The South Dakota Badlands have a menacing beauty. Colorful, rich in texture and expansive, the Badlands under the right conditions can provide a landscape photographer endless opportunities. Having visited the Badlands National Park in the spring I was happy to find intense green grass dotted throughout the landscape. Recent rains and overcast light enhanced the intensity of the green grass providing a nice offset to the rusty red color normally found in the sedimentary layers of the eroded buttes, pinnacles and spires. Spring in the Badlands is certainly not a bad place to be with your camera.

Stormy Badlands - Badlands National Park, South Dakota

Technical Info:
Canon 1Ds Mark III, 16-35mm f/2.8 II USM, f/22, 1/10 sec

Technorati Tags: photography, landscape, Badlands National Park, badlands, South Dakota, stock photo

Copyright Jim M. Goldstein, All Rights Reserved

Stormy Badlands – Badlands National Park, South Dakota

© 2010 Dawn LeBlanc. All Rights Reserved (see policies). Contact for Use.

A white cyclamen shot in natural light using a west-facing window in late afternoon. The black background is achieved by using simple foam-core boards angled away from the light source. At first glance, it reminded me a bit of that shot of Marilyn with her skirts flowing around her, but no doubt that’s my overactive imagination!

Keywords: cyclamen, flower, Macro, Nature, vertical, white

This photo was posted by Dawn LeBlanc on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 11:09 am and is filed under Macro

© 2009 Andrew Gibson. All Rights Reserved (see policies). Contact for Use.

A shrine outside someone’s house in Venice, Italy.

Keywords: Architecture, blue, color, colour, Italy, red, religion, religious, shrine, Venice, vertical, yellow

This photo was posted by Andrew Gibson on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 11:05 am and is filed under Architecture

UPDATE: Corrects backpack, adds links to backpack and duffel.
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I have logged a lot of air miles over the last few years, and am getting ready to pile on a few more en route to Dubai this week.

On of the biggest advantages of being speedlight-based is being able to avoid the excess-baggage mafia. Given that I usually travel with computer, camera gear, lighting gear (including stands, etc.) in addition to the typical clothing stuff, I thought I would do a quick post on what and how I pack.
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Two In the Belly

First off, I always strive to get all of my clothing/personal items into a medium-sized L.L. Bean White Mountain backpack. I can get a ton of stuff in there, and it doesn't take any hands to schlep it. That bag always gets checked.

The second checked bag is an L.L. Bean roller duffel. It is modestly sized but can really swell up to handle extra clothing and/or souvies for the kids. That bag takes my light stands, umbrellas, grip, mods, etc. Nothing in the soft roller is very fragile. And more important, if it gets lost there is nothing in there that I cannot replace quickly in any medium-sized city.

Being able to throw four light stands and umbrellas into a normal-sized bag and still have room for plenty of other stuff is one of the reasons I love 5-section compact stands and Westcott double-fold umbrellas. Pint-sized powerhouses.


Two in the Cabin

Never lost a bag yet, knock wood. But if I do, the goal is to still be able to do a shoot with the carry-on stuff. To that end, the most important stuff stays with me.

My one carry-on bag, pictured above, is a Think Tank Airport International Security. I cannot tell you how much I love this roller. It is built like a tank, has locks (and locking cable), holds all of my critical stuff and is designed to be a legal carry on just about anywhere in the world. They make a bigger one that meets U.S. domestic limits, but that one is too big for many international carriers.

Pictured above, it has my core and/or breakable gear. In addition to the pockets full of cards, papers, gels, fold-flat Lumiquest mods, speedstraps, etc., here is what I typically take in the main compartment:


1. Nikon D3 -- main body.

2. Nikon D300 -- backup body. Bought two weeks before the D700 was announced, of course. Grr.

3. Nikon 24-70 f/2.8 -- my most frequently used lens by a mile.

4. Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 -- great lens, but I use it way less now that I do not shoot for papers anymore.

5. Nikon 55 f/2.8 AI (MF) Macro lens

6. Holga (80mm portrait) and Diana (wide) plastic lenses in Nikon mounts -- light, cheap, quirky and occasionally invaluable.

7. Six Nikon SB-800s -- I know, I am a little bit addicted.

8. Orbis Ring Flash Adapter -- gets heavy use. Will sometimes take a Ray Flash, depending on circumstances.

9. Charger for D3 -- (D300 charger rides in checked bag.)

10. Two Nikon SC-17 cords -- one neutered, one not.

11. Honl grids (underneath other stuff) -- prefer the 1/8 to the 1/4.

12. Four Nikon diffuser domes for SB-800s.

13. Three PW Plus II's (and 4 more in the second case.) These will get me by just in case, as I can SU-4 the other SB-800's.

14. Extra AA's -- Kodak slow-drain Ni-MH's are my favorites.

and, special for this trip…

15. A couple RadioPopperJrX's, because I am doing the GPP Shootout against JoeyL and Zack Arias. And I just know Zack is planning on trying to pwn me with his Pocket Wizards after what we did to him last year.

Oh, and I got me a nice, long SYNC CORD, too, Mr. Zack. 'Cause I wasn't born yesterday.


Last, I have a small "personal" bag which gets the laptop, iPhone, spare hard drive, coupla magazines and a book. And, just in case: An extra T-shirt, skvvies and a toothbrush for the inevitable airport delays/cancellations. And for overnight flights, I have a big, poofy jacket that I wear onto the plane. It transforms into a pretty nice pillow once I am curled into that window seat.

I shop for tickets inclusive of baggage fees, so I compare apples to apples. (That's one reason I love Southwest airlines.) Delta, which charges out the wazoo for checked bags, for some reason has no fees if you are going to the Middle East. So this week, it's Delta for me.

(For lots more very good gear/packing/flying info, I recommend the blog Flying With Fish, by Steve Frischling.)

Seventeen-hour trip up next = guaranteed Hobbit feet by the time we get to DXB. But at least my gear will be none the worse for wear.
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NOTE: If you are posting Q's on the Flickr photo page about the Think Tank bag, please be aware tham I am in Dubai right now and cannot access Flickr as it is a banned site. The Firefox plugin that worked last year is not working this year, either. Solutions welcomed!

Here's an idea that Moishe has been kicking around with me for the last couple of weeks: Midwest is letting readers vote on which items will go on sale the following week.

So far, everything is small flash/lighting related and they plan to rotate it each Monday. This week, the Lumiquest SB-III has jumped out to an early lead.

-30-

Photography: Chris Burkard

The Web might have made it easy to show your images to admirers but the appeal of the old methods of displaying pictures still hasn’t disappeared. Photographers continue to look enviously at gallery walls, and a name on the cover of a photography book still delivers the kind of warm fuzzies that no website can ever inspire, however flashy.

There’s no shortage of photographers hoping to see their images gathered together, surrounded by text and sitting on bookstore shelves or, even better, decorating coffee tables around the world.

Part of that comes from the thrill of publication itself. When persuading a publisher to bet on your book idea is so difficult, success feels like an endorsement. An expert hasn’t just complimented you on your photography; he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is. You don’t find that often in the comments on Flickr and in terms of support, encouragement and kudos there are few stronger endorsements of your talent .

Publishing a Photography Book Is Not About the Money

But part of it is also the quality. The publishing company might take a big cut of the sales price, but they also know what makes a book sell and they employ professional designers, editors amd marketers to make sure that the images are placed on the best possible platform.

“For us it wasn’t about the money,” says Chris Burkard, a 23-year-old professional photographer and co-author of The California Surf Project, “we just wanted it to be the best it possibly could be.”

Chris’s book was the result of a road trip taken with co-author Eric Soderquist along the Californian coast. Chris, who had been shooting surf pictures professionally for three years, handled the photography and image editing while Eric did the writing (and all the surfing, notes Chris). Neither had planned the trip with a book in mind, but saw the images and text as a way to share what they loved about California and inspire others to explore the state.

“We had no idea it would ever actually turn into a real deal book,” Chris recalled. “We were inspired and just did it because we wanted to, book deal or not. Needless to say when we came to Chronicle and presented the idea, it was pretty much a packaged deal. They were stoked on the idea and the motivation behind it.”

Persuading Chronicle to publish the book was perhaps a little easier than the experience encountered by most photographers. Chris’s editor at Surfline.com had published a book with Chronicle in the past, and gave Chris and Eric an introduction. Chronicle saw their vision, loved the photography and, importantly, allowed the authors to take part in the development process, retain creative control and ensure that the book was not over-designed. The company also supplied a publicist and marketing manager, paid for printing and distribution and even came up with an advertising budget. Chris and Eric were able to focus entirely on quality control and photo quality.

The Marketing Is Up to You

That’s unusual. According to John Fielder, a professional photographer and former owner of Westcliffe Publishers, a publishing company which he sold to Big Earth Publishing after 26 years, the support of publishers tends to stop at paying for the production and distribution.

“The rest is up to you,” he told us, “including most of the marketing.”

That suggests that book authors could find themselves faced either with high advertising bills — as they try to promote their book themselves — or low sales, as the publication withers for lack of exposure. When it came to publishing his own books, most of which focused on Colorado (his latest is about Coloradan ranches), John tended to use two strategies that enabled him to reach a large audience without having to rely on a large advertising budget.

