Christmas Carol, Austin style. An undercurrent of Dickens, lots of modern music, incredible choreography, a "Ghost of Christmas Past" with panache and a glowing wig, and Madonna's song, "Holiday" thrown in for good measure.

Not your parent's Dickens Play.....

Marketing missteps to avoid. #1 branding yourself as the top tier of your local market...

LBJ's school house, outside of Johnson City, Texas. 

I think most photographers survive financially not because of the big jobs that come to them from time to time but from the income derived from a constant stream of smaller, less flashy projects that constitute the bulk of what most advertising and public relations clients need on a month by month or week by week basis. 

Going against the prevalent marketing common sense I'll say that the continuous flow of decent paying, moderate to low stress jobs beats the adrenaline euphoria of the occasional all hands on deck, national advertising jobs. 

I realized lately that, in my market, many local clients and potential clients have positioned my company in their minds as one that only does high profile photography projects. While this is not true, nor even welcome by me, it's a market perception that is most definitely a double-edged sword. A long tenure in any market paints a target on one's back for all the up-and-coming photographers while also fostering the idea that financial and business success in our field depends on creating only top dollar images for big, complex projects. But nothing could be further from my own wheelhouse of skills or preferences. 

My greatest comfort zone is the happy creation of portraits either in the studio or in any fun location within an hour's drive. The budget is generally always less important than how much freedom I'll have in doing the actual work and defining the style. There is so much that's reassuring about "limited engagements." For example, if your intuition failed you and you are on site with a client that turns out to be a real jerk, you have the comfort of knowing that after you wrap up, head home and deliver the deliverables, you'll never have to work with that client again. You have that control. You've only suffered through one engagement.

It's different if you are working on a big project through an ad agency and you've done lots of pre-production work before finally meeting the client from hell on the set. At that point you have sunk cost and sunk scheduling and you probably have a number of people who are directly or indirectly counting on you to pull off the job, and stomping off the set, no matter how convincing your excuse, is pretty much career suicide. Multiple day jobs create multi-day stress. The higher the budget, generally, the higher the stress...

Don't get me wrong, a big, long job with a fun, happy, well adjusted client is like an early Christmas but there is charm and calmness that comes from a series of unrelated but similar smaller assignments that will keep your blood pressure low and not mess up your early morning swim schedule. 

When we (collectively) market we tend to put our best feet forward and that usually means finding the most impressive job you've done in a given quarter and then broadcasting it far and wide. That's great but by doing so you create the expectation amongst art buyers that this is the only kind of work (budget) that you are interested in. They save you for that mythical job that might come to a smaller agency only once or twice a year. Those are the kinds of jobs that generally require competing bids, jockeying amongst client requirements and budgets, and lots and lots of nervous tension from the agency and clients (remember, if they are doing this kind of work only once or twice a year that makes them amateurs for this kind of project!). 

By the time you finish with a typical high profile project you'll have spent way too much time hand holding, running through airports and managing people and not as much time shooting as you'd like. You'll find the budgets better but you'll also find that this kind of work, from a business point of view, is like whale hunting, in that you might invest in a big ship, sail the seas for months, maybe over a year, before you even catch sight of the next whale. In truth, I'd rather go fishing, cast a net and bring in a daily catch. In my mind a constant stream of fun, smaller jobs beats the feast and famine nature of giant undertakings. 

I've been changing up my marketing to emphasize more that I do small scale projects. I want people to call and book me for one executive portrait, one product documentation or one video interview for the web. There's so much less stress and so much more financial continuity this way. And, generally, I find that these dependable clients, when treated correctly, will come straight to you when a bigger project emerges: you've already built-in trust and value for the client and most of them will assume that you can "scale" to a more complex project. The reverse isn't necessarily true. Most people wouldn't go to a surgeon for a head cold but most people with a mysterious pain will head to a trusted general practitioner 99% of the time. 

I want clients to call at the drop of a hat. I don't want them to feel as though they have to schedule weeks or months in advance. 

A client called yesterday and they were almost sheepish about their request. They needed some photographs of a rental space to put on their website. "When could I schedule this?" It was an exterior space so the vagaries of weather were a consideration... I had just finished editing a different project and I was in the process of uploading 18-20 gigabytes of files. The client's rental space was a five minute drive from the studio. I hopped in the car and drove right over, shot the space from every angle and uploaded finished files for the (astonished) client about an hour later. Did I care about the budget or prestige of the project? No. I've worked with this client for years, decades. I knew what they could budget and I knew they could make good use of the images. I also knew that they'd call again in a week or a month with a daylong project or a half day video interview or some other calm and happy project. 

