Food? Food Photography!

I love food. I owe everything I know about food to my friend, Patricia Bauer-Slate. Patricia owned the best bakery in all of Texas for 32 years, introduced the real croissant to Austin and created a number of restaurants that people still talk about a decade after she exited the restaurant business.

I'd been going to her bakery, Sweetish Hill Bakery, for years to get bear claws and petit pain au chocolate and killer coffee before I actually met her and became a Bauer-Slate fine food disciple.

The change from customer to friend came from one of my earliest magazine assignments. I was assigned by one of the city magazines to go to her new restaurant, La Provence, and make photographs of the beautiful dining room, the chef and the front of house manager. I was working exclusively with 4x5 inch transparency film at the time and did my lighting with several Novatron power packs and flash heads firing into big white umbrellas.

I made (through sheer dumb luck) some of the best interior images I've ever been able to make and some very passable portraits. Patricia was so pleased that she asked to buy some of the images and, to sweeten the deal, she also invited me and my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) to come by and have a dinner ( we could never have afforded at the time) as her guests. Belinda still remembers the angel hair pasta with truffles and caviar as one of the best dishes she's ever had while I remember the entrecôte mirabeau (a perfect steak criss-crossed with anchovies) as the best steak I've ever eaten (sorry Morton's and Sullivan's). We shared a bottle of wine that had a little booklet tied around the neck which explained the provenance of the wine. We still have that booklet now 34 years later.

We spent years eating Patricia's cooking, devouring her bakery's chocolate cakes and whole wheat bread. She taught me how to perfectly poach an egg and to make a Hollandaise sauce that wouldn't separate. I've photographed hundreds of products and dishes in return.

I love photographing food almost as much as I love eating it. But the important thing in my education as a food photographer has been a thirty five year education in what makes good food good---taught to me by a master. The photography part is easy if you know why you are making a photograph.

Graffiti Wall Video. Austin, Texas. By Kirk Tuck

Untitled Project from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.

Go to Vimeo via the link to see and HD version. This one is only 500 pixels wide.
Shot with the Sony RX10.

Happy Valentine's Weekend.

Getting more focused on good camera and studio technique.

Caught mid-sentence in the Craftsy.com Studios.

I was having a discussion with friend, Frank, over coffee yesterday in the late afternoon. We'd both put in long, hard days and it was refreshing to share a little time with someone as interested in the holy triad: photography, video and marketing. When it comes to marketing I defer to him. He's an actual pro. But I can hold my own in discussions of photography and to a certain extent in video. 

We've both been buying m4:3 cameras and we both are excited about the introduction of the Panasonic GH4. But over the course of our conversation the talk turned to the use of small cameras for professional work. When it comes to format my brain ebbs and flows. Sometimes I like the look a full frame file can give me and sometimes I like the ethos of the smaller cameras. After all, what were the original Leicas if not the answer to an earlier generations fixation with larger and more ponderous cameras?

And all that started me thinking about how much good image quality we leave on the table by not practicing each piece of our craft with diligence and purpose. One reason people seem to shoot raw files is to be able to fine tune color and exposure better, after the fact. After having shot an image casually. Many think it's a badge of honor not to use some of the functionality of the cameras when making images. For example, to eschew the use of face detection auto focus when doing portraits or to not take advantage of a camera's software filter to improve an image. 

I'm still amazed at how opposed most people are to the idea of using a tripod where it's possible. I'm often guilty of believing what an LCD shows me when evaluating exposure instead of taking time to meter a scene. 

I was still thinking of this last night. I'd made basil linguini tossed with a smoked salmon and parmagiano cheese cream sauce for dinner and then, while my family relaxed, I went out to the studio to pack for a shoot we did this morning. I went out on location to a rehab hospital to set up a temporary studio and shoot twelve staff portraits against a seamless background. 

While I was packing I was thinking about our conversation and about getting all the details right up front. Would this make shrink the quality differences between full frame and smaller formats? I had already made up my mind to shoot these portraits with a Panasonic GH3 camera and a moderately long zoom lens. At the last minute this morning, before heading out the door, I tossed my RX10 and a couple extra batteries into my jacket pocket. 

After I set up the lighting in the small room at the client's location I pondered the cameras. I would be shooting under controlled florescent lights and I would have the camera on a tripod. My brain reached for the GH3 but my inquisitive and mischievous side came up holding the RX 10. "What the hell?" I thought, "Let's give it the old college try."

I set the camera for medium sized, super-fine Jpegs and started doing the due diligence check list. I metered the position in which I would place my subjects with a Minolta incident light meter. I ended up with 1/60th at f4 at ISO 250. Perfect, considering I was photographing adults and I would have the camera on a tripod. Next I pulled out a Lastolite gray target and made a custom white balance. And then I did it again a couple more times just to make sure. 

