Category Archives: Photography

I’m back from my trip, which included spending three days in a darkish room learning how to print photographs. After all, Lightroom has a print module built in. There are many good labs like MPIX or Bay Photo that will handle your printing and turn out good prints. Isn’t that good enough?

The answer, I believe is a profound “it depends”. 

David duChemin is one photographer that argues that you need to print your work, to live with those prints, and to study them to really make your images the best they can be.  I’ve been feeling for a while that the quality of my images had stagnated — good, but I knew there was another level of “better” in them, but I wasn’t sure where the ladder was. 

I’ve been questioning my approach to my photography for a while, either, which ended up as an extended “what do I want to be when I grow up” discussion with myself. Between all of this, there’s been a lot of thought and research and contemplation about what I’ve been doing and where I was trying to take my imaging. I haven’t talked very much about it because questions without answers is lousy conversation, and because most of it would frankly be incredibly boring to you, because much of it was incredibly boring to myself, when it wasn’t incredibly frustrating. 

When your wanderings take you into a box canyon, sometimes the only answer is to retrace your steps and try a different path. That’s what I’ve been fighting the last few months, here on the blog and in my photography. A feeling like things were on the wrong path, that things had stagnated, and that I needed to figure out how to fix it or stop going through the motions and turning out mediocre content. 

For my photography, it took me a while to sort it all out. 

What I finally realized was that what really drew me into photography, what I really appreciated was seeing my images on the wall. When I first started making that switch from “I hold a camera and press this button” to “photographer”, what I originally wanted to end up doing was fine art images, whatever that was — prints on a wall. Not flickr, not stock, not licensing images for publication — big, pretty pictures I stood near and looked at.

Somewhere along the way, I lost sight of that.  

The last few months have been about figuring that out, refocussing myself and my work, and deciding what path to choose to start moving forward again and then stepping out and taking it. 

I’ve been trying to get a specific image to look like I knew it could — literally for months. And I was failing miserably. I’ve talked about it before:

 The problem is that while I love the subjects and composition, technically, this image has problems. It was shot with a 30d, an older body who’s sensor isn’t nearly as good as modern ones. And it was shot with my 300 F4 attached with a 2X teleconverter at an effective 600mm. So the original is as sharp as maybe it could be, plus it was handheld. And it’s cropped — when I was done, it’s about 2400 x 1500. Not a huge amount of megapixels to work with.

But I love the image, and I wanted a print of it on the wall. And I had another person who wanted a print on his wall. And I was unwilling to hand off a print that wasn’t up to par. 

And I couldn’t make a print that was good enough, but I knew that print was in there somewhere — and I was struggling to figure out how to pull it out and get it on paper. 

I had retired my old HP 9180 a while back and stopped printing. I did some lab printing, but stopped even doing that — and then I realized that I missed the act of printing and seeing my images on my walls and putting copies in the hands of people. I bought a new printer, my Epson R2880, which I love. The prints that came out of it? I hated. I could see they were flat, were soft, were — wrong.

It wasn’t the printer. It was a combination of things, but mostly my lack of technique, and the fact that since I retired the 9180, my eye has improved and I demand a lot more out of my images than I did a couple of years ago — and my technique wasn’t up to it. I found myself getting really frustrated, and I realized I had some major work ahead of me, and I was at a point where I had no time to sit and focus on it, so I had to put it on hold until I did. I picked it up again at the start of the year.  

As it happened, I had scheduled a trip to SoCal to visit my mom and spend time with her, and I had reserved some time where I was thinking of heading out into the desert or Death Valley for a few days of photography. I’ve been trying to get out to Death Vally since 2008 — and my schedules just haven’t meshed yet. 

But then I realized that the Light Photographic Workshop folks had their printing class scheduled that same time. This became a no-brainer. I scheduled myself in. Light Photo teaches classes and runs workshops and tours out of a facility in Los Osos, California, near Morro Bay. I first ran into them at a Morro Photo Expo when I took an HDR class from them. At the time, the current owners (Hal and Victoria Schmitt) were just taking over the operation from George Lepp. Since then, they’ve been on my radar since as an option when I was looking for a class on a specific subject. I know Hal knows printing. I knew I needed someone to kick me in the butt and drag me forward past this technical hump I’d been struggling with. 

