dispatches

Being There

The lovely thing about traveling and photographing with no agenda is that I can indulge myself. I am in Lisbon for the week. There is no goal, no assignment, no list of things I have to get. I can walk through a neighborhood with the most indirect of intentions, with the only aim to be fully present to all my sensations and feelings. The point of doing it with a camera is to deepen that feeling of connection with where I am, which is my go-to device for getting in that state. But what was remarkable about today were the moments I intentionally did not reach for it.

I was chasing the sensation of light. The way it skimmed across surfaces, the way it made blocks of shapes by its absence in shadow, the way it bounced and lit places the sun wasn’t lighting directly. People were useful only as foils and silhouettes, passing as shapes through the landscape. And yet.

An old woman is sitting on the stoop, “Boa tarde,” I say. She says something back, then I sit on my haunches to be at her level. She starts on a long soliloquy that I can only nod and murmur to. She’s the quintessential old Portuguese village lady with all the right wrinkles and all the old lady clothes. Any other photographer would be all over this situation. But I decided, I don’t want to make a souvenir of this person. I just want to enjoy this moment of connection. She’s not a trophy to share. She wanted to share the moment with me, and I with her. That was sufficient. So, no picture. I didn’t want to make it about that.

There’s no judgment or moral point to be made here. I gave myself permission to only shoot what I felt like. Which was, the afternoon light in Alfama. Nothing more.

 

 

 

Staying Limber

A friend of mine, who's a professional symphony musician, says this about her craft. If you don't practice for two days, you notice. If you don't practice for four days, everybody notices.

This idea is occurring to me as I'm teetering with one foot on a not-so-stable log on a boulder strewn beach, looking for the right relationship between these two shapes and textures beneath me. Every micro adjustment in the viewfinder makes me feel a little different inside, and if I could just get a little more of the light colored shape in the left of the frame to tip a bit more, but to do that I need to hover a couple inches beyond my shaky perch to pull it off, and I'm looking for alternate solutions. I'm also trying not to over think this compositional problem, which is frequently the end of the effort. If it's coming from the head, the heart has a hard time following. So I keep checking in: how do I feel when I look through the camera? Better? Good. Click.

I make this effort daily. Wherever I am, I work the craft and I post the result on my daily photo blog, Today I Saw, like I have for the past 11 years. This week I'm in an extraordinarily scenic environment, southern Vancouver Island, and I'm a sucker for rocks and trees and water. Trite and well worn this photographic terrain may be, nonetheless, I cut my esthetic teeth on Weston and Strand and White, and I still find personal emotive juice in their groove. I'm not making any profound photographic statements. I'm just chasing photographs where they feel good, to me. It keeps me limber.

The next time I perform on stage, when someone's paying me to do this work, it'll be obvious that I haven't missed the practice.

 

 

 

Where's Contradance Calendar 2015?

The 2015 Contradance Calendar will happen. I'm just behind, that's all.

I've got lots of communties to show this time: Coos Bay, Louisville, St. Louis, Peterborough, Concord and Clarkdale, to name a few. I've shot over 30,000 dance photos this past year. Documenting the contra dance ecosystem has become the defining personal project of my photographic life, and the calendar is the most visible manifestation of this effort.

By this time last year and the year before, I was in the middle of a Kickstarter for the calendar, and I knew what it was going to look like. This year I've barely begun my edit and I haven't even shot my pitch video. The big project this spring I worked on instead (besides moving my mother-in-law out of her home for the last 12 years) was a self-promo campaign to revive my business, which has slowed down more than I'm comfortable with.

Also, I lost my calendar designer and I need to decide what to do about that. Joanne charged almost nothing to do it, which is a good reason for her not to pick it up again. The budget won't support paying a professional fee--I may have to learn enough InDesign to update last year's files and do it myself. (Updating last year's files is how we got two Passovers in March this year. I definitely need an outside proofreader.) I need a new print broker too.

I'm feeling a little swamped. I tell myself, I don't ship until November. There's plenty of time.

At the weekend I was just at, May Madness in Clarkdale, AZ, I can't tell you the number of people who came up to tell me how much my photos mean to them. I really feel that this work belongs to the community, and that I am indebted to everyone in it. You guys let me work out my creative process by allowing me to photograph your bodies in motion. We're all connected by joy, and it means the world to me that the work I do is appreciated. I owe it to you to produce another calendar, and then what?

I'm on the lookout for a photo editor. There's a book in this project, I think.

