Has the tide of "I'll do it free for my portfolio" photographers broken?

I think it's interesting to look at the numbers for the camera industry. Camera sales by unit peaked in 2010. They were 18% below the 2010 level by the end of 2012. Who won? Sony, Canon and Nikon. Who lost? Everyone else. I think what we saw in 2010 was the trailing end of a lot of people in I.T. and other tech fields being laid off and thinking that, maybe, photography would be a good, easy and carefree gig. What 2012 numbers tell us is that a large number of the temporarily unemployed finally got jobs and breathed a massive sigh of relief that they wouldn't have to depend on freelancing in the imaging industry to make a living. It's a tough slog to make it as a freelance image maker. It takes time and persistence to build a clientele, and even more time and persistence to craft a discernible style.

The recession and the total transition to digital have decisively decimated all of what used to be entry level jobs. That actually makes it much tougher on the newcomers, kind of a new barrier to entry, based on experience this time instead of gear. Without a broad based pyramid of entry level work it's harder and harder to gain critical steps of experience both in defining a vision and in dealing with the art of the business deal, imaging-wise. The only work left for the inexperienced is as event shooters and kid sports contractors and that pays about as well as working at a coffee shop....but with none of the fringe benefits.

When clients have the budget to do something that transcends cellphone documentation they are loath to risk their budgets on the untested. The remaining, weathered and experienced pros get the nod because the clients know that their money won't be wasted or squandered. Yippee! Hurray for those of us that made it over the hump.

So, what makes us different? Well, we learned the craft step-by-step and we've got years of trial and error under our belts. We know how to use lights that don't come permanently attached to our cameras (exception: Terry Richardson). We understand not only what we're doing but why we're doing it. We have the right gear and we understand the legal liability (and reputation liability) of not having redundant back-up gear for jobs that can only be done once. (I read some idiot arguing that back-up gear was B.S. because new entries into the market couldn't afford it and because cameras never break....yeah, and hard drives never crash.)

And how about this? We actually have liability insurance. Real insurance that we buy in case we accidentally destroy someone's property or injure someone. Just like real, live business in other fields. And we don't get bored, sidetracked or otherwise distracted from delivering just what our clients need within the deadline they've specified.

Sigh of relief, enough of the business remains to ensure that it still is a business.

The image above? Another one of super muse, Lou. An example of the idea that real professionals are constantly testing, shooting on their own dimes and creating work to show clients where they might like to go next. What a great concept.

A bit of bad news for Olympus shooters. WallStreet24/7 was predicting companies that will probably exit the U.S.A. market by 2014. Along with J.C. Penney's and Volvo sat Olympus. They've just announced that they are jettisoning all of their cheap, point and shoot cameras and that they are losing significant market share elsewhere. While the OMD EM5 was a smash hit one hit in a product line isn't necessarily enough to float the whole boat. I hope they are dead wrong.

Finally, a few websites have been (for years now) floating the thought balloon that real pros shoot with medium format digital cameras. And I'm sure that some do but it's wishful thinking on someone's part when you realize that in total, combining all the MF camera makers, last years sales of large sensor, medium format cameras were barely 6,000 pieces. About a week's worth of production for the typical Canon Rebel.

We're coming back from the holidays and getting ready for Summer. Sandals ready. Tech shirts ready. Heat resistance training has already commenced. Welcome to Summer 2013.

What do we do for fun around the house? Well, we shoot video, of course.

I'm not sure what other, average Texas families do on cloudy Friday evenings. I guess some of them cook up some frozen pizza, dump some salsa on the top, grab some beers and watch TV (lite beers for the kiddos...). Others pull on their ostrich skin boots, grab an appropriately goofy cowboy hat and head out to the kicker bars for an evening of boot scootin' merriment. The new Austin hipster families probably head to south Congress Ave. to hang out around the food trailers and look disaffected. And the wealthy head out to the hotels for whatever fundraising gala will provide them with the highest visibility. Maybe they'll meet that guy who has had three face lifts by age fifty and writes about "society" events in that breathy and overdone prose. 

