Wave your camera at your Christmas tree

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This tree has not even had any eggnog.

My Apple calendar is a beauty!

I recently ordered calendars from three sources to see what they would look like, and I have received products from Vistaprint and Apple. When I get the third one (ordered through SmugMug) I’ll write a post about my impressions of all three.

For the moment I will just comment on the Apple calendar. It’s outstanding! As befits an Apple product, it arrives well packaged and delivered by FedEx. The calendar is packed in an elegant white sleeve, and both are inserted into a sturdy carton. The pages are of ample size, and the printing quality is very good. The pages are spiral bound. The price is just $19.99! I used to buy Ansel Adams calendars for nearly that price.

You can make the calendars any length from 12 to 24 months, and you can choose the first month. It doesn’t have to start with January.

This is a cool way to display your favorite photographs! You can assemble your Apple calendar using iPhoto. The program will even import birthdays from your contact list!

Calendars don’t have to start with January

Celebrate YOUR new year whenever you like.

People have been messing with calendars for thousands of years trying to get them right. We now feel pretty much locked in to the one we know, but I want to suggest one tiny little bit of wiggle room.

We don’t have to start calendars with the month of January. Calendars start in January because they are massed produced and one size must fit all. We don’t have to mass produce calendars anymore. I just ordered one each from three different companies to check the quality of printing and presentation.

I ordered from Vistaprint, Apple, and SmugMug. I’ll report on them once they arrive.

My point in this post is that you could start a calendar with your birth month, or with June to commemorate the summer solstice. We can give ourselves a bit more leeway about calendars now that they do not have to be printed thousands of copies at a time, and we can determine if they contain twelve months or twenty-four, or any number in between. You don’t have to be Pope Gregory to make a little change like this. You don’t even have to be religious, or be an astronomer. Anyone with about twenty bucks can print a calendar starting with the month of his or her choice.

I’ll have more to say once the calendars arrive and I can report on them, so please check back. In the meantime, break your mental bond with the twelve-month, January-dependent calendar. It’s a new age.

A potent means of self-exploration

The Getty Center Museum in Los Angeles is currently exhibiting a collection of self-portraits in various media. I like their insights into this genre. They say on their website:

Portraits can do more than immortalize the likeness of a sitter. They may also construct, project, or perpetuate a certain perception of the sitter or their position in society. Additionally, they may convey something about the rapport between the portraitist and sitter, display the maker’s skill, or merely experiment with technique or style. In the case of self-portraits, the artist and sitter are one, further complicating attempts to view this kind of representation as an objective account. In addition to their potential for self-presentation, such images have served as a potent means of self-exploration.

The phrase that strikes me most powerfully is the reference to “a potent means of self-exploration.” I practice yoga, which if done thoroughly, includes a large increment of self-exploration. It does not follow that yogis are interested in portraiture.  The role of portraiture in self-discovery is apparently arrived at by a different path.

Richard Ruthsatz and I are currently staging a cellphone self-portrait fair among our two circles of Facebook friends. There is a smattering of interest at best. None of our accomplished photographer friends have shown any interest.  Whether my photographer friends are snobs is an exploration for another post, but clearly Richard is not. You can see the discussion thread and the images we have so far HERE.

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The images in the accompanying slide show illustrate some points that seem significant to me. Among them is the idea that you should take a slow, thoughtful look at the animals in your life. Another is that smiling is probably the least informative expression a person is likely to have. A third is that a portrait might be more revealing if the individual is not actually in it. I’ve seen a lot of terrific work done with icons such as reflections and shadows. The possibilities stir and provoke the imagination in the most interesting ways.

If people understood the value and potency of portraits to help them reveal who they are we photographers would have client waiting lists stretching months into the future. Wouldn’t that be fun?

The cast of players in order of appearance: Katlyn Lacoste (professional model), Bill Finch, Kat Conour (yoga teacher), me in a self-portrait, Jasper with Michelle Yauger, Karma, an effigy of me, and Yuri Makino. My deepest thanks to all of them.

Inspiration, or, it’s news to me

My most popular recent photograph. This is Sianna Sherman and Theo Kyriakos. I recently attended a yoga retreat they led. It was wonderful.

I’ve found some really great photography stuff on the internet lately, and this post is all about sharing it with you. Hopefully I’m not the only photographer in the United States who is just discovering these.

I’ll start with Manjari Sharma’s series of shower portraits. Yes, she invites people to take a shower, and she photographs them. She writes:

Many of my subjects shared intimate details of their life with me and every new person in the shower became a brand new allegory. With every new visit I had a new protagonist; A new plot and a new parable of hurt and heroic that came undone under that shower – My Shower. I felt a personal mythology was being shared in that shower. An independent study that I have gotten addicted to.