I enabled the camera's face detection auto focus and figured out a standard for head sizes that I'd apply to each sitter---for consistency on the website. Finally, I enabled a filter called, "Soften Skin," took a few test shots of my client and evaluated them at the largest magnification the camera is capable of. The effect was perfect. Nice and sharp on features, eyelashes, eyebrows and hairs but a slight softening of intrusive skin texture. Not plastic, but, on the other hand, not cruelly clinical.

I shot these same settings for twelve people which equalled about 500 frames. Since the camera was doing the focusing and aesthetic work for me I was absolutely free to focus on composition and building a nice rapport with the sitters.

When I got back to the office an hour ago I dumped all the files into the latest rev of Lightroom and started peeking at the images. There's strong detail in all of the images but the areas of skin are smoother and less contrasty than a typical shot. The color is perfect and at 1:1 there's very little real noise. 

The images are right on the money. Exactly as I'd planned them and the camera was all but transparent. Granted, the front shoulder is not going to ooze away into Bokeh Heaven but the background only six feet behind the subject is smooth and texture free. 

Based on the intended and contracted use for the images they are for the most part interchangeable with the full frame files I did for the same client just last year. The camera didn't miss a beat. Didn't miss focus or deliver unwanted artifacts. It proved to me that many of the situations that we think to be the provence of bigger cameras are only thought of that way because of history and tradition. 

I'm sure that if I had not taken the time to meter and white balance I would have had to struggle more with the files and I would have found more "forgiveness" in the full frame images. But that's where photographic best practices and diligence come in. Those things enabled me to press a smaller, cheaper camera into service without penalties. And yes, I'd do it again. 

This business is changing. If things need to be faster and cheaper than the projects should be easier to do. And that's the arena in which small, mirror less cameras with fast, sexy lenses thrive. 

Did I just buy my last spindle of DVDs?

I've been on DVD-Autopilot for the last ten years. Shoot a job? Back it up on two DVDs. Deliver a job? Send it on a DVD. Seems like a workflow that became a routine that became a habit. Now, don't jump in and tell me I should be backing up everything onto successive hard drives because I've been doing that too. In fact, I have a large filing cabinet drawer filled with carefully labeled external hard drive filled with stuff I probably don't need and never want to see again. But every quarter I hire an assistant to come in, plug each drive into an older computer station and spin em up. Just to check em. We run disk repair on them for good measure, let them spin down and put them back into the drawer. Costs me a couple hundred bucks but it keeps the freelance anxiety at bay. Or at least on a leash. 

Lately, when client insist on "owning all rights" we make them sign a waiver informing them that once they receive the materials we have no obligation to archive the images or make any sort of replacement of the images for any reason after the first 30 days. We STRONGLY encourage them to participate in a good back-up strategy. With implied ownership comes a new layer of responsibility for them. 

So----I've been in the DVD habit for a decade and in the last year all jobs were actually delivered using alternate methods. We sent a lot of single, retouched head shots and hero advertising shots to various clients with on line services such as DropBox (Thank you Samsung for giving me two years of 50 gigabytes of free space!!!). That's worked out well and clients like the delivery system. They tend to want to keep stuff up on Dropbox so they can use it as a defacto storage platform but we send them a notice, give them a time window and then relentlessly sweep out the folders. 

For bigger jobs, especially those under 16 gigabytes of finished files we use thumb drives/memory sticks/usb flash memory (call it whatever you like). We load up the images on the stick and hand it off or send it to the client via USPS Express Mail or similar service. Takes longer but that's really a lot of material to get through some company firewalls done over the web....

For really big jobs that exceed 32 gigabytes we bite the bullet, grab a portable, USB powered hard drive and write out the job to that. The drive is handed to or shipped to the client and we generally don't ask for the drives back. Although some make their way back to us when a client does another job. They usually bring the HD along with them and ask us to add the files to it. 

So why am I still burning these damned disk? I'm guessing this is my last spindle. I need to research the state of HD reliability and move to a series of ever bigger RAID arrays. Not happy about it because I have the prejudice that optical media is more robust than magnetic media but I'm ready to be proven wrong. 

The biggest driver for change? HD Video and the looming memory black hole that is 4K video. We need to back it up. We need to move it and we need to share it. And very few projects I've done, even the 30 second spots in an editable state will fit on the meager pastures of the DVD ranch. 

Funny how changes in technology relentlessly push changes in storage. I guess I've been lucky to have lasted in the "old school" paradigm of DVDs for this long. 

