Over the holiday break, I used a (much appreciated) gift card to pick up Mark Marchesi’s photo book, Evangeline, based on his Acadia photo project.
This is my kind of photo project: about space, and history, featuring a tragic backstory. The photos of abandoned Victorian homes, and the tidewater landscapes – all with the background of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem.
It’s a beautiful book, with a soft fabric cover and lovely essay. And, because Marchesi’s project ran as a Kickstarter project, it has me thinking more and more about running my own crowdfunding campaign.
Since early autumn, my family has been house shopping.
Part of house shopping is seeing many, many kinds of houses, in all shapes, and in all kinds of conditions. Strolling through some of these houses, you see some very interesting things – in fact, there may be no deeper view into American culture and eccentricities than someone’s home.
I’m also paying attention to light. In our current home, the light is great – very airy and open. In our next house, I want to make sure it’ll photograph well. As I see neat lighting situations in these houses, I’m capturing those.
Last year I did a series of photographer interviews as a fun winter project. It was a great way to chat with photographers whose work I enjoy, and to learn about some photographers who I’ve followed on social media, or connected with through On Taking Pictures.
Let’s do it again!
I have a list of people I’m going to reach out to, but if you follow the work I do, and you’re a photographer with good work to share, I’d love to feature your stuff.
In fairness, this idea stems from the success I had with an email newsletter to announce and promote my Artists In Jackson project. I simply took that list and said to everyone “You’re either with me, or unsubscribe now!”
Turns out, most of them stuck around.
What will my email newsletter contain? Various bits of material from this blog, interesting photography I find, arts and culture going on in my community, and updates on my latest projects – specifically, the big portrait projects. It will be an experiment, but as I think about using things like Facebook less and less, an email newsletter could be my way to keep my friends, family, and followers in the know. Bi-weekly to monthly, depending on what I have going on.
Ben Brooks has some valid skepticism over original content on email newsletters. I’m going to think a lot about what he wrote. Part of me feels like you can have a different kind of fun on an email newsletter, to keep it special.
Mostly it’ll be a testing platform to see what I can do with it. Join me for the ride.
I spent a good time of the holiday break absorbing Rebecca Lily’s 365 project, from start to finish. I’ve mentioned Lily’s project here before, but I keep coming back to it because I love her journal-style posts, her photos, and her voice. And I admire the project.
It has me thinking about 365 projects in general. Many photographers attempt them, and many never finish. Some say don’t bother.
Reading Lily’s project blog got me thinking: could I do my own 365 project?
In a way, keeping a daily blog is a sort of 365 day project. Except for weekends, I post a photo (or two) per day on my Flickr.
The difference is, a 365 project is daily – make a photo every day, post a photo every day, even on weekends. It’s the combination of discipline and routine, along with any lessons learned along the way, that make a 365 project worthwhile.
Or not. Toward the end of Lily’s project, you feel her struggling to see the thing through. Is a mundane photograph worth the daily post? How do you handle the ebb and flow of the project, from the highs to the lows? What’s to stop you from giving up partway through?
Thinking about this kind of project, I voice these questions as I look at my own fears. I don’t think the daily photo making would be the tough part, although it would still be a challenge. It’s more like, what would be my goal in establishing a 365 project? Would I post every day? How?
This is the kind of planning and goal setting I feel would make for a successful project.
A 365 project is by far the best recommendation I could ever give a photographer who is struggling with finding their own style or voice. It’s like taking an intensive college course that’s normally a semester long, in 6 weeks. It’s perhaps five years’ worth (or more) of photography condensed into 1 year.
Maybe I should’ve started a project two years ago.
As I plan for my next portrait project, the idea of renting a studio space keeps popping up. Wouldn’t it be nice to have my own dedicated creative space, instead of relying on environmental portraits at other people’s studios or homes?
So I started shopping around, and asking friends and colleagues about potential studios.
The kicker is the set of conditions I’ve set on myself: strong window light, with an east or west-facing window, semi-centrally located in Jackson (for easy access), plenty of wiggle room for materials, and convenient availability to fit my work and family schedule. I’ve seen a few places around town that fit the bill, but another complication is that I’ll only need the space for a month or two. If I rent, I’m not sure how many landlords would be up for a 60 day lease.
But we’ll see. I’m starting to make phone calls and get my bearings. It’s a whole new world.