I especially like her reference to “a personal mythology.” If I had thought of this motif I would have scolded myself, not sure of my real motives. I applaud her for not getting stuck in some bog of self-doubt and self-reproach like I would have. The images are marvelous, and they shine with respect for each of her subjects.

Where did I happen across her work? In an online magazine call Burn. If you are a serious photographer, or are becoming one, you really must give yourself the tour. David Alan Harvey has done a remarkable job.

Another site I found engaging and remarkable is about prison photography. I had never thought of taking on prison as a photographic theme, and if I had I would have convinced myself that a photographer would never get access. It just shows how wrong I can be. This project was created by Pete Brook and launched with money from Kickstarter. An announcement on his blog tells of some current plans:

Between October 1st and December 20th, 2011, I am interviewing over two dozen photographers who have documented prisons. In addition, I am speaking with over a dozen leading practitioners in prison arts, prison education, prison law and activism.

If prison photography makes you solemn, Carli Davidson‘s photographs of dogs shaking will cheer you up again. She has a Facebook page, and I “liked” it, and you might decide to do so too

Carli has a couple of self-portraits that are really cool. I have a self-portrait game going on in Facebook, and hers inspire me to new heights.

Thanks to all the people I’ve mentioned in this post for the inspiration!

Your Tucson portrait photographer, Dan Wilson.

10 tips for Christmas photographs

Sunset brings a luscious kind of light to photographs.

Christmas is coming, and New Year’s. These occasions provide an abundance of photo opportunities. The holidays also remind us that another year has passed. Did you get all the photos you need? Kids won’t be kids forever. It seems like the family doesn’t gather as often as they used to. All in all, there is plenty of motivation to put your camera to good use.

There are some simple ways to improve your individual photos and your collection as well. Here are ten that may be helpful:

1. Get started right away! Christmas is just around the corner! This is especially true if you plan to present some of the photos as gifts.
2. Choose your time of day carefully. Days are short this time of year. Be sure you have enough light to make photos you will be proud of. Sunset is an excellent time for producing luscious gold tones in your photos, but you have to be well organized because your window of opportunity is brief. If you have an iPhone, the Sunset Sunrise app provides the exact time of sunset and last light. Last light marks the end of the shooting opportunity.
3. Photograph the details in your home and holiday decor, and not just the people. The photo of Santa taking a well-deserved rest is a typical example. Details provide a context for the photographs of people, and they help you tell the whole story of your celebration.
4. Let the family know you plan to take photos. Give them an opportunity to dress appropriately and to plan any props they might want to bring with them. Use props creatively. Your choice might be flannel antlers for the dog, or a complete Santa costume for yourself. Have fun!
5. Use the “night” setting to capture the glow of decorative lights while illuminating your primary subject with a burst of flash. If you use the “auto” setting the camera will only record the area lighted with flash. Advanced photographers will probably shoot in manual mode in these lighting situations.
   

   Decorations and other incidental items help establish the atmosphere in your photo gallery.

6. Move in close to reduce clutter in the scene.  Cast off gift wrap and many other items compete for attention in a holiday photograph. Simplify your composition to emphasize your primary subject.
7. Remember to include incidental subjects to add atmosphere to your gallery.
8. If you have a flash that pivots, take advantage of it. Pivoting the flash enables you to bounce the light off a wall or ceiling. Actually, any white or near-white object is helpful to bounce a soft, pretty light onto your subject. Bouncing your flash is one of the best ways to improve snapshots. It reduces, or even eliminates, the heavy dark shadows that often produce a jarring effect in snapshots.
9. Take plenty of pictures! Expect to reject a lot of photos. Chances are you are taking action shots more than you are working on carefully posed subjects. People will continue to talk as you photograph them, and this means a lot of photos won’t be flattering. Take enough that you can comfortably discard half of them.
10. Hire a professional if you want to be in the pictures yourself and join the season’s activities rather than photographing them! If that’s your plan, make that phone call now!

Use the "night" setting, or shoot in manual mode to pick up the soft holiday lights.

If you are extra ambitious, put your video camera on a tripod and sit down for a conversation with the grandparents. The grandchildren will thank you for it when they are old enough to appreciate your foresight. Grandparents’ wisdom and memories ought not be lost.

You are the teacher

At our best. we are teachers.

The punchline of this post is this: We don’t need smart people these days so much as we need smart families, communities, and congregations. Being a smart individual is just half the job, and maybe less.