Quick data point for those who are interested. I've been randomly pulling out and checking CDs and DVDs from as far back (CDs) as 1996 and I have yet to come across an unreadable or corrupted disk. Many of our CDs and DVDs were burned onto various maker's "Gold Disks" (Kodak, etc.) and while I don't image that they will last forever some of them are coming close to 20 years of service. We keep them sleeved, in the dark and in temperature controlled environments. Fingers crossed we'll last until someone comes out with indestructible storage and I'll hire that assistant to come back in and spend a month transferring.....oh boy! That will be fun.

Don't care how but you really should be backing the good stuff up. All the crap you shoot? Just stick it in the cloud....everyone else does.

Forced to buy the RX 10 because the R1 was so darn good. Sony inertia.

As many of you may know I recently picked up a Sony RX10 which is kind of an all-in-one camera with a one inch sensor and a very good Zeiss 24-200mm equivalent lens. This is not my first Sony all-in-one camera. That honor goes to the remarkable Sony R1. The R1 was the first fixed zoom lens camera with an APS-C lens. It used a sensor from the same family of sensors that was used in the Nikon D2X around the same time period. The lens was also designed by Zeiss and matched precisely to the sensor. Just like the RX10 the R1 sported an electronic viewfinder, although it was primitive by comparison.  

I liked the camera a lot. Enough to purchase two of them and press them into many, many commercial projects. The images from this project date back to 2007 and were photographed for a capabilities (print) brochure for a national financial services company with a branch here in Austin, Texas. We made a lot of images during the course of a long day. I ran across a back up DVD this afternoon and wanted to try it in my main computer to spot check and see if we are starting to have an corruption issues with data stored on older, Kodak Gold DVDs. 

Once I started scrolling through the files one thing led to another and I decided that I wanted to see if Adobe had made any improvements to the lens profiles and camera profiles in the latest revs of PhotoShop. I was happy to find that there was a complete profile for the R1+lenses that included updates for vignetting, chromatic aberrations and lens geometry. One click gets you a very clean and rectilinear file, whether you shot it raw or in Jpeg.

While the R1 is only a ten megapixel camera it does wide angle well and when used at its native ISO of 160 it makes nice files. Compared to the current Sony RX10 you can see some difference in the progress of noise reduction even at both cameras' base ISOs. The R1 has more, and more obvious color noise in the shadow areas. Noticeable at 100% but negligible at almost anything you'd do on the screen. On the other hand the files have rich colors straight out of the camera. 

On this project we worked all day in mixed lighting and I thought the Sony did a great job sorting out color shifts and making good AWB selections. But whenever I had doubts I'd pull out a white target and do a custom white balance.  The camera does not have image stabilization but it is an early example of mirror less and has a leaf shutter so there's no shutter shock and there's no real noise or vibration. I tend to shoot on a tripod. Go figure, I own five or six photo tripods and two different video tripods with fluid heads...

I doubt I would have jumped into purchasing the RX10 if I had not first worked with the R1 for nearly nine years. I trust that Sony has the sensor tweaked as well as it can be and I know I can claw out a lot of detail in the dark areas. I trust that Zeiss wouldn't allow their brand to be plastered on a lens if it didn't perform. I'm in the early days so far with the RX10 but I think it's the descendent of the R1 and I hope I get five or ten years of good photography out of it as well. It's all in the family.

To be a Team Player or a lonely hunter? That is today's question.

Do you remember how we used to believe that people could multi-task? I mean really multi-task, like type on a keyboard, watch a movie and change a diaper simultaneously? And then neuroscientists started poking around in people's brains to figure out how that all might work and they found that, well, no one really does multi-task. Instead people switch between tasks as quickly as their brains will let them. And it's not too quick because it turns out that all those synapses have a kind of inertia. And time friction. It's like every task can only happen after its subroutine software is loaded in the right part of the brain and running. In fact, what the scientists figured out is that "multi-tasking" is really a very inefficient way to work.

The stopping and starting between the almost simultaneous tasks that one is trying to perform adds 10-20% more time to the overall execution of all tasks involved and causes more fatigue. The net result is that no one task is done as effectively as it could have been if the subject had undertaken each task sequentially or serially. Big surprise to anyone who has been rear-ended by a Suburban driver who was trying to text, put on lipstick or shave, keep a grip on their vente coffee and operate a motor vehicle in stop and go traffic.

So, that's one set of operational efficiencies debunked.

But a recent comment by a reader pushed me to think about one of the parts of the speech I recently delivered and subsequently put up on the blog. He suggested that teams can be machines of creativity and that my preference for "lonely hunting" is just that----a preference. As I understand his point teams, whether in workshops or on the job, can create imaginative content, creative content and original work as well as or better than a lone individual; an artist.  And I thought that, here too was another supposed operational efficiency that should be debunked.

A dancer on the subject: http://stanceondance.com/2013/05/23/collaboration-collective-art-practice-and-when-to-go-it-alone/

Larry Shiner's take on the evolution from collective guilds to the aesthetic of the individual mind is in his book: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo3633486.html

Is teamwork a valuable part of creativity?

