Yesterday, I trekked to St. Charles, and deposited a boxful of new pieces at Framations. Being framed for the wall are:
Printed on metal, Sarah and Amy are mounting these images:
And finally, I dropped many new works into the sale bins. These images are matted, and ready to be installed in your favorite frame:
As always, these images — and many others! — are available at my online gallery.
So, you might ask, “How do you know Santa is coming?”
I know because I’ll be photographing his visit at Mozingo Music in O’Fallon on December 4th!
Eric (of Mozingo) had asked this week if I’d be interested in doing something with their annual visit from Santa. I went by, and we talked about what they’d done in previous years, and what his ideas were for this year. When he asked what I’d charge for something like that, I answered, “Will photograph for guitars.” 🙂 (I’m not actually expecting a guitar, btw!)
He pitched to idea to the higher ups, and it looks like it’s a done deal. I’m pretty excited about it. I don’t usually photograph people, so this’ll be a lower pressure way to do some of that in a pretty controlled setting. Mozingo’s been very good to me, and they will, I’m sure get some benefit from the gig. And me, well, I’ll get to extend my experiences in photographing people, and probably walk away with some music related swag for my playing enjoyment!
I’m home, but still catching up on the blog, Project 365, life, the universe, and everything else. There’s some retroblogging in my future. (So, just to make sure your head hurts, I’ll be blogging as though I did it in the past, but actually in the future of where I sit right now. Ouch.)
While you’re waiting, enjoy this video. Get a Kleenex. You’ll need it.
Leave Me from Daros Films on Vimeo.
For a few months, I’ve had a real bee in my bonnet concerning the voices of photography. When I first started shooting digitally in 2002, most of what I was doing was trial and error. I didn’t have any mentors that I was learning from, so any voice of experience that I searched for either came from a web search for a specific issue I was having, or from buying a book at the local bookstores. Nothing wrong with those paths, and those paths served me well.
A few years later, several of us at the office were all shooting Canon gear, and for the last three years or so, we’ve been critiquing each others’ work, and helping each other as we’ve bumped into particular issues. One guy’s a gearhead, another is a Lightroom guy, another is a Photoshop experimenter… we all bring something different to the table, which has tremendous value. Most of us are selling our art locally, and are displaying in galleries and shows throughout our region, so we’re not exactly living in a bubble, mutually fawning over each others’ work. IDIC. In other words, if all all you hear/see/do is what just one gaggle says you should, then you end up with a real opportunity to shut out other voices.
A few months ago, I started getting the podcasts of a photographer who was offering his services to review your portfolio via his podcast. In fairness of full disclosure, I didn’t submit anything — I don’t have the cojones to do that at this stage of my game. While I’m sure there’s value in that kind of critique, I’m finding a great deal of constructive criticism with our little photo group, and that’s kept me plenty busy with my imagery.
When I listened to the podcasting photographer, my first sense was that he was pretty harsh toward the submitters’ portfolios. Now, that’s probably realistic in the big, bad real world of photography, but when he and his wife began cracking jokes at the expense of the images — to the point of using some of them as running gags while critiquing other folks’ work — well, my respect for this guy dropped off the map.
Where I come from — and this photographer is based only 150mi or so from where I was raised — you don’t poke fun of folks’ hearts when they’ve laid them bare out there for everyone to see. To quote the first Spiderman film, “With great power comes great responsibility.” There’s wisdom there. If you’re gonna lay yourself out as an expert in any field, there’s no requirement that you help another living soul. But when you ask them to come with their work in hand, there’s a certain amount of decorum expected as you deal with those invited folks’ “children.” That kind of treatment of invited folks led me to believe that this was a voice in my head I could do without.
And now to a separate topic, which I’ll tie together at the end.
For quite some time, there’s been a real bone of contention between the established wedding photographers (which I’m not) and the newly minted, freshly camera-bearing wedding photographers (which I’m also not — my doctor has enough issue with my blood pressure without adding the stress of event and portrait photography!). The new ones aren’t charging what the established ones think they should, and the old-timers are saying that’s eroding the price for the field, and therefore destroying photography as we know it. Or something like that. The new folks, of course, don’t have twenty years of experience against which they can justify higher rates, and frankly, the new folks’ work and products may not be the caliber of the old-timers… sometimes. Or it could be just as good or better, but in reality, it’s really up to the purchaser to make that call. You certainly can’t decide that based solely on the price charged. If the old-timer has a better portfolio, that should be pretty obvious, and then it’s a value proposition — is there enough difference *to me* as the consumer to justify the difference in cost?