Recently two friends told me they don’t know how to download photos from their cellphone or camera to their computer. These are responsible adults who have completed many important tasks in their lives. The telling point is not that they did not know how to complete the task, the telling point is that they had decided to live with this situation.

For geographical reasons I could only help one of them. I was able to help my friend Darla when I visited her in Santa Monica.  During the tutorial she kept reminding me that I didn’t need to spend time showing her this technical process. We could be “visiting”, to use a word my grandmother employed to describe what neighbors do in the other person’s house.

Technical training did not, it seemed, qualify as visiting. It did for me. I enjoy learning new stuff, and I enjoy showing people something they want to learn that I happen to understand. My friend Richard Ruthsatz teaches me new stuff all the time. He has critiqued my work over many years. His generosity is legendary. I share with him, too.

We grow when we teach. We also enrich our community.

One of the great teachers in the field of photography is Derrick Story. I discovered him when I subscribed to Lynda.com. He has an extensive tutorial on Aperture 3 on that site. I recommend it highly. He also has tutorials on his website, The Digital Story. In a recent story he compares the fancy Gary Fong light diffuser ($50 to $60 a copy) to an improvised Tupperware diffuser. Conclusion? Save your money. Go for the Tupperware. I have the Fong gadget, and it’s not that special.

Derrick makes his community smarter, and I like that, since I am a member of the community via an internet connection or two.

Share what you know. The value of knowledge resides in your success in spreading it across your community. You want to be distinctive? Rely on talent, not knowledge. Talent can’t be copied.

The audience for art

I don’t get to see Richard Ruthsatz as often as I’d like, but whenever we get together we talk about the audience for great photography, and for art in general. I argue that the commercial audience is shrinking, and to prove my point I pull a few magazines from the basket under Richard’s coffee table, and I challenge him to show me a photograph in any of them that he would be happy to put his name on.

Even in the fancy magazines we have to hunt diligently. Most of the photographs are imitative and manipulative. They are clones that are intended to stir envy, or lust, or some such reaction in the viewer for an item of clothing or a piece of jewelry. They do not intrigue, or create any sense of wonder.

Sure, there are magazines published for photographers to share great work among themselves, but that message is not reaching the world at large. There are people like my friend Daniel Plumer who put gorgeous landscapes online for the world to see—for free! Yes, we photographers communicate among ourselves.

Richard has often suggested to me that the decline in  the demand for quality is due to an unwillingness to pay what exceptional work costs. I think something else happens first that makes his point moot. There is a lack of interest in quality itself in the business community.

I’m reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. The main contribution Jobs made to the world, in my view, was to take an extreme stand in favor of excellence. Most people in business think that excellence is not necessary, and not even relevant to what their business is all about. If you offer excellent work to managers of such organizations they will not resonate to it. Long before you get to any discussion of price, they have zoned out mentally because you are offering something to them that is far beyond the boundaries in which they operate.

Managers today want to get by, and they don’t want their time wasted with the seemingly Herculean tasks associated with achieving and sustaining excellence. The danger in this goes beyond the problems it creates for artists. The obsession with “good enough” pervades most big organizations. Milton Glaser is my guru in this area. In his remarkable book, Art is Work, he recommends dispensing with the notion of art altogether. Art, he suggests, should be blended into a category we would call great work. I consider my iPhone to be an example of great work. It’s clever, and I have an endless amount of fun with it. Richard Avedon’s photographs are great work. I return to view them often, and they move me every single time. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is great work. I never tire of seeing it.

If you join an organization and you advocate great work, you will most likely be pulled down, or even shunted aside, by the people who see their mission as getting by. What do we do in the face of this?

The failure in matters of taste begins at work, and then it rubs off on us in a personal way. How many people do you know who are content to show you pictures of their kids, their pride and joy, on their cellphone? Do they think they will still have that image on their phone twenty years from now?

I recommend reading Milton Glaser’s book, especially the text from his speeches in the last part of the book. More immediately, you can watch Michael Jang share a bit of philosophy in THIS VIDEO from the Lenscratch blog. His advice about creating great work, like Mr. Glaser’s, is “do it anyway” whether you see an audience for it or not.

I think it is important to understand the obstacle we face. There might be a money issue behind the indifference to excellence, but we are not dealing with that yet. We are dealing with an affinity for mediocrity because so many people think there is safety in mediocrity. Our current economic problems are due, in part, to the fact that big business offers us so little that is interesting or creative. How many hamburger restaurant chains do we really need?