 

 

 

 

The Making of the Megaband Timelapse

There's a ton of great time lapse eye candy out there. Look at very many of them however and they soon seem cut from the same cloth: a stunning landscape or cityscape, amazing light changes, and cinematic camera movement. They possess a consistent tone of meaningless awesomeness. I wanted to see if I could apply some of the same techniques to something personal and close to my heart, and make something that moved me.

The organizers of the annual Portland Megaband contra dance in Portland asked me if I'd document the setup of their big event (I shot a nice video of the event last year). The evening is a highlight of the Northwest dance calendar, featuring a 75 piece orchestra and over 500 dancers in a huge ballroom. Following is how I did it.

I had my four DSLR cameras (Canon 5Ds and 6Ds of various vintages) and a GoPro. I arrived in the morning with the crew setting up the ballroom. I knew I would be capturing images for the next 13 hours. RAW capture would have been too arduous a workflow for the amount of images I expected to take, so I carefully synchronized the color balances of the DSLRs for jpeg capture. I had my laptop, so I photographed the white ceiling of the hall and loaded the files to see what color temp and magenta-green settings I needed (2800K, 20M, it turned out).

I had two fixed cameras that didn't move, the one in the control booth near the ceiling in the back, and the GoPro clamped at the back of the stage. Two others I had on tripods that I migrated from place to place. I'd set them loose near something what was happening, they'd click away every 5 seconds for awhile (using Canon intervalometers or Pocket Wizards), and then I'd move them around to something else. The daytime capture was pretty leisurely. Throughout the day I downloaded cards and make quick sequences of the images (with Quicktime 7 Pro). It was a way to build a feedback loop into the day so that I could course correct as needed.

I kept the same pattern of filming during the dance, perching the cameras somewhere and going away. I danced myself for well over half of the evening. Towards the second half of the evening I started shooting some handheld sequences, basically shooting in continuous mode and following things around. This is how I captured the bits of musician closeups and many of the dance sequences, and they proved to be some of the most flexible and emotive sequences. I wish I'd done more shooting this way.

My audio capture was with a Zoom H4N in four channel mode—two channels coming from the soundboard, and two from the onboard stereo mics. What I've learned is that sound from the board is crisp but sterile. You need ambient sound from the hall to feel like there's life to the dance, which I get from the Zoom's microphones.

It was a daunting amount of data on the laptop by the end of the evening: 150gb, over 21,000 images. It took a couple of days to organize it all. I resized all the images with a Photoshop batch action to fit in a 1920x1080 pixel sized box. I built image sequences from each camera, at various frame rates, using Quicktime 7 Pro. At this point I had an asset collection that looked like a video shoot: a bunch of footage and an audio file.

I'm still using Final Cut 7 for my video editing (I can't wrap my head around Final Cut X, and anytime I try to use Premiere my muscle memory fails me and I can't do squat. This is not sustainable, I know). Like any video shoot, I gave all my attention to the audio track first. I found a flow of tunes I liked and worked carefully to medley them seamlessly. Then I started laying in tracks. The 15fps clips generally looked the best, but the final piece has a little of everything. It only took a day to get to a rough cut. I ran the final cut by the Megaband organizers before I posted, and I released it into the wild Sunday night.

Within the hour I had a dozen shares on Facebook. I've never had a video get so much attention so quickly.  

Learning piano

Three years ago this spring I began to learn to play the piano. As I am preparing a set of photo tutorials and planning for a workshop this summer, it helps me to reflect on the creative process of acquiring a brand new skill, and the personal barriers we all bring to getting better at anything.

This all started when my mother-in-law got rid of her digital keyboard, and I took it. I barely knew where middle C was, even though I had a couple years of piano lessons as a kid. They didn't take--they were the sort of lessons that put me off learning music for decades. But noodling around on the keyboard, I was enraptured with how, when I played a scale in different keys, I felt different. There was a profound emotional range just in starting a series of consecutive notes from different places on the keys. It was like making these feelings arise out of thin air.

I scoured YouTube video tutorials, I relearned how to read music from Bach's Prelude in C, and I quickly found a piano teacher who fed my thirst for how this all worked (He didn't say hello when he opened the door. He'd bark, "What is the order of Sharps?")("Fred Can Get Drunk At Every Bar", I answered.) I quickly graduated to a real piano, an upright Steinway that I got for a song.

My attraction to music has largely been the mysterious conversation I watch between musicians at play, that place they go in a tune where the magic happens. It's been a serious subject of my photography for ages, reaching a kind of apogee in my travels across Ireland over a decade ago. I'd listen to and photograph pub sessions all over the West of Ireland, and when I'd return I'd see my photos posted on the pub walls, which was a kind of acceptance from a culture reluctant to grant it. I got into the music in the way I knew how, by observing it deeply with my instrument, the camera. I learned to dance the sets, those vigorous quadrilles whose footwork is so distinctive and regional that you can tell what county you're in by the sound of the floor. When I came home to dance contras, they seemed so plodding and slow.