Signing up for the class was an immediate no-brainer, so I did. 

This was my boot camp. 

Quick digression — I don’t care how good you are at teaching yourself stuff, I don’t care how plugged in you are to learning from online resources, at some point you’re going to find that the best way to push yourself forward is to find someone who knows this stuff a lot better than you, sit down at their feet and have them teach. Even more importantly, have them show. And you need to sit there and soak it in, and ask questions, and think, and poke and try, and ask more questions, and use that time with your sensei with as much enthusiasm and intensity as you can muster. As much as I love resources like Craft & Vision and CreativeLIVE — and I can’t tell you how much both have helped me improve my craft in the last couple of years (but I plan on trying, soon) — at some point, you need to get in person, with someone who can twiddle the knobs on your image and talk to you about your problems and get one on one about specific challenges. I don’t feel I’m exaggerating when I say this class shaved weeks or months off my learning curve, and there were things I probably never would have gotten a handle on without it, much less taken a long time to get there. Seriously. 

Anyway, the class. There were eight of us, with Hal teaching and Victoria kibitzing and assisting. I might have been the youngest in the class; if not, it was close. Everyone there was a damn good photographer and very serious about it — one specialized in underwater photography, another was doing stunning black and white work. One was doing a combination of pictures of her grandkids and some truly majestic landscapes from Yosemite. About half the class was from the Morro Bay area, the other half came in for the class — me from Silicon Valley, another from San Diego, one from outside Yosemite, and one from Oregon. 

Day one was lecture on theory and technique. Color theory, how computers deal with color, color spaces, gamuts, how they interact with each other, what happens when you change color spaces. Lots of geeky detail. I felt I had a good grounding in this going in, but I still ran into a lot of details that were new to me and filled in gaps. As the day progressed we moved from theory to technique, and Hal started walking us through his processing and printing workflows.  He went through his workflow for preparing an image and various techniques for output sharpening and proofing and how to get the image out of the computer and onto paper. 

This carried into day 2, and by late morning, we started working on doing our own printing. By lunch, we were starting to print our own images. We’d been asked to bring our own images to work on. I had about 25, all of them things I knew would give me grief in some way or another. 

Once we started processing and printing, the class shifted into lab mode. Everyone had their own projects and interests. A couple of people had a specific image they wanted to optimize and get printed, and spent most of the time on those. A couple were working through a number of images and trying to get finished prints of them. Hal’s facility was set up with one big-ass Canon printer (24″ wide format or bigger) for every two people, plus there were his really big printers, going up to, I think, 60″, and with the capability of both printing various papers and canvas. 

The lab itself was kept fairly dark and the monitors calibrated to that. A nearby room had a color-calibrated viewing area, plus we could carry the images out into the front to see them in natural light. Once we got started printing, Hal and Victoria were available to comment or to teach a technique or to make suggestions on ways to improve the image. For the rest of the class — about a day and a half — it was about working on an image, making a print, taking it out to the lightbox to evaluate it, and then iterating. We spent time looking at each other’s works and commenting, and Hal and Victoria offered up their advice, or at times would show someone how to do something, or work with them to get the image ready to print on one of the really big images or on canvas. 

Like I said, for a couple, it was about going home with that one great image and in a couple of cases, it was on canvas, and it looked awesome. For me, I was less interested in a finished print and more interested in improving technique, so my time was spent beating on an image trying to draw what I could out of it, printing it out, evaluating it and figuring out how to improve it and going back and working on it again, until I either was happy with the result, or I’d solved the specific problem that image had (like noise, or a sharpness problem) until I was comfortable I knew how to manage that problem, and then I’d move on to some other image and some other problem. 