I’m lucky to work in higher education, where the week between Christmas and the new year are seen as an automatic holiday. This year, I took a few extra days before Christmas off, meaning a lot of time at home with the family.
What did we do? Not much. A bit of repair work on my car, some house showings, a couple of sick kids to contend with, and the busy back-and-forth of family holiday time. I was able to dig into a few photo books – Alex Webb’s The Suffering of Light was a nice Christmas gift – and think about my creative work for 2017.
But mostly, it was just what I had hoped for: quiet time, doing quiet things.
What’s amazing to me, looking at the past few years’ worth of photographs, is how (a) I take more photos and (b) it seems to be affected by what takes place in each of those years.
Did I take a wedding job? Did I take more iPhone photos? Did we take a big summer family trip? Heck, I have photos from 2015 that I haven’t even processed yet. They’re just sitting there, waiting for some Lightroom attention.
This year, I’ll hit 11,000 photos no problem. A new kiddo will do that.
Our Photos Per Year tell us a lot about the activities and output of each year. We take breaks. Life happens. We shoot more months than others.
More importantly, do we have an emotional attachment to that Photos Per Year rate? Do we feel bad we didn’t take as many photos this year as last? Why is that? Will taking more photos next year help us feel better?
I would argue that buying even 5 great street photography books will do more for your photography than any lens out there would. And assuming that each photo-book was $50, that would cost $250. That is a small fraction of any lens that you could purchase out there.
Good reminder this weekend, when you have some time for reading. And for the holiday season, when those Amazon gift cards come rolling in.
Last year, we didn’t get to Gwinn’s until darkness covered the tree lot. We picked a Christmas tree that felt right. And it was so cold.
This year was different. The temperatures were in the 40s, thanks to a very mild autumn, so we let the kids run through the rows of evergreens, tiring themselves in the cool air. We played tag, and chased each other in the trees.
Then we got the tree home – a short-needle variety, very soft – and did the real work: putting up the ornaments and lights. The kids were so tired from running at the tree farm that they were ready for bed early. That was fine with us.
As we plugged in the lights, we felt official. Ready for the holidays. All that’s missing in are the cookies.
Sick day at home with the kids. The boy got pink eye two days ago, and the baby woke up with it this morning.
Lots of hand-washing these past few days.
It’s not all bad. We watched the snow fall – only the second snowy day here in Michigan so far, which is weird this late into the year. The kids are still in pajamas, the Christmas music is going, and we’re all quiet and restful.
Working from home while a baby toddles around the house is a challenge, especially with icky hands. But I wouldn’t trade days at home with the kids for anything.
In the process of my big DAM switchover, I’m going through a ton of photos from past years – locked inside iPhoto, or tucked away inside random Finder folders. There are a lot of memories in these old photos.
Talking with fellow photographers, it’s often memory that comes up the most for “reasons why” people make photos. Photos are the physical or digital means to preserve moments. Often, they’re all the evidence we have of certain times or events taking place.
This is what attracted me to photography, as far back as a teenager. I would take disposable cameras with us on family trips, and I have albums full of photos from high school, college, and beyond.
Looking at those images in iPhoto, some as recent as 2011, was a good reminder of this important purpose. Five years ago doesn’t seem all that long ago, in my brain. But as I look back from the images of when I bought my first house (2011), or remodeled my office (2012), it feels like a lifetime ago. Photos help me remember, and show how much time has passed.
“Look at how skinny I was in 2010,” I tell myself. Or, “Boy, what a great Vegas trip we had in the summer of 2011.”
This is all happening by accident. My digital photo management is making me look through these old images, and as I do it it’s reminding me to remember.
Early color photograph holds a special place in my heart. The pioneers, like William Eggleston and Joel Meyerowitz, showed that color photography could be used for more than advertising and editorial work, especially when taken out on the street.
But even before those two guys, and their comrades like Stephen Shore and Alex Webb, photographers in the 1950s were blazing a vibrant trail.
Ernst Haas was one of these trailblazers, exploring streets and urban scenes in the ’50s, and making his living as a Magnum photographer. A reissued book of Haas’s photography, Color Correction, is out from Steidl, and it’s a great overview of Haas’s personal work.
Haas sits in the same photography family as early color photographers like Saul Leiter. You get the sense that color, light, and abstraction were all tools Haas (and Leiter) used to express his personal vision.
It’s Haas’s use of light and shadow that really gets me excited. That low-key work, combined with the vibrant colors, is what attracted me to Haas in the first place.