The literature on this, and my personal experience, says otherwise. On the other hand the commentor and I may be defining the nature of the team differently. My knee jerk reaction comes from my days in advertising when "designed by committee" was always short hand for crappy work that seems safe from client disapproval because it has had its balls removed.  In the ad business you often hear about "creative teams" but it doesn't mean the same thing as it might when discussing a sports team. In advertising, as in film making, there is a very definite hierarchy to a "team."

Advertising is essentially mercenary and a good creative director will use ideas from anyone on his team. But in my experience there is usually a lone conceptor for each successful campaign who in spite of being a member of the team comes up with most of the great ideas. The teams serves as a support to hang the meat on the bones of the concept. But it's rare that the team brainstorms and jointly hits on some sort of group epiphany. The idea bubbles into one person's head. That's the genesis. Then the team takes the idea, embraces it, and forms it for presentation. Their presentation preparation skills might be legend but they need the spark of an individual to start the engine.

In the film work everything starts with a script and many scripts started life as novels. You'll be hard pressed to find a more solitary undertaking that being a writer--- honestly. But that's where the ideas come from. They come from a solitary mind working for months or years in isolation from group think. And then, when the novel is crunched into a script (which takes talent but not originality of ideas---they are provided by the primary source) the leader of the next team is the director. His alone is the over riding creative vision for the making of a real movie. He originates the scenes and the movement through the scenes. He understands the way he wants to tell the story and again, his team is there to support the manufacture of that vision. The making of the story. But the story existed before the team-----as an original idea percolated up from one person's mind.

The director doesn't sit down with the grips and gaffers and electricians on his "team" and ask them for ideas and creative input. If he asks for input it will be about practical matters: How high can we get a camera on a crane? How many generators will we need for the night time exterior? Where's the craft service? The ideas flow downhill from the director who is the source of all the creative ideas about the film. Can you imagine a committee telling Orson Welles how he should shoot Citizen Kane ???

"A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated something is wrong."  - Orson Welles

"I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will."

-Henry David Thoreau

But let's reflect about teams and photography because that's the real gist of the disagreement. While you may learn new ways of thinking from a team or new ways to do things the value that you bring to your art is your unique vision. Two people shooting side by side and capturing the same image at the same time from the same angle dilute each other's vision. Or, one is the creator and the other the xerox machine.

While going for PhotoWalks or hanging together with like minded peers in a workshop is pleasant and fulfills our need for social company it's a dangerous situation for an artist. On so many levels it insinuates that the median distillation of the group's behavior and ideas is the correct one and this creates psychic momentum that pushes the individual off their equilibrium and pulls them closer to the attraction of the cohesive social and conceptual order.  "Look at the reflections of that bright neon in the water of the ditch!" One member might say, having made a solitary discovery. Then all of the members in the group come by and take a variation of the original idea. To each person who doesn't discover order in chaos well the original observation is given value and then the value is reinforced by the additive power of the group's repetitious capture of the same concept. That changes the individual in small ways because he gathers multiple data points that reflect what is considered artistically positive by his chosen group.

To walk solo with the camera and to discover the same reflection adds an empowering sense of discovery and increasing mastery for the individual. And it could be that the ability to discover the conceptual image was always in his power and he would have discovered it on his own anyway if not for the distraction of the group.

Speaking of distraction, the very nature of having a group means that everyone must feed the construct of the group for it to have continuance. A small portion (or large!) of each person's energy has to be concerned with compromising their unique point of view and needs just enough to create a cohesion to the group; to the purpose of the group. That shift in energy is tilted toward the group and away from the individual except in cases where the group disproportionally enables certain members.

In the case of a workshop, for example, the power of the group would seem to be evenly distributed and evenly contributed but that's seldom the case. There is always a small contingent that is able to manipulate or coerce everyone else in the group to rally around them and assist them in the realization and construction of their personal vision. They take a little more of everyone's power and attention than they return, and while the results of the group's efforts might be successful each lesser member of the group is more detached from the ownership of the final image than the more assertive member or members. There is always an ebb and flow to the politics of power within any group that diminishes the value of the undertaking for some while embellishing it for others.

I'm not saying that we don't need teams to produce an artifact from one person's creative conception. A writer benefits from an editor---but the story is already there. The director benefits from an editor but the footage is already in the can.  There are examples in the commercial world where teams create photographs. An art director may come to a commercial photographer with a comprehensive layout for an ad and ask the photographer to render the image to match the drawing.

A client may come to a videographer with a story board and ask him to shoot the video precisely but we both know that in these examples there was a point of creation somewhere earlier in the time line. In these cases the photographer is the part of the team facilitating the production of someone else's visions.