In a couple of cases, the work proved that the image wasn’t fixable. This one, for instance: 

It works just fine on screen, I think, but as soon as I try to put it on paper, it falls apart. That’s fine. Not everything is fixable. 

For me, a major stumbling block has always been sharpening. I have sucked at it. Nothing I’ve studied and nothing I’ve done has really made me competent at sharpening. I finally got to the point where I wasn’t actively destroying images by mis-sharpening them, but only by borrowing some basic sharpening presets (from Jared Platt’s CreativeLIVE lightroom class) and using them without over thinking it. That worked fine for online images, but I could tell I wasn’t doing it right to get them really optimized for printing. 

But listening to Hal talk through Sharpening, and watching him do it, and seeing the results, and learning how to do some of the techniques he was using, and then working through some images and talking them through with Hal — now I can sharpen, and I don’t suck at it. Sharpening is one of those things that really doesn’t come through well online and in books and videos; at least I can’t look at an image that’s been printed in a book and really see what that version is good sharpening and this version is bad, and online, well it’s easy to look good online, and hard to translate that good look to paper. At least to my eye. 

So a few hours on sharpening with Hal solved a problem I’ve been literally beating me head against a wall over for years. Or at least got me past that hump. I’m sure there are more humps to find in my sharpening life, but I was able to pull back what I learned on output sharpening and apply it to workflow sharpening as well, and consistently get to the point where I can get that image on paper looking like I believe it should look.

And if I print the image out both with and without sharpening, I can now SEE the difference. Before, it was all kind of magic, magic I couldn’t really grok. 

That alone made the class pay for itself. It was what I hoped for out of the class, and it paid off. 

When the class was done, I came home with a bunch of test prints, but not anything I considered “final”. That wasn’t my goal. So when I got home, I spent the next couple of weeks working my way through images — they’re showing up on the blog in the portfolio category — because one thing you need to do after learning material like this is practice it and turn it into habits, and figure out how to integrate and adapt it into your own personal workflow. If you don’t do that, if you don’t keep at it and really burn it into your brain, then when you go back and try to use it down the road, you’ll struggle to remember how everything happened. 

The thing is, figuring out all of the details that lead to a good print isn’t necessarily difficult, but there are a fair number of steps, and there are a number of decisions that need to be made along the way. The process isn’t complicated, but it’s tactical and technical. Doing it a few times gets you started, but you have to do it until it’s second-nature and you aren’t really thinking through the process. 

It’s more than simply hitting the Print button, at least if you want to generate a quality print and be able to take an image and make it a quality print reliably and efficiently. Those two words are key here; you really want to get to the point that this stuff becomes habit so you aren’t making mistakes and botching prints and wasting time. 

So for me, the class was perfectly timed and just what I needed. Hal and Victoria are good teachers, their facility is top-notch, and hell, it’s in Morro Bay, and you know what I think about having to visit that area (well, if you insist…). 

They don’t teach this class often, but if you’re trying to figure out how to improve your printing and turn out high quality prints reliably, I recommend it highly. They teach a number of different classes there, and if it’s a facility you can get to and a class you’re interested in, I suggest you consider it. If you’re trying to figure out all of this printing stuff and you want to get serious about doing your own prints or you feel the prints you’re doing through a lab could be better, but this class isn’t an option for you, I suggest you start reading Martin Bailey and you pick up his book Making the Print from Craft & Vision. I found it another very good and useful resource as I was working my way through all of this. 

If you take nothing else out of this discussion of the class though, it’s two things:

• While I’m a big fan of ebooks and recorded classes to study and learn from, there are limitations to pre-recorded material because if you hit a sticking point where what you need to learn isn’t what they teach. that’s one reason why I really like the CreativeLIVE format, because the interactivity of their live classes and the Q&A they build into them goes a long way to burning those sticking points into their recordings, because if it’s a sticking point for you, it’s probably a sticking point for someone else, too. 
• But there comes a time when you really should do it in person. Maybe it’s a class (but make it a class with a small audience, not one of the 200 person lecture hall things — you need the ability to go one on one with the teachers); maybe it’s a workshop. Maybe it’s getting to know experience photographers and buying them a coffee or a dinner and picking their brain. However you do it, there are going to be times when what you really need is to get one on one with people who can teach you, and sitting back and letting them. As with me and sharpening, there are going to be things you’re grappling with where that’s the only way you’re going to get over the hump and take control of them. 

