Author: nixonphoto

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The Essential Guide to Photographing Martha's Vineyard

I have a number of Countryside Press’s Photography Guides and I’ve found the guides for the New England area to be generally well worth the money.  I was excited then to see ‘Photographing Martha’s Vineyard: Where to Find Perfect Shots and How to Take Them‘ arrive on my door-step. I was also curious to see how someone synonymous with photography on Martha’s Vineyard would share the insights from 25 years of shooting there. Would she hold back favorite sites? No worries there! All the sites that Alison took her workshop to last year are described, with just stunning illustrative photographs rolled in for good measure. There are even the ultra-fine details of how to find some elusive spots such as Lucy Vincent’s beach.

As a guide to the potential shooting locations should be essential reading for everyone heading to the Vineyard with camera in hand. Additionally, the introductory chapters on equipment and dealing with the beach environment are useful for someone who hasn’t photographed extensively along the shore. Go to one of Alison’s workshops, you’ll have a blast. If you can’t get to a workshop, this book will guide you to some of the most photogenic locations on Martha’s Vineyard.

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Mare's Tails

I would be the first to admit that I struggle to handle wide angle lenses.  They cover a huge amount of real estate which makes it a challenge to control all the details within the frame.  One of the things that I’ve consciously been working on with my rocks at the waters edge project is to use a wide angle for the majority of the images, just to force me to use it and get used to it.  I naturally gravitate towards a longer lens that allows me to extract details from the whole, often resulting in an image that takes a moment to figure out what you’re looking at.  This was the case for the image above.  The larger fishing boats were at the dock in Scituate harbor and the yellow in the nets caught my eye.

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Getting Things Done

How do you keep track of and manage your commitments?  Most people are wearing multiple hats – this could be husband, father, dutiful employee, or at a more granular level – little league coach, counselor, accountant, marketer, content creator, etc. all of which have a pull on your time.  There is a real skill to keep track of your commitments, to maintain balance and to allow for enough space to be creative and productive.  How ready you are to engage productively with your life is proportional to how much psychic clutter you are toting around.

One of the tools that I’ve been using for almost a decade now is David Allen’s Getting Things Done or GTD system.  GTD helps cut the psychic clutter and provides control and perspective.  It’s well described in David Allen’s Book of the same name, and with the follow-ups ‘Ready For Anything’ and ‘Making it all Work’.

The central tenant to the GTD system is to get everything out of your head and into an efficient capture system.  Once there you can review and define what the next steps are.  This can be tremendously freeing and can result in remarkable increases in productivity.

The capture system can be as simple as a stack of 3×5 notecards clipped together or something significantly more sophisticated such as the tasks function built into Microsoft Outlook. Your capture system should be portable, or at least you should have a way to make sure ideas can be captured off-line and then entered into your system promptly.  This and not regularly reviewing my lists of projects and associated next actions are the main reasons that I have fallen off the wagon in the past, while my calendar system where appointments get entered automatically is rock solid.

In addition to resulting in bursts of creativity and productivity the other thing a system where you can see all of your commitments in one place does, is to make you realize how much stuff you have going on.  Consequently it’s much easier to say no to taking on additional tasks, or at least have the conversation about reprioritizing activities to allow a focus on the one you’re going to pick up.

And so it is with me.  Since photography is something I do in addition to many other things, I need to fit it into an already busy schedule.  I’ve been using my ‘photography time’ in the last couple of weeks to print and mat photographs. The people who’ve received the prints have been genuinely pleased with them and that in turn spurs me on.

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The Simple Secret

I’m continuing to explore my understanding of composition by learning about how painters think about the issue. I recently bought ‘The Simple Secret to Better Painting‘ by Greg Albert that I thought would give me the answer to all my problems. Although I’ve only had a chance to quickly go through the book and it has already been a help. There’s not a lot of new information here for anyone who’s studied composition much at all but Albert’s “One Rule of Composition’ is a nice twist that can really help cut through, what I find to be a complex, rule laden subject.

One of the things that I feel I need to do is slow down and really look before I leap into action. The section an alphabet of landscape composition was useful for me and I will certainly take the time to look for letters and shapes the next time I’m out in the field. Equally helpful was the chapter that dealt with setting up still lifes. This is something that I am interested in, particularly in the summer months, and having some basic instruction in their set up will help my thinking about my ‘Found on the Beach’ series. All in all worth a read.

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Nailed It!