For the last two years I have been a closet pianist. When I could, I'd be on the piano every day after lunch. Half an afternoon would vanish sometimes. I got lost in a New Age piano ghetto for a bit (Einaudi in particular), but soon made Bach my piano touchstone. I loved playing, but I couldn't play around anyone else, and the time or two I tried to go to a music jam it was disasterous. My social anxiety swamped any weak skill I had achieved, and the shy introvert part of me rose to the fore.

Lately I've been attacking that barrier head on. Last year I found a welcoming session that played Portland Collection tunes at a slower speed. I got a piano teacher from within my music community and I'm learning both English and Contra accompanyment. At New Years Camp on Vashon Island, I played for more hours with other people than for my entire piano history up to then. It ramped up my confidence tremendously.

I just joined a "real" weekly session that intimidates the hell out of me. It's got some of the best players in town in it, and I so feel like an interloper. I'm at a point that I'm able to tolerate being scared, but still stay on task. They're preparing for a gig next month, a half hour set at our annual contra dance marathon. I haven't commited to joining them, but I'm practicing the tunes as if I could.

Music is a technical, physical act that require embedding a lot of neural pathways, many by rote. Paying attention to what's going on outside my internal experience, which is what else I'm working on in my music, is one of the hardest tasks I've ever tried to learn.

Latest on the Treadmill Desk

I've been having a lot of pain lately in my upper back and neck. The more I'm on the treadmill, the worse it is. The more I'm on my piano, the worse it is, too. This is not good.

I've had several sessions with my physical therapist to try and nail down the problems. I've been showing her videos of me at my treadmill and at my piano. She didn't like the way my legs were bent sitting at the piano, and suggested a footrest. I've built one that can accomodate the pedals, and it seems to have helped some, if I remember to do the other postural things she's suggested ("long neck, scapulas back").

The treadmill is more problematic. Today she put me on her exercise treadmill to see what we could do. "Breathe into your sides, into your chest. Breathe out, keep your shoulders up. Bend from the pelvis, lean forward." She poked and bent and adjusted my back, my pelvis and my head and positioned me until I felt like a robotic cyborg. "Put me in a brace like this, and I'll be fine," I told her.

"Don't go under 1.6 mph. If you saunter you slouch. Faster is better for you. At 2 you look real good."

My PT also wants me, ideally, to limit my work sessions at a treadmill to 20 minutes (I talked her down to 30). I need to break it up with something else, like sitting down. It's not something I should do for long periods without a lot of breaks. It should definitely not be an all day mode of work.

I've been putting between 3 to 8 miles a day on mine. I love moving all day. I've solved the foot soreness problem (a Soucony Ride-6 with an insole). I'm going have to relearn how to walk, apparently, and I'm going to have to sit down more.

What does this mean for anyone else considering a treadmill? It can exacerbate some problems as it fixes others. Postural issues are crucial to address. Foot care is significant. You will spend lots of money on specialized bodyworkers (I'm seeing 3). There's a learning curve to working with a keyboard and mouse. A foam wristrest is really useful. I'm fine working now at 2 mph, but I wasn't when I started.

I'm hoping that I can build up to long sessions upright eventually. Until then, I guess I have to learn to actually be conscious of my body. Oh well.

 

The Treadmill Desk Report

When my photographic work transitioned from standing in a darkroom to sitting at a computer for much of my day, I felt the impact on my body. Particularly with video editing. I would avoid starting on a project because I knew it would mean hours of immobility. My legs would ache, I'd get listless and I wouldn't be able to focus. I'd take a break to do a vigorous bike ride, but an hour later I'd be back at the desk, immobile for the rest of the day. When an actual photo assignment came around, when I could run around all day, I'd feel great. After a week on the road I'd feel fantastic. Then I'd have to go home and process all that work for the client. Sitting down.

Sitting is the new smoking, in terms of impact on your health. When I read Susan Orlean's New Yorker article this summer on treadmill desks, I wanted one. Immediately. I found a decent site, workwhilewalking.com. I bought a Lifespan treadmill and a variable height desk, and started walking.

Instantly I felt more energetic. The desk lethergy was gone. This is going to change my life, I thought.

Everyone wonders how hard it is to actually do deskwork while walking. That, actually, was the easy part. Typing, using a mouse, Photoshop, Final Cut--no problem. In the beginning I would slow down the treadmill when I needed really fine motor control, but now I rocket away at 2mph no matter what. But there are problems and adaptations.