When you realize you’re at that point? Do it. 

Attention Overload | Guy Tal Photography Journal:

I was in one of Utah’s National Parks, scouting for a new workshop itinerary. As I stood there, rummaging through the ice for the last can of iced tea, a car parked behind me. With its motor still running, the driver’s window slid partly down to reveal the top half of an iPad aimed at the view across the road. I could smell the artificial scent of chemical air freshener wafting out of the narrow slit, and hear the loud booming beat of music I could not recognize. A second later I heard the synthesized sound of a fake shutter, the window slid back up, and the car continued on down the road, its passengers never knowing the silence left in their wake, never feeling the grit of the sandstone, never smelling the delicate aroma of sagebrush, never hearing the mocking laughter of pinyon jays, never feeling the breeze on their faces – never experiencing the place. They were there for the sole purpose of recording an image, never really disconnecting from the (presumably) urban technology-rich environment they left to get here.

I disagree with Guy Tal slightly — they did experience the place, but on their terms, not on Guy’s. You have to be really careful about assigning and judging someone’s actions based on them not being the actions you’d take. Now, the way they were experiencing the park isn’t one I would do or recommend, but then, they’re not me and they’re not demanding I live my life to their satisfaction, either… Since I hate to be judged, I try to limit my judging as well…

But this does bring up a situation that highlights something I’ve been pondering about my own work for a while. When I dropped into my most recent struggle with myself over my photography, I found myself asking a question I couldn’t answer: 

How does my photography differ from a vacation snapshot? Or does it?

I think discovering the answer to that question is a key to leaping the huge gap between being an enthusiastic photographer and being an enthusiast.

What the person in the car was doing with their tablet camera was creating an image for themselves. They may show it to their friends. They may put it on Flickr or instagram — but that image is personal. When they look at it, it’s going to trigger a memory, and it’s the memory that creates the emotional response and impact, not the image. That’s why so many vacation slideshows are so painful to watch: because the images mean something to the people who were there, and those of us politely waiting for them to end don’t have the memories and experiences to trigger that make them interesting and meaningful. But that doesn’t make the images poor or meaningless to the people who were there.

But that’s the key difference between the image that person took and the kind of images that photographers like Guy Tal take, and that I strive for. When you start shooting images that are intended to be enjoyed by others, you no longer have the ability to trigger a memory. You have to create one. Your image can’t invoke a reaction to something that happened to have an emotional response, it has to initiate that emotional response.

Learning that this difference exists is the key point that, I think, shifts a photographer from being a hobbyist to a craftsman and starts the process of learning how to make photos instead of merely take them. And learning how to master that craft of making photos is how you grow along the path of craftsmanship towards that point where you can consistently create not just technically good images, but artistic and emotionally powerful ones — the kind of images that people react to because the image creates the reaction. 

So don’t put down the person in the car with the iPad. At least they were in the park and exploring and looking at it. They could have been sitting at home and watching a documentary of it on Travel Channel instead, after all. Hopefully this is their first step down that path towards discovering the great opportunities for life that exist in these places. And if not? Well, my dad was one of the most enthusiastic vacation photographers that ever lived — and most of his photography was frankly pretty poor technically and compositionally. 

And he loved it. He enjoyed taking them, he enjoyed looking at them, and he enjoyed the memories they triggered about the times and places and people they represented. He had no interest in his photos being more than that. 

And we shouldn’t put people down for that, we should accept and encourage that. Those images aren’t failures, they’re a gateway drug to the kind of imagery and craft we’re all hoping to produce.  Some of those people will want more, and some of them will find the path that takes them away from that and searching for deeper meaning in their images — and some of those will end up being people like Guy Tal or David duChemin or Galen Rowell or Ansel Adams.