Around our house we fire up the video cameras and get to work. Well, maybe not all the time but at least we did on Friday. My kid Ben has been taking a film course all year long at his high school. They shoot on various video cameras, edit in Final Cut Pro X on big iMacs, and they finish off their projects with After Effects. Ben already turned in his end of semester, documentary project on the impact of iPads on education and he needed to knock out one more short piece. He decided to do a paean to food preparation. Kind of a montage.

He pulled out his primary production camera: A Sony a57, along with his Rode Videomic and then asked me for the loan of an 85mm lens and my bigger, fluid head tripod. He's used the a57 to record an award winning PSA on early onset diabetes, PSA's for Zach Theatre's kids programs and a ton of fun projects with his friends. He knows the camera forward and backward and even though he's a teenager the camera doesn't have a scratch on even---though it's been his primary imaging tool for well over a year.

Love those big, soft continuous lights.

On this particular project he wants to do a montage of food being made. He was working with his mom to document all the chopping, mixing and seasoning for a White Bean and Tuna salad with freshly roasted, red bell peppers. He leveled the tripod, figure out his best angle, took one look at the existing light from the little MR-16 spots in the kitchen and then asked for some "good" light. We used one 6 lamp fluorescent fixture up high and to his left. 

Ben works with manual focus and loves the focus peaking in the a57. Manual focusing is his standard operating procedure.

He loved the light from the big fluorescent light. I asked him is he wanted additional diffusion but he just looked up and said, "No thanks. I don't fear contrast like you do..." And, in fact, the images he was shooting do look a bit crisper than what I usually turn out.

With the celery chopping, pepper roasting and assemblage complete he's moved on from salads and his next video targets are: Extreme close ups of sizzling bacon in a frying pan, flipping an omelette, putting canned whipped cream on a dessert (for the "awesome" sound effects) and maybe even the sizzle of a steak being put on a grill. I can hardly wait to see how he edits it all together.. 

My suggestion for a close up wine pour was more or less dismissed out of hand. Not really in the "food preparation" category.  Hmmm.

The a57 is a great, cheap camera but now I'm partial to the a58. Ben's happy with what he gets from his current camera. 

Now if I can only convince him to use the EVF...

The stretch at the end of a long sequence.

I asked him about his interest in video but the long and short of it is that he enjoys the concepting and writing much more than the actual shooting. While he understands it from beginning to end he's just not interested in being a technician. Somehow I feel I've been dissed.

Commodities or precious resources? It's all a question of context.

I guess photography can be a lot like water or gas. When you are surrounded by more than the market can absorb it becomes just another commodity. When you need something really special it's much harder to find and becomes a precious resource. I guess everything has to be considered in context.

The death of the professional photographer.

We like to talk about trends here. And a trend I've heard a lot about is the death of the "professional" photographer. It's true and it's not true. The problem with the discussion is that lay people think of photography through the lenses of their experience. It's the "big, all encompassing tent" concept. To the typical family in America that is not directly involved in imaging or advertising fields, or publishing, the "idea" of a professional photographer is a cliché. It's a guy in a bad suit who photographs weddings and bar mitzvahs. It's a chubby woman in a black outfit who does "available light" weddings and it's a bunch of blue collar guys who swarm around children's soccer, baseball and Pop Warner football leagues snapping a zillion photographs of Johnny and Suzie kicking the goal or sliding into home plate and hoping to sell some prints to moms and dads who want something more, photo-wise, than can be snapped with an iPhone.

Depending on your generation your stereotype might include "Animal," the scruffy and unclean photojournalist on the TV show, Lou Grant; Ron Galella, the paparazzi photographer who stalked Jackie Kennedy Onassis, or some chubby girl in bad boots giving an online class on "Boudoir Photography" on Creative Live. The pervasive idea conglomeration is that all photographers work for retail customers or for newspapers. The generic American knows that newspapers are a dying medium for the very reason that they no longer subscribe and neither do any of their friends....

Most Americans either can't afford the luxury of a classic portrait session or they don't see the point. They've been able to embrace immediate gratification results with their iPhones or a cool, new Canon Rebel. And in many instances and in many locales the "professional" who handles baby photos, senior photos and other portraits is so far behind the cultural cool curve that the products offered are aimed at markets that stopped existing in the mid-1990's. Along with cassette tape players. And answering machines.