The first is sea legs. For the first few weeks I would stagger a little drunkenly for a minute whenever I got off. Then, I started hurting in new and different places than before. My neck hurt a lot. My hamstrings were getting even tighter. My feet ached all the time. I was visiting the chiropractor weekly now.

I saw my doctor in the middle of this transition, and told her about the new regime. She pointed behind her--there was her treadmill desk. "Have you found anyway to stop your feet from hurting?" She asked. "No, have you?" "Not yet."

I made three trips to a running shoe store, trying out different solutions. I think I've settled on a cushy Saucony with bright green trim and with a serious arch support insert. When I went back to my doctor, she showed me the shoe she had found--it was the exact same model.

I got a professional ergonomic consultation to tweak my desk and monitor height. She made some adjustments, and made me get a foam keyboard wrist rest and a smaller mouse. And told me to only use my computer glasses at the desk, not my progressive trifocals. She was somewhat helpful, but it's hard to find anyone who's encountered this setup and has direct applicable experience.

There are tasks that you just can't do at a treadmill desk. Paying bills and filing paperwork don't work for me. And really, you can't put in an 8 hour day at a treadmill. I rarely put in more than 3. I set up a separate sit-down workstation with my old computer, and I use the Shared Screen function to access files from the work computer. After three months I'm starting to get balanced with how much work I do on and off the treadmill, and my body is gradually adjusting.

Oh, and the cat loves the treadmill. Or loves me when I'm on the treadmill. She demands to be picked up and held while I'm walking.

 

 

 

 

Kickstarter aftermath

I just came back from the post office and delivered the last of the Kickstarter rewards for my 2014 Contradance Calendar project. It's a good time to review how it went.

This is the third year that I have published this calendar. It's a showcase of my dance photography, and it has acquired a place in the subculture of contra dance. It is a wall calendar, however, which is an increasingly anachronistic product. It's going to be hard to sustain demand if I keep this up.

The first year I was wildly optimistic about prospects for sales. I had a non profit partner who would help, I hoped, get the product out there, and they were going to share in the profits. It didn't turn out that way, and I lost about $6,000 in the venture. Fortunately, my business had had a good year, and I could absorb the loss.

Devon Leger, a music promoter, gave me the best take on that: "Every band has boxes of their first CD in the basement." The next year I dialed it way back, and used Kickstarter to raise about half the production funds. I barely broke even by the end of the year, though one of my customers, the CDSS bookstore, took a big loss.

This year I raised my Kickstarter ask to cover everything. Quality is a big piece of this project for me, and that's where the money went--high end printing, high-end file conversions, and a low press run. My Kickstarter goal was $11,200, which I just made.

Kickstarter is a ton of work. I've been strategically building up my Facebook presence the last few years, and that was my primary tool to get the word out. I had to become a one-person NPR pledge drive for the duration. I posted daily, minimum. I felt like I had to be super annoying. I leavened it with lots of posts about other stuff, and I had to generate news so that it wasn't all-beg-all-the-time. I had dance photos to share. I linked to cool stuff I found. I released a how-to-take-dance-photos video that I had prepared for the project (in addition, of course, to the pitch video. Which wasn't slick, but it got the point across).

The big takeaway of Kickstarter, and the part I most like about it, is that I am now socially connected and indebted to everyone who supported me. This really is their project, and they valued my skill to produce it enough to pay for it. It represents what my photography of this subculture means to me--I am reflecting back the joy and the community that gives my life such meaning.

So, the budget. After Kickstarter took their share I had $10,400. I spent $450 to promote the project: the bulk of it printing and mailing flyers to a lot of dance organizations, and $100 for Facebook advertising. The calendar production itself cost $8,840. Reward fulfillment cost another $1,500, and took easily 50-60 hours. I printed only 800 calendars. It's not a cheap product.

I'm only $170 in the hole now, and I have nearly 300 calendars left to sell, so I'm actually going to show a little profit this year. It'll let me travel to some places that have been left out of the project up to now, like the South and the Midwest. It's a great relief to have that covered, but I worry about hitting the community with another big Kickstarter ask next year. I'm thinking of making it a subscription product, pitched to the fans I already have, and using Kickstarter to make up the difference. Ideas anyone?

 

 

 

 

My Seattle Workshop Series: How To Take Photos That Don't Suck

Wednesday nights, 7-9, Bryant neighborhood in Seattle
6 weeks starting 25 September
$100 for the series
Limit: 8
Sign up via comment below, include yuor email--I'll follow up.