And when I finally could answer that question — when I understood what I needed to learn to make sure my images weren’t just vacation snaps — that’s when my craft started moving forward again. Because unlike my dad, I’m not satisfied with images that only are interesting to me. We should appreciate and encourage people on all of these paths, not think less of them because the path they chose isn’t the one we prefer.

David duChemin – World & Humanitarian Photographer, Nomad, Author. » Hokkaido Re-Cap:

I’m not one to pigeon-hole, but all the same, I’m no wildlife photographer. Of course I said that about landscapes three years ago as well, so what do I know? I’ve spent almost 2 weeks in Japan, mostly in Hokkaido, with birds and monkeys, often flopping around gracelessly and hip deep in snow, and almost always freezing my arse off. It’s been amazing. I came to meet Martin Bailey, a friend I’ve never met in person until now, and to learn from a man I consider a peer and a colleague. 14 of us traveled around this northern island of Japan, with enough outdoor wear to open an outfitters and enough camera gear to keep B&H stakeholders very happy for a very long time. It’s been a wonderful trip and so much of that is to Martin’s credit.

David duChemin may not be a wildlife photographer, but you really need to take a look at what happens when someone approaches wildlife photography with the esthetic of a portrait photographer. It’s fascinating. And awesome. There’s some really great imagery here that truly honors the subjects. 

One of the things I’ve been working on in my spare time is a Lightroom workflow that would let me easily select and publish images for use as wallpapers in various formats. I finally seem to have it working well, so I can now publish my images for use on my phone, iPad and computers. And to share.

To kick this off, here is a set of ten wallpapers you can use on your desktop or laptop. These are all 1920×1080 (16:9) JPEG images. I have assigned them to a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND (Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives) license, which allows you to use them without charge in non-commercial situations, and to redistribute them to others as long as you maintain the attribution back to me; please do not remove the watermark. It does not allow you to use them in any way in a commercial situation, or to repackage and redistribute them as part of your own distribution, or use them in a modified form. If you want to use an image in a way not allowed by this licence, or if you aren’t sure if your usage would be allowed, please drop me a note and we’ll talk about it.

As soon as I figure out how I want to distribute and display these on the site I’ll get publishing new images onto a schedule. If you have other sizes or formats you think these should be published in, let me know!

Right-click on these images to download them:

Download the Entire Set (ZIP file, 3.4Mb)

I’m convinced one of the more significant tipping points in the maturation of a photographer is when you make that mention shift from “Damn, I only got 20 keepers from my photography today” to “wow! I have two keepers from today’s work!”.

That may seem like a trivial shift in mindset, but I don’t think it is. It’s a combination of a realization that you have a lot of good work in your library already, and an understanding that what you’re trying to do is add better work to it, not just more images. And that it’s okay to decide not to add stuff into your library just because it’s “good enough”. 

Should I work for free? — James Duncan Davidson:

Jessica Hische’s flowchart for determining whether or not you should work for free for somebody. In summary, if it’s for a legitimate business: no. Otherwise, it depends. Easy to laugh at, sometimes hard to implement.

My friend Duncan points to this “don’t work for free” piece that’s been floating around the net. 

It’s interesting to see a bunch of people who are making a living selling photos tell other people who aren’t to please stop doing things that might help those people who aren’t making money on their images break into the business enough that they can start getting that income.

That’s my problem with this. It’s a bunch of people who HAVE gotten over that hump telling the rest of us to stop trying. 

I admit it: I sometimes license my work for free. Why? Well, because in some cases, it gets my work exposure. In other cases, it gives me a reference or the ability to point at an image and say “hey! this is licensed!”. That’s something you can market around, and to put it bluntly, it’s easier to get a foot in the door if you can show that foot’s gotten in other doors already. 

And sometimes I do it because I think it’s a situation where it’s worth donating an image. I’ve done that for a number of charitable organizations, and I’ll continue to where I think the cause is worth it. Does that cost a “pro photographer” a sale?