Is it any wonder that a whole generation has come to think of photographers in the broadest sense as no longer relevant? And when I look at the work of most generic "shooters" I am reminded of the Kodak books on portraiture I used to buy in the 1980's. Some of the styles were wonderful in the moment but the rest of the world seems to have moved on.

So the person whose pressing need is an image for Facebook will turn to their network of friends and invest in a bit of quid pro quo rather than looking in the Yellow Pages (do they still exist?) to find someone who they can go to and pay to get something that doesn't look as cool, in the moment. All the simple imaging stuff has migrated to the handheld devices of friends and family.

But there is a different reality that most people don't see. It's the reality of professional photographers who are lighting architecture and shooting it with tilt/shift lenses (and good taste). It's the reality of bright young (and older) advertising photographers who still routinely command low to mid six figure incomes per year co-creating a new visual language for national and international clients. And it's teams of image makers who are delivering hybrid collections of still images and wonderful motion for more and more companies and agencies. The people who can light impeccably and topically. The people with a good radar for style and trends. The people who can see (or help make) a visual future. What's the next chapter? Instead of "let's re-read the classics."

I'll conjecture that between advertising, catalogs (OMG, have you seen the massive, new Restoration Hardware catalogs???? Shot in the USA and absolutely amazing!!!!) corporations, retailers, healthcare and travel and leisure clients those photographers (not wedding/baby/senior = retail) who serve those markets are thriving just as in the "golden years."  When you add in the massive increase in video and even short motion pictures the profitable market is probably far larger than it was in the go-go 1990's. It's just spread out a bit more.

Most of us (photographers) took a giant hit in the last recession because most of the country (USA) snapped their wallets shut and wouldn't answer the doorbell, much less the telephone.  And there were two trajectories that photographers seemed to take: One group tried doing what they had been doing for the last twenty or thirty years and they saw their markets shrivel and die. The other group changed direction and served up a whole new recipe for servicing clients. They zigged with the clients and then zagged with the clients and now they are busy and business is growing.

We didn't have to dumb anything down because we're not working with the masses. We had to smarten things up because we're working with professionals who both see the value of our work and who also want much more. Give it to them and you win. Whine about the glorious past and you lose. Count on it.

The image above was taken many years ago in Paris. Back then a man with a plain camera and some boxes of film could make a living shooting couples on the Place de la Concorde with Kodacolor film and mailing them the prints. Cameras were hard to use back then. Most people didn't carry them about. But you can see that the street vendor/photographer in the photograph was hedging his bets even then. The box over his shoulder was filled with one use, disposable cameras for sale. And sell them he did. 

Photography is changing. You can jump into the river and swim with the current or you can cling to temporal rocks and hold on tight until you succumb and drown. The choice is yours but the market for interesting, new and exciting imaging with always exists. And people with checkbooks will want it because it says something interesting about them or their businesses. 

We're all visual creatures. The power lies with those who keep reinventing the visual language. Professional photographers are not dead, they're just not as visible to the masses as they used to be...the ones that remain or have recently arrived just found better clients.

Some weeks are anti-photographic. This was one of them.

Spanish Steps. Russian Woman.

Some weeks seem destined to be non-photographic for me and it makes me sad. Don't get me wrong, there was lots to do but so very little of it had anything to do with taking photographs and even less to do with wandering around aimlessly and taking fun photographs. Maybe that odious woman (Marissa Mayer) from Yahoo jinxed it for me when she came out and said what we've all be thinking but are too fearful or hard headed to say out loud....Since everyone takes photographs all the time now there's no such thing anymore as a professional photographer.

I did all the things creative people are supposed to do. I had a wonderful monday morning coffee with a business man I've known for many years. The kind of business man who could live for another 10,000 years and still not have to work again....but he still does because he seems to enjoy the deal and the process. We talked about politics in Syria and start-ups and CEO training. When I left I felt as though I'd been a temporary member of the big leagues of business and it made me feel a little down when I realized that all I really wanted to do on monday was to be somewhere cool and takes some interesting photographs. The afternoon was filled with domestic errands and the last gasp editing of that novel I've been talking about since 2002. My friends won't listen to me anymore when I talk about it. "Just publish the goddam thing!!!" seems to be the most common advice.