A camera can allow you to enter more deeply into the moment. Taking pictures, your senses are more awake and attuned to your surroundings. But most of us are frustrated with the results. Why isn't the emotional charge when I took the picture coming through? Why doesn't the camera know what I feel? Why do so many of my pictures suck?

It's a cruel fact. Your camera doesn't care about you. It doesn't care about what's in front of it, like you do. You have to learn how to see the way a camera does. You need to learn how to take the emotional, connective energy that makes you want to document the moment, and transform that into the craft of seeing.

This workshop will help you do that. We will meet for six weeks, sharing work that we have done on assignment, and I will guide you to understanding the art and process of working with a camera. You don't need to have a good camera. Your phone is better than most cameras ever made. I will teach you relevant technique, but this is not a class on learning all the buttons. This is a workshop about seeing.

Digital Infrared

(Costa Rica, 2000)

 
I've had an ambivalent relationship to infrared black and white photos for the duration of my photographic career. Back in the 1970s, the look of Kodak High Speed Infrared film became almost an art school trope. Anything you pointed the stuff at became interesting. The stuff was everywhere. As a rule, it's a good idea to avoid techniques that easily make interesting images without a corresponding deep intention behind the choice.

Nonetheless, I dabbled frequently through the decades, and worked to master a more subtle approach to the look. With film receding in my rear view mirror, I had pretty much abandoned black and white imagery and the occasional foray into infrared.

Browsing one night last month, I came across Ctein's TOP column about converting a digital camera to infrared. Camera sensors are natively sensitive to IR light. They have a filter to block it. Remove it, and you have an IR sensitive camera.

I followed this wormhole a ways, and next day I sent one of my old 5D bodies to Lifepixel.

Yesterday it came back. It's probably all you're going to see on Today I Saw for awhile as I plumb what's possible. One of the things that's possible is that I can now take IR video. I have a project I'm working on right now that this will be perfect for.

What I've noticed so far:

I'm now in the "cool, this looks weird!" phase. I intend to wallow in this, "instant art, no muss, no fuss" mode until I purge it from my system. Then I can start seeing what else is there.

It actually encourages a more thoughtful, slower working method. The best way to craft these is to use Live View mode. It displays the image in all its weirdness, which helps with composition, and you can enlarge the image to focus it (the IR focus point is different than for visible light, so if I just used the viewfinder I'd be taking out of focus pictures). It means I work on a tripod, with a loupe. Slows me down.

IR is completely an artifact of the technology. As such, I suspect I might feel freer about subsequent manipulations of the image than I currently allow myself. One time a curator chided me for an overly respectful treatment of the tonal range in my work. Who knows if this will change that.

I've been feeling for awhile that I wanted something to shake up my personal shooting. Even if this is an artificial, super weird look and can get pretty dreadful pretty fast, perhaps it will lead me to whatever is going to come next.

 

 

The best light ever

I photograph people and situations for a living. At my core, however, I am a landscape photographer. It is how I started as a teenager, bicycling around the back roads in south central Pennsylvania with a camera around my neck, getting up before dawn and seeking the early morning light. On vacation I can indulge this distinctly non-commercial, personal passion to be in the landscape and connect with it photographically.

Such was the moment last week when we ascended into the fog on Hwy 101, about 10 miles south of Crescent City, CA. I saw a pullout at the top of a hill, passed it by, then swung the car around when we started to descend below the fog.

I walked into a fog-shrouded, mature redwood forest. I was stunned, and hardly knew where to begin. Mostly I gazed and took it in, then went back to the car to interrupt Robin, who was deep in a book. "You have to get out in this. I've never been in such a magical place."

After ten minutes she announced, "I'm cold. I'm going back. Have fun."

I found some photos and started working the place. Rhododendrons hung over the bark covered path. Swordferns carpeted the forest floor. I had grabbed my panoramic rig when I went back, and I was constructing some sweeps of the forest with it. Then the light started to change.

It was brightening, slowly. The sun began to burn through the fog, and the magic level ramped up a few orders of magnitude. Beams of light sliced through the thick air. It was an otherworldly, stunned-into-holy-silence variety of light. A couple wandered up the path, gazing upwards, the woman trying to capture it with her phone. We whispered to each other and shared our amazement of this place. I found a spot to work, and shot consciously and slowly, trying to experience the moment and not lose myself in the dials.

I have been photographing the landscape for over 40 years in a serious fashion. I had never felt light as amazing or as magical as this.