That’s no more my problem than my lack of paying jobs is the pro photographer’s problem. 

But I’ll make a deal here. When I start seeing photographers saying “hey, rather than hiring me, go buy this guy’s stuff” and referring some jobs off to people like me, I’ll stop donating images that these photographers seem to think are costing them sales. Deal?

I’m not holding my breath. 

This is a lot like the Gary Fong suggestion that photographers be certified (ht Zack) . Who’s going to certify photographers? 

Well, of course, other (pro) photographers.

This is, whether you call it that or not, a guild; you don’t get in the guild unless those in the guild give you permission. And frankly, the primary purpose of a guild is to limit membership, so that the members can maintain their prices and limit competition by limiting the numbers who can compete for jobs.

Which is a really great thing — if you’re in the guild.

There are some skill sets where guaranteeing your skill set is  a good idea: surgeon is one. Plumber and electrian are others. That’s why those professions still have licensing requirements and some form or another of apprenticeship and skill validation.

But photographer? Licensing “pro” photographers is really nothing more than an attempt to limit the number of photographers in the field, to limit competition.

This proposal will have just as much success as the stock photographers who tried to convince people not to use microstock. 

Or those telling photographers not to give away photos. I see the advantage to YOU for me to not give away photos. 

What’s in it for me? I’m not seeing much. So why shouldn’t I?

I hesitate to call these macro shots, they’re more pure experiments. I have oriental lilies out in the front yard that I love (which is why they’re there), and for some reason, I always plan on shooting them and never do. So yesterday I grabbed the camera and went out and played a bit. These are all natural light, hand held, using my T3i and the 24-105/f4. For some, I added a 12mm extension tube. 

I think they’re nice, and it’s always worth trying things, but they aren’t going to make you throw out your macro gear any time soon, but I kinda liked them. 

This is a bit of lavender that’s also in the front yard, which actually came out better than I thought it would. 

And this is blossom, one of the neighborhood ferals, who’s been hanging out in the yard with her kittens. She supervised, as long as I didn’t get too close. These are her final kittens; if you look at her ear, it’s been cropped, indicating she’s been through the trap/neuter/release cycle since she gave birth. 

Street Photography :: Photography Is An Enigma 

Zack Arias brought it up –

Someone recently said of me on a forum something that went along the lines of…

“I don’t know how he (speaking of me) has so many followers. His photography isn’t all that special. There are so many other photographers doing real work out there yet this guy (again, speaking of me) has everyone thinking he’s great.”

That’s not a direct quote but it’s close. To whomever you are… There’s a lot of truth in your sentiment. I agree with you. It’s what continues to push me deeper into photography.

Back around 2006, I decided I wanted to be a professional photographer and set off to become one. I knew (at least I knew this much!) that the first thing I had to be was a good photographer. In the years since, there were two or three times when I thought “I’m there”, times when I now look back with some embarrassment at my naiveté about my own capabilities.

Along the way, “going pro” stopped being a priority. Life is like that some days. There’s an entire month of essays in trying to explain this.

This is a long-way-around explanation to the guy questioning why Arias has a lot of followers, and the other guy doesn’t. One of the things I learned along the way is simple, but I think it’s profound: being a good photographer won’t make you a success, and won’t get you lots of followers. There are millions of really damn good photographers out there looking for jobs and sales and followers. 

Being a good photographer just gets you in the game. If you don’t have that, nothing else matters. That’s the starting point, not the finish line.

The reason Zack has me as a follower and you don’t is simple: Zack talks to me. He opens up a vein and pours it out all over his blog. At some point, I realized if I read one more piece on the rule of thirds or how to use a Grad ND filter that I’d puke. I don’t need to be told how — I’m beyond that. I know how.

I’m not looking for the geeky bits. I got those down. I’m trying to find my voice, sharpen my vision. I can press the shutter, but I’m still learning how to see. And so a year or so ago, the photographers I followed changed radically from photographers that were telling me how to do things to photographers that sat down and talked about what it was like being a photographer. There are very few photographers out there willing to open that vein and be real in public.

