Category: Uncategorized

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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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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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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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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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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.

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Disruptive Innovation

Disruptive innovation was coined by Clay Christensen in 1995. Clay Christensen’s website says that disruptive innovation ‘describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors.’  Really we’re talking about those game changing innovations that spur a revolution in how we think, behave and do things.  The development of the automobile wasn’t a disruptive innovation – it was a toy for the super rich – Henry Ford’s model T – a car for everyone – was.  I haven’t done a comprehensive analysis but it’s hard to imagine a time in history where there has been so many disruptive innovations in such as short space of time.

In the last 10 years digital technology has changed the game across a variety of industries and has had a hugely impact on how we create and deliver our art.  I first took notice of this in the music industry.  Purchasing habits have changed dramatically, most of us rarely buy a physical artifact – the CD – any more.  I bought a CD for the first time in probably a year recently, it was an album from one of my friend’s bands and I could get it before it made it to the iTunes site.   This is a rare exception for me, but a typical lack of restraint, most of my music purchases are now digital downloads.  Even the CDs that I buy will be imported into the digital music library that I have on my computer.  In addition to changing how music is delivered to the consumer, digital technologies have changed how music is created.  Musicians now have access to technology that makes it possible to record their work at home, with the production quality that a previous generation would have had to go into a big budget studio to achieve.  They can upload their newly recorded songs to their website for their audience to download without the need for a record label.  How cool is that!

The book industry, in denial for a while, is staring at the same kind of revolution that has swept over the music industry.  The growth in the number of books that are being downloaded is remarkable.  Take a look at how much real estate your local Barnes and Noble gives to their Nook reader – there’s a reason for this.  Digital books are here to stay!  The technology is available to make it very easy to write, edit and publish an e-book without the need for a book deal.  It seems to me that Seth Godin is at the leading edge of this revolution with the Domino Project.  Essentially he is throwing out the rules of how things were done in the past and reinventing the book publishing game.  This is something that just about anyone can do, perhaps not on the same grand scale, but the technology makes it quite possible.

Photography has been hugely disrupted.  I can imagine how it must feel to have been a photographer for 20 years and have the game change so dramatically in a few short years.  The advent of digital has led to the demise of film companies, radically reduced offerings from others, specialty printers are feeling the pinch, stock sales are off and yet this is a great time to be a photographer.  We’re in the middle of a revolution, the old rules don’t apply, which means we’re free to make it up and make it happen.  Try some things, run with what works.  Chase Jarvis appears to be the poster child for the new generation of photographers who are exploiting new technologies and new ways of doing things.  He was taking photos with his iPhone before it was a very good camera, his photos became a book and an app. He regularly lifts the curtain on the inner workings of Chase Jarvis Inc. on his blog – from how he packs his bag for a shoot to a the occasional daily diary of a shoot.  With the huge number of people taking up photography, there’s an incredible demand for photography education. What’s the most disruptive thing that you could do to the photographic education market?  Give it away for free! With Craig Swanson, Chase started CreativeLive, a website that hosts and streams workshops with some of the best working photographers today – Jeremy Cowart, Zach Arias and Tamara Lackey to name but a few.  While our projects may not have the same reach that Chase’s do, there are opportunities to be had, so let’s go be disruptive!

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Follow Your Passion

I’ve been reading a variety of art instructional texts in an effort to find things that will help build my photography chops.  I’ve mentioned Betty Edwards’s ‘Draw on the Right Side of the Brain’ methodology previously.  I’ve also been exploring a couple of books about watercolor painting too.  A new one for me arrived this week, David Bellamy’s ‘Watercolor Landscape Course‘.  David is apparently quite a famous watercolorist and educator, although not the David Bellamy I’m familiar with.

The introduction has a number of useful comments for the prospective student.  The section ‘Getting Involved In The Subject’ particularly resonated with me.  Here’s an excerpt:

The best paintings, I feel, result from the artist having an affinity with the subject.  Painting is nothing if not accompanied by the poetry of feeling.  You need to find those subjects that excite you most, for only when you find an involvement with the subject can you do your finest work.

This as equally applies to photography and I couldn’t agree more!

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A Visit from the Masters of Light

I was lucky enough to attend the flashbus boston stop recently. An amazing flash extravaganza, starting slowly with David ‘The Strobist’ Hobby and building to a crescendo with a live demo in the afternoon from the Dean of Flash Joe McNally.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect or for that matter why I was even going – I rarely take photos of ‘people’ and when I do I’m not fluent enough with flashes to incorporate them into the mix. I’ve actually given presentations in the Long Wharf Marriott conference rooms but to a crowd smaller than the 250+ that were there to see Hobby and McNally perform. It was fun to have an opportunity to interact with Hobby before the event began – he worked the line of photographers laden down with all the gear they own as they waited to get the Adorama event band and associated goodie bag.

Hobby’s presentation was a walk through of a series of images to show how he builds ‘Layers of Light’ to get the look that he wants for a particular photo. I must admit that it actually made sense and seemed quite a logical approach to getting the photo.

I’d seen McNally up close a while ago now at the Acadia DLWS in 2007 that was just before the moment it clicks came out and his star as an educator began to rise.  Then he did a couple of on location small flash lighting demos that were quite impressive. In the Marriott ballroom he started quite simply with one light building to a finale photographing Bruce (an audience member) with 4 lights including a gridded snoot for Bruce’s impressive beard.

The day really was a firehose of information and someone more practical than I would probably be able to put it to good use. I feel like I need some further study. Fortunately both Hobby and McNally have supporting DVDs.  I have McNally’s and certainly recommend it (check out a clip here) and I suspect that Hobby’s 7 disc set would be well worth the money.

I think Zack Arias‘s one lighting workshops are also worth checking out. There are a couple of places to get these – the live workshop, the One Light DVD, and the CreativeLive workshop. Zack starts more basic than Hobby and his teaching style resonates with me more than Hobby and McNally. For me the progression should be Arias, Hobby, McNally although they all have something to offer for everyone.

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Cleaning Your Gear

Oh my goodness, there are few things that irritate me more than realizing that I have huge tracts of sensor dust to deal with when I get back from a shoot.  The less time I have to spend tweaking my images the happier I am. Granted this is very easy now to deal with in lightroom or photoshop but I’d rather not have to deal with the problem at all.  I’ve taken to making shots of clear sky at the end of a shoot in the vain hope that I’ll one day figure out how to automate the removal based on the imperfections on an otherwise clean background.   If I ever figure that trick out I’ll share it here.  Until then I’m going to develop a more rigorous sensor cleaning routing.  I have no excuses really.  I have sensor cleaning products from visible dust, including the sensor loupe, arctic butterfly and sensor swabs to name but a few of the tools of the trade.  I question the utility of the arctic butterfly – I’ve never had this do anything other than make the problem worse.  The sensor swabs however are great and highly recommended.  Cleaning your sensor is not very difficult but it is a bit nerve wracking the first few times.  Visible dust have a number of videos that explain the process nicely.  I would also recommend taking a look at Moose Peterson’s website for his gear cleaning videos.  This is a comprehensive set of demos covering everything from cleaning lenses to sensors.