I’ve been thinking a lot about this question over the past few months and thought I’d share what works best for me.
I will work for free this year, just like I did last year and the year before, but it has to be with the understanding that we’re all in it together.
I’m not talking about self-assigned projects either, that work is created by me, for me. I’m talking about shooting for someone else for no pay.
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It’s that first shoot of the year time again, the one that sets the tone for the year to come. This is always one of the most important shoots for me. After not shooting (other than with my iPhone) for over 3 weeks during the holidays it was time to get out there and start making some pictures again.
I needed a printed portfolio. It was my first time attending the PhotoPlus conference in New York City this year, and it was my first time going through an intense round of portfolio reviews. After reading all the popular blogs, I opted for the Portfolio Presentation Case from Pina Zangaro, but the very thing that brought me to this case-style portfolio is going to drive me away to a more triditional book-style portfolio.
After picking up a Nikon 105mm 2.0 prime lens this month I finally had a chance to use it in the field this week.
Review coming soon...
I did a small portrait-lighting demo for my buddy Andrew Blanchard’s photo 101 class this week. Drew teaches printmaking and photo at Converse College, a liberal arts women's college in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He’s also an amazing printmaker himself who embraces his southern roots his work. He brought his class into his personal studio space and we did some environmental portraits of him. This is one of my favorites.
I shot this billboard campaign for Spartanburg’s independent bookstore, Hub City Bookshop last month. We used Hub-Bub artist in resident Steve Snell as the model. It’s always more interesting to me to work with real people as opposed to models. Steve has tons of personality and brought it without hesitation to our shoot. He also schooled me on all things hipster.
I spent a few hours on the plane ride to Oregon last week hanging out with Clint Davis. Not really, but he did keep me company while I watched his Mastering Compositing DVD produced by Slickforce Studio.
I’m not huge fan of compositing images, mainly because I don’t like spending that much time behind a computer. I would rather be building sets, shooting and chatting with people. I get bored quickly when I’m editing pictures, even if I am listening to music. My goal has always been to get things right at the time of exposure and not later in Photoshop. Sometimes though, that skill is necessary and when it is I’ll be prepared.
Clint’s DVD isn’t about correcting things in Photoshop that you messed up during the shoot and just to be clear, it’s not a lighting or portrait DVD either. It’s a Photoshop tutorial about compositing images. In this DVD Clint takes the images from open to close. He goes all the way from how to cut something out of a background to creating a movie poster using multiple images.
The first thing I noticed about his tutorial was
Thanks mom but telling me how pretty my pictures are is not helping me stand out in this crowd.
Last year I drove down to Atlanta from Raleigh where I had been working for a few days because I knew Zack Arias was having an open studio. I wanted to pin him down for a portfolio review in the same way he pinned down Chase Jarvis the year before. It took all night to get him alone but at midnight I had him in the corner and he spent over an hour with me going through my work and giving me advice. Although some of his words were hard to swallow, I can’t say enough nice things about the man.
I took that advice, let it simmer in and I’ve been creating all year long. This year
I have been creating sets in the studio that essentially follow the four-foot by eight-foot panel-board formula.
Generally speaking I’ve been taking four-foot by eight-foot thrifty white panel (the same white panel board that Mr. OneLight speaks of here) and hanging it horizontal from the ceiling to create my backdrops. I then paint it or wheat-paste newspapers to it, hang burlap over it, drag Christmas lights over it, stick stuff to it, the list is never-ending and the set up is simple. That’s it, one $11 board and some ideas and you have endless opportunities to create interesting and unique pictures.
So this time it happened to be four-feet by four-feet and not four-feet by eight-feet and it cost $75 not $11 but I couldn’t help myself.
The above image is a four foot by four foot piece of movie-theater ticket-window glass that was already
I’ve been trying to one-up myself in the work that I’ve been creating over the past year and I’m finding that it’s more in the idea than anything else.
The above picture is on white seamless, with one light in a softbox, a friend with dreads and some fishing line. It’s certainly more about an idea than it is any complicated lighting structure or elaborate set building.
Learning the technical side of photography is not that hard if it’s something you