Chances are, dude, you’re showing me some really great photos on your blog — that look a lot like the photos on a thousand other blogs. And writing blog articles that are really similar to blog articles found on a hundred other blogs (like my blog; I’ll happily damn myself to my own words here, but at least I’m aware of it).

There’s only one Zack. And Zack doesn’t just point at a Grad ND and tell me how it makes water flows, he talks about what it’s like being Zack, in all its glory and successes and failures and insecurities and flaws. 

And not only is that a major reassurance, to have someone like him express these worries and let me know that I AM NOT THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD that goes through these recurring crises-in-faith, but as he does so, he teaches me about the attitudes and mindset needed to become someone like Zack, someone who’s successful at what he does — sometimes despite himself. 

Just like me, and what I hope to be some day.

that’s why I follow Zack, and owe him many beers if I ever meet him (and David duChemin, and Kirk Tuck, and Chase Jarvis). Because he’s real. Because he’s not afraid to be real. Because after a while, it’s not about how to take photos, it’s about how to be a photographer. and that’s not something you do with screenshots of lightroom or pushing a shutter. It’s something you do by talking about being you — and I know that’s a seriously scary, risking thing to do, because it opens you up to criticism you can’t easily shrug off, because it’s about what you are, not about what you do. 

And I expect the reason Zack has many of his followers is because they’re like me and listen to Zack for similar reasons. At some point, it’s not about the camera, or the workflow, or the process. It’s the voice, it’s the vision, it’s about being a photographer. And that’s what Zack talks about. And that’s why I’m listening and learning. 

Are you this person? I honestly want to encourage you to stop talking about being a photographer for a little while, pick up your damn camera, and go be a photographer for awhile. Find a personal project to work on. Find an organization you can donate your time to and don’t just shoot their fund raising galla. Don’t wimp out and shoot portraits of the executive committee. Do something unique. Do something difficult. Do something really different then what you’ve done before. Prove not only to this industry that you still have your chops but prove it to yourself.

Early this year I made a strategic decision to do things other than shoot — it’s June, and I’ve only picked up the camera and gone shooting nine times so far this year. I knew the start of this year was going to be rough for free time, and I had all this infrastructure stuff that was an albatross around my neck; it mattered to me. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but it did. So I put the camera down and when I had time, went geeking instead of shooting. 

Still, the additions to my collection for the first six months of this year are about 80% of the number of images I added in the same periods in 2011 and 2010 — I’ve shot a lot less, but accomplished a lot more in those shoots. And I’m coming out the back side of this infrastructure work, meaning soon I’ll be able to do more camera and less code.

And the yards will be weeded, and a lot of house projects will be done, and I won’t have to feel guilty about grabbing camera instead of rake; not being a full time photographer makes all of this even more challenging, in that it sometimes has to squeeze in around work and life and family and weeds and all of that.

If there’s a criticism I can make at full-time photographers who push the rest of us forward in our craft, it’s this: I think if you live full-time with a camera it can be hard to understand how tough it can be for those trying to do this while fitting it in around the edges of their lives. It’s tough enough doing this stuff on a daily basis when it’s your profession. now, suck out another 50 hours a week for the non-camera profession and try it. So some of the advice goes sideways and i think it can be damaging to photographers who try to follow it despite it being unrealistic in their situation. It took me a good while to back off and realize that a lot of my frustration was because I was trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip and that I had to make it work in the context of my life and my available time. Once I did that, things got a lot less stressful for me.

A final reason I put down the camera: A year or so ago, I sat myself down to have a long talk with myself. I asked myself the question all photographers shudder at: “how do your pictures differ from those snapshots everyone is taking with their point and shoots?” 

I couldn’t answer it. And answering that question is the core of finding that voice, that vision. Wtihout it, I’m just taking holiday snaps. And that isn’t what I wanted my imagery to be. so while I was struggling to find an answer to that question, I went off and worked on other stuff instead. 

and I must say, fighting out what seems like a simple question was a real bastard, because I had to go down to the core of my motivations and drive, and I didn’t like some of the things I found down there in the sub-basement. 