The first was to focus on publishing books that were unique and which didn’t compete directly with other published titles. And the other was to produce books that had an environmental component. They might have related to the protection of a natural resource or benefited the goals of an environmental non-profit organization. The idea, says John, was to attract the media to report on the project it covered.

“This reduced the need for paid advertising,” he explained, “and support from the publisher… which in my case was me. And it’s easy to get a book into bookstores if there’s publicity.”

Choosing to photograph a controversial topic that can pick up media attention then might be one way to make publishing – or at least marketing – easier but what about landing that first publishing deal?

Put yourself in the publisher’s shoes, recommends John. Imagine what it would take for the book to sell then submit your proposal. Tell the publisher whether the book is  unique in the market, how well competing books have sold, who will buy it and why, as well as technical details such as format, page count, photo count, price and proportion of photos to text.

Or alternatively, you can do what John did when he produced his first calendar back in 1981: create your own publishing company, self-publish, then commission books from other photographers as well.

While that would guarantee that you get to see your images in print though, it’s still not going to guarantee that you see any money. John says that his books paid him well because they sold in relatively large quantities.

“In general,” he says, “a photographer cannot rely upon book royalties alone.”

It seems that it’s not only the appeal of photography books that hasn’t changed; the pay hasn’t improved either.

If a photographer were to open a store — or even a gallery — the business plan would be pretty simple: figure out the right price for a photo, put the price on a sticker, put the sticker next to the image, and wait for someone willing to pay that amount. It’s the way retail usually works and it’s straightforward enough. The seller names the price; the buyer gets to take it or leave it. Set up a photography business though and when it comes to ways of taking money for your photos, you’ll be spoiled for choice. Selling prints might be simple to plan (if hard to do), but event photographers have to create packages that combine hourly rates with physical products, making them flexible enough to appeal to different budgets but enticing enough to encourage clients to spend as much as they can. Even those sorts of packages though are fairly clear, and a quick look at what competitors are doing can usually provide a pretty good guide. It’s when a photographer want to license his or her photos that things start to get really complicated.

In practice, photographers are basing their prices on four main models. Choose the wrong model for your images, you could well find that you’re priced out of the market and struggling to make sales.

Microstock’s royalty-free model is the simplest. Prices are low and once a buyer has bought the image, he can do whatever he wants with it, short of selling it somewhere else. So an image that might have cost no more than a buck or three can end up on the cover of a book, on the website of an international magazine as well as on blogs, marketing material and in low-cost newsletters.

Cheap and Simple

This model’s simplicity benefits buyers — and microstock agencies — most. Designers can go from needing an image to acquiring one in just minutes, and even for a low price, and the agencies make profits by taking a small cut of lots of sales. While that can mean plenty of buyers and lots of small opportunities, it does mean that images run the risk of being underpriced and overused. Publishers are usually willing to pay several hundred dollars for an image that will appear on the cover of a major book, for example. This microstock picture cost just a few dollars on Shutterstock.

That makes microstock a useful model primarily for images that are hard to place elsewhere and for photographers without helpful contacts. “Rich,” the microstock photographer whose photo was used on a children’s book cover, also has images on Alamy. They’ve brought him one sale. Shutterstock has given him almost 6,000.

“It is near impossible for a beginner photographer to first get represented by one of those agencies, and… to have their images shown someplace where buyers will actually get to find them,” he explained. “So in that situation I turned to microstock.”

Stock is Hard for Photographers – and Hard for Buyers

Those traditional stock agencies represent a very different pricing model, one that provides full value for the image but which is both difficult for photographers to break into and complicated for buyers who have to state exactly what they plan to do with the picture. It’s a model that’s under pressure and while it’s likely to remain for top photographers and the biggest buyers who need the most exclusive images, even Getty and Corbis have subsidiaries that offer royalty-free photos in the same way as microstock.

It’s also a model that’s based on long-term revenues. Microstock photographers often post images that they shot with at least one eye on the pleasure of creating a good image. That allows them to write off at least some of their costs. Professional stock photographers shoot with both eyes on the profit, and they’re willing to invest in an image, spending money on models and location, even if it means waiting a couple of years before the sales move the photo into profit. It’s a model for professionals with exceptional commercial photos and a solid track record. Even users of PhotoShelter, a site that allows anyone to license their photos themselves using the stock industry’s usage model, tend to sell to clients they already know.

Microstock’s low-cost, royalty-free licenses and traditional stock’s rights-managed licenses represent two extremes but there also different models opening between them.

Flickr’s Free Photography Market

On Flickr, where photographers tend have a much looser grasp of market rates and the potential value of their images, contributors negotiate freely. They also often make frequent mistakes, charging too little — and often nothing at all — for their photos.

As a model, receiving or inviting requests on Flickr is popular among photo-sharers and has the advantage of providing complete flexibility. Sellers receive an amount that they agree for their photos. There’s no framework, no rules and little attention to conditions, usage limitations or terms. It contains all the anarchy of the open market but one in which an experienced buyer will always have the upper hand over an inexperienced enthusiast.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a model to avoid though. Buyers are browsing the site looking for the kinds of unique images that are hard to find elsewhere, even from stock companies, so Flickr can provide a good model for creative photographers. But it does mean that those photographers will need to look at the stock licensing model to understand the kinds of conditions they should be demanding.

Limited Licensing for Small Niches

Finally, the method that photographer Craig Holmes uses to sell images can be seen as yet another way of buying and selling photos — and one which reflects the very processes that are changing licensing models. Like microstock, his own stock site prices images based on size not usage.  Unlike microstock though, the license is limited for a year and prices begin at £25. Regular customers can download freely and receive a monthly bill.

The ability to use that model comes in part from Craig’s knowledge of his buyers and their budgets — something to which users of PhotoShelter are able to relate — and also from years of struggling with usage rights. Clients, he says, just didn’t get it.

“Gone are the days when clients wanted to chat over the price of an image,” says Craig. “They simply see it, want it there and then for a fair price.”

It’s likely that all of these models will continue to operate side-by-side for different photographers and for different buyers. Professionals will continue to sell rights managed licenses through traditional stock agencies; enthusiasts will earn small amounts for royalty free microstock images; creative photo sharers will negotiate openly with buyers as they turn up; and niche photographers will create unique models that reflect their markets and the subjects of their images. When it comes to licensing models, there’s no one sticker price

I started Photodoto in 2006. In four years, we’ve published nearly 600 articles on a diverse range of topics for beginners to advanced photographers. I’m proud of the work. For myself, and on behalf of all of Photodoto’s contributing writers: thank you for reading and contributing.

When I started Photodoto, my mission was to try to make photography more accessible to everyone. I believe strongly that anyone can be a good photographer and that photography is not as mysterious or difficult as many people think. I hope that I’ve achieved that goal, at least for some of you.

Unfortunately, over the past year, I haven’t had the time to dedicate to Photodoto that I think it or you deserves. I’ve got a lot on my plate. I’ve been forced to prioritize and Photodoto just didn’t make the cut.

Photodoto will not just disappear. There will be no new blog posts. But the content will live on in some form. I intend to reorganize and republish the most popular articles. And all existing links to content here will continue to work.

There are many great photography blogs out there. Here are three in particular that I think have a similar aim as Photodoto and that I think you will enjoy:

• Epic Edits
• Beyond Megapixels
• Digital Photography School

See you around. :-)

-John
john@photodoto.com

This guest post was written by Sherry Osborne. Sherry is unable to leave home without at least one camera hanging off her shoulder. She posts photography tips geared to beginners several times a week at photoblog.net. Contact me if you are interested in guest writing for Photodoto. -John

I don’t know if this has ever happened to you but one of the worst feelings in the world (photography-wise at least!) is discovering that your memory card has become corrupted and you’ve now lost all the photos you recently took. It happened to me on my old point and shoot card but I was really lucky in that there were only about five or six photos on the card and they weren’t particularly important to me.

It can, however, be a disaster to lose your photos before you can remove them from the card. While you can’t prevent all problems, here are some memory card tips to avoid as many issues as possible.

1. Enjoy sales on memory cards but avoid cheap. When you’re shopping for a card buy the big name brands when a store is having a good sale. No matter how tempting it is, don’t pick up a card with a name brand you’ve never heard of and say, “Huh, only five bucks! I’ll get this one.” Sometimes price and brand really do matter and while even the popular brands can occasionally produce a defective card, you’re less likely to find yourself asking where all your photos went if you don’t buy a cheap card.

2. Do not leave your card in a card reader, even if you don’t think it’s doing anything. This is one of the tips that is hardest for me to follow. I have a tendency to take an average of 100+ photos on any given outing so I’ll often put the card in my reader, let it start, and then I’ll wander off to do other things. Then I realize, hours later, that the card is still sitting there. It seems like no big deal but as long as something is in the reader the computer will keep interacting with it. Don’t use it if it doesn’t actually need to be used.

3. Format your card each time you finish removing photos. Even if you delete the photos from the card, some data is still embedded in the card. When you load it back in your camera, take a moment to go into your menu and format the card each time.

4. Avoid extremes. Cards don’t like a lot of intense cold or high humidity. Keep it away from a lot of dust, and magnets. Be careful with it. They may look all sturdy and compact but they’re very sensitive.