If an old-timer has shot gazillions of weddings for the rich and famous in all the lavishness of those environments, that’s great. However, when Bobby and Bobbi Sue graduate high school or college and get married right before he ships to Afghanistan, they aren’t looking for a $2500-to-$10,000 photographer or package. Some newly minted wedding photographer may be exactly what’s needed. Frankly, with the economy what it is, it could be that you can even get an old-timer for a bargain rate.
That brings me to this weekend, and some photographic steam which has come to a head via Twitter.
I think of Twitter as a giant party room, with bazillions of conversations going on at the same time. It’s pretty easy to find a conversation that sounds interesting, featuring someone leading the conversational thread with apparent authority and confidence. At times though, I find that some of those folks that are deemed experts — by popular consensus (Twitter follower count) or self-proclaimation (oversaturated self-promotion) — in actuality have no more or less authority than anyone else out there. But at times, they act like thugs on the street, leveraging their empires against quieter, dissonant voices.
This weekend, another photographer started tweeting about his consultancy for a wedding photography house to combat another house that was way undercutting his client’s prices. Now, this guy’d been on the border with me. He’s attracted a pretty strong numerical following on Twitter, perhaps for his podcasts and website, but probably more likely for the frequent giveaways of photographic items he promotes through Twitter. I’d been getting pretty alienated by some of the views he held, but this weekend sealed the deal for me. He made comments that indicated all $500 photography is bad, and engaged in a slappy-fight in the Twitterverse with someone else on Twitter, making points steeped in lunacy, and I knew I had discovered yet another voice I could remove from my head.
I watched Superman II this weekend, and I think there’s some applicability here. In particular, I’m thinking of the scene where the villains from the Phantom Zone begin blowing hard to quell the home-spun resistance from the people in the streets of Metropolis after they believe Superman has been killed. The tie? If you’re enough of a blowhard, you really can try to quieten the masses with your apparent strength.
So, there may be too many voices in my head, but there are two fewer today than there were.
I got another opportunity today to photograph at the agility field today. After all was done (about 800 shots, I think), Kris surprise me with a basket of cheeses, along with stray apple, toasts, and salmon — what a treat!!!
It kinda reminds me of the stories I’ve heard about farms and small towns of long ago. Folks would swap goods and services all the time. Pretty cool.
So where to start? Hmmmmm…..
This morning, we planned our day around being at the Old Towne Square most of the day. The best way to start a day of exploration is with breakfast. We’d been selecting hotels with continental breakfast included. I know that “free” ain’t free — TANSTAAFL, ya know — but it’s just more convenient to not have to strike out in search of breakfast. However, this morning, we’d likely have been better off going elsewhere. There were kids everywhere, doing what kids do, and the community TV was tuned to Spongebob Squarepants. Urgh.
Once we hit the road, things got a little quieter, and we found ourselves near the Old Towne Square pretty quickly. The area was friendly, full of great shops and restaurants. A few stood out.
One of the first places we found was the Monroe Gallery. I’ve not been in too many galleries that focused specifically on photography, so finding this place was a real treat. The Monroe’s current exhibit, A Thousand Words, focuses on photojournalistic images, which is a little outside my normal experiential sphere, however, there were plenty of times when I had to blink back the mistiness from my eyes as I gazed upon some of these wonderful pieces. There were images by photographers I was familiar with (Eddie Adams and Joe McNally, for example), along with iconic images that I’d seen my whole life. These were serious prints too — values in the thousands and tens of thousands — as contrasted against what I print. Truthfully, this was photography as it should be… moving, emotionally, telling a complete story with no caption necessary. No epiphanies about my work from this — my photography is far, far away from photojournalistic — but I was touched, humbled and inspired to view a collection of masterpieces like this.
There were jewelry shops everywhere. Beck was “gentle” on only took in a few of them, and they were interesting. Plenty of nice pieces, unusual cuts, and not too terribly out of line pricewise. And there was everything you could want — rubies, moonstone, coins captured as jewelry… a very big selection. I think it’d be pretty easy to spend a full day just touring the jewelers’ shops, enjoying all the play-pretties.
For lunch, we stopped at the Atomic Grill. This place was a nice surprise. After wandering around in the 80° weather, we were ready for something light for lunch, and finally chose these guys from among the many choices downtown. They had loads of different beer (although surprisingly they didn’t carry Red Stripe), which under other circumstances would’ve been intriguing. However, after all I’d been through in the last few days, it was iced tea. 🙂 Beck and I each ordered a gyro, and man was it great! I was really surprised how light and flavorful it was. AG’s definitely a place I’ll revisited when I get back to Santa Fe.