And now I’m back. And maybe I have the answer. Only time will tell…. and it was worth it.

(I think). 

I’ve been doing a lot of reflection and self-examination the last few months (it’s only a coincidence this occurred as I ended up making a decision to change jobs. really. sort of). As I noted in my look back at my 2011 goals in photography, my trip to Yosemite really got me started on an extended process of figuring out what photography meant to me at this time in my life, and where I wanted it to take me moving into the future.

That has also caused me to think about what about my photography I’m not doing, or don’t do well — that I want to do and learn how to master. Somewhat tied to that I found I had a list of photographers I keep turning to for inspiration and to deconstruct what they’re doing because what they’re doing is what I want to figure out how to do. Hence, my list of five photographers I want to be when I grow up.

Obviously, I can’t be all of them. I’ll never be any of them. But I can understand what they do and why they do it, and learn to integrate that into who I am and what I do. So here are the photographers I’m currently studying so I can continue trying to learn from them, because I believe it’ll make me a better photographer.

Michael Frye: not new to my list but still high on it. I’ve adapted his workflow as the basis for my own, and when I’ve gone shooting at Yosemite, I’ve tried to see the park as he sees it through his images, to help me learn what to look for in visualizing my own imagery. As he has time, he’s been doing a series of critiques on his blog that I find a quiet interesting and useful view into the thinking he puts into deciding how to process an image to make it the best possible image. His willingness to explain those processes and decisions has been and continues to be very useful to me and something I follow with great interest.

Jim Goldstein: Jim is probably the closest to the pure concept of what I want to be when I grow up. He’s a former high tech geek who’s made the leap into professional photographer. His photography is very compatible with my vision of what I want my photography to be.  He’s done a lot of work in social media and social marketing, as well as experimenting in ebook publishing, all areas that (now that I’m no longer tied down by HP’s “employees can’t do that” rules) I am looking forward to exploring in my own work. His ebook on White Sands was an inspiration to some of the ebook plans I’m starting to look at moving into 2012, and has some amazing photography as well as being a great example of how this new publishing form can be exploited. And he’s a very nice and accessible guy. All in all, if I were to make this jump to pro photography (which I’ve decided not to do. for now) my jump would look a lot like this.

George Barr: author of From Camera to Computer: How to Make Fine Photographs Through Examples, Tips, and Techniques and Why Photographs Work: 52 Great Images Who Made Them, What Makes Them Special and Why, Barr does a style of photography that’s very unlike anything I do — fine art architectural subjects with a strong abstract or pattern sensibility. I find what he does fascinating. When I try to emulate it, I find what I do sucks. Obviously, I need to keep working at this, but it’s a type and style of photography I want to figure out, although probably to translate more into the natural/landscape environment.

William Neill: There are two aspects of Neill’s work that draws me to it; he is a master as painting a natural landscape with light, and he has a strong vision for using abstraction in a natural venue to create very beautiful and moving images that are both representative of nature and not strongly photo-realistic. Both are at essence to me a very painterly approach instead of a more classic photography approach.  He’s also been doing some very interesting innovation in ebook publishing of his work which I recommend to you if you aren’t familiar with it.

G. Dan Mitchell: It’s not just his seeming ability to post a strong image every day (but that alone impresses the hell out of me). It’s that the images are invariably things that I feel I’m not very good at creating images of — and they’re consistently images I think to myself “I wish I’d taken that”. His images are less about iconic landscapes (think grand vistas from Tunnel View) and more about pulling out elements and bringing a focus to them. And he consistently nails a style of landscape I find I still struggle with; I seem to be able to take interesting “iconic” images of Yosemite, for instance, but getting down into the valley and making interesting images of the trees and features in the valley? That, to me, is one of Dan’s strengths, and a major weakness of mine and figuring that out will be a focus of mine in 2012. And part of that is continued study of how Dan does it so I can learn to see how he sees and adapt it into my own work.