5. Don’t use your card as a storage unit. This is such a common mistake and it’s so easily avoided. My parents travelled out East for my sister’s wedding back in September and my father took hundreds of photos while out there. I visited my parents at Christmas time and was utterly appalled that my father had never dumped his photos onto his computer. It was over three months after the fact and he had simply left the pictures on his card, continuing to take more on a fairly regular basis. He’s extremely lucky that his card didn’t become corrupted because he would have lost hundreds of pictures of his youngest daughter getting married, not to mention all the travel photos he took during his week-long visit. Just because your card can hold hundreds or even thousands of photos doesn’t mean that you should. Dump them and back them up often.

6. Consider more than one card. If you can buy two it’s a good idea to do so because then you have a back up. Change out your cards partway through the day. If you lose photos on one card, at least you’ll still have some on the other.

7. Don’t remove your card from the reader while it’s accessing the photos, don’t remove it from your camera while it’s turned on, and don’t insert it when the camera is on. All of these things can potentially corrupt your card, causing you to lose some or all of your images.

Do you have any memory card tips that work for you? Share them in the comments!

Local tech blogger Gus Sentementes popped down to The Cave for a headshot recently. And that was a good excuse to play with some atypical (for me, anyway) light.

Keep reading for some thoughts on working with differently shaped faces -- and taking the final display size into account, too.
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Take a Walk on the Wide Side

Facial shape is something you really do need to take into account when designing your light. To that end, there are a standard list of pat solutions for just about any variety of face.

Problem is, I hate standard, pat solutions.

What they are really doing if you stop to think about it, is using light to push us all toward some idealized ratio. And who wants that?

As far as I am concerned, any time someone give you the "if they have this kind of face, light them in this way" speech, you can be pretty sure they are trying to cram you into some standardized portrait box.

Seriously, what's the point in that? If the goal is to make everyone look the same, just use the liquify filter in Photoshop and be done with it. Everyone will come out looking like the Dove Lady.

That said, there are some lighting styles that will give you problems with some face types. I just like to try to find more interesting (and varied) solutions when practical.


Here is Gus, with beauty dish + ring lighting. It is similar to the AscendOne shots I blogged about a little while back, but without the rims. This lighting makes his face look pretty wide. And the effect would be enhanced if I added the rim lights.

Another thing you may be noticing is the reddish tones on Gus's face. This is (as far as I can tell) a byproduct of the combo of my D3, which tends toward warm/red, and my AB's -- which do the same, but in an inconsistent way.

Shooting in RAW, I still have not been able to tweak things to a tone I am happy with. But I am not exactly thrilled about it and I am doing some testing with other platforms to see how to best swap out to correct it. More on that soon.

Anyway, back to the lighting position. In the pic above I have a AB in a beauty dish top/front, and a ring (a couple of stops down) for fill. There is an SB-800 on the background, and another SB-800 up top in a scissor-clip for a top light.

And this light really does not do anything for me, to be honest. It's a headshot, but it really does not bring anything special to the party. But it is a start.

Lately, I am trying to approach each headshot as more of a unique experience. And that means working with the light as a variable to add interest or visual focus. And in this case I wanted to draw some interest to the center of Gus's face with some restricted light.

Normally, I'd head straight to the grid spots for this kind of thing. But I already had the strip boxes out from another shoot. And besides, they had egg crate -type grids on them anyway.


So I killed the dish and the ring and brought the strips in very close -- aimed at each other. They were right in front of his face. The falloff from each gridded strip light kept it from creeping around to the side of Gus's face, which created a neat focus in the front.

The lights, of course, fall off kinda gradually, which accounts for the fact that there is some detail going back around his head. You can vary this falloff from how you aim the lights. Point them more toward the camera for a faster falloff, and aim them further back for more light on the sides.

To me, this light has way more interest than does the beauty/ring light above. It's certainly not a pat response to a wide face, either -- nor is it ever to likely be one. But playing around with different solutions is what makes tight portraiture so interesting to me. For something that is very standard in general shape and scale, there are still lots of creative possibilities.


Here's a pullback so you can see just how tight those gridded strips were. His face is really just a few inches from the edges of the boxes, and that is the key to getting the control on the front of his face.

The SB up top is gobo'd with a strip of gaffer's tape, and the (unseen) background light (another SB) has a dome to make that little separating glow.

You can modify how fast the gradient occurs in the background with the dome (180-degree light) and varying the distance to the wall. In this case, it was about a foot away.


Size Matters

As I said, my strong preference is for the shot with the more interesting light. But when we saw it avatar-sized (~50 pixels) it kinda made Gus look like, um, The Devil.


See what I mean?

Having worked with Gus for the better part of 10 years, I am pretty sure he is not, in fact, the Dark Lord Mephistopheles. (Although, to be fair, I don't socialize with him that much at night.)

But for very small (i.e., avatar) usage, we both agreed it was better to go with the other pic. Interesting, as I think the more dramatic light kills the standard-lit stuff at any other size.


Valuing Experimentation

This was a collaborative shoot -- no money involved either way -- so there was plenty of room for trying new things. And next time out, I will have that extra lighting technique in my bag of tricks and will be comfortable using it.

And that's what makes those kinds of shoots both interesting and valuable. I get to experiment and Gus gets new photos for his various social media channels. It works for both of us.

For his part, Gus is in at an interesting intersection for a newspaper guy right now. He is working in traditional media, but his blog's subject matter means that he has strong visibility into both print and new media/tech.

Gus is a fairly young guy, and no doubt realizes that newspapers will not be a dominant information channel going forward. Fortunately, the people who work in newspapers are very well suited to transitioning to new media formats as individuals.

The printing presses, trucks, newspaper racks and dead trees -- not so much.
__________


Check out Sentementes' blog BaltTech, here.

© 2009 Brian Auer. All Rights Reserved (see policies). Contact for Use.

This photo was taken on my first roll of film through my Diana+ camera. I was attending a photowalk at Newport Beach and I had only planned to experiment with the camera and learn the ins and outs. I wasn’t expecting too many “keepers”, but I ended up with a handful of print worthy images.

This one is just a quick snap of the Merry-Go-Round, and it might have even been shot “from the hip”. This is a film scan, but the darkroom print has a little better detail in the highlights (signed prints are from the darkroom, unsigned are printed from the film scan).

Signed prints available for $570 USD. Available at any size up to 16" x 16" on gloss finish fiber paper, hand printed gelatin-silver process, selenium toned, not matted or framed, limited to 25 signed prints.

Keywords: 120 format, 75mm, ASA400, b&w, beach, black & white, black and white, california, carousel, Diana+, film, grayscale, horse, HP5, Ilford, Lomo, Lomography, medium format, merry go round, natural light, negative b&w film, Newport Beach, outdoor, outside, ride, square, square format, Street, sunlight, toy camera, United States, Urban

This photo was posted by Brian Auer on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Urban

Yesterday the professional free skier C.R. Johnson died in an accident on the slopes of Squaw Valley, California. My heart goes out to his family and friends. I first crossed paths with C.R. while shooting the 2005 Icer Air event in San Francisco. In 2005 Icer Air caught the attention of millions of people who were witness (in person or on TV) to the odd juxtaposition of extreme skiing and snowboarding against the backdrop of steep San Francisco hills, mansions and iconic landmarks such as Alcatraz. The scene was surreal, but the energy was intense. At this event C.R. Johnson won the skiing competition. His enthusiasm for the sport was palpable and his energy lit up those around him. I never knew C.R. other than this one time we crossed paths, but seeing how his influence in this sport grew and his incredibly positive energy impacted others it’s obvious now the sport has lost a great ambassador. More on C.R. Johnson can be read over at Chase Jarvis’ blog

C.R. Johnson being interviewed after winning the 2005 Icer Air skiing competition in San Francisco, California

Technorati Tags: C.R. Johnson, extreme sports, sports, skiing, Icer Air

Copyright Jim M. Goldstein, All Rights Reserved

Remembering C.R. Johnson

Dear readers, sorry for the temporary absence. It’s been over ten days since the last post. I’ve been busy working on my other site, Photocrati. If you haven’t been there yet, check it out: Photocrati Photography Blog and Digital SLR Camera Reviews. We’ve recently added a gear review section and brought on Peter Burian (co-author of the National Geographic Photography Field Guide and author of numerous Magic Lantern guides to digital SLRs) as a reviewer. We’re also about to add Jack Neubart, author of the Photographer’s Exposure Handbook and at least three other books on photographic lighting, as a reviewer. They join a team of 7 other pro photographers working in diverse fields. We’ve added a Twitter account - you can follow us at www.twitter.com/photocrati - which something I’ll be doing soon on DSLR Blog as well. And we’ll be launching a forum and major photo contest sometime in the next two months.

Anyways, now that the flurry of changes is done on Photocrati, I can get back to sharing some business tips here. Up shortly: a review of Printroom.com online storefronts.

Thanks for the patience, Erick

Light tents (also called light boxes) are a great way to shoot a product. They eliminate harsh reflections and create appealing highlights. This specific light tent from Robert Miler has a nice twist since it can fold flat for storage.

It is all Robert from after the jump

read more

Well, the rest of this post is not necessary, I’ve said it all in the title.