I'm sure Stephen Pressfield could use my procrastination with this project as a classic study in resistance. But I'm so close and I want so badly for my first real effort out of the blocks to be a good one. Every typo I don't catch now will be like a wasp sting when I find it after the fact.

Most of Tuesday was taken up by the machinations of being (not practicing) a portrait photographer. I retouched five images for a client who works for an oncology practice. After a tuna sandwich I spent the afternoon making web galleries for people I photographed next week. At the end of the day I decided I had put off the editing of a video project long enough and it was starting to spoil like buried cabbage so I jumped onto that train and rode it until midnight. Still no recreational photography. No professional photo work either.

Wednesday is a blur of lunching with clients (great Chinese food), signing contracts, writing proposals and studying up for conference calls. I think I'll be doing a project in July as on camera talent. I'm pretty excited, or at least I think I am until I remember that I also need to produce the content for my 2.5 hour on camera project....but that will be something to prevent fun-tography in June so I'll worry about it then. Three days of shooting for two and a half hours of programming. Who would have thunk it?

Hard on the heels of that was the realization that it was my turn to shop, cook dinner and wash up after. I'm lazy, I made fajitas and frijoles ala charro and guacamole. Then I remembered how much I disliked cleaning up the grill at the very end. Why does the clean up always fallow those two great glasses of wine instead of proceeding?

I packed a camera bag full of Nex gear on Thursday but the bag never got out the door. I don't remember much about yesterday but I do remember looking over from my desk, longingly, at the Sony a850 and the medium tele lens flirting with me as hard as it could. I'd gotten almost to the door when a request for bid came in and I realized that bidding video/hybrid projects takes a lot of time to do right (and profitably). I got the bid done and the pizza ordered for the kid just in time to walk out the door and attend, with spouse in tow, the premiere of "Harvey" at Zach Theatre. Yes, we had great seats.  Yes we had Cuba Libres at the lobby bar at halftime (drives my theatre friends crazy when I called it that...) and yes, we had Champagne and little desserts at the end. After the standing ovation. (well deserved).

I dragged myself out of bed this morning and got into the studio to start writing an outline for an educational program and then I realized that I write a lot more than I shoot. And most of my friends and family never really get to see the executive speeches, project proposals, scripts, books and other stuff I seem to be consistently cranking out. Maybe Marrisa Mayer is correct. Maybe there is no such things as (just) a professional photographer anymore. Maybe we have to do all these other things to keep the ball rolling. To put bread on the table. To move it all forward (and a thousand other hoary sayings).  Or maybe it's just that way for me.

Sometimes I feel like I'm living proof of an old Russian saying, "It is impossible to chase two fast rabbits at the same time." And I feel like I'm juggling three or four rabbits. But I can't bear to put one down in order to concentrate on another. I fear what I might miss. It's the curse of having more than several things you love to do. The linear among us would have me sit down and diagram life out and find the most efficient and efficacious method of earning a living and just flush everything else, accept a pair of blinders and go in a straight line. Eat the meatloaf every night. 

But I'll see if I can't get it all balanced out. Shoot a bit more. Think a bit less and, for goodness sake, stop writing so much.

Over there, by the filing cabinet next to the studio door. There's an old, brown Domke bag and inside is are two Nex 7's and a passel of lenses. I think I can sneak in some imaging tomorrow. But that brings up the next conundrum, do I shoot stills or little movies? Ah... it never stops.

I hope you have a photographic adventure that makes you happy this weekend. It's time.

500px just introduced some more template styles.

I'm trying out the one that does full screen images. Check it out and tell me what you think of the presentation: http://kirktuck.500px.com/beauty

Click anywhere on the images at the 500px portfolios to make the overlying type go away. Let me know what you think...

More like play, less like work.

There's always some way to technically improve a photograph. I was jarred into thinking about the difference between the joyful discovery of beauty via a camera and the hard work of compulsively honing both equipment and technique in the pursuit of perfecting the recording process of capturing a photograph.

I say, "jarred" because I seem to have forgotten almost entirely the time I spent in the retail audio business back in the 1970's. for me it was a way of making some extra cash to spend while pursuing a degree of some sort at the University of Texas at Austin. For everyone else around me; customers and fellow employees, audio was a passion. And, if you read carefully you'll see that I wrote, "audio" and not "music."

