dispatches

Stock report

I just got word today that my Getty editor is quitting. That means I’ll be shunted to yet another photo editor, my third, since Photonica was bought by Getty. I have not met any of my editors in person, nor even spoken to them by phone. My emails take forever to be answered, and it is difficult to impossible to get anyone to look at my new work. I am an orphan. I am excess baggage that came along with the Photonica sale, and no one quite knows what to do with me.

That said, I just got the sales report for May, and it’s one of the bigger ones I’ve received. I am making money for Getty, and somewhat less (well under 40%) for myself. Biggest single sale: Hammock on Beach, 6077-001914), for a print ad in Germany, $2,043.45 (I get a little over $600 of that), Footprints in Sand (6077-003138), for web and in-store display in France, for the Automotive industry, sold for about $2,500 combined ($700 for me). Then there’s the Siberian Tiger Running, (6077-003080), for which I got a royalty of $.01 from someone in Japan who downloaded it for their cell phone.

Why bother

"Color management is intrinsically complex. I’ve had two NASA scientists, literally rocket scientists, complain to me how hard it is."
             C. David Tobie, Colorvision, Inc.

The designer’s specs were for the files to be in a "Generic Adobe RGB Profile." This was not terribly useful (Adobe RGB is not an output profile--it defines an abstract color space, not the behavior of a device like a printer/paper profile.) So I talked to the printer. "We don’t color manage anything. We work from colormatch prints. I know how to tweak it on the computer to match." On an unprofiled monitor, of course.

This is the printer that has, among other clients, National Geographic.

Naked and exposed

As a child of the 70’s, social nudity was a normal part of the era for me. In the uptight 00’s, it seems like an act of extravagant spectacle and an opportunity for flaunting and acting out. The Fremont Solstice Parade seems to be becoming our city’s statement for the right to be nude in a crowd.

Mysterous Traveller points out how everyone in the crowd seemed to have uploaded their digital photos to Flickr within hours. A search there last night under "Solstice and "Recent" results in thousands of photos, the majority of them of naked bicycle riders.

"You are so heterosexual," accused Robin, when looking at my take. I was looking for good body paint. And shooting at a slow shutter speed, so it could count as artistic. Yeah, right. Half the photos I took yesterday are of naked people on bikes. To be fair, a third of them are of guys. "At least you’re not afraid of penises," Robin said. Hardly any of them are very good as photographs. That came later, when I got into the parade myself and made contact. You can look at a selection here, with the usual caveat—not workplace friendly.

As I learned yet again, being on the sidelines makes for ordinary photographs, no matter how compelling the subject. The good stuff happens when you immerse yourself in the event and the moment, and connect with your subject. When I got into the parade the photographs became relational, and they got better.

At Fremont, this is not a big deal. Half the floats have music, and dancers surrounding them. Robin and I two-stepped to the Cajun band, then we wandered upstream and I worked with the belly dancers, then on to the marimba orchestra.

If I really want to get compelling naked body-art bicyclist shots, I may have to strip and paint myself and ride with my camera next year.

I miss film

In my desert birding jaunt last weekend I took along my Xpan and shot film. That’s right, film. It was the first time I loaded film into a camera in six months.

I dropped by Panda Lab and picked up my proof sheets and scans (Yes, scans. Panda can scan the negs too. Black and white. Panoramic. Anything you want.). Dana likes showing off to me the latest he has figured out his equipment can do, so he had printed out digital proof sheets of the images. I louped them. I just saw a pixellated mess. "These look terrible, Dana! I can’t see anything!" "Yes, they do fall apart when you magnify them," he said. He took the negs into the darkroom, and 5 minutes later I had a set of real, analog contact sheets in my hand.

"Oh man, I miss this," I said as I glassed the sheets. "All the pictures, here, in my hand, and I can examine them to my heart’s content." Next week I’ll fire up the darkroom and see what they really look like.

As I was leaving Dana asked, "Hey, do you know anyone who’s a good fiber printer? Any assistants you know? We need someone. We have just one high-end client who wants fiber prints, and we don’t have anyone here who knows how to do them." So this skill set is vanishing sooner than I expected. Any of you printers need a job, and want to work in a photo lab?

Are you sufficiently calibrated?

I’ve been working through Bruce Fraser’s (et. al.) Real World Color Management over the past few weeks. It is relentlessly geeky, especially in the Profiles chapters. If your professional or avocational life has anything to do with photographic output in the digital realm, I’m afraid you have to read this book. It’s your homework.

I’m going to invoke the "Fair Use" clause of copyright law and share with you a calibration check for your monitor that’s in the book. Perhaps it will convince you of the value of buying it. The question here is, how good is your monitor calibration?

An important point of monitor profiling (the most basic piece of color management) is that there are really two parts. Your hockey puck that reads all those color squares on the screen does two things: it asks you to make adjustments to your monitor (black and white points, color temp, gamma), and then it creates a profile. But is that initial calibration accurate? And how good is your monitor? Here’s a way to check the black point, the hardest part of the calibration regime.