I need a team to produce a labor intensive advertising shoot. But I never need a team to produce personal work. But I guess my argument falls apart if I included in my personal work the making of portraits. In that pursuit I am somewhat at the mercy of the sitter.  Can I bend them to my will and force a one sided collaboration or am I willing to settle for a compromise that somewhat pleases both of us but at the expense of the true rigor of my conception?

My working understanding of the real value of teams is that they are good for taking big projects, breaking the projects up into discrete chunks and assigning each chunk to one or more people. At some point all the people bring their finished chunks of project back and we fit it all together. More like parallel computing than high speed serial computing. But the project always has a genesis. A moment of conception. An idea in someone's head. Without the individual conception there is nothing for the group to grapple.

The bottom line is that artist don't create in a vacuum, rather they pull in references from everywhere and everything in their lives but at a certain point they allow those resources to blend in their brains in a very unique way before have a moment of instant Satori where the creative concept flows into their consciousness. That's a moment that can be supported by a team but no team can, by support or force, cause the creative idea to exist. At the core every new idea is delivered by the muses to one mind at a time.

Humans are like sponges. They soak up every emotion and action emitted and acted by the people around them. They absorb influence and the constant subconscious goal is always to fit in. To be part of a society. But it's the outsider nature of artists that allows them to see and present a vision to their culture that is difference and valuable. The outsider sees things from a different angle.  Explains things from a different point of view. That's what makes the work valuable.

Teams facilitate what is already conceptually there. They are great at turning concept into artifact. They are great at providing efficiency. But to depend on them for singular ideas of power and vision is to expect too much. That's what individual artists were made for.

I suspect we'll get a lot of disagreement on this one and I'm okay with that. The idea of art and the individual has changed over the course of history. Our current idea of art as an aesthetic expression of  the individual artist is relatively recent (1800's?) and we're still wrapping our brains around it. But to me the concept of value of a team comes from manufacturing, harvesting and building. These are all concerned with realizing an idea that already exists, not making a creative new one.

Now, if you'll excuse me I'll step outside and make a few images on a lonely but happy walk by myself.

edit: I know, I know. It's too long. A blog should only be 500 words and one picture. Luckily my regular readers read quickly and with perfect comprehension.

I have a small reader request.

 If you are a regular reader of the blog but have not signed up as a "Follower" of the VSL blog would you please consider doing so? It costs you nothing but it helps me to have a feeling of who is out there and for whom I am writing. It also makes me feel that spending time doing this also means spending time building a community of like minded people.

The following applet is just over there on the right. If you get this via a reader please take a moment to go directly to the site and "sign up."  You don't have to but I'd sure appreciate it if you did.....

Thanks, Kirk

edit note: Three images below from a freezing, downtown, twilight walk added to the post as a sincere "thank you!" to all the people who stepped up and signed in. Thanks!

edit note 2: If you aren't on Google+ and can't do the sign in, don't worry about it. I'm happy you are here and reading my stuff on a regular basis. Thank you.  Kirk

All images done monochrome in camera. Panasonic GH3+ Olympus 12-50mm lens.

Here is the speech I gave to the students and instructors on Friday at the Capitol. Some of you asked to read it...

Please note that the written speech is never given verbatim but serves as an outline. Where I sensed more interest I fleshed out the content on the fly. Where I found things to be flat I edited on the fly. During the speech I had a slide show running with 135 images that I selected from work images, theatrical work and (mostly) favorite personal portraits and greatest hits. 

( What is my point in making the speech?  To inspire and motivate a new generation of professional photographers!)

Kirk's Speech ©2014 Kirk Tuck. Do not use without permission!

Welcome. Welcome to Austin. We’ve been keeping it weird just for you.

There’s just one thing I want to talk to you about tonight. And that is the fact that right now, right in this moment, we are experiencing the golden age of photography. 

It’s not something that old guys got to have all the fun with in decades past. It’s right here and it’s right now.

When I first started out the camera companies had just come out with affordable cameras that could actually set their exposures AUTOMATICALLY.

The photographers who had been in the business for a while were all moaning and complaining that this would make photography so easy that no one would ever get a paying photo job again! Well, that obviously didn’t happen. The markets just got better and better because people started to understand that there was more to taking a great photograph than just getting the exposure right.

Next up?  Autofocus. That too, according to the people already in the photography business, was supposed to destroy the commercial market…

And after AF got really fast and worked most of the time that was what might kill off photography.  Then we found ourselves plunging into digital and even phone photography. The technical stuff has never been easier but it still just as difficult to take an interesting photo and it’s still damn hard to make a photo that will make people sit up, stare and go, “Wow!”

You people in this room have to find your way to make people go, “Wow!” And it’s not going to be by finding some new technical thing to fix.