You see, the pursuit of perfect "audio" has nothing at all to do with music other than the fact that recorded music is used to show off the clarity, richness and noise free fidelity of the machines. Starting to sound familiar?

So, this morning I had coffee with an "audiophile" and he was telling me about a new turntable. He sold off a world renowned "reference" turntable in the ever escalating compulsion to squeeze even more "transparency" and accuracy from his collection of long playing records (LP's).

We spoke for a good while about audio and I still don't know what genre of music he enjoys, or who his favorite artists are. We never got around to talking about music. He did mention that they current "state of the art" home audio system was currently around half a million dollars. We also remembered a crazy mutual friend, also an audiophile, who was so obsessed that low frequency, vibration induced rumble might be affecting the sonic performance of his turntable that he cut thru the floor of his "pier and beam" house, poured a reinforced, concrete pillar that reached down to bedrock and mounted his machine on that (after building an insulated room just for the turntable first.

Surely the emotional need for the illusion of perfection has its roots in the human need to quantify the parameters of an experience while ignoring the experience itself. Like an adolescent, quickly and dispassionately having sex so he can run off and brag about it to his peer group.

A few years ago, after I wrote a review on the Canon 7D, several "concerned" readers felt the need to recommend cameras to me that measured even better. They assumed I was looking for measurable perfection. I was and am aware of what is out there in the market and all of the compromises involved, but my praise for the 7D was for its attitude of "I'm ready when you are." It fit my hand, which more readily assured that it was along for the ride when I felt the desire to go out and make some art.  I was thinking about these things when I had coffee with several friends and a few of their friends. All part time photographers of one sort or another.

One acquaintance, knowing that I'd taught and consulted with colleges, asked me about getting a photo education at one of the three institutes of higher learning in town. One program is at a two year college and I'll describe it as a "blue collar" curriculum. Which means, "Teach me how to make money with photography by showing me how everything works." They'll teach you how to set your camera, how to use lights, how to compose and shoot as well as all the steps you'll need to have an efficient and knowledgeable "workflow." But they won't teach you how to do art. Which is the WHY to shoot.

They assume you had a reason, an angle or a vision that you likely wanted to pursue in the first place.

The medium school, a private college with a 4 year curriculum teaches some "nuts and bolts" and also some art history, critical theory and helps one hone a philosophical point of view as it relates to creating photographic works.

They assume you were motivated to be a photographer in order to communicate an aesthetic or idea that resonates for you. They deliver the rudimentary technical "tools" you'll need in order to get your point across. But they assume you do have a point. 

The third school is a major university. Their four year, fine arts curriculum is nearly devoid of technical teaching altogether and is almost totally consumed by aesthetics, and theory, a discovery of the artist's voice and expression.

They assumed you were able to read your camera's owner's manual and that you got the rudiments of a subject you've chosen as your university major at least competently mastered. They teach the "why" and assume the "how" is a given.

All three programs assume that you are coming into the mix because you have something you feel compelled to offer to the "discussion."

None assume that technical mastery of your camera, alone, is an end goal.

And it became so clear to me over the course of the conversation that obsessing over process, workflow and technical proficiency were the surest sign that these people would never make the leap to producing art because they really have nothing worthwhile to say.

They want to gain proficiency in something that can be quantified "sharper than" and see photography as a medium solely in which to actively display their proficiency. Well-----sorry. There's no guarantee anyone will be able to make meaningful and culturally important art. And there's no fast track to becoming good at the intangible parts of the photographic process. But in the end the only thing that really does matter are the absolutely intangible properties in a photograph. Things like: The story, the narrative, the feel, the vibe, and the point of view. The creation of a visual poem.

And all the technical "candy" won't do squat to fix a poorly seen or poorly imagined photograph.

Bottom line? If you don't have a passion, if you don't have a message or a voice in photography you are just a piano tuner or an visiophile.

Final thought: The name of a great local photographer came up in the course of the second conversation. Someone at the table made a dismissive remark. The remark inferred that the artist had essentially wasted his life because now---just for the last few years---the photographer had experienced some financial and emotional difficulties.