However, if you happen to be reading this late at night, you’re tired, and don’t mind a bit of baloney, read on…

Why did I say this?

1. When you have to shoot, Shoot! Don’t talk.

Tuco Says it all. Do use a camera though…

2. Some people read too much.

They theorise, record facts, and they research techniques, look at beautiful photographs, read about the photographers that took them, and the amazing equipment that these brilliant photographers took these enchanting photographs with and then they sit back, too confused to act. They deliberate about what equipment to buy so that they can get the best photographs, ai-ya-yai-a-yai!

Like I said… Just shoot… When you have the need for a gazillion pixel camera, you’ll know… and your fans will be willing to buy you one… Till then, just take out your cameraphone, or your rusty film SLR, or your brand new dSLR that’s been sitting on the shelf, and take photographs…

3. Some people worry too much.

They worry that their cameras will get dirty. They worry that their photographs may not be good enough.

C’mon man! Face facts. Nobody was as good as Ansel Adams when they first picked up their camera. They practiced. They got a bucket load of shitty pics, they figured out what was wrong, corrected the mistakes and moved on…

4. Some people don’t get the time.

Good Photography is about how you see the world around you. When you’re seeing photographs that you should be taking all the time, everywhere around you, and you’re not getting any of them in your camera, you know that you’ve got to make the time… or get a smaller camera, one that you can put in your shirt pocket!

If you don’t have inspiring things around you, you know you’ve got to go out a bit more… When you do, take that camera along with you.

5. Some people are just plain lazy.

And maybe, just maybe… that’s why you’re reading this post? Get off your lazy arse and mess around with your camera… Learn a new technique, or just get better acquainted with your gear!

Know of other reasons why people want to, but don’t take photographs? Leave a comment.

This post was published on Beyond Phototips.com if you like what you’re reading, please visit the website.

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• 18 Quick Lessons from On-Location – Revived
• Obvious Street Photography Tips
• 7 Ways To A More Observant Life
• Point n go shoot

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For pro photographers, there is life before and life after LaCie – the new back up and storage data system will hold up to staggering 6TB (6000GB).

EDIT FOR SUSAN:

New Version of Topaz Adjust out today!

Topaz Adjust 4 is out today on the Topaz Website. You may have already seen my Topaz Adjust Review in the recent past, and you’ll be happy to know the new one is a free upgrade if you have the previous one! I got a sneak peak at the new one, and I posted an image below from the slick new interface. If you haven’t already got it, then I recommend it totally. I use it quite a bit to sharpen things up and give images some pop.

Screenie from the new Topaz Adjust 4 – Nice looking interface, eh?

Daily Photo – The Icy Cave at the Franz Josef Glacier

I’ve had an amazing time so far in New Zealand. I’m here for about a month with my family. On a recent evening, my 8-year-old son and I went on a decent hike to the base of the Franz Josef Glacier on towards the west coast of the southern island. Once we got close to it, we could see the icy blue cave where a glacial-white river emerged. Awesome! My son looked at me and said, “Wow. I feel like we just discovered Atlantis!”

In truth, we stayed way too late. This was a good 1.5 km from the car, and it was pretty dark. By the time we got back, it was totally dark except for the moonlight that helped guide us home. I had a flashlight hanging off my camera “just in case”, but, as case would have it, the flashlight fell off into the glacial river!

Looking for good Podcasts?

If you are like me, you don’t have a lot of spare time in the week, so you try to hyper-compress and optimize your media consumption. To that end, I now listen to a few podcasts on a regular basis.  You can subscribe to them all via iTunes for free, or go right to the webpages below.  I have many that I sample from time to time, but the following are some great “regulars”.

• This Week in Technology – A great combination of tech news and analysis.  Always fun and interesting.
• This Week in Photography – with host Frederick Van – he’s often joined by very knowledgable people like Alex Lindsey, Ron Brinkmann, Joseph Linaschke, Steve Simon, and more!
• Macbreak Weekly – I do love my Mac – and this is a great podcast that is all-things Mac.

Leo in the TWIT Cottage

When I was there, I grabbed a quick photo that I put in this previous post about visiting Petaluma.

Daily Photo – The River Through Petaluma

A few days after the talk at Google (I think the Authors@Google *LINK to video are adding subtitles now, for those of you that have trouble hearing), I went up to Napa to visit my mom and my grandmother. Besides getting a bunch of homemade fudge (which I brought to the Stanford photowalk), I also stopped on the way back south in Petaluma at Leo Laporte’s “cottage”.

I’ve always been a big fan of Leo’s!  Beside just seeing out of one eye (a strange bond I feel with him), I’ve really gotten a kick out of the way he approaches and discusses technology.  In fact, I listen to his podcasts so much that my wife often says, “If I have to hear that Leo ONE MORE TIME, before jamming the radio to get off AUX to FM.”

Leo was in the middle of a podcast when I walked in to watch his operation in person.  We didn’t really get a chance to talk, but he was gracious and said hello quickly while in the middle of the broadcast.  I think he’s very clever with his media powerhouse there.  I was fascinated seeing the operation — everything from the logistics to the electronics – smart.

His whole team was out in the front part of the college, and, while there, I also met Dr. Kiki (Dr. Kirsten Sanford is probably what it says on her degree).  She was as nice as I expected as well – her show is called “Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour” — another nice podcast for your lineup!

After leaving, I stopped in downtown Petaluma to grab some lunch and some internet.  Whilst there, I went over one of the bridges to grab this shot.  I don’t know if the water is always this brown and muddy, but it certainly was this day!

You probably have seen the famous photo of Earth taken by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972, which shows most of Antarctica, Africa and the Saudi Arabian peninsula. Well, we can add more amazing photographs to the ‘Blue Marble’ series. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has released these beautiful images to the public, showing gorgeous detail of our planet.

This spectacular “blue marble” image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. These images are freely available to educators, scientists, museums, and the public. This record includes preview images and links to full resolution versions up to 21,600 pixels across.

Photos by Goddard Photo and Video Blog.

    

  

    

A massive magnitude 8.8 earthquake has devastated central Chile with tragic loss of life and property, and has set off tsunami warnings around the Pacific Ocean. Our thoughts go out to all affected and condolences to those who have lost loved ones in this tragedy.

Photos by condeorloff, action datsun, Destino Para Lelos!, JanOSpixeles, and todosnuestrosmuertos.

The new external bling from SONY – HVL-F58AM flash – can be turned not only up and down, but also by 90 degrees to the sides which means it potentially covers 180 degrees in total.

"Bee in control" with the soon to be released transmitter and receiver from AlienBees.

Photography: ©2009 Scott Hargis Photo

The recession might be bad news for banks and terrible news for Realtors but it’s been good news for at least one group of professionals. Real estate photographers have reported a rise in demand for their services – and at least some of those photographers are responding with higher rates.

Faced with a glut of properties on the market, brokers are discovering a need to market their properties harder and enable them to stand out from competitors. They’re turning to professional photography to give their listings greater appeal.

“As the RE [real estate] industry has been tanking, I’ve found that my services are actually in greater demand than ever,” freelance real estate photographer Scott Hargis told us. “I’ve raised my rates twice in the last two years, with another increase likely this fall.”

The ability to raise prices though — like the rates themselves — depends on location. Scott operates in the San Francisco Bay area where rates typically run from $150 to $550 for a three-hour shoot (including travel and post-production time) that produces from twelve to fifteen images. Panoramas and video, as well as additional services such as websites and floorplans can bring in extra revenue. According to a poll on the Real Estate for Photography blog, an authoritative source for real estate photographers, those rates represent almost the complete range that photographers might charge. More than half of the photographers who voted report receiving less than $200 for a shoot and 49 percent say that real estate photography brings them under $20,000 a year (although 8 percent reported earning over $100,000 shooting images for the real estate industry.) Little more than a third of those polled though said that they shoot real estate full-time. Scott, who has been taking pictures of real estate for four years, also does portraiture and advertising work, areas he’s looking to expand.

A Real Estate Photography Business in One Year

Before a photographer can raise his or her prices though, they first need to  have clients. That can take a while. Photographers typically mention a year as the time it takes to build up a viable real estate photography business. The best place to begin is by approaching the top 10-20 percent of listing agents in your area.

“It is relatively easy in any area to make an ordered list of what Realtors are selling the most homes in the area,” says Larry Lohrman, the Real Estate for Photography blog’s publisher, and author of The Business of Real Estate Photography ebook. “Often the very best prospects are the ones with ‘kind of good’ photos — they’re the ones who have already thought about better photography but who haven’t yet achieved it.”

Many Realtors though work independently and tend to be very aware of costs. High-end homes, for example, the type that look like they could benefit most from professional photography, may take years to sell during which time a Realtor may lose the listing, together with his investment in the photography. For lower-priced homes, you  might have to do some hard persuading to prise Realtors away from their camera phones. The most effective tools are usually a website and a pile of finished products, such as brochures, leaflets and flyers, that you can leave with the Realtors and which contain your URL so that they can see more of your work. Once you land your first clients, you should find that referrals and word-of-mouth marketing bring in others.

