PixelatedImage Blog

I alluded yesterday to the tendency of photographers, particularly working photographers who endeavor to do this for a living and therefore feel the stakes are higher, to compete with each other. Few things kill the creative spirit so efficiently.

We become photographers, most of us, because in this craft we discover a means of expression that suits us. And we love it so much we do it as much as we can, and then people begin to pay us to do it, which suits us just fine because we love doing it so much. But soon it becomes the bread and butter and because, we assume, there is only so much work out there, we become competitive. We look to other photographers and see how they’re making money, which markets they’re serving and what those markets want. Without knowing it we’re begun to drift towards the herd and away from our unique vision.

Yesterday I championed the value of knowing our place and fighting our weight. I think it’s just as important to know your place and find your niche. Find that place that you fit like a glove and do so well others will flock to you. Does Steve McCurry do weddings? Maybe, but he’s not known for it, is he? Does Annie Leibovitz shoot Nascar races? Does Moose Peterson shoot kiddie portraits? Joe McNally says “shoot what you love.” Same thing. What’s the one thing you love to shoot so much you could do it every day? You love shooting it so much you shoot it with a special affection and an eye knows the subtleties of the subject for having looked at it day-in and day-out? Find that niche and own it, baby. I’m not talking about being better than others, but about being unique, different from others.

“Yeah, but what if someone else already shoots that niche? I mean, I wanna shoot elk and stuff, and Moose Peterson already shoots that stuff. AND his name is MOOSE for crying out loud!! How can I compete with that!?” I hear ya. But you’re slipping into the comparison paradigm, again. It’s not a pyramid with room for only one at the top of each broad category. Make your own pyramid, in your own style, from your own angle. But make it yours. Unmistakably. Switching metaphors, make sure the red X you are standing on is yours and yours alone. There’s no room on Zack Arias’s X for me – it’s his and his alone. And if I try to usurp his then my own X, the place I alone was created to occupy and shine on, rests vacant.

In marketing speak this is what branding and positioning are all about. When the market thinks of you, what red X do they associate you with. Heck, if you’re smart and really creative your X won’t be red. Probably won’t even be an X. Do they think of you as a destination wedding photographer or as the guy who does weddings and portraits and Nascar and travel and dogs and still life and, oh, also landscapes and macro flower stuff. If it’s the latter then you stand on a very diluted X, my friend, and when the client goes looking for a destination photographer they’re going to look for the brightest red X in the style they prefer and go with him. Same with the client looking for portraits, Nascar, travel, dogs, and still life.

Know your place. Own it. Make it the brightest, most unique red X you can make it. And best of all, beyond all the marketing talk, is that this is the place you’ll be most challenged, most content, and most creative. Feeling frustrated? Where’s your X?

As a child I asked my parents to let me study Judo. Begged them. They conceded, I assume, because the last time I was beaten up it had been the day after I got my braces removed only to have my front two teeth broken by a bully using a wall as a weapon. My wimpyness was getting expensive.

So I went to Judo earned a couple belts, went competitive, got my skinny orange-belted butt handed to me on a platter by a guy with a brown-belt and I promptly retired. My competitive Judo career lasted less than a minute, if you count the time it took to peel me off the mat. Future historians will look back at that time in my life as “the wussy period.” Shoulda eased into it, should have fough someone with whom I was on level ground. Come to think of it, what the heck were they thinking putting me up against someone as close to the top of his game as I was to the bottom of mine?

I’ve since been more careful to fight my weight. It’s helpful to know your place. Keeps the dental bills down, for one. As a photographer knowing where your craft is at is important. Spend a couple hours on the internet and you’ll find green photographers talking trash about the more established ones. “I don’t know why that guy’s shooting for National Geographic and I’m not, I can shoot that stuff better anyways.” Really? But you aren’t are you? Instead of going out and shooting, you’re bitching and whining. I’m guilty of this too, but when I catch myself I remember that talking trash is not the same as working on your chops and getting the gigs. Comparing yourself to others doesn’t get the gigs, working does. Pay your dues, work the gigs at the level of your talent. As your talent and craft grows, so will the types of work you get. The only thing worse than not getting that big dream assignment is getting it long before you’re ready, and totally blowing it. Not alot of chances for a second round when you get whooped in the first. Sure, dream big, take on a little more than you think you can chew. But be smart about it. Not really alot of difference between a can of Whoop-ass and a can of Dumb-ass.