In fifteen minutes it was over. There was still fog in the trees, but thinning rapidly. The forest was now a sunlit patchwork of brilliant spots and dark holes, becoming more ordinary by the minute.

The shot, above, is a High Dynamic Range composite of 7 separate images. Conditions such as this have a range of light values that far exceed the capacity of either film or digital to capture. There is a cult of extreme HDR photography that I eschew, mostly because it's pretty dreadful, but used judiciously it can be the only way to convey the intensity of a scene like this.  

 

Report from the Content Marketing Retreat

I'm spending two days this week at the Content Marketing Retreat on Whidbey Island, put on by the Langley Center for New Media. This event has industry leaders talking to a small group of professionals, split roughly evenly between marketing and production people, about the latest trends in video storytelling and their application. Rather than link to individual bios, the comprehensive list of presenters is here. The quickie summaries.

From Scott Abel (by far my favorite presenter of the day). There are story archetypes that all videos fall in. Some examples:

• Overcoming the Monster: Terrible forces are out there, but we can help. American Express Small Business Saturday

• Rebirth: We're changing how things are. Cipolte Back To The Start.

• Journey and Return: Literally, a voyage, a trip. Expedia's Find Your Understanding (my reaction to this one—WOW)

• Tragedy: The consequences of a tragic flaw. St John's Ambulance

• Comedy: The ones that make Facebook, et. al. Kotex GenerationKnow

Russell Sparkman made the crucial point that video is about the customer journey, and the tests of that alignment include:

• Does it touch an emotion?

• Are the targets who you need to connect with, (which is not the same as how many you reach)?

• Is the deployment properly managed?

• Is the piece worthwhile and engaging?

• Is it part of a series of videos, all of which can have a long life?

• Are they shareable?

From Chris Donaldson. Videos have 3 requirements: find your story (what is the conflict, what is the problem to solve), find the metaphor (the larger meaning), and find your heart (connect emotionally).

Jon Wuebben gave a distressing, and misleading factoid about video budgets, for which I called him on later. He maintained a high production value video should cost between $2000-$5000. Given that I couldn't hire crew or stay in business at the high end of that range (and I'm a seriously low overhead operation), this is not an encouraging trend if this becomes accepted fact.

Kim Barnes, on the basics of rights and assignments, used three very bad words: Work For Hire. That all clients need to hire their video production on that basis. Two words. I don't. (Yes, I know RTW is the generally accepted practice in film work, and I won't say I'd never sign one, but as a producer I've maintained the licensing model I've applied my entire career as a still photographer for all my projects up to now.)

Pamela Muldoon made my head spin with where video deployment on social media is headed. YouTube Facebook channel apps, Twitter profiles for video, Pinterest boards for video, LinkedIn as the new hot place for video and promotion. Man, it's busy out there.

Nate Riggs outlined the common elements that make a video go viral (from the awful to the transcendent). Colin Christianson talked about live video, which I hope I never have to do. Bryan Zug went all animation graphics on us, pitching it as the budget alternative to real humans in front of or behind the camera. Scott Pierce talked about data and analytics, and I couldn't understand a single word he said.

Tomorrow we break into small groups, and work on a plan for a strategic video initiative, which we'll sell to the larger group in the afternoon. Stay tuned.  

Palm Springs Photo Festival: The Outcome

“You're absolutely right,” said Kristi, the one Photo Review buddy I made here. “I've never been to a conference where it's so hard to make friends.” It was nice to know it's not me. Something about the tone of this event makes it really hard to connect. I spent five days here and ate every single meal alone.

I'm remembering why I stopped doing review events 6 years ago. These things are brutal. They are crucial events for a photographer, particularly fine art folks, but man are they grueling.

 What I learned this week at the Palm Springs Photo Reviews.

• I'm a mediocre printer. It affects how people respond to the work. Since I closed down my darkroom, photography has ceased to be about the artifact. It has affected my ability to create one when I need to.

• It's about my marketing, not my work. Again and again I heard this—the work is there. My client base is not. My marketing doesn't work. It never has. A big part of me believes it never will. I suck at that part of it. I gotta pinpoint who I want my clients to be, to the person, and target them like a laser. I'm going to need a ton of outside consulting, and maybe therapy, to get through that block.

• The first thing I say at a review determines where the next 20 minutes will go. If I say, well, I need more clients, I get a basic lecture on marketing. If I come across as confident about my stance toward my work, it sets the discussion at a higher level.

• Video appears to be my strong suit. Somehow, I'm doing something unique. Big time, big agency art buyers were impressed.

• There is no way to keep an emotional even keel at these things. I have been from my-career-is-hopeless to I'm-going-to-be-a-star and back, and then back, and then back again. Within 2 hours.