After we returned to the hotel, and while on a search for a soda, Beck ran across a young guy and an older gentleman discussing photography. Had I not been so tired, I’d like to have joined them. The young guy was a Canon shooter, using a 5D and a G10. He sang the praises of the G10 to Beck… only a day after I’d done the same. You see, I’ve been finding it hard to pull out the 40D during the trip. The G10 is so small, easy to carry, and aside from superwide or super telephoto situations, it’s done everything I’d needed and anything I’ve asked. Folks looked at it, and weren’t intimated by the size, thinking it was just a point and shoot. And yet, I could do almost anything with it that my 40D would do. The young photographer basically said the same thing. Great minds, I guess.
Anyone who’s read this site for any length of time knows that Moose Peterson holds a special place in my view of photography. I respect his body of work, the sense of responsibility to the environment he displays, and frankly, his strong desire to inspire others to go off and find their photographic muse. Moose has recently joined the Twitterverse, and today I had an exchange with him.
Essentially, my take was that he was seeing a lot of product movement on Twitter, and was questioning whether there was any sense of community on Twitter. That’s a really good observation, and a really good question.
With that in mind, it seems like I could do more giving back to the photographic community, and I should. Now, I’m no Moose (as I told him today), but maybe I’ve got something to lob out there to the three or four folks who read one of my blogs. And like Moose told me, “there is even a possibility that from our community, we can infect others and then, well, anything is possible!”
As Darla says, true dat.
So here’s the deal. The photographic chatter is gonna move over to colin-wright.com. That’ll keep all that info in one place, and leaves The Deauxmayne for all the other technological nightmares I get myself into. And I’ll try to get more regular at posting material on “the other site” — setups for the things I’m shooting (especially with the new macro lens), my crazy backup strategies… who know what else might show up!
Thanks for challenging me, Moose!
Last weekend, I had planned to continue working on converting some old VHS tapes to digital media, sucking them into Doc Oc. However, a couple of tapes later, I found that both my VCRs had become crusty from lack of use. One even had gained a taste for tape eating.
As punishment to them both, I dissected them. 🙂
Two days of dissection left me with two VCRs with the mechanical parts separated from their planars, and loads of things to photograph with my Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens. I won’t bore you with all the details on every discovery on the parts — there was nothing earth-shattering — but I definitely had a ball photographing this treasure trove of small electronic parts and gears.
Although I photographed many different types of small parts, my favorite images were those where I was capturing the different colors on resistors, some kinds of capacitors and glass diodes. I also dissected a DVD drive from one of the units, and got to play with the laser’s lens, which was a gorgeous color of blue.
My least favorite items? Well, surface mount stuff wasn’t as amazing as I was expecting. It was cool to capture things that small, but there wasn’t much beauty to them — little black boxes with printing atop. Give me regular ol’ circuit board components. They’re colorful, big enough to make for good lighting, and they create some neat images, especially in moderate density clusters.
Take a look at the clusters of photos below, and let me know what you think.
Just a test to see how iPhone photos show up on the blog…
Move along. Nothing to see here.
Jack Frost, that is!
With Fridays now being part of my regular weekend routine, I’m finding time to look at the world through some fresh eyes. Darla gets up for work around 6am, and that leaves me a little time to slowly wake up, eat some breakfast, and await the sunrise.
This morning it was about 19 degrees, with frost all the surfaces. And not the crazy thick stuff, just a layer, with all the intricacies of the frost fingers visible. Way cool!
I took the camera, trike, new lens and new flash (watch for some retroblogging about some of that) out on the deck, and shot frost on my favorite glass table. This MP-E 65mm is just flat amazing! Most of what I shot was at 3x life size, with the 580EX flash handheld at various angles. Seeing that frost so close was a great way to energize me, wake up my brain, and get me moving this morning.
I still think I have a long way to go with shooting frost and other frozen objects, but if this morning’s any indicator, I think I’m on my way. The bad part is that there’s not too many more frosty days in store for us this season — spring is almost here, and then I switch to flowers and birds again!
And speaking of birds… I think this is the year that I can catch the killer hummingbird shot I’ve been stalking for years. With the 580EX, I think I’ll have the light to do it, and I’ve already been able to prove out slaving my crusty 420EX off it (the 420EX won’t work connected to the camera, but wireless off the 580EX, it seems to work fine — go figure), so I should have two angles of light. One longish PC cable, and I think I’ll be able to sit in the house with the 100-400mm lens, and never disturb the little guys.
Watch this space! 🙂