Know your place.

But don’t be limited by it.

Knowing your place means not only knowing where you’re at, but also knowing that your place is a constantly growing, and evolving, vector on your journey as a craftsman. Knowing your place means you take the gigs you know you can rock, it means learning from those that have gone before you and mentoring those that are coming up behind you. It means you take courage from how far you’ve come and find humility in how far you’ve yet to go. It means you constantly assess your strengths and you play to them, and you don’t flinch from your weakness, you find ways to strengthen them. How’s your lighting knowledge? Is it lacking? Read up. How’s your composition? Needs work? Take a course. How’s your ability to work with people and create compelling portraits? Never better? Make sure your market knows it, but don’t rest on your laurels.

The flipside is ugly. Not knowing your place leads either to arrogance or “I am a worm for I am small of talent and large of belly and ugly of face” false humility/self-loathing. It leads to comparing ourselves with others and envying their talent, their contracts, and their success. It’s a downward spiral and it will kill that beautiful, unique spark within you that’s evident in the best of your work. Don’t let it get a foothold.

Tomorrow; Know Your Place, Part Two. Finding Your Niche.

A good Monday morning to ya. I got some great feedback on my Global Workflow article. Articles like this always bring up a bunch of “yeah, but how do you…?” questions. A couple of them were about organizing and file naming in Lightroom, so I’ll walk you through some ideas I had about this.

First, you need to understand that Adobe Lightroom is more than a put files here and fix images there, kind of program. One of the genius things about Lightroom is that it operates on a database. So frankly, if you wanted to put 10,000 images all into one bigg-ass folder called My Photographs, Lightroom would handle it just fine. So this isn’t about how you structure your folder or buckets or drives. It’s about the tools within Lightroom to keep you organized. Second, you need to understand that I’m naturally pretty organized, my brain just knows where things are – most of the time. This arrogance will no doubt come back to bite me as I age, but for now it means I don’t have a huge organization system I can teach you, just a bunch of tools I can show you. So in the spirit of The Big Q:

The Big Q: How do you keep organized in Lightroom?

1. File Structures. Ok, I said this wasn’t about this. But it’s just way easier for me to navigate to my folder: Round The World > Havana than it is to search in other ways. It’s how I work. So I keep my stuff in folders that are usually a simple description of a place or project and that one is inside a folder delineated by year. So the structure would be 2009 > Round The World > Havana.

2. File Naming. When I import images I generally convert the RAW files to DNG and re-name the file. Did you know you can change the file-naming templates in LR? I have mine set to YYYYMMDD_Text_Seq but you can set to whatever you like. In the import dialogue in the File Naming section click the Template field and go to Edit. Now just add the fields you want in there. I like custom text because if my file name is 20090108_Havana_0001 I can always just use the search function in LR and find all images with Havana in the name. Easy. Also makes it easier to find if I’m searching for images in Bridge, which I do occassionally.

3. Keywording. I’m getting better at this as my forays into the world of stock begin to make more sense to me. But generally I’m lousy at it and only paint with the broadest of strokes. So I use Keywords like Travel, Cuba, Havana – mostly so I can keyword an entire folder of images at once. Still, the more disciplined at this you are, the easier it’ll be to find the right images using LR’s search functions.

4. Color Labels. I use colour labels on my files to indicate use. Some are personal (yellow), some are for clients (red), some are for stock (purple) and some are use-pending (blue). So if I know it’s a shot of Havana that’s in my stock library I use the filters, search for Havana with keywords (Havana) and ask LR to filter out only the red labels.

5. Ratings. I rate my best work with 5 stars. Makes it easy to toggle the filters on and off – want to see my 5 star images from Havana, no problem. Navigate to the Havana folder and toggle the filters to show only the 5 stars. Or search for images keyworded Havana and rated with 5 stars. Or….

6. Use Collections and Smart Collections. Collections are easy. Create a new one called Havana 5 Stars, then drag in all the Havana 5 Star images. Done. Now it’s there anytime you want to see those. But Smart Collections go one better because, well, they’re smart. You can create a collection that is dynamic. Let’s say I do a trip to Havana every couple months for a long-term project. I create a Smart Collection called Havana Best, and when I do so it allows me to specify the filters. So I create one that automatically puts ALL images with keyword Havana, rating 5 star, and colour-label Red into the Smart Collection. Each time I come back from Havana and import, keyword, and rate/label my images it automaticall updates the collection. Brilliant.