One controversial issue is whether to offer free samples as a way to initially demonstrate your work and the benefits it can deliver. Larry Lohrman argues that free samples lower the value of the work overall and are  not necessary, but he also points out that many photographers do it anyway. It is a method that Scott Hargis used to win his first real estate clients:

“When I was just starting out, and had neither clients nor a portfolio, I went around on Sunday afternoons to open houses and asked the agents if I could photograph their listings for free, just to get experience and a portfolio. That worked really well for me.”

Even Scott though recommends restricting your free offers to only the top-level agents and making a sample shoot part of a personalized pitch.  William C. Hutton Jr., who has been shooting real estate for just under a year, suggests offering the first shoot at cost — which may be half price. The most common reasons that Realtors aren’t already using photographers, he notes, is that they don’t know about photography, don’t know how to contact a photographer, or don’t believe it’s going to be cost-effective. Free samples rarely help to remove those obstacles.

Keep the Walls Straight

Real estate photography then may be a relatively easy field to break into, especially at a time when property is hard to sell and brokers are looking for every advantage they can find. A good website and high-quality printed material may be enough to get your foot in the door, and a year of patience as your name spreads and the referrals bring you a solid base may be enough to give you a business. But you will need the photographic skills. Real estate photography has to be effective rather than creative, and provides different technical challenges to those presented in architectural or interior design photography. The shots tend to be wider — between 18mm and 24mm — but must still keep the walls straight and vertical. The rooms need to be bright and airy, the colors vivid and accurate, and the view through the window is an important part of the final image and not a distraction that can be blown out. Scott Hargis offers specialized workshops but nothing beats practicing on your own.

“Before  you find your first client, practice on homes of friends and family members,” recommends William C. Hutton Jr. “Keep a diary of each shot… [and] photograph the same interiors on bright sunny days and cloudy days.”

And it might be a good idea to do it now, before the economic climate warms up again

If not, here is what you’ve been missing…

PhotoNetCast #22 – Defining your photography goals – We tried to show how important defining goals is in order to help your photography, whether from an hobbyist or professional perspective.

PhotoNetCast #23 – Photographers’ Rights and the new UK Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 – The title says it all. A must listen, specially if you’re based in the UK.

PhotoNetCast #24 – Filters in the Digital Age – And what about those weird little pieces of glass that film photographers used to put in front of the lenses? Do they still have a place in the digital age?

PhotoNetCast #25 – Best Practices for your Photography Site – Not all photography sites are the same (gladly), but some work better than others depending on the objectives. Here are a few tips to make your site work for you on promoting your photographic work.

 

If you want to keep up-to-date with PhotoNetCast (no iPod needed), the best way is to subscribe to our feeds. If you use iTunes, you can use this link. Even if you’re already subscribed through iTunes, I’d still encourage you to subscribe to the full feed to get everything else that is published on the site (polls, news, contests, etc.).

And as always, your comments are truly appreciated. Also, if you have any photography questions you’d like us to answer on the show, just send us an email.

Happy listening…

Including copyrighted works on your photography

 

We’ve all been there – photographing a nice street scene only to find out later that the art installment on the background is indeed copyrighted by the artist.

While for editorial use this might not be much of a problem, for any other use that photo is pretty much out of bounds. Still, once in a while some horror stories of photographers getting sued for copyright infringement come up.

So, how to deal with this issue? What is fair use and what isn’t? While the definitive answer is too much of a gray area even for the courts, from our discussion you might be able to get a few pointers on what is allowed and what you should avoid.

Many thanks to David Sanger (@davidsanger, David on facebook) and William Burrard-Lucas (@willbl, Will on facebook) for their insights on this discussion.

As you’ll probably notice, the conversation was going and going and I didn’t want to interrupt just for time reasons. In any case, I know that not many people have over one and a half hours for just one episode of PhotoNetCast, so we’ve decided to break the conversation in two. The remaining part (including answering some listener questions and our Selected from the Web) will be released in a few days.

As always, your comments are very much appreciated. Drop them below or use our re-opened Listener Voicemail.

 

 

Show Notes

 

Intro

• Feeling Negative?

Copyrighted Works in Photography

• Photographers beware: This Seattle case opens a can of legal worms
• Broadway sidewalk dance causing another legal two-step
• Mike Hipple’s side of the story
• Public Art Lands Photog in Hot Water (the photo in question)
• The art piece
• Eiffel Tower by William
• Eiffel Tower by David
• Eiffel Tower by William
• Photo Attorney

Photo Competitions

Participating in photo competitions is one of the many ways photographers have to get their work out there. Choosing the right images, the right title, the right print and of course, the right contest can overwhelm even the most experienced photographer. But besides the exposure, participating in photo competitions can also improve you as a photographer.

In this show we welcome David Ziser, a professional photographer with many competitions on his belt, as a participant and judge, to share some of his experience and tips.

 

 

As usual, the show got longer than we expected but it’s worth it.

Please feel free to leave us your feedback and if you enjoy the discussion, why not going to David’s site and telling him that also.

Thanks for listening.

 

Show Notes

Lots of reading today…

Photo Competitions

Links:

• How to win photography competitions
• Photography Contests
• Photo competitions – Judging the art
• How the rights to your photo are being hijacked through photo contests & Social Media
• The Bill of Rights for Photography Competitions
• The Rights On List
• The Rights Off List
• Marketing Photos with Mary Virginia Swanson
• How to Win Photo Competitions – Tips You Must Know
• Critique Boutique
• You be the Judge
• Photography Contests
• Photo Competitions Blog
• Current Photo Contests
• The Art List
• Art Show

David talks about his work

• Digital Pro Talk
• David Ziser (workshops)
• Fine Art PhotoBlog

Selected from the Web

• Brian: 10 Things I Hate About Film
• Martin: Matt Stuart
• Jim: Getty and Flickr: What Just Happened?, How Getty Is Killing the Stock Photo Industry, The Curious Case of Getty and Flickr
• Antonio: Light Painting (author’s site)
• David: What’s Right with the World

When a Canon and a Nikon come together…

… at least they’re not a Pentax.

Joey L & The Photo Club.

This post was published on Beyond Phototips.com if you like what you’re reading, please visit the website.

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• How your lens was made… a video
• Amazon’s top Digital SLR Cameras, Lenses & Books
• Lenses for Architectural Photography
• Possible pics of the New Canon 40D

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A Digital SLR is a modern piece of equipment. It has nothing of the old-world charm associated with photography. No “wait till the film is processed“, no “did I get the exposure right“, no “oh, this is not good enough to be photographed“, no “Is the light right?”, no “I’ve got only 2 frames left. They’ve got to count“. Instead, you’ve got instant gratification, with nothing left to your imagination. You see the exact photograph that will be printed (or viewed on your screen) instantly, and if you want to change it, you can experiment till you get it right.

But why not try to experience the magic of not knowing exactly how your photographs are going to turn out? Want to try it? Simple.

1. Set your ISO to 100, 200 or 400, and set your white balance to Daylight because these are the most easily available film rolls available.
2. Set your camera mode to M so that all the aperture and shutter speed decisions are made by your brain, and not the camera’s.
3. Set up your camera to disable image reviews after you’ve taken a photograph. If you don’t have this option, stick a Post-it Note on the rear LCD screen so that you can’t see the image. Post-it Notes leave no sticky residue on the camera once you peel them off, so they’re perfectly safe for your camera.
4. Stick a cut Post-it Note on the top LCD so that you resist the urge to look at the number of frames remaining, shooting / AF mode and other details.
5. Rely on your intuition, and try not to use the light meter readout in the viewfinder.

Any other suggestions? Leave ‘em in the comments.

Watch out for a Photo Project based on your newly set up Retro DSLR in the days to come.

This post was published on Beyond Phototips.com if you like what you’re reading, please visit the website.

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• Selecting Photographs: What not to show
• Photo Project: Going Retro With Your Camera
• Canon’s New EOS 50D
• Photoshop Process – Edit Brian’s Picture

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The following idea kinda reminds me of what do you get when you cross kinda jokes. You know, like: What do you get if you cross an octopus with a cow? An animal that can milk itself. Or what do you get if you cross a sheep with a kangaroo? A woolly jumper.

Ok, so what do you get when you cross a GPS flash mount with a Mount it anywhere camera tripod? (Answer after the jump).

read more

The fact that Pocketwizard have a new TTL enabled unit is old news. The Flex TT5 and Flex TT1 have been shipping for almost a year now.

In the beginning the Flex units were having some hard time dealing with radio interference coming from some of the Canon flashes. This interference comin from the Canon flashes had impact both on distance and reliability of the TTX units.

The good news: Pocketwizard made a 580 radio-frequency-blocking-beer-holder for the delinquent Canon flashes. They go by the code name AC5 (I can only guess that it stands for Allocation Control, or Algorithmic Collision. Go figure).

The even better news: Pocketwizard decided to provide them AC5s shields free of charge to US photographers who bought the Flex units.

The not so good news: If you are living outside of the US, this offer is not for you. Other thing is that the AC5s will be free only till the end of the month.

Good news again: photographer Daniel Aqua posted a DIY tutorial on the Flickr pool that shows how to build a Canon shield at home.

read more

As you know I’ve been slowly (very slowly, sometimes) working on a series of reviews of website templates for photographers. This has given me a bit of insight into the advantages and disadvantages of various kinds of solutions.