The older I get the more that shiny and new has limited appeal, with the exception of new camera gear of course!  The bag that I’ve carried files around in for the last 5 or 6 years has had all the rough edges worn off, my 10 year old jeep gets me where I need to be be when I need to be there.  I have a hankering for a new SUV, a mid-70’s Ford Bronco but that’s another story.  So it ought not be a revelation to me that the things that catch my eye are those things with character.  That was the case when I was out for a walk around the harbor in Scituate when this well used telephone pole caught my eye.  It’s clearly see many posters in it’s time and will likely see more in the future.

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DAM, Those Photos

I’ve been trying to figure out a good reliable system to manage my photographs – digital asset management (DAM) to use the lingo. My biggest issue is how to back up my photo archive, particularly since it’s not static. Many of my photographs are still a work in progress – as my photoshop skills improve I revisit old photographs to see whether I can reveal what I had originally intended when I tripped the shutter.

There are a number of great resources for this, check out Chase Jarvis’s video for an overview of how Chase approaches the problem. Peter Krogh’s DAM book is a must read and recently I’ve been reading through Ben Greisler’s ‘Photographer’s Guide to the Digital Lifecycle: Real-life workflow scenarios for managing still and motion photography assets‘

I have been using lightroom to both process and catalog my images. I now use multiple catalogs split by year to help improve the speed at which I can navigate through the catalog. My workflow when working at home is to import the photos from the memory card into lightroom. During the import the photos are named with my name and the date, my copyright information is added and I may add a generic keyword. I then do a quick edit to flag photos that will be deleted – those photos that are out of focus, a miss or generally junk and to find those that are my keepers.  The keepers fall into 3 buckets: those that I will process as and when I get to them; those that are worked up in lightroom only and finally those that are worked on in both lightroom and photoshop.

I found that once I reached 50,000 images, navigating in Lightroom was a tedious process. This led me to split the archive up and so I now have lightroom catalogs based on the year, so 2005-2009, 2010, 2011. This keeps the number of images per catalog in a reasonable range. It also means that back-ups are relatively simple since each catalog is less that 1 TB I can have a mirrored copy on an additional external drive.

I am toying with the idea of a server in a secure location but that is something for the future.  It’s not perfect but is evolving and with a little more thought I should have a bullet proof system.

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O Summer Where Art Thou

Here we are in the middle of May and in New England, we have rain for the foreseeable future.  What a difference to this time last year.  In May last year I was fortunate enough to travel to England and spend a weekend at my brother’s house.  His back garden at the time was still a work in progress and had been taken over by dandelions.  It was warm here in New England at the time and felt like the middle of summer in the North of England.  While my brother got the grill going I played around with some of the dandelions.  For this shot I picked the dandelion and managed to wedge it into the top of his fence.  The light breeze began blowing the dandelion seeds out of the dandelion head and I was able to get this shot of the action.

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Overcoming the Resistance

At some point in our lives we all run up against what Steven Pressfield refers to in his book ‘The War of Art‘ as the resistance. Paralyzingly fear that prevents you from finishing your work, showing to someone else or submitting it for publication. This fear is genetically hard wired, a throw back to a time where it was incredibly dangerous to stand out from the crowd. Seth Godin calls this hard wiring the lizard brain. Yet we live in a time where success is critically dependent on our ability to differentiate ourselves and stand out. So what to do? Run headlong towards the things that scare you and just do them. This is easier said than done. Start with small wins. Surround yourself with a supportive community.

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Spinnaker Pole #1

There are few things that I enjoy more than poking around boatyards.  I was lucky last fall to have a chance to spend some time on Martha’s Vineyard and to have an opportunity to visit the Gannon & Benjamin yard in Vineyard Haven.  The shed that they started out using is still in use, although they now have a bigger building nearby.  I hadn’t realized that these buildings are three sided so that they boat builder can roll the hull right side up when it’s complete.  Poking around the shed there are all kinds of treasures that I can only imagine came from boats that were being refurbished and held onto in the hope that they could be useful in the future.  This spinnaker pole perhaps falls into the same category.  It was in a rack at the side of the shed, starting to show signs of being exposed to the elements.

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Telling Your Story

I’ve been reading Ann Lamott’s guide to writing called ‘Bird by Bird’ over the last few days.  It’s an enjoyable read and like Stephen King’s book ‘On Writing’ has much food for thought for photographers.

One section describes an approach to getting unstuck that involves writing a letter that describes part of your character’s history, or part of your history.  I wonder how many times you’ve tried telling your story or the story of some significant event through photography when you’ve been stuck.  I know that I never have but it seems like something that’s well worth doing.

Some great examples of the use of photography for storytelling can be found on a new website called ‘Rear Curtain’.  The team managing the Rear Curtain site is looking for submissions found out more here.