• The friendliest, most helpful, able-to-connect people here have been the front line volunteers. They're working 8 hour days for the chance to get a leftover review at the end of it, and they somehow aren't resentful at us entitled, ambitious, self-centered photographers. They're amazing.

• At this moment, I hope to never go to another review event, ever. Unless I'm a panelist.

 

 

Back on track

On top of recent debacles, a review with an art rep that I had on my calendar for this morning was, in fact, really supposed to be yesterday morning. I was a no show. A PSPF volunteer, Megan Miller, miraculously rearranged my schedule and rebooked me with another art rep this afternoon. They've been great making up for my cluelessness.

Fortunately, the stars has realigned. “You did the edit on this reel too? Highlight that, it's really good. This is all fabulous work, it's real, it's authentic.” This one and yesterday's art buyer (the one who sent me into the my-career-is-over tailspin depression) work for the same ad agency. After today's reviews I can mark that other one as a bad data point.

I've heard this before and resisted, but an art rep says to get an intern. Use them to ferret out the corporate direct and more hidden markets for my promotion. Another art rep suggested ways to use LinkedIn and my current clients to get more work. The magazine people have been kind and supportive, but I haven't been sensing gobs of opportunity there.

The weather has cooled off to almost tolerable levels, and I finally had the first decent meal of my time here (TripAdvisor, you've been leading me astray all week). I've had an odd relationship with this event compared to prior reviews I've done. I've been way less social than usual, and doing no activities other than the reviews. Somehow the structure of this event, or maybe the geography of the physical space, isn't as encouraging to a feeling of being part of a group endeavor in ways I can't put my finger on. Maybe I'm removed from the communal Pacific NW mindset and experiencing California über-individualism. I'm spending a little too much time alone, even for me. Maybe I'm just not getting enough sleep—there is that AC roaring in my ear all night. Tomorrow is a huge day—7 reviews. Night.

 

But on the other hand

Then there are the days when all the reviews are bad. But bad in different ways.

The photo editor, younger than my children, had I had any, who said, I'm sorry, there's nothing I can tell you, and no one I know who I can send you to. Your reel is really amazing, however. But the pages in your book should be glossy, not matte. The tattoo-covered photo editor who was actually the nicest person of the day, but with no names he could give me, said “I'd be a good fit for the magazine, if we had anything,” as a less than encouraging goodbye. The art buyer who kept saying, heavy, dark, heavy, tonally wrong, this looks stocky, too interspersed, no story. Who thought the clips in the reel were great but had no focus overall. She was probably the most important review of the day (maybe the week) for the impact it could have on my presentation, but it was really painful to go through.

It's late morning, my reviews are done for the day. It's almost 20 degrees cooler today. I'm leaving town to go find some desert to hike around in.  

The reviews are in

 

There was a group of women in the lobby of the Hyatt in matching yellow t-shirts that said on the back, “If Lost, Return To Bachelorette Party.” “So, what are the circumstances that would lead to having to implement this notice?” I asked. “Can I take your picture?” They started to gather for a group photo until I said, “No, pretend to ignore me.”

The Palm Beach Photo Festival is not the only thing going on in this hotel, obviously. We occupy the back part of the main floor, and it feels like a small, intimate gathering, unlike Portland's PhotoLucida which noisily overwhelms every public space of the Benson Hotel. The review sessions, perhaps as a result, feel less fraught and more casual, though maybe I'm speaking as an old hand at these review events. Two of my reviewers, Anthony Bannon and Robert Morton, are people I've met with before. Tony Bannon, former director of the George Eastman House, is someone who, in the past, has been able to see my work and tell me more about what was going on in it than I ever thought I could know. I count him as an influential mentor, even though we have spent all of 60 minutes together in the last decade. He quickly named several institutions that would love to have my dad's archive, and we pieced together a path to getting my contra dance work more widely known, mostly by connecting with the American folklorist network around the country. He told me to whom, and how, to drop his name when required.

As did Robert Morton, photo book editor emeritus, who also apologized for being unable to figure out a path to commercial publication for the contradance project 6 years ago. Kevin Miller of the Southeast Museum of Photography offered places to contact regarding my dad's work and who to approach about my dance project. An art buyer for a major ad agency said, essentially, my style and approach is what's going to be hot, soon, and said to visit the agency when I'm in town later this year.

So, an encouraging start to the reviews. The temp hit 106° outdoors; walking to the after-review social hour was enough to wilt me for the night. 