This caused me to reflect for a moment. The photographer's work has been collected by the pre-eminent museums of our time, in our country and several European capitals. He had traveled all over the world and met famous and interesting people.  His work still graces magazines that the rest of us would likely give up a testicle to work for... And he's done it by having a courageous and consistent visual style for over 30 years.

No compromise in his vision. No stepping back from the edge.

He has something the technically obsessed will never have.

He can actually make...art.

I sat at my desk and ground my way deeper and deeper into Final Cut Pro X. Boy is my brain exhausted.

Small child at Half Priced Books, many years ago.

Back when cameras did bokeh without having to be

instructed to do so.

I sat down around 10am today to start editing what turned out to be an eight minute video for my sculptor friend, Marja Spearman. She's the artist who did the 1,000 Forget Me Knot ceramics for an installation at the end of last month. I wrote about her in an earlier article...

I had a huge stack of video clips with lots of Marja on camera explaining the project and talking about the challenges of working with high quantities of ceramics. I also had good clean "footage" of mini-interviews with her three collaborators. In addition to that I had lots of what they call, "b-roll" which is really just extra stuff you shoot so you have material to use when you get bored of seeing "talking heads" for too long.

But here's the deal, unlike a good still image that may need to be cleaned up or given the ole PIZZAZZ filter in PhotoShop, video demands that you take charge of telling the story to your audience and, hopefully, keeping them interested. 

I put down a well reasoned story line and used a bunch of the interview footage then I went back and added b-roll as frequently and strategically as possible. I color corrected each clip using the waveform monitor and the vector scope and then I went into each clip and equalized the sound.

It takes forever. I couldn't find any background music that I liked in my usual sources so I opened up GarageBand and spent a couple of hours composing my own. It's not wonderful but it's 16db down from the voice tracks to it's hardly more than colorful white noise. But, of course I wanted to go in and modulate the music to come up over parts of the dialog where there were pauses and dead air.

I was feeling pretty good until Ben got home from high school. He cruised into the studio to say, "howdy" and to check out what I was working on. I may have mentioned it but he's got two years of film classes under his belt and works on FCP X nearly every day. He's soooo much better at editing and video story telling than me. He offered to critique the project and we rolled. He didn't even wait till the end before he started "helping me" fix it. He had me shorten it by a minute and a half, add more b-roll, make the cuts quicker and lots of other little tweaks. When he finished with his critique I felt like the project was a solid B+. I learned a lot doing my own editing and my own music bed. Learned a lot from my younger mentor. And I learned that video is a process and not just an inspiration followed by a little bit of post production filtering.

In all, a humbling experience but not without its own light at the end of the tunnel.

Next time I'll stop acting like a photographer and put a lot more movement in the shots. I won't always crop as tightly. I'll get more second angle in interviews. But the one thing I got just right was the music. Thank you, GarageBand.

Now I understand what my video friends mean when they tell me that 90% of a good project is in the pre-production. Amen.

If you could design your ultimate camera what would it look like? What would it do?

You probably know what I want in a camera. But it doesn't exist on the market right now. I'd like a camera that's set up like a Leica M. Simple controls and simple menus. I don't want an optical finder or rangefinder but I'd like that window on the top left to have a 4 million pixel element electronic viewfinder. I'd like a camera that only shoots raw. Not that I have anything against Jpegs but I'd gladly give them up if I could have an ultimately simple menu interface. Color balance, format, view options. That's about it. I don't need a screen on the back. With a great EVF I could do all the reviewing and menu setting I would ever want. And not having a screen on the back might give me better battery life and a more indestructible machine.

I want my camera to be black. Not shiny black but matte black with a slight texture over all.

In the guts of the camera I want a full frame Foveon style sensor, made by Sony. I like their sensors. And in my ultimate camera there would be four ISO settings: 25 ISO, 100 ISO, 400 ISO and some vague setting that would just be called, "High."

The camera would have built in image stabilization with all the bells and whistles that Olympus have wedged into their IS in the OMD EM5 and the new EP5.

Finally, the entire exterior body shell would be made of real, thick, glorious metal. The kind that shows as brass through the wear areas after years of hard use.

Final wish....fully electronic shutter. 

So-----what would your ultimate camera look like. What functions and features are important to you?