XXXXXXXXX

Lucky for you I actually know the secret to getting more interesting photographs. I do. And usually I charge people thousands of dollars for the secret but tonight I’m going to give it away for free. Why free? Because most people are too lazy to use my secret to make their work better. Or they don’t believe it takes anything more than mastering their cameras and lenses to get better. But if you are willing to listen I’m ready to tell you….

To make more interesting photographs you have to change yourself.

You have to become a more interesting person.  If you are a more interesting person you’ll take more amazing images. Because people will be blown away by your point of view. 

I’m sure you know people who love their cameras. The whole world for them revolves around knowing the stories of their cameras. Which sensors are noiseless, which cameras can shooting in the dark, which lenses are the sharpest….everything technical.

But I bet you know people who can take great, amazing, wonderful photographs with just about any camera. What’s the difference? These photographers are using the cameras to take photographs of things, people, places and performances that really excite them. And they are just using a camera to share the excitement.

The whole secret is to find what it is in your life that makes you want to capture it in the camera and share it with everyone you know. The secret is to find the subject, topic or object that makes you single-mindedly obsessed. 

I have a friend who loves art, design and architecture. He makes images of houses and buildings that are beautiful. His photography is a way to share that beauty with other people who value design and art.

And what do your think fashion photographers love? They love clothes. For them fashion isn’t just a good excuse to pull out a camera it’s the reason to have a camera. They want to share the looks styles that excite them and make their brain cells move faster.

The people I don’t really understand are the generalists who don’t have a favorite subject but will just photography anything. What I think that means is that they haven’t found their passion yet. That photography is just a job. But we can do better than that and you can do better than that!

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So, how do you become a more interesting person? 

I have a list and when I feel like my work is getting boring I read the list.

It reminds me to try stuff that makes me uncomfortable. To put myself into situations where I don’t fit in. Where I have to try new stuff with new people.

Here’s some samples to try:

Read more novels. But let someone else pick out the books for you. We pick safe or fun stuff for ourselves. Reading a novel about someone different from you puts you in their shoes.

Try new food. Eat Sushi. If you love meat become a vegetarian for a week. See stuff from a different side.

Find some friends who are a lot smarter than you. And find some friends who don’t know the stuff you know. Hang out with them.

If you grew up on Transformer Movies and James Bond movies go and see some romantic movies. And vice versa.

If you grew up going to a certain church go and be a guest at a totally different religious center. If you’ve been a Baptist all your life try visiting a Jewish Synagog or a Buddhist Temple. Your mind is like a parachute—— they both work best when they are open!!!

Go to museums and look at paintings and sculpture. Try to understand how the artists used light. Leave your camera at home so you make sure it’s all about learning something new not just finding something else at which to point your camera.

Find a website that’s about something you know nothing about and dive in. What do you know about cooking? Have you ever baked a cake? Find a website about making salads. When you learn to love food you’ll have more to talk about to more people than ever before. And you’ll get some good meals.

Learn to Speak Italian. Learn to make cowboy boots. Take a trip to somewhere freakishly exotic. And when you come back you’ll have stories to tell and a totally different way of looking at everything. 

A totally different way of looking at everything!!!! That’s the secret we’re looking for. Because if we look at stuff the same way everyone else does than why should anyone care about your vision. Who needs to make the millionth photograph of a coffee cup?

Unless that coffee cup is made out of a skull and filled with strange multi-colored coffee from a distant rainforest.

So the first part of my secret is to become a more interesting person. And I think you guys get it. 

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The next secret I’m going to tell you is the secret formula for getting really good at photography. I don’t mean that your pictures of kitten whiskers get sharper I mean that everything you photograph just gets better and better. 

But first let me tell you a story.  I read it in a great book entitled “ART and FEAR.” 

At one of the prestigious universities there was a professor who was a great ceramics teacher. He turned out some of the artists who people call geniuses. 

And he did an interesting experiment.

He had a class of students who really, really wanted to be there and they all wanted to be the best. He divided his class into two halfs. And he said, All the students on this half of the class will proceed during the semester like this: You will only have to make one really perfect piece. Just one great sculpture and your entire grade will depend on that one piece of sculpture you create. But you have the whole semester to make it so it better be top notch. 

To the other half he said, “I hate to tell you this but I’m grading your work on a curve. And I’m grading it on the sheer volume. In fact, at the end of the semester I’ll weigh everything that you’ve done and the person with the most stuff will get the top grade. And so on. So you’ll need to really get some work done. The students got to work and the results were interesting. The group tasked with perfection were paralyzed. How do you make a perfect piece? The second group, the “how much can you make group” rolled up their sleeves and pounded away at the work for hours every day. 

And at the end of the semester a strange thing happened. The students who needed only one perfect piece didn’t do well at all. They were so afraid of failure that they had a hard time starting or committing. Their work was mediocre. 