Steve Jobs, who was clearly a troubled individual, will be remembered mostly for “putting a dent in the universe” as he liked to say. That zeal is what makes  “great work.” Putting a dent in the universe requires boldness and tenacity. That is probably while so few people do it.

I welcome your thoughts.

An interview with model Katlyn Lacoste

Katlyn Lacoste

Katlyn Lacoste travels the country offering her services as a professional model, and she mostly works nude. I shot with her in 2010, and based on that experience I recommend her highly. After the shoot we sat and talked for a couple of hours, and I discovered that she is a fascinating person. We later arranged a second shoot, but Tucson was cut from her itinerary at the last minute.

She obtains many of her bookings through an email campaign she launches three or four weeks in advance of her planned departure. Casting her net in this manner results in a wide range of responses in spite of her efforts to screen prospects.

Through websites such as Model Mayhem she is able to view a gallery of samples of a photographer’s work and read a short statement in his or her profile that describes the person’s experience and style. With this information she can make a tentative evaluation of both talent and character.

This method does not really filter fine enough, and she garners plenty of people who are ready and eager to unload their anxieties and hang ups on a person they have yet to meet.

She encounters people who want her to work for free in the interest of creating art. Her response is, “You paid for your camera, didn’t you?” She adds, “I have people whip out their iPhones sometimes.”

She explained, “You get the gist of people through email, if they’re friendly or whatever. Then you get emotionally prepared for each person before you show up for the shoot. Then, when you work with them you find men who are recently divorced or are going through some kind of emotional trauma. Sometimes they are just mean, or they hate women in general. I once ended a shoot in the middle because of the photographer’s attitude. You would think a photographer would be attentive enough to notice that the model was becoming angry. He didn’t.”

Katlyn has so many beautiful poses in her repertoire that it can be difficult for the photographer to keep up.

She added, “Those shoots don’t happen often, but they leave a mark, and you remember them.”

“You get a wild ride of different experiences on the road,” she said. “I’m comfortable working with anyone from amateur to professional, just so long as they are good to you.”

I asked if she has a zillion pictures of herself. “Uh huh,” she replied.  Then she blushed.

“I have three prints hanging in my bedroom, and I give a lot of photographs to my grandmother. She was an art teacher, and she critiques my work.” Her mom is next on the list, but her interest is in photographs that are published in magazines. Dad is last, she explained. It took a while for him to be comfortable with the nudes. “He’s a Republican,” she said in the way of explaining his reluctance.

Katlyn is a photographer, and she draws with pen and ink. Her photography interests are a bit skewed: she shoots Polaroid film. Yes, Target, among other places, still sells it. I received a hand-made greeting card from her not long ago. On the cover she drew a full-frontal view of herself with one of her best anatomical features emphasized. The illustration is quite charming, if your tastes are anything like mine.

Her priorities are turning increasingly to painting and drawing over modeling. She will soon re-locate to Florida, and she is interested in finding an agent to represent her work.

She is not giving up her artistic ambitions, just redirecting them. “One of my major goals in life is to never have a corporate job,” she said. “I want people to know it’s OK to use your imagination, because the more you grow up you lose what you had as a kid. I want to show that using your imagination is OK. It’s a dream, and dreams make you go somewhere.”

Then she said, and I promised to quote it, “People don’t have enough appreciation of who they are.”

In my all-too-rare encounters with Katlyn I continue to expand my appreciation of who she is.

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Katlyn’s contact information: Model Mayhem profile; Tumblr; Studio (Model Mayhem and Tumblr profiles contain nudity). We conducted this interview via Skype on November 15, 2011.

Things one finds on the internet

And now, class, two hours of slides from my summer vacation.

I use the internet to confirm, validate, and otherwise expand on things that I write about in my blogs. In the course of doing that today I found a couple of interesting sites that might appeal to you.

My first discovery is a blog called Lenscratch. The blog is interesting in general, and THIS LINK will take you to a post featuring self-portraits that I found quite entertaining. I like many of them a lot. I’ll return and explore the whole blog in more detail.

I like Wired, and this summary of their favorite photographers can keep you busy for a while. Wired reports, for instance, what Blake Andrews would like to see in photo blogs:

Instead, he’d like to see “more unpublished street photography circa 1965-1985; more creative quizzes, lists, contests, and generally interactive posts; and more trading of prints, books and other physical objects.”

I don’t have any street photography from that era, and not much from the current one, I’m bad at constructing quizzes, and nobody enters my contests when I have them. Interactiveness depends on my readers, and I have no control over them either. Still, I like his ideas.

It’s a good saying: “So many books, so little time.” It’s now true of blogs.