This isn’t a full-on tutorial, I realize. Might even leave you with more questions. Some of you are already clicking the comments button, “yeah, but how do I…?” Tell you what, FIRST open LR and play with it for 10 minutes, see if you can figure it out. I’m betting you can, and you’ll retain it better. LR is incredibly intuitive when it comes to this stuff. But if questions remain or just dying to tell me I spelled something wrong, let me know

Got a tip I completely overlooked? Comments, as always, are open. On a completely unrelated issue – my book, Within The Frame, comes out 5 weeks from today.

Some of you know my story. Here’s the short form for those that don’t. Been a photographer since I was 14, wanted to be Steve McCurry. Who didn’t? Life zagged and I went to college, a theology school, after a summer on the Amazon River. Kept shooting as a hobby. 5 years later life zagged again and I became a comedian for 12 years. Still shooting as a hobby. Went to Haiti. Zag #3, retired from comedy and finally came back to my first passion. I learned a lot along the way, and many of those lessons have stood me in good stead.  I loved that gig, got where I wanted to go, but this one’s more…me.

I can juggle flaming torches on a 6ft unicycle; my mother bought me my first unicycle for Christmas. The next year she bought me a straitjacket. Christmas around our place was a little weird for a few years there. I think they’re all pretty relieved to be buying me camera gear again. And while I doubt I’ll ever be called on to juggle or do a 2-hour stage show again, my diversion into show-biz, specifically comedy, taught me much that’s transferable. Here’s a few things professional comedy taught me about being a vocational photographer.

1. Show Biz is 10% show, 90% biz. Now I’m not sure about the math on this but it’s the same for photographers who shoot professionally. You need to hone those photography skills all the time. But you also need to hone the professional skills. When’s the last time you bought a book about trends in viral marketing or learned how to keep better financial records?

2. That’s Hack, Man! There are few insults in the comedy world that’ll strip a man of his pride like telling him his routine is hack. Cliche. Already Been Done. It pushes the best comics to make their routines as unique to them as humanly possible. Just because it’s original doesn’t necessarily make it funny, but it’s part of guarding your artistic integrity, and for a group of people who seem to be all funny all the time, the best of them can be very neurotic about this. The best comics don’t try to be someone else. Neither do the best photographers. Annie Liebovitz isn’t where she is today because she tried to be Cartier-Bresson.

3. The best comedy is tight, intentionally edited stuff. There’s not much room in comedy for extraneous bits. If you want to keep you LPM (laughs per minute) up you need to trim the fat. Set it up, get to the punchline, and then call back. Seinfeld is the king of the call-back. I’ve counted his LPM as high as 11, a good comedian will get 5-7. Comedians know how to get to the good stuff faster. Photographers need to hone their editing skills, both within the image – there’s a reason Capa said “if your photographs aren’t good enough you aren’t close enough” – and in their portfolios. Tighten it up, it makes for stronger communication.

4. Comedians understand what makes people laugh and they craft their routines accordingly. Do you know how people read your images? If not, how do you expect to lead their eye to what you consider important? Photographers must be visually literate. I preach this all the time, but the WHY is important, it informs the HOW. As in HOW you make an image depends on WHY you’re making it, where you want them to look, and what you want to say. Only visual literacy gets you there.

5. Performers understand what it takes to create and leverage celebrity. Their careers survive on the strength of their fan base, which of course is only partly dependent on the strength of their talent. Photographers who understand marketing, branding, positioning, and how to honestly leverage these things within their intended market, have a better chance of making it, than a photographer with the same talent who does not. Uncomfortable with the word “celebrity”? Don’t think you need it. What if you use “word of mouth” instead? Seems pretty important now, doesn’t it.

6. Comedians – the very best ones – know from whence they came. They know the heritage of their art. They can tell you who did the first bit about airplane food, where Cosby paid his dues, and when Vaudeville died. They know that to understand the present and future of their craft they need to understand the historical trajectory of the craft, where’s it been, where’s it going. Not all of them do, but the best ones seem to.

7. They take their craft very seriously. Ever been to a convention of comedians? You’d think it would be all laughter all the time. And it is. Sort of. But sit in on a conversation with six comics discussing the craft and you’ll think you just dropped in on a planning session with the mafia. They get very serious, and very articulate in between the fart gags. They know that the more seriously they take their craft offstage, the better it will be on stage when the house lights dim.