But the second group had amazing results. Their group turned out hundreds and hundreds of great pieces because they were never afraid to try new stuff and possibly fail. As a result they took chances and tried everything. And they evolved. And their work soared. 

So, my second secret, the one that will lead you to photographic greatness is to jump in now and do photography all the time. Always be experimenting and trying new ways to do images. Don’t be afraid to fail. If you shoot ten times more stuff in a year than everyone around you then you essentially progress ten years beyond your competitors. Really. You are only limited by how much you can apply yourself. And really, you don’t need sleep, right? 

I know that by now you have me figured out and you know that their must be a third secret. Right? Well, there is but I’m not sure you’re ready for it. Maybe we should take a break from the secrets and have a discussion of which lens is sharper, the Canon 85mm or the Nikon 85mm. Right?

Well, I don’t have a clue so back to the secrets. But I will ask you not to share this one because it is so critical to finding a path that will make you great that it should be patented. But, if you think you are ready—- then let’s continue. 

A great writer, Joseph Conrad, once wrote “The treasure you desire to find is within the cave you fear.”

The way I like to say the same idea is:

The Passion is in the risk. 

Both phrases really mean the same thing. There are things that scare you in life and as a photographer. I know. I’ve been there. Some people are afraid to approach strangers and ask them to sit for a portrait. Some people are afraid to travel someplace foreign and different. Some people are afraid to show their work.

But the biggest thing I hear and the biggest fear I had to get over was to ask perfect strangers if they would let me take their photograph. Their portrait. And I wasn’t looking for just a chance encounter on the sidewalk. I wanted them to come to my studio and collaborate with me and give me an expression I loved. And I was scared to ask because I hated the idea of being rejected or people thinking I was weird or something. 

But when I started breaking through that fear I found the treasure. I found that photographing people in my studio was the thing I most wanted to do in photography. It was my treasure and it was hidden behind my fear of asking complete strangers to trust me and let me into their worlds, even if it was just for an hour or two. 

I’m going to bet that each one of you has one thing in photography that scares them. Asking strangers, showing a portfolio, sharing wild ideas that might get ridiculed. Or you are just so afraid of failing that you refuse certain kinds of projects. Learn to identify the biggest fears because those fears are the caves that hold the best treasures. And everyone’s fears and rewards are different

But I can guarantee that if you push yourself to go into the caves you fear you will emerge as a much more powerful photographer than you can imagine. 

So, do the things that make you nervous, push at the stuff that scares you. Do as much work as you can. Always be photographing.  And keep becoming a more interesting person. You’re 90% of the way toward being a great photographer.

But…….there’s one more thing. And it has nothing to do with gear and everything to do with all the stuff above. It’s the final secret. The one that makes Joey Lawrence and Zack Arias and Chase Jarvis successful and great role models. 

I will share this final secret with you tonight. It’s the easiest one to understand and may be the hardest of the four secrets to actually do. But if you do it. And you combine this one action with the three I’ve already disc used I can almost guarantee that you’ll be a successful imaging expert. A photographer of distinction. Here’s the secret: Go out and start now. Go show work now. Get work now. Find assignments now. Assign your self a project Now, Today. 

When I taught at UT I had a class with 30 students. It was a studio course. Most of the class put things off. They were waiting until they had just the right lens. They were waiting for the perfect camera. They didn’t show a portfolio because they were waiting for the perfect prints and better images. And many of them are still probably waiting for the perfect moment to launch their careers almost thirty years later. Sadly, most of them waited so long that they eventually gave up. 

But there were two students in the class who were so ready to work and shoot and play and collaborate with their photography that they immediately went out and put whatever they had learned that day into motion. 

They volunteered, they found clients and they launched. Immediately. By the end of the semester they were shooting for someone every day of the week and they were learning logarithmically. They might get stumped and when they did they’d rush back to the studio and figure out what to do and then go back out and shoot. One had one camera with one 50mm lens. He shot everything from fashion to head shots with it. The other person had one old Hasselblad that she mastered and she was still using it to shoot a Neiman Marcus catalog ten years later when I went to  visit her in Dallas. 

But their secret of success was to start now. Today. Not when all the stars lined up or when they owned every L lens in the Canon product catalog but right now with whatever was in their hands. And it became a habit. And now they always start. And 98% of people put off getting started until too late. 

So, if you always wondered why some people make it and most don’t you need to know it’s not a difference in talent or knowledge it’s the courage to go out right now and get started. 

I have so many friends who tried to do photography as a business when we all started out. I lived and breathed photography. My friend Will would used cheap cameras that were falling apart to shoot for Texas Monthly and other great magazines. He didn’t wait until he could afford the finest of all cameras. He went for it. And since he showed up and and had the desire he got the jobs. The jobs don’t wait until you are ready. Your projects won’t wait. What are you waiting for?