Along with the team over at Photocrati, as well as a couple teams of web designers, I contributed that insight to help design a new series of WordPress themes for photographers. I think these are now one of the best low-cost solutions on the market (I’m biased, of course). I’m not going to write a full review of the themes, since it’s hard to objectively review a product you’ve helped design. But I do want to talk about what some of the advantages are, and, yes, some of the disadvantages. I’m going to structure this like my other reviews.

Let me start by saying that we’ve converted this site and I’ve converted my own phojournalism site to the new Photocrati WordPress themes. Check them out here:

MORE INFORMATION | DEMO

OVERALL APPEARANCE

In my view, these templates are beautiful. They have just the look I like, which is a simple, elegant look that emphasizes the images. The rest of the site just kind of fades into the background. They use primarily whites, grays, and blacks for the background, which for me is less distracting from the images than greens/reds/oranges or other bright colors.

Let’s start with a few screenshots of the themes. Here they are:

They have the look of many flash sites, even though they are not flash. The home page is designed with one large image space that contains a flash-style slide show.  The gallery pages contain rows and columns of thumbnails, which I prefer to “filmstrip” style thumbnails that require you to scroll up/down or side/side to see all the thumbnails in a gallery.

I actually like the gallery look enough that I actually use a gallery as my home page on my new photojournalism site. Below a screen shot of my new homepage. It also shows you want the galleries generally look like (although you can customize those like everything else.

Grade: A

EASE OF USE

I’ve often noted that there is an almost direct trade off between Ease of Use and Flexibility. Designers of templates can make thing easier by limiting the number of options you have, or they can give you lots of options, which will complicate things.

WordPress has lots of options. You can do almost anything with it. One downside of that is that WordPress themes are very much do it yourself solutions. You need to set up your own domain, your own hosting, and install WordPress. If you are familiar with all that, it’s really not too complicated. You can do it all in a few minutes at sites like <a href=”http://www.BlueHost.Com/track/erickdan” target=”_blank”>Bluehost</a> that offer one-click installation of WordPress.

Once you’ve got your blog and you’ve got to fill it out, and make many of the layout decisions yourself. Again, this is great for flexibility, but less so if you are looking for a plug-and-play-and-don’t-worry-about-it kind of site.

That said, pound for pound, WordPress is known to be one of the easiest web platforms to learn, giving you a tremendous amount of flexibility for a relatively short learning curve. And once you know WordPress, it IS easy.

Grade: B

FLEXIBILITY OF DESIGN

If these themes have a learning curve for WordPress newcomers, then the payoff is incredible flexibility. There really is very little you CAN’T do with a WordPress site. You can change colors, fonts, layout. Add elements or take them away. Move elements around. Add text where you want it. Integrate with social media. You can even add a full-fledged forum or e-commerce shopping center to your site if you want to.

The WordPress community is huge, and there are thousands of plug-ins that allow you to do just about anything.

Grade: A

BLOGGING CAPABILITY

WordPress is the world’s most powerful blogging platform. Not much more to say.

Grade: A

E-COMMERCE FUNCTIONALITY

I mentioned just a paragraph or two that there are all kinds of E-Commerce plugin-ins that allow you to add full shopping capability to WordPress. So the potential is there.

But for the time being, these these don’t offer what many of us want, which is the ability to sell photos directly from our galleries. The Photocrati team is working on this, but doing it in a way that is simple and elegant is tough work.

So for the time being, unless you are a WordPress guru who can do it yourself with one of the E-Commerce plugins, then you are out of luck until the Photocrati team comes up with an easy method to do it.

Grade: D

COST AND FEE STRUCTURE

Again, it doesn’t really get any better. Right now the Photocrati themes are selling for $59 each - for lifetime rights to the themes any updates. Pay once, low price, and it’s yours for life. Most highly managed template solutions (Photobiz/PhotoShelter/etc) entail ongoing monthly payments ranging from low to very high.

Grade: A

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Once again, WordPress is widely known to have about the best SEO capability that it’s possible to have. It has an inherent advantage over managed flash solutions, because it is a powerful blogging engine. And search engines love blog-style content - it fits all the qualities that search algorithms look for and therefore does very well. That’s while small mom-and-pop blogs can compete on the front page of Google with major multinational corporations.

Grade: A

FREE TRIALS AND GUARANTEES

Photocrati offers a 30-day money back guarantee that entails sending one email requesting a refund. Easy enough.

Grade: A

CONCLUSION

So, as you can see above, the Photocrati themes are strong in almost every aspect. They have two weaknesses: they do not yet offer the ability to sell your images directly from your site, and there is a learning curve for users who are new to WordPress. The second weakness, however, goes hand-in-hand with overwhelming flexibility. The reason there’s a learning curve is that, with WordPress, you are in control, and you can do just about anything.

As of now, pound for pound, I think these are best low-cost solution on the market, and it competes effectively with some highly managed solutions that cost 10-20 times more.

OVERALL GRADE: A-

Today, pro photographer and fellow Photocrati contributor Steve Buchanan offers some advice on marketing plans for your photography business. Steve is a commercial photographer in Maryland. His work can be seen at www.buchanan-studios.com.

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When is the last time you updated your marketing plan?

This is of course assuming you have a marketing plan. If you do - good for you. If not - get on it. I certainly don’t want to hold myself up as a model of small business marketing. I have definitely made my share of mistakes (and will hopefully continue to do so) but I have invested a lot of effort, time and even some money into learning about what works and what doesn’t.

I’m not here to tell you what will work for you and what won’t because those will be different for each photographer. Your particular market, the type of work you do and your geographic location all come into play when determining the right mix. The point I want to make is that all successful marketing campaigns have a few things in common.

1. They are planned and executed according to a plan. Failing to plan is the biggest single error photographers when it comes to marketing.

2. They are executed as campaigns - not discreet events. I’m regularly amazed at how many photographers try a marketing technique, don’t see results and abandon it relatively quickly.

3. They are consistent with the core values of the business.

Whether you shoot commercial or retail work, people, food, or weddings - you’ve got to market yourself in order to bring in new business. As of this writing the international economy, well, sucks. Things are looking better now than they have for a while but they’re still way down.  In times like these it’s easy to pull back on marketing expenses, after all, if the money’s not coming in, you can’t put it out again. While I’m not indifferent to the plight of small business owners, and I certainly wouldn’t advise anyone to pay for and ad before their mortgage, cutting marketing budgets and efforts right now is a big mistake. Look at it this way. If you have a 10% market share of a million dollar market, you have sales of $100,000. If that market shrinks to $800,000 you need to increase your market share from 10% to 12.5% just to hold steady. That’s certainly not possible without marketing.

Writing a marketing plan is not an easy task and brining in outside professional help can be great. A marketing consultant can bring their expertise to yours and help you drill down through your business data. In the event you’re not able to afford or find a good marketing consultant there are a plethora of books and internet tutorials on writing marketing plans. Ask 100 different marketing experts how to write a marketing plan and you’ll get 100 different answers - but the basic concepts are the same.

1.  Establish your goals - these should be solid, measurable goals, ie increase sales to $350,000 or shoot 47 weddings this year.

2.  Establish a budget - usually a percentage of your monetary goal.  It will be different depending on your particular area of expertise, geographic area and your customer base. My personal marketing budget is 7 percent of intended sales for this year.

3.  Establish methods to reach your goals.  This is the meat of the plan and requires the most research. This includes the tools you’ll use as well as a schedule.

4.  Establish systems and methods to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

I use a program on my Mac called Omni Outliner to keep track of my efforts. This program is great because I can essentially create an outline very easily add sub headings and break down larger tasks into smaller discreet tasks.  How do you eat and elephant?  One bite a time.

Of course writing the marketing plan is not enough, one must follow and execute it.  But this is the beauty of the plan. This business is usually very cyclical and inconsistent. With a well written plan and schedule in hand you can best utilize your down time.  If this week is slow get your newsletter articles written, start the printing on your postcards, shoot for your portfolio.  In other words, use your downtime and check those things off of your list.

For this edition of Pick of the Week: Photo Edition I’ve noticed a pattern in my choices – Black and White. Not all, but I’m spending more and more time admiring black and white photos. I hope you like the selection.

Don’t forget to go to the photo pages and leave your comments. I’m sure the photographers appreciate it.

 

 

 

 

 

Five Stars of the Week

I have to say that I’ve spent a LONG time admiring this photo. Overall, everything seems right with it. The backlighting creates a perfect mood, and even the light in the curtains looks good. My Five Stars of the Week.

 

(A rant about self censoring your work)

Have you ever stopped yourself from taking a photograph? And then thought later that “I should have taken that shot…” The excuses and reasons abound for not taking a photograph that presents itself to you. Not the right time Not the right lens. Not exactly what I had in mind. Not as good as that shot I saw by that photographer I like so much. Not a photograph in my style. Can’t use it in my portfolio.

I have heard them all. And I have said all of them to myself earlier in my career. And they seem on the surface to be somewhat valid, if not a little lame. But I also think that there is a certain amount of fear associated with the reasons and excuses stated above. A fear that we bring to our work through years and years of self-censorship. A fear of failing, or not measuring up. A fear that somehow taking a photo that will not go in your portfolio is wasted, or silly… there are so many fears disguised as reasons. Reasons are fine, irrational fears are not.