Get your viewing environment in order. Generally this means you want to be in a dim environment, with no ambient light on the monitor. In Photoshop, first set up your colors so that you’re seeing the RGB information that your monitor is displaying. Go View—Proof Setup and choose Monitor RGB at the bottom of the list. Make a new file, roughly the size of your monitor resolution (say 1000x700 pixels). Be sure it’s in RGB. Fill the background with black. Press the "F" key a couple of times so that you have a full screen mode with a black background.

With the Marquee Tool, make a square box inside the image. Press Ctrl+H to hide the marching ants. Press "Tab" to hide all your open palette windows. You want an empty, black screen. Press "Ctrl+L" to open a Levels adjustment. On the Output Levels at the bottom of that box, highlight the zero black setting. Drag that box off the edge of your screen so it doesn’t interfere with the view. Using your up arrow key, see when you start seeing a change from your background black.

It’s a brutal test of your monitor. I’m on a Lacie Blue CRT, and I was able to see a difference at level 2. A typical threshold is level 5 or 7. If you’re not seeing anything until 12, your black point is set too low. If you’re seeing a color cast, you’ve got multiple adjustment problems.

Looking for a new photograph

The cell phone buzzed my thigh while I was crouched in the tall grasses. "Where are you?" Robin asked. "At the Fill. I couldn’t look at any more pictures on the computer, so I came down here to take some." "That sounds self-defeating. Any good birds?"

The grass is waist high, and under the trees the equisetum is nearly as high. If I were more enlightened, I might not need a camera as a mechanism to focus my awareness on the landscape. But I’m not enlightened, so I use the camera as a means to see deeply into where I am. When I go out I want to take a new photograph, something I haven’t seen before. In a way, that’s what I want to do everytime I pick up a camera. That I succeed only infrequently does not appear to dissuade me.

This time I find myself sitting a lot, and the horizon vanishes as though I have descended into the landscape. I look at the layers in front of me, through the camera. Mostly it’s out of focus, and I play with pushing myself closer to grasses to make it even more out of focus. Except for maybe something through this green screen, that sharp bit that maybe makes a picture. I don’t know if it will, but the pursuit is fulfilling enough.

I stand up, and see that the grass is waving in the wind. What will happen if I shoot it slow? The day is too bright for me to be able to see anything on the LCD, which is a relief. I will have no distraction, and no attachment, to my play. I handhold at a fourth of a second for a bunch of shots, then think, maybe if I’m on the tripod, I can have some elements that will be still. I wonder what will happen if I do that?

I’ve been slowly traipsing along the edge of the marsh, along Lake Washington, when I am surprised by a Great Blue Heron just 20 feet away on a floating log. It doesn’t rise up with a great "Croaack" like I expected it to. It just stands, regal and patient. I have a 300mm with me and, as I’ve been doing this screening-through-vegetation thing for the last hour, I shoot the bird this way too. When I step to the side and look at him through the viewfinder in the clear, the feeling is less mysterious. It looks like a zoo shot. I stay with the mysterious green veil and watch. Again, the camera is a means to slow myself down, and become more fully aware of where I am. The log is rising up and down a few inches with the waves of the lake. The heron keeps his head absolutely steady , using his neck to absorb the up and down motion. It curls and uncurls like a spring. I didn’t know that about herons before this moment.

Art buyers tell all

ASMP Seattle held a panel discussion with four ad agency art buyers tonight, moderated by our VP Kate Baldwin. Rick Hutter from Cole and Weber lamented that his agency doesn’t permit portfolio drop-offs anymore, and really hopes that will change. Anne Kleinhenz of Sedgwick Road impressed on us how much art directors are inspired by seeing portfolios. Every one in the agency looks at every book that comes in, she said. With the loss of Washington Mutual, there’s a lot less work though. Shayla Miller of Publicis said the book has to have the goods. At the highest level, for the big jobs, it has to communicate a vision unlike anyone else’s. And those jobs nearly always go to out of town photographers. "Art directors like to travel. When there’s the budget, the first thing they do is book a plane ticket."

"Stock is your biggest competitor," was the word to us assignment photographers. And all the stock business is going to Getty and Corbis. Or Istockphoto (the $5-a-photo site), one buyer sheepishly admitted. There’s a lot less work now because of it. "We all would rather commission photography, but once the client sees the ad with an image in it, it’s hard to convince them that it’s a concept. It looks finished."

"Art directors keep a list of photographers they want to work with." So how do we get on that list? Show up in Communication Arts. "The phone will ring off the hook," said Lore. "It’s the Bible."

Rick likes direct mail, even if its job is direct him to the website. Shayla likes booklets that can function as a portfolio. She added, "The website has to be fast. If I see a load bar, I’m out of there." Simple and clean is what works. Email is often deleted if it’s from someone unknown.

During the Q&A, the panel was asked about estimates, and how to find out what the photography budget is. I immediately liked Shayla when she confessed, "Well, I was trained to lie."

Mosquito memories

You’d think that a desert would be bug free. But Washington State’s Columbia Basin is filled with marshes. The discordant chord of Yellow-headed Blackbirds often fills the air. So does the buzz of mosquitoes.