At the beginning of my talk I made the statement that these are the Golden Years of professional photography. How can that be when everyone in the world has an iPhone and everyone thinks they are a photographer? Magazines and newspapers are laying off pro photographers like crazy. Prices for work seem to be falling.

But. I think photography has finally split. We pros make what I would call Artifacts. These artifacts have a long life. They are meant to be used over and over again by advertisers and historians and that’s their power. That’s what gives them value. 

Most of the photography that’s being done casually by most people is what I would call consumables. Like coffee and hamburgers these images are just quick visual snacks that vanish into the web after one round of viewing on Facebook or Tumblr or Snapchat and then they are gone pretty much forever. 

We use talent, insight, intelligence and style to make artifacts. That’s what gives them their value. They are thoughtful and engaging images that serve a continuing purpose. And people will pay for sticky work like that.

The other reason that I say this is the golden age of photography is that this is the first time in the history of the world that you can share your work with people from around the planet. From China to El Paso. If your vision is unique you can have fans from around the globe. And you’ll be the first image makers who don’t need to depend on magazines and newspapers to reach people. You can create your own online media and you can control it and you can figure out how to make money with it. 

There are legions of people making money from their blogs and there are countless people who make income from YouTube for their videos. 

They reach audiences that most photographers never dreamed of in the past. And they make connections that we never thought possible.

I write a blog and just last year Samsung reached out and asked me to test their new camera. The one with cell data on board. They sent me a camera and a case of lenses and then sent me to Berlin for eight days to shoot. In the days before I put photos and stories up on the blog I doubt they would have ever found me. 

I teach online workshops for a company in Denver called craftsy.com. They pay me a percentage of every class they sell. My blog generates income. And now we make video for clients. 

Every year is like starting over. And I love it because it’s a level playing field. It’s a golden age because you get to make your own rules for success. You get to expand into making movies. You  get to decide how well your images are used. 

There’s only one danger in all of this for you. That’s the danger that you’ll do what so many people always do. You have to be on guard not to get comfortable with the status quo. Not to get too invested in one way of doing things. 

The danger is that you’ll get warm and comfortable and you won’t want to change, you won’t even want to acknowledge change when it is happening all around you. And one morning you’ll wake up and there will be no market for the stuff you spent perfecting for the last ten years. There will be new markets and they will eat the old markets. This is why you must always work at being a more interesting person. Because interesting people keep up with their culture. 

The best treasures go to the people who create the new markets not to the people who have to be pushed into learning after the fact.

Don’t be afraid to fail and don’t be afraid to break from the herd. The lonely hunter  generally has a better hunt. 

Your training and your self education is preparing you to make the most of the market right in front of you right now. You must jump in fearlessly. You’ll love it. And in thirty years I hope one of you will stand up here and tell students like you that They are living in the golden age of photography.

The end.

Decompressing from a week filled with photography. Sometimes you just need a break...

I went to Whole Foods for some soup. I also photographed some random flowers.

It was a wacky week of headshot photography, speeches about photography and a full day of doing photography in San Antonio. When I finished with the post production of yesterday's files around 2pm today I was totally burned out so I decided to talk a nice long walk in the sunshine (75 (f) degrees today...).   Of course I wouldn't leave the house without some sort of camera so I grabbed the RX 10 of the dining room table, shoved an extra battery in my pocket and headed out the door. 

The chicken and veggie soup was great and I snuck in a piece of jalapeño corn bread for contrast. I wandered around downtown, marveling at all the new buildings going up. Luxury hotels, more high rise condos and a smattering of office buildings and parking garages. 

The RX 10 rode along with its promotional Sony strap clinging to my left shoulder. I set it up for simple. Aperture priority, ISO 125, auto neutral density filter and AWB. No thought-o-graphy at its best. 

Didn't shoot much. I was trying to just look today. Make my eyes do that infinity thing to counteract that two feet to fifteen feet thing I'd done all week long. I guess we'll take a deep breath and hit the ground running tomorrow.

In case you didn't know (I might have been too subtle), I think the RX 10 is the best camera I've played with for the price ever. While I resize files to 2100 pixels on the long side for the blog I've succumbed to some pixel peeping at 5640 or whatever and the files are incredibly detailed and sharp. At the lower ISO's they just don't break down until you go past 100%. The color is great and the metering is 98% on the money. All in all a great product from Sony. It would be interesting to see just how good a full frame, 28-70mm fixed f4.0 camera would be. The ability to match the lens and the sensor into a non-removeable system may mean less flexibility but I have a feeling that it's one of the last remaining paths to ultimate image quality. 

That said, I eagerly await the arrival of the GH4's. Double slap in the face to the $12,000 Canon video/faux still cameras....