Let’s examine that a little.

Fear of making a bad shot:
First of all, I don’t believe in failing as a bad thing. On the contrary, a failed shot teaches us so much more about what we need to work on. It shines a light on the areas we are lacking in. It is a triumph over the un-taken image because it simply exists, while the image not taken is lost. Forever. It is unable to teach us anything.

I see it in the workshops, occasionally. A photographer won’t take a shot because he/she cannot see beyond what they miscalculated. They see the shot on the screen and begin to analyze it within the constraints of failure instead of the joy of learning. Looking at the image as it starts to come together is a truly marvelous tool, but judging the image as to its worthiness from a single snap is unwise.

That failed shot shows you where to go next… tighter, move back, zoom a bit, change the angle, make her smile, move her hips, bring in the fill card a little more… it isn’t a failure. It is actually a roadmap to success, if it is studied and dissected.

And that goes as well for entire shoots. If things didn’t go well, analyze and correct. Fix it next time. Dwelling on that failure only makes it bigger than it ultimately is. It isn’t the end of anything, it is the journey of photography and the discovery of our own talent that is beginning. Acknowledge it, learn from it… move on.

Becoming good at photography is not an easy process, no matter what you read on the blogs or the forums. It takes time and consistent effort. It takes perseverance.

The fear of not getting something totally right, not ‘measuring up’ to something or someone you are emulating should never be a reason to not taking the shot. You want it to be your shot anyway. Make your shot… work it until you cannot conceive of another way of shooting it. Then shoot it a little more just to be sure.

I have seen photographers shoot something, a few clicks, and walk away without pushing anything of themselves into the shot… don’t be afraid to challenge yourself or your subject or the location or the gear. Make it do what you want to try. You could fail (see above) or something truly unique and exciting can be achieved.

Too often it is an unreasonable fear that someone somewhere will make a disparaging comment on the image. The fear that the image will be torn apart by Flickrites, or someone on another forum somewhere. And, heck, it may be.

But so what? You took it, you like it, it means something to you, it may lead to more images that are better. Making a photograph is action, criticisms are not. Let it go… make the images for you, not other people who may or may not be even worthy to criticize your image. And keep in mind that not everyone everywhere likes your kids… ya know. As long as you do, all is well in the world.

When is it the right time to make the photograph?

When it is the time you have. With the lens you have, and the gear you have, and the place you have to do it. Right now, with the camera you have with you. iPhone, P&S, D700… whatever you have, when you have the shot in front of you.

Too many times I hear that the photographer ‘woulda’ done the shot, but they were waiting for a sunny day or a cloudy day or the weekend or when they would have more time or after American Idol is over (JK…) or a litany of ‘reasons’.

Bull.

You didn’t take the shot because you were afraid it wouldn’t be that magical time when you would only have to control those things that weren’t already perfect. You wanted a blue sky, on a weekend, when the only model you want to shoot is available, and you would have all day to work on it and the location was a beach in Maui… that about right? All you would have to do is set up your beauty light. Ahhh…

Well, I hate to burst your bubble, baby, but that ain’t never gonna happen. And you know it. You really do, but instead choose to blame all those things on the reason you don’t photograph. If those things are keeping you from making images, you may be more of a hobbyist than you thought. And that’s OK, it really is.

It wouldn’t be right for my portfolio.

I hear this all the time. From photographers I meet and work with to students at the workshop to that little voice that used to chat in my mind when the cameras were out. And this particular one is a doozy of an excuse… “I can’t use it in my portfolio.”

And really, does that matter? Are you a photographer or a “portfolio constructionist?” Do you love and revel in making images, or are you simply trying to get some pictures together so you can go out and show them a couple of times then get rich shooting only the stuff that will – you know – go in your portfolio?

Oh, I got some bad news for you. That just isn’t the way it works. This is not a business you go into to become rich. You want rich… banking or congress. Photography is a lifestyle choice that is made because you simply want to do it more than anything else. (If you are not driven to photography, the business will drive you out of it quickly.)

Shooting for your book is always important… but not shooting something that potentially will not go in your book is not the way to go. Making photographs of the family dog, or that cool sunset, or the way the ketchup bottle makes a shadow on the lunch counter… all that stuff is your vision at play. It is simply what it is… a photograph of a ketchup bottle shadow on a formica counter.

Someday you may be working on a still life shot, or a portrait… anything, and struggling with some aspect of it. The shadow shot will pop forward in your minds eye and it may be just the catalyst you need to work through the shot at hand.

To me, being a photographer means freedom. No 9-5 for me (more like 5 – to a little north of midnight sometimes). No cubicle, no parking space. Take Wednesdays off to hit a movie or travel… whatever. It also means the freedom to simply make an image of a shadow, or a wall, or the way the light bounces off a girl’s hair. It is all good. Those shots may never be in my portfolio… but I have them, and they are mine. My vision of something that happened for a split second one day in my life. Captured.

Without taking that shot, they would be lost. I prefer to keep than lose.

I used to hear that voice – “nope, not a portfolio shot” – but I vanquished him when I realized that it was far more fun to make a photograph than to not make a photograph.

NOTE: Family and friends may get on your case about always having your camera out and making photographs. Let them. They don’t understand why you want, need, must take photographs. And that is OK, really it is.

They aren’t photographers… you are.

Thanks for visiting Lighting Essentials. We try to publish stuff that emerging and serious photographers are interested in. You can follow me on Twitter, and see more about our workshops here.

Content is King

In preparation for the Social Media Marketing article, I came to the realization that most of us have trouble figuring out what to say about ourselves, so I decided that we first need to talk about content – both on the website and in the portfolio. Whether your printed portfolio, your own website, tweeting, using a fan page, blogging, or any other content outlet, we need to focus on the #1 rule in creating an enduring web-based marketing strategy: Content is King. Yes, I consider your printed portfolio part of your web-based marketing strategy. Since we rarely show our portfolio to anyone who hasn’t already seen our website, it becomes part of the overall web-based strategy.

Your target audience falls into two distinct categories: prospects and repeat business. Let’s address these demographics separately.

Repeat Business
Existing clients are relatively easy to market in 2010. In fact, they are easier than ever. All you need to do is open a media channel to them and then provide interesting photos and bits of written content that let them know you’re active and progressing in your craft. They want to know that they’re working with someone who is consistently producing quality content and social media is the best place to keep them informed of your work.

The flip side of social marketing to your clients is that you need to be watching their channels and occasionally providing positive feedback to their content. This way they will know you’re staying in touch. Don’t be sales-y on your comments, be genuine. Keep an eye on their business trends and send them the right marketing messages.

New Business
New business is a totally different endeavor. Attracting new business through a fan page or twitter is much more difficult because there is so much competition for the attention of your client and there’s no direct way on these networks to reach out and impress the prospect with your style and expertise before they begin to follow you. Yeah, the best content in the world is powerless if nobody ever sees it.

Another very interesting fact about social media is that prospective clients hardly ever follow you. From my conversations with other photographers and my own experience, most of our followers are other photographers, friends from outside the industry, or existing clients. When I started on twitter and my fan page, I expected mostly potential clients to follow me. In reality, it has been other photographers who are following and contacting me through Facebook or my own website. I don’t feel as though putting the work into these media outlets is wasted energy, but it is something that should be understood and analyzed before making the commitment to social media. Eyes wide open.

The most effective way to engage a prospect is to show them that you’re constantly updating your content with stuff they find interesting. They need to understand that you’re a working professional and that you are an approachable and knowledgeable individual.

(There is more from Daron after the jump, and you must read his entire article. I just had to jump in with a few items before we leave the front page. Workshops are going great, and I do have openings in Omaha and New Orleans which we will see a ton of push on. I am so excited about bringing the concepts of great lighting and professional photography to those areas.

We are working toward a seminar titled Going Pro NOW with Selina Maitreya, Jack Hollingsworth and myself. I am excited like crazy about this project. The price will be wonderfully affordable and the seminar will have you ready to embark on a professional career, or fine tune where you are going currently. We are planning three cities at this point: Seattle, Chicago, Boston. If there is anything that has you stymied and think this seminar should address it, let me know so we can look at making the seminar the most informative you have ever attended. NOTE: We will not be addressing tax, licensing, incorporation and similar issues that are best left between you and your accountant.

One last thing. This week promises to be a big one for LE. We have a review of Nick Onken’s new book which will launch Tuesday and an article on the touchy world of model releases sure to bring a lot of controversy… heh. That’s me. Shaking the hornets nest!

So on with Daron’s great article on Content for your Portfolio.

Portfolio Images
Choosing images for your portfolio is very tough. I have been doing this for 20 years and still sweat the correct images. Occasionally I even totally miss the mark and show the wrong printed portfolio entirely. It’s a tough market and you have to communicate with your reviewer.

When I am preparing to show a book, I gather as much information about the client as possible. I will read their publications, Google them and see who they work with, and make phone calls to contacts in the industry who I know have worked with them or may have some experience to share. Once I have a good idea of what type of work my reviewing art director sees on a regular basis, I attempt to figure out what they like. Remember, if they are reviewing your work, there’s usually some type of opening.