The spray-on insect repellant was not doing the job. The mosquitoes considered it an appetizer, or maybe a dressing. So I pulled out my stash of jungle juice. The moment I smelled the scent of 100% pure Deet, I was flooded with memories of the muskeg of Northern Ontario, when I would practically bathe in the stuff, during my bird survey days.

In 1983 my girlfriend and I were based out of Moosonee, at the base of James Bay. We were working on the Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas, surveying remote, roadless grids by hitchhiking rides on government float planes. They’d drop us off at some nameless lake in the trackless wilderness, and a few days later (we hoped they remembered where they dropped us off), they’d pick us up and deliver us someplace else.

There are no mosquito hordes like those in the black spruce forest of the North. We each bore our own personal black cloud of insects everywhere we went. Ingesting, imbibing, inhaling them became mundane. All my photographs of that landscape have a screen of out of focus dark dots in them. We had headnets, but they were impractical in the field and uncomfortable. Fortunately, Deet is effective up North. We slathered it on first thing in the morning, touched it up throughout the day, and reapplied it before bedding down at night. Deet is a powerful solvent, and the plastic on our binoculars soon bore grooves from our deet-covered fingers. When you're drenched in Deet the mosquitoes don’t bite, but you do have to grow accustomed to the patter of them on your face as they try to penetrate the chemicals.

There is no faster route to memory than through scent. I am co-existing in dual realms in the Eastern Washington desert with those memories. At this stage in my life, I am unwilling to endure the privations that seemed adventurous then. I remember the trial of mosquitoes with pride, yet this time I slather on the Deet to avoid an occasional bite on this walk. Then I followed compass bearings to bushwack through forest so dense you couldn’t see 10 feet ahead (one time I left my pack on the ground while I followed a warbler song. I wasn’t 30 feet away, but it took two of us a half hour to recover my belongings.) Now the trek is down a dirt road through sagebrush and ponderosa, and I’m not bushwacking through the brambles to identify a birdsong. The bird shall remain a mystery this time out. (Actually, I did bushwack off trail on the walk back to try and find him. I got a fleeting glimpse, but I never did identify the bugger.)

The past inescapably colors the present, though usually beneath the surface. When a bubble of it bursts through to the immediate moment, I want to savor both, like a complex broth.

Newsletter stats

I’ve been sending out emails as self promotion for years. For my last mailing, I signed up with a mailing service, Constant Contact, to fulfill the task. All of a sudden, I feel like a real e-marketeer.

For the entirety of my career, I’ve done promotion of some sort. For most of the last 20 years, it was direct mail. In the last 4 years, it has been almost entirely email. The source of my list has been my clients who I’ve worked for, graphic designers and art directors who I want to work for, people who have signed up at my exhibits, and the friends in my Eudora address book. For a time, I was harvesting email addresses from Adbase (only those who said they would accept emails, really). I felt like I was a spammer though, sending these unsolicited emails to people I had no prior contact with (I was sending out a proto-photoblog before such things became ubiquitous, a Photo-of-the-Month). After attending an SPGA event about e-marketing and the current practices, I learned that I indeed was a spammer, and I halted my email activities for months while I figured out what to do next.

I returned to a strictly newsletter format, and cut down the list. I’d been managing it myself, with Group Mail Pro and an html editor, so advancing to a service has been a big jump. Now, I get a flashy template to organize my content. I get reports on the behavior of my respondees, which is really cool, and a bit unnerving, because now I know that people are doing it to me too.

My list has 381 people on it. Two days after sending the newsletter, I can report that over half of them opened the emails, and 40% clicked on one of the links in the newsletter. 4% bounced. Only one person opted out of the list. Compared with other sites, as they say in Lake Wobegone, I’m way above average (which are: 18% bounces, 37% open, and 9% click through).

There’s a new button near the top of my Typelists there on the right (under the About and the email), where you can subscribe to the next issue of my newsletter. Or you can click here to do it.

Phovi.com interview

I’m pretty good at pontificating. Tonight was a test to see if I could pontificate on command, under hot lights, for the camera.

I was being taped for Phovi.com, a photography instructional website (still in beta) for their "Talking Business With the Pros" section. The 10 minute segment will "air" in August, and I’ll participate in a discussion forum on the site.

What surprised me was how cool I was under the camera, and at mimicking a back and forth repartee that was interrupted by changing camera angles and repeated takes. Bre would ask a question. Cameraman would reposition camera. I would adlib a cogent and, sometimes, overly meandering response as if I were freshly responding to what I just heard. I found myself watching my thought process in action as I spoke. Let’s see, I just made this point, and this association, and this related point, now, how should I bring it to a conclusion and make it sound thoughtful instead of a mad scramble to tie up a loose end, and still be grammatically correct, while talking slower than usual? If I had to repeat it, it was never as good. There was a powerful incentive to complete my thought process in one take.

This was the opposite of the bantering conversation of a good dinner party, with a couple bottles of wine and smart people around the table. Instead I had to be alert, but not overly alert in a caffeinated way, calm, but without lassitude, and consciously, powerfully grounded to the best of my ability. It felt like being behind the camera, but with ten times the pressure. Fun, but I’m glad it’s not my day job.