Palm Springs Photo Reviews

I'm at my first photo review event since my last whack at one 6 years ago. Photo reviews are speed dating events for your career, with way higher stakes. You get 20 mintes with an influencial "mover and shaker" in the field. Career trajectories are launched, or dashed, at these events. 

I'll be blogging frequently the next few days from Palm Springs, CA, the center of the photo review universe for the rest of the week. Expect my emotions to tap into the hormonal 13 year old girl that I keep inside me. It's going to be a wild ride. As Chris Raushenberg said, in introducing the 2007 PhotoLucida reviews, "In a four day event, you're not the same person two days later. If you are, see me later and get your money back."

You can see my blog entries from that 2007 event, starting here:

http://dougplummer.blogs.com/dispatches/2007/04/camp_photo_luci.html

Are you in focus?

I've been suspicious about my new camera and whether the autofocus was accurate in critical situations. Before I head out for a 3 day assignment next week, I wanted to run some tests.

I use a specialized lens alignment rig to check my auto focus accuracy, but you can probably cobble something on your own. What it involves is accurately getting your camera and subject planes aligned, shooting wide open, and seeing if you're off. The high end cameras have the ability to set a correction factor in them, and set that for an individual lens, and even at different focal lengths for a zoom lens.

The LensAlign rig has a clever sight-through design that solves the alignment issue for setting up the test. The tilted ruler gives you a scale to measure how off the focus is.

My suspicions were correct--my 70-200mm was forward-focusing by three ticks on the correction scale. There was no problem with my other camera bodies, just the new 5D MarkIII. It's all good now.

Geeking the flower

Today's "Today I Saw" photo is not as simple as it appears.

Sometimes I like to geek out in my image making. I try not to let it show, though, and I want to have the image make the point, not the technique. In this case, I'm using a technique called "focus stack" to combine many images, shot at different focus points, into one. This single shot is a composite of 16 separate images.

I do a lot of macro shots in the garden. It's my default setting when my life for the day is boring and I've not left home. In a pinch, I can go the garden with a macro lens, and find something quickly. Pretty much anything is interesting when you're 3 inches away. I can capture and process my daily photo, and be back at work 20 minutes later.

This one took a bit longer. Here's the drill. You take a series of photos (with the camera mounted on a tripod), with the lens on manual focus, and rack the focus from near to far. Just nudge the focus a bit each time.

I use Photoshop and Bridge in my workflow--there might be a Lightroom equivalent, but I don't know what it is. After I name the photos and add metadata (in Photo Mechanic), I open up the folder in Bridge. I select the series of images I'm going to use and go Tools--Photoshop--Load Files Into Photoshop Layers.

In Photoshop, I highlight all the layers, go Edit--Auto Align Layers. The Auto radio button should already be highlighted, which is what you want. When that's done, go back to Edit and choose Auto Blend Layers, and pick Stack Images as the Blend method. Voila, it's done. If you've captured the images correctly, the shot is cooked.  

The Vera Project Video

 

 

This winter the Vera Project approached me about producing the video to be shown at their big fundraising gala and auction. They loved the piece I did for the Northwest Stories series on the All Ages music scene, and wanted to know if I was willing to do a piece just about them.

I love supporting causes, but I told them I don't work for free. One reason is that you tend to be treated what people perceive you're worth. When you work for nothing, you often get that level of respect.

Vera had never paid for their gala video before. It was a mental and budgetary stretch for them. I told them, you decide how much it's worth, and pay me that. Figure out an amount that you don't feel like you're taking advantage of me, but that you can afford. I didn't care about the amount--I wanted to work with them. We agreed on a low, but reasonable fee.

At their holiday party I set up a studio in a conference room, and hauled Vera members up for short interviews. I don't work from a list of questions when I interview. Actually, that's not quite true. I just never remember to look at my list of questions. I just get my subjects wired and in front of the camera, and we start talking. It's entirely conversational and casual. After 15 or 20 minutes I'd send them out, with instructions to find someone new to send my way.

I'm used to getting people to forget the camera equipment when I do portraits. Video is easier, in a way. There is no shutter release, mirror flap, strobe going off, no singular instant when my subjects fears, yet again, they didn't get it perfect. The camera sits there, silent. It's wonderful.

 The edit, however, was rough to organize. Where was I going to find my narrative thread? After a lot of looking, I recognized that each of my interviewees addressed three distinct subjects: what The Vera Project is, how and why they came to Vera, and how it changed them. I cut up all my interviews and sorted them into those three bins, and made that my arc.

In their eyes I proved my worth. "You instantly got what we wanted to say," said Kristina, the Director of Development. "It was a better product and an easier process than we've ever had."