Now that I believe to have a handle on the needs of my prospect, I attempt to build my portfolio around that assumption.

I will pull my strongest images that I feel meet their expectations from my archives. I will mix in different types of images that show my strengths and style as a photographer. In fact, I try to use mostly images that didn’t have specific art direction- ones where the entire concept is my vision. I feel that this communicates a stronger sense of my style than showing images that were closely directed by another creative professional. I also like to show a good number of paid work mixed in with my personal work – if the paid images are strong enough, it is a much smoother conversation when the AD starts asking who you were shooting certain images for. They do ask.

Once I have about 50 images, the goal is to cull them down to the strongest set of images that work and flow well together. For general commercial relationships, I prefer to show 24 images – but when the style or scope of your reviewer is much narrower, it’s best to show less unless you really have the depth of work.

You can’t show a weak image in your portfolio. I can’t say this enough. Your book is only as good as the weakest image. Missing the mark with a client and showing a bad image are two different things. Showing them images that aren’t what they’re looking for may mean that they’re not going to hire you, but if they’re solid images; they may refer you somewhere else or remember you in the future. This has happened to me more than once.

Once you have strong images selected, it’s time to figure out what order to display them and which images won’t fit into the lineup. There might be some great images that just don’t work with the book your displaying. That’s fine. If you present yourself well, your reviewer will take the time to visit your website and see what else you have to offer. I tend to put images together by category then find smooth transition images within those set. These transitions my be through mixed-subject images or through color palettes. Looking at the images and analyzing them should give you a pretty good idea of what flows and what doesn’t.

There has been a lot of talk lately about choosing a color palette for your work and shooting within that palette, creating a strong body of work with a concise feel. I couldn’t disagree with this approach more. In our markets, we may need to show work within a very wide array of subjects and styles, so tying ourselves to a specific palette will make creating this diverse portfolio very difficult.

Printed Portfolio
There is debate over what makes the best presentation, some AD’s are adamant about not using presentation books with poly sleeves and others are annoyed by buckles and latches that are on the more expensive presentation books to make them fancier. Choose work that speaks for itself and you won’t need to buy an expensive case and minor peeves of the reviewer will be forgotten by the third image. In my early days, my book was an 11×14 Oriental Seagull box. I got a lot of jobs with what was in that box. I doubt the box itself lost me any work.

I would love to have a hardbound book of my work that I show to prospective clients, but my work changes so often and I tailor my book to each reviewer (I haven’t showed the exact same book twice in the last 15 years) – I am just not willing to invest in a custom book for every presentation. I have two books. One is 8×10 and the other is 11×14. Both have the poly sleeves.

Portfolio Presentation
I strongly prefer to have a face-to-face review. I consider it a job interview – with a resume of photographs rather than a written history of your experience. I like to be available for any questions that may arise and to watch the eyes of the reviewer. It’s important to use this opportunity to present yourself as the professional that they will be both working with and sending to their clients. You must be a professional that can walk into any situation and make it work when their reputation is on the line.

Hopefully you will be asked questions about images. I personally love this type of review. An anecdotal story about how an image came together or the opportunity to drop names of previous clients can really help close the deal.

Thanks to Daron for sharing this solid information. For a look at Daron’s work, visit his site and blog at DaronShade.com – there is a wealth of information there.

For more on Going Pro, visit that area on Lighting Essentials and let us know what you think. To follow me on Twitter, click here. To follow Daron, here ya go!

I ran across this quote today:

“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing.
Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Being willing is not enough; we must do.”
– Leonardo da Vinci

It gave me pause.

The “urgency” of doing.

Pretty much says it all. Doing is the thing that makes it work. Not reading or listening or studying or being desperately in love with the idea. One must ‘DO’ what one does. It is the only true path to becoming better and stronger.

Imagine a weight lifter who reads all the weight lifting books, listens to 6 or 7 weight lifting podcasts a week, gets a couple of weight lifting magazines a month, and can quote weight lifting stats that amaze his friends. But he only occasionally ever goes to the gym to actually lift weights.

How well do you think he does at the lifting when he gets around to it?

Same with photographers. We must make pictures to be photographers, otherwise we are not. We only discuss, read, and study the subject. Occasionally pulling a camera out to make a shot or two won’t increase our skills. Are there exceptions, maybe… I think I read about an art photographer who thinks about his shots for weeks before executing. But that seems to be his particular way of working, and the images reflect that, I’m sure.

But for the majority of us, doing is more important than learning or wanting. I have always ascribed to the philosophy that it means less what one says and far more what one does. Actions speak louder than words is another way of putting it.

Action. Doing. Progressing. Achieving.

When I teach the workshops, I blend all the different modes of learning together. We talk about what the light does, we look at what the light does, then the students do it with the lights. Hear, See, Touch. It forms a bond of learning that encompasses all the different approaches we humans bring to the ability to understand.

What struck me about this quote was that I had just finished reading a couple of post questions asking things like; “What is the difference between a shoot-thru umbrella and a beauty dish?” And, “Has anyone ever used a bounce card for a reflector, and what does it do to the image?”

In my mind it is nearly impossible to answer these questions with simple words, or even pictures and words. Maybe we can add some words to the pictures, but even then we cannot even come close to the knowledge that would be gained by simply doing it. Get an umbrella and a beauty dish and see the difference. Grab a bounce card and add it to the mix… what then happens to the image?

Of course one should know how to get hands on both a shoot-thru and a beauty dish, but that is a logistical problem, not a photographic one. Knowing where to put the bounce card can be learned by charts and graphs, but what it does the image is purely look and see. And move it a little to there… a little more. That kind of thing.

Applying the knowledge that one achieves through different means is the balance to the learning. Shoot. Shoot everything you see. Make it an urgent and immediate project.

And wanting to won’t get it done. As Yoda said to Master Luke… “Either do or do not, there is no ‘try’”. Truer words were never spoken. Telling me that you plan on or want to or should… whatever… means little. Only that you have idle time to plan dreams that will be gone in a few days or years.

Do the thing you want to do. Now… it is urgent. Urgency builds energy, energy builds desire, desire spills over to action and the thing gets done. I am not talking about procrastinators, I am talking about the “terminally planning”. Make images today, it matters not what you photograph, only that you make the images yours.

The urgency that Leonardo must have felt is obvious in his level of production. Books, paintings, flying machine drawings, architectural renderings and more. He had to get as much done as possible.

Maybe he knew intrinsically that our moments here are shortened by our existence. Yesterday is over, and will never be repeated. It has no bearing on what our today brings. And tomorrow… well, tomorrow is a great place to be, but not yet.

A talented young photographer I know just sold most of his gear and is moving back to the small town he grew up in. Talented by the work that was actually accomplished, but unfortunately the call of partying and ‘livin’ large’ was too overwhelming. He shot all the time when he got to LA, but after a couple of years, he wasn’t shooting any more new things, but trying to get by on what had been done. His work grew a little stale, and he began to complain about the business. His failure was other people’s fault. He rarely picked up his camera unless it was for an assignment, and the work started showing it.

He lost his sense of urgency. He forgot what he was, and what he wanted to be, and, most of all who he NEEDED to be. I hope he gets to a point where the action takes hold of him and he starts to produce again…with new eyes and a renewed sense of himself as a photographer, not a “business man with a camera”.

Knowing about business is of course vitally important, but if it becomes more of the focus than the photography itself, then other challenges, some even more devastating than not knowing spread sheets, enter the fray and the love of the craft can be lost.

Being a photographer is one of the coolest careers one can have. And no shooter I know of does it for the money alone. They do it because they love it. And the really successful ones push themselves hard… inventing and re-inventing and pushing themselves. With a sense of urgency.

So ask yourself if you have a sense of urgency about your work. Do you push hard enough, or depend on someone else to tell you what you should do? Find your vison/passion and DO IT with your cameras. Do it every day… push and refine your work and get over the hurdles as quickly as possible.

I am not a big fan of patience… preferring to push and shove and run and leap and fall. A lot. Patience is a slower, easier to set aside type of habit. Urgency, along with terror and fear, is a motivator.

Get urgent and get going.

Thanks for visiting, and follow me on Twitter if you would like. If you are thinking about a workshop this year, take a look at the schedule here at Learn to Light. See you next time.
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Zoriah – War photographer

As we announced earlier, we managed to schedule some time with war photographer Zoriah.

To be able to better follow the conversation, we’d encourage you to visit his site at Zoriah.com and take a look at his portfolio and his stories.

In our conversation, Zoriah shares how he decided to become a photojournalist and later on started covering some of the major war locations and how it affected his life. We also discussed the events that brought him and his work to the eyes of the world in the middle of controversy.

As always, comments on the show are welcome.

Great work Zoriah, and thanks again for your time. It was an honor to have you on the show.

 

 

Show Notes

Interview with Zoriah

Links:

• Kevin Carter
• Kevin Carter’s suicide
• Baghdad reporter publishes video

Thanks go also to the wolf brigade and Olivier for their questions.

 

Selected from the Web

Jim: Stranger Photos Have Happened

Brian: Before I Die I Want To…

Antonio: Joe McNally talks about "The Moment it Clicks" at Google