My time in comedy taught me much more than this. I don’t do comedy anymore, but when I am shooting in Africa, surrounded by 300 villagers laughing at me wiggling my butt or butchering the swahili word for “smile” I’m right back where I started. Ain’t no business like show business, but the similarities, to me, are striking.

Have a great weekend , y’all.

I know there are many of you that don’t get Photoshop User Magazine. I also know you know that I think you should be a member of NAPP and getting this magazine as part of your membership. But I’ll save the sermon for another time. The kind folks at Photoshop User Magazine have graciously allowed me to post the PDF version of my latest article, a gift of love to all you non-NAPP folk out there who want to read the article but don’t subscribe. Click HERE for a downloadable PDF version of my article GLOBAL WORKFLOW, an excerpt from the April/May 2009 edition of Photoshop User.

That’s the actual technical term, or it’s what I call it anyways. More and more I’m engaging in this kind of framing. I’m just that kind of guy. What can I say, sometimes I run with scissors too. Increasingly I go out of my way to Put Crap In The Way (PCITW) while other, more responsible, photographers are busy doing the mirror-opposite, Taking Crap Out of The Way (TCOOTW).

Before you write me off as some lunatic fringe of the photography world (again), hear me out. I do this for two reasons. But first let me explain the technique.

First you take a simple composition, then you, uh, put crap in the way. You move until you get a strong, usually OOF (out of focus) foreground that partly obscures your main subject matter. Or you wait until someone or something moves into your framing. Option 2 is less predictable. Take the image above as an example. I have other portraits of this man, a tea house owner in Cairo, that are more traditional. He’s the foreground, his shop is the background. Nothing wrong with them, except that I have harddrives full of these shots. Five minutes later, once he’s gone back to ignoring me, I shot him from another angle, one that gave me a little junk to put between my lens (in this case an 85/1.2 wide open) and him. Much more interest than the portraits I shot. Anyways, that the simplified How-To, it’s not complicated; I’m a simple man. So here’s the Why-To.

Reason One. My compositions tend to be pretty simple, and clean. This is my rut. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but I’m engaging in intentional rut-out-getting behaviour. I think you’ll agree, it’s not terribly radical. In fact I think my compositions still need further complications. I’m a work in progress. That’s Reason One, Reason Two is better.

Reason Two. PCITW does more than complicate my compositions. It gives the images a sense of depth and that sense of depth gives the viewer a greater sense of being there. Like the use of wide angle lenses pulls the viewer into a scene, PCITW does the same thing through a similar visual means. It creates a stronger sense of foreground, midground and background, than a longer lens and a simpler composition might normally do. A viewer who feels more engaged by an image has a greater chance of responding to it in a deeper way. So that’s why the recently more intentional effort to PCITW.

Are you a TCOOTW-type of person or a PCITW-type person? Try the other shoe on a while, add to your visual repertoire of tools, jump the rut. Give it a try. The PCITW technique is growing on me.

I shot these (click to enlarge) over an early breakfast while on assignment in Bangladesh recently. Our breakfast joint was no more than a hole in the wall off the main street, we’d go in at dawn, somewhere between the rising volume of the morning call to prayer and the sun coming up hot and fast. Halfway through our first plates of roti, dahl, and eggs, the sun would peak through the door and sidelight the steam from the fresh roti. And by the time I finished shooting, my meal was cold. I looked forward to these mornings, it’s rare that the light and the food is so good all at once, the shooting-grounds only inches from my breakfast plate.

I look at these frames now and they seem so serene, no hints whatsoever of the buidling chaos and noise in the streets, as though the moment the sun awakes all the horns in the city wake up and begin their incessant din until long after the sun’s gone down on the other side of day. And in those hours we’d be miles away, in small villages tucked up against the Indian border, photographing children and families, listening to stories of how elephants trampled their home, and how they’ve rebuilt and moved on. I shake my head alot on these trips.

The quality and direction of light while shooting food is absolutely crucial. Watching it play in this man’s kitchen morning after morning gave me a renewed appreciation for the subtleties of light, not only from one hour to the next, but from one minute, one moment, to the next. You turn and it’s gone. I love this about our craft, playing with something so intangible, so fleeting.