The Next Step (Part 2)
I was glad to see a couple comments from some friends on the first half of this monologue. Both friends who left feedback on the original post are accomplished photographers, and I admire their work. Both of them, however, posted ideas that aren't what I had in mind. I stopped the first half of this post without answering my own question intentionally. I was sorta hoping to get some feedback with ideas about what the 'next step' in this game is or should be. Joe and Nathan both agree that the next step should be pushing and expanding boundaries. Both of them also agree that teaching is a worthwhile endeavor. I agree with both ideas, and I'll also discuss them here.
Pushing the Boundaries:
Exploring new artistic concepts and venturing outside the box is definitely something everyone should do. This idea, however, is still an mid-game concept in this game of chess. After securing the center of the board, our objective becomes one of breaking down the defensive barrier of our opponent and ultimately producing a checkmate. The checkmate is our goal. Getting outside our box with the camera may help expedite this process if we don't already know what our final goal will be. Exploring new ideas may help us realize the unknown goal. We may stumble across something that sucks us in like the smell that triggers our senses when we walk past the Godiva chocolate shop in the mall. We know there is something good there, but we just have to walk inside to see what it is. This idea does examine ways to the 'next step.'
Teaching:
I would love to teach, and suprisingly enough, I have been working on that idea for a few months. It's not visible on this website yet, but I'm working on an online classroom, but it's quite time consuming to write the text and prepare lessons for a class. I think that teaching photography would be quite rewarding in many ways, but I just don't have a great venue for that... yet...
So what is the next step?
As I mentioned in the first part of this discussion, lots of photographers spend many hours producing images in an effort to receive external validation from their circle of friends. This is a valid part of the game, but I think we need to look inward instead. What is the subject (or subjects) that we love to photograph on a personal level? Should we remain random and just pay attention to whatever we see or should we focus to produce a body of work that encompasses our personal passions?
I guess the answer to this would be based on overall goals. If photography is providing the bread and butter, we may be limited in what we can do towards our personal goals beyond putting food on the table. In some rare instances, it is entirely possible to let your passions provide for you, but there are only a few who can make that happen. Most of the professional photographers I know are booked up with weddings and commercial work to the point that their personal passions in photography take a constant back seat. There is one in particular who is in such demand in my town that he takes his vacations and leaves his camera gear at home just to get away from photography for a while. Maybe his commercial work has become his passion, but it wasn't like that for him when he started out in photography.
There is nothing wrong with commercial work being the passion. By the same token, there is nothing wrong with flowers, pets, children, wagon wheels, and sunsets. I simply believe that the key is finding out what or where the passion is and following it...
The Next Step
Canon EOS 30D / Canon 50mm f/1.4 @ f/2.0 / 36mm Extension Tube / 1/100" / ISO 200 / Incandescent Light
We're finally getting some more rain around here, so playing outside today is out of the question. I wandered around the yard for a few minutes, camera in hand, before the rain started coming hard enough to push me back inside. I was just in the mood to photograph something, and I didn't really care what it was. I haven't been spending a lot of time lately on my personal endeavors in photography, and I'm in a little withdrawal at the moment.
Daisies, and flowers in general, seem to be the brunt of many snide remarks within my personal community of photographers. My associations with other photographers seem to be at a beginner and amateur level, and those people love to spew words such as cliche and overdone and stereotypical. "How many times am I going to have to look at photos of flowers? If I've seen one, I've seen them all..." I don't know the answer to these questions. If I had to venture a guess, I would probably say that those who make these comments are in a stage of trying to produce their first masterpiece or something. They know it won't come from a flower, a pet, or a child... or at least they think it won't. Their objectives are fairly narrow though. They try to impress those within their community. When you find yourself in a group of photographers that is learning various processes and techniques, you quickly realize that what's important in any given photograph whatever topic, process, or technique is on today's table. The choices of subject don't seem to be as significant as a technique or a compositional aspect.
I know when I was starting out in photography, I fell into this mode of operation also. Technique was more important to me than anything else. Through this process, I learned technical skills with the camera, and today I'm quite comfortable with technical ideas. I can make my camera perform whatever task is before me. I can make technically great photographs of the most mundane subject with absolutely no problem. When a photographer reaches this point, what's next?
The next step is the tough one. Everyone can learn how to use a camera. Some may take longer than others, but anyone with the desire to achieve can learn the process. Moving beyond that level is where the real challenge in photography comes. There are no books on this subject, and there is no formula for success.
Canvas On Demand
The photograph above shows a 16x24 canvas that is gallery wrapped on 1.5" thick stretcher bars that I just received today from Canvas On Demand. Some friends of mine turned me on to this service recently, so I went to check it out. When you sign up for a Pro account (no charge for this) on their website, they will give you an $84 credit toward your first canvas print purchase. I spent my $84 credit on this 16x24 (plus $15 freight) and I'm very impressed with the result. I really like the gallery wrap option where the image wraps around the side of the framing. This gives a customer an option when it comes to displaying the final result. This piece can be hung without a frame, or it can be framed with the customer's choice in framing as well. Hanging hardware was included with the purchase.
Normally, I'm not really into photography printed on canvas, but I can definitely see the value in it. I'm going to make this option available to my customers. I'm not sure how I would price something like this just yet either. Under normal circumstances, this particular piece (or any of the same size) would cost me $100 delivered. In the artist's game, I would have to sell this piece for about $300 to make a decent profit on it. If I sold it for $300 and paid a 30-40% commission to whatever venue I chose to place it for sale, I would profit about $100.