Color Correction is an affordable look into that midcentury color photography that’s timeless and continually satisfying.
This time each year, all the major camera and lens companies put their products on sale, along with the rest of our consumerist-crazy world. You can get some seriously great deals from Thanksgiving to the new year.
Rebates, bundles, sales – if you’ve waited all year, and you’ve been a good boy or girl, now is the time to grab your gear.
Six years ago, it’s exactly what I did. I bought an older-model Canon Rebel T1i with a lens bundle, and it changed my life. Here I am today, a hobbyist photographer, because I jumped on a great deal during the holidays.
Here’s a tip to help you feel better about your purchases: If you shop through Amazon, use their AmazonSmile program to help your shopping dollars give back to a charity or cause you care about (my dollars support our local nature center). Or shop through the affiliate links of an artist you enjoy.
Give back to others, and those in need. And then be good to yourself, if you really mean it.
For many photographers, going into depth on digital asset management (DAM) can be good and bad. Good, because sometimes it’s interesting to know how other photographers manager their photos. Bad, because – well, maybe we should be concentrating on something else.
For me, especially lately, my system has been really crazy. In short, here’s how I do things now:
Load my photos from my card reader into Lightroom as DNG files, organized by date
Go through and mark my favorites, and process them
Export the processed photos as high-quality JPGs into dated folders on an external drive
Load those JPGs into Aperture, tag them, get the metadata right, and organize them by months and days, by year.
From Aperture, I take those photos and send them everywhere else: Flickr, Facebook, photo books, calendars, etc. But before they get to Aperture, my photos are filtered and sorted two different ways.
Why not just keep them in Lightroom? I like Apertures metadata handling, organizational scheme, and export options better (here’s my setup). It works like I like to work.
Why not just start in Aperture? Because I like Lightroom’s post processing setup way better, including using VSCO for editing.
For a long time, this setup has worked surprisingly well. One place to process photos, one place to organize and create print projects with them. Except last week when I went to print a photo book of my daughter:
Bonk! Aperture no longer lets you print photo books or calendars (this after I had done all the hard work already).
So why use Aperture anymore if one of the main benefits has vanished? Good question – one I’m wrestling with. If all that’s left is Aperture’s superior organization methods, then a switch to Lightroom means relearning my tag management and organizational strategy. Plus I have photos in Aperture that do not live in Lightroom, like from my iPhone. All those will have to get moved over and sorted.
When I want to make a photo book, I’ll have to either import photos in Apple’s Photos app on the Mac, or stick with Lightroom and create photo books in there, probably through Blurb. My Flickr setup will have to change. And I’ll have a bunch of tagging and sorting to do.
My plan, so far as I’ve thought about it, is this: continue to use Aperture through the end of the holidays, and use the time in between to slowly migrate my system to a Lightroom-only DAM philosophy.
Aperture was a great program while it lasted. Now that it’s officially on life support, it’s probably time for me to rethink my damn DAM strategy.
I was invited to give a talk at the Jackson Civic Art Association Tuesday night on my still life photography: what was my thinking, what were my techniques, etc. It was also a how-to for other artists to think about making their own still life paintings, drawings, or photos.
It’s a good way to really think about your own projects. If you have to explain the whole thing, from idea to execution, you get really intimate with your process. I feel like the talk was good for me and helpful for them.
And many of the group members did come up and compliment me on my presentation. “I really appreciate the length of your talk,” one lady told me. “Some people are up there for hours going on and on about technique.”
That’s another thing: can you show and tell in an efficient time frame?
In another life, I was probably a teacher. Coworkers at my last job nicknamed me “Professor Dave” because of my presentation style, and my love for getting up on a whiteboard and scribbling out thoughts and ideas. I see talks like the one I gave Tuesday as part lesson, part performance. It’s fun for me.
It was also fun to break down my inspirations, thinking, and planning during the still life project.
What if we finally thought about breaking out of that narrow little world I call “photoland”? If were really serious about it, that would not entail giving up all of the things we believe in so dearly. But it would mean thinking about a lot of them a bit differently. You don’t like Humans of New York? Well, try to do a site that does the same thing, but better (whatever your idea of “better” might be).
Colberg’s points are that (a) photographers might want to keep their art world exclusive (“Do photobooks, for example, always have to be luxury objects?” he asks), and that (b) nothing interesting comes from catering to that exclusive world.
