.
It could be that I left my little rangefinder in my front seat, and then left the car unlocked overnight, a prime opportunity for a wayward thief. Or it could be that me, the absent-minded photographer, left the camera sitting somewhere out of sight, waiting to be discovered again.
The point is that I can’t leave the 365 half finished. No, I’ll load a roll of Lomo into my Olympus and keep going, and try not to pine for those lost photos from earlier this month.
Lost, or found, I have to keep going.
Settling into the new house, here six months after moving in, means doing things in different ways than before.
Mowing the lawn? It takes half as long now. My commute? About 20 minutes shorter. Moving into town, we have time in the morning to let the kids sleep in a bit before taking the boy to school.
We take walks like we used to, just around a more suburban setting. We play out in the yard, as always, it’s just that the yard is not as big.
Little things, here in there, that I’m still getting used to.
I made a thing.
Seeing as how my musicians portrait project is on hiatus, I’m releasing my new photobook, #abandoned, a collection of urbex and abandoned photography from the past few years, all taken on my iPhone.
Better to ship something than nothing, right?
#abandoned is a simple 8″ square softcover book that includes 30 images of abandoned houses, factories, and farms – mainly in south central Michigan.
Although I’ve largely retired from urbex photography, I felt like I had a few more projects in me. One of them was to make a photobook of all my urbex adventures, but keep it to mobile photography. I’ve made plenty of photos using my “big” camera, but my iPhone is always with me, even when my DSLR isn’t. The photos are all of high enough quality to make a modest book. On Instagram, I’ve had a few people ask me to make something like #abandoned, so here it is.
I wanted to keep it simple and affordable, so I’ve posted the book on MagCloud for order. It’s $15.
My style, such as it is, comes in large part from my explorations in abandoned properties. There came a point where I was both shooting urbex locations and developing my creative voice. I feel like a lot of these photos come from that combination of recklessness and light chasing, and are a good representation of the kind of work I do now.
Order your copy today, and please let me know what you think.
It’s been a weird summer.
It started with such promise. But as the months passed, more and more projects started to slip. My musicians portrait project fizzled, and I found myself picking up my camera less and less.
Just today, I turned in the keys to my studio. I paid for the whole month of August and only accomplished one portrait shoot. I held on to it a month longer than I should have. Guilt made me keep it – you paid for this great space, don’t give it up! – until I couldn’t logically justify the expense.
After a while, I had to tell myself to stop feeling guilty, and accept this new-found funk for what it is: a down period.
Plenty of creative people go through it, and there’s tons of ways to deal with it. My own method has been to recognize it, accept it (grudgingly), and hope things get better.
The sticky part is thinking back on previous years where I was productive. I look back through my Lightroom catalog and Flickr albums and yearn for those creative periods. I was shooting every season, every day, every situation. I was making documentaries and exploring my community and learning about other artists. From 2012 until this spring, I feel like I was on fire with photography.
At the start of the summer, I tried to power through this down period I felt coming on. I started my musicians project with half a heart, but after a while I couldn’t ignore my creative block. I tried really hard, too.
With this blog, I wanted to make it a daily thing for at least a year, and then try posting a few times a week after that. My strategy worked decently well for a while, but now I feel like I have nothing to say about the larger world of photography. I’ve turned inward, sharing and documenting what’s going on around me, with little thought to best practices or experiments in picture making. These days, it’s mostly just picture sharing.
Could it be that I was so steeped in photography that I got burned out? That doesn’t explain my desire for more productive times.
Several things happened in the spring that I can point to and say, “Maybe that was it.” We moved into a new home, into a new community, had a new baby. I was a year into my new job, hitting my stride. My commute wasn’t what it used to be. All of these were big life-changing circumstances. Did they affect my photographic output? Or was it something else?
Time will tell. I’ll let the autumn come and try to capture the season and its changes, and use the cold months to think about this funk.
My hope is that, on the other end, I’ll come up with a recipe for whatever the opposite of feeling like a failure is.
This was it – the last big adventure of the summer, saved until the end.
The trick was lining up our northern Michigan vacation with the grandparents’ schedules. One pair in Mackinaw City for a few days, and the other in Petoskey for the second half. Help with adventures, babysitting, and overnights. With three kids, taking one to spend time with the grandparents relieves a bit of the strain.
Not that this was stressful. No, northern Michigan moves at a vacation pace. Water, and sky, and enough green and blue to make both of our major state university fans happy.
(It’s Go Blue season, just to be clear.)
This close to Lake Michigan, and this close to all those forests – it’s a proper goodbye to nice weather, and water, and wilderness for a while. We even said goodbye to the trout sunning themselves at an honest-to-goodness fish hatchery, complete with a bald eagle waiting, and watching, in the canopy above.
It’s what’s so great about living in our state. A few hours in every direction and you’re next to a giant freshwater lake and enough nature to forget that it’ll all be buried in snow and ice in a few months.
This kind of thing just hasn’t happened in Jackson. Not historically.
This is the (or a) birthplace of the Republican Party, after all. Once fairly progressive, now very conservative. We’re a blue collar town – a small city whose claim to fame is a prison.
So when Jackson’s LGBTQ community scheduled the city’s first pride parade, I had to be there, camera in hand. And I brought my entire family.
The parade turnout was small, but the celebration was big. Flags, costumes, fun t-shirts – it had it all.
The parade had pride.
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