Hmong New Year
I had an interesting assignment today. I photographed the Hmong New Year celebration at the local fairgrounds. I really felt like I was in a foreign country, because there were a couple thousand people there and I didn't hear hardly any English spoken. I met Zoua Lor (pictured above). She's 96 years old and was enjoying the event :)
My Photography Backup Strategy
The Hickory High School Varsity Cheerleaders ride an antique fire truck during the 2006 Hickory Christmas Parade...
As a photographer, I have unique requirements for backing up my digital photographs. I make a lot of photos every week, and the sheer amount of storage space required for that is tremendous. I don't delete anything. I even keep my bad photos just in case there may be some oddball use for them in the future.
The Microsoft Windows operating system creates a special "My Documents" folder when it's installed on any personal computer. This is simply a logical place to store documents that you create, including photographs. Within the My Documents folder, there is another special folder called "My Pictures" for photographs. This folder is my starting point for saving photographs that I shoot on a regular basis. In my "My Pictures" folder, I have created several folders, but the primary photography folder is simply called "Photos." Each time I shoot a batch of photos, I create a new folder within the "Photos" folder that is named with the date and subject in this format:
2007-11-12 - Purple Garden Flowers
When I name folders like this, they stay in alphabetical order with the newest folders at the bottom of the list and I have a sequential view of all my current photo shoots.
My PC has two internal 160gb hard disk drives and one external 120gb USB hard drive. Every morning at 3am, my PC runs an automated scheduled backup of the "My Documents" folder to my secondary internal hard disk drive. This process creates my first backup of my photography and any other documents that exist in my "My Documents" folder. The purpose of this backup is to have a recovery option if my primary hard disk drive fails. I can simply replace the drive, reinstall the operating system, and then restore my personal data, including all my current photography. The problem with this procedure is that my hard disk drives are not large enough to keep ALL my photography online all the time. My primary hard disk drive would fill up rather quickly. This is where my external USB hard disk drive comes into play.
My PC runs an automated script every night that just copies the contents of my "Photos" folder over to the external USB disk drive. At this point, I have two backup copies of my photographs. The first backup exists on my secondary internal hard drive and the second backup exists on my external USB hard disk drive.
Periodically, my primary internal hard drive starts to get full, so I have a need to free up some space. At this point, I start copying my older photo shoots in the "Photos" folder to DVD for storage. After I copy them to the DVD, I delete them from my primary hard disk drive, but leave them on my external USB hard drive until that drive starts to get too full. The external USB drive allows me to have up to 110gb or so of current photography readily accessible without having to go back to DVD to get images that I may need. As the external USB drive starts to get full, I delete a few of the older photo folders from that drive to free up additional space. The external USB drive currently lets me keep 4-6 months of my most recent photographs online. I hope to replace the 120gb drive with a 500gb drive soon, which should let me keep a lot more photos active, but I just haven't done that yet.
This backup method is a very inexpensive and fairly comprehensive way of backing up large amounts of data. The only problem I see with this method is the fact that I'll have a LOT of work to do whenever DVD is replaced with some other type of storage media in the future. With backups of digital data, I can't rely on DVD for a lifetime of usability. I have already run into this issue once when I decided that I needed to make my hard backups on DVD instead of CD. I had to load all of my CD data back onto hard drives and burn all that to DVD, which took quite a long time to do. That day will come again when DVD is replaced by something else that is higher capacity and more reliable.
In reality, I could build a RAID-5 disk drive array with a lot of storage space and keep all of my photography online all the time. The fault tolerance of a RAID-5 array is rather good, and the likelihood of losing all my photography would be slim, but not an impossibility.
It's sort of ironic when you think about how much more complicated it is to back up digital photo files as compared to filing away strips of film :)
Keeping Up with Blogs
I guess if you are reading this, you are a blog follower and possibly a blogger as well. I follow quite a few blogs myself, and I have been searching for the best way to keep up with what's going on in the blogs I follow. In the beginning, I was using Live Bookmarks in the Firefox web browser, which works rather well, but in my case, I also use My Yahoo as a home page in my web browser. I just happened to notice the other day that My Yahoo has a new beta format running that you can try. I decided to switch over and take a look at it, and I am fairly happy with the new format. Just before I discovered the new My Yahoo beta, I had started setting up my blog feeds on the Google Reader. Since I'm already using My Yahoo as a home page for news and other stuff, I figured I would give it a try for managing my blog preferences as well.
After I switched to the new My Yahoo Beta page, I clicked on the ADD PAGE option at the top and created a blank page for my favorite photo blogs. On the "Personalize this Page" button, there is an option to add RSS feeds, which will pop the blog feed right onto the page. If you are using the Firefox browser, there is an RSS feed button on the right edge of the URL box that will also allow you to add the feed to your My Yahoo page. This option adds the feed to your MAIN My Yahoo page, but the feed display can be dragged and dropped onto the secondary page and then moved around by dragging and dropping as well.
The Real Deal
Tonight, I had the pleasure of photographing the "Real Deal Talent Search Concert" at the Ridgeview Recreation Center in Hickory. This was a group of young people who participated in Rick Cline's grant and privately funded project over the last few months which ended with tonight's public performances.
In the picture above, 11-year-old Robert Sherrill looks at a wild standing ovation from the crowd after his powerful performance of Mary Mary's "Yesterday." All of tonight's 11 performers were outstanding, but this kid left me speechless. I can't recall the last time I saw this much command and confidence from an 11-year-old...