I'm more likely to market with a nice location portrait these days than a Promethean project. An e-mail blast and a post card. A quick upload to Instagram. The benefit is that I tend to lock in clients with these less intimidating projects. When bigger projects erupt there's less resistance on the client side to awarding me the project. Less competition. 

In the early part of the century I thought I was on the wrong marketing track. Most of my work came from ten or fifteen regular clients who had assignments like events, product shots, portraits and "people at work" stuff. Like radiologist reading scans, specialists taking readings at water treatment plants, engineers supervising large scale construction. They were smaller projects, less budget, less usage fee income, but the trade-off was stability. And consistency. And a certain flow.

I became friends with a legendary photographer who moved from New York City to Austin just before the big bust of 2008. He worked the big projects for corporate titans. His work was everywhere. He was surrounded by producers, multiple levels of assistants, representatives and more. His burn rate was (to my mind) ridiculous. We had dinner and we talked about each other's business strategies. After the bust his work more or less dissolved, vanished. The big projects weren't on anybody's radar for a couple of years. None. I too worked less but my work was flying under the CFO's radar which meant we kept working so the wheels of industry would keep turning. My friend's projects dropped from ten per year to maybe one per year. But all of his previous marketing made it unlikely that anyone would call him for a P.R. headshot. 

My work dropped (in 2009) from a pre-bust average of 140 projects per year to 60. But the income kept flowing. We tightened up on costs wherever I could and were able to survive what has to have been the roughest year for freelance artists since the Great Depression. In retrospect I owe that survival to the strategy of casting a wider net. The fish were smaller but there were more of them in the nets. 

Now, my decision making is less about economics and cash flow and more about controlling my free time. Working shorter and less rigorous projects means more unencumbered personal time and a more relaxed working environment. I'm happy with that. 

Now I need to figure out how to market "smaller and easier" without dumping the bigger projects altogether. It might take some dancing but I think I've got the shoes for it. 

Curious to hear from fellow pros about what works best for you. Thanks. 

It was entirely possible to do photographs even before the advent of digital cameras. Or autofocus. Or HDR. Or ..........

Just fooling around downtown. It was nice.

Walked with a Pentax K-1 and the 100mm Macro.
Shot raw and used the +2 clarity control. Nice. Pretty.

Cruised into the Royal Blue Grocery for a hot Cuban sandwich and a coffee. It was luxuriously good.

My hat reminded me to relax. I almost left it on the chair next to mine. But I remembered.

I've just packed up my Lumix gear and I'm headed to Zach Theatre to shoot the Tech Rehearsal for
Christmas Carol. I can hardly wait to slip into the wonderfully immersive magic of live theater.

This musical/play is like a booster shot of joy that gets me through the holiday season. It's funny, poignant, musical and hopeful. It's also really well done. I hope all of you have something like this in the fourth quarter that brings a big ass smile to your face and even makes you more tolerant of everyone else.

That's all I've got for today. Hope you're having maximum fun and minimum resistance. KT

(fun bumper sticker I saw today): "Do No Harm. Take No Shit." 

Complete with a drawing of Buddha meditating.

My DE-ACQUISITION review of the Fujinon 8-16mm f2.8 lens. Why I used to think it was "great" but now think it's good "trade-in" material.

The Fujinon 8-16mm f2.8. Big, sharp, and to me....useless. 

I've written lots of reviews about cameras and lenses before, and recently I wrote a satire about all the lead up reviews that are written about new products. You know, first impressions reviews, unboxing reviews, not-yet-in-my-hands-but-still-click-bait-able reviews. Mine was called a PRE-ACQUISITION REVIEW. That spoof-y blog post was about a product I had ordered but had never seen nor touched. I thought it was funny and, gauging from the comments here, so did at least 18 other people. One person (who did like the original piece) suggested that a novel, new and untried approach might be to write a de-acquisition review so I'm going to give it a shot. Here goes: 

I don't know why I bought the 8-16mm Fuji lens in the first place. I recently looked at the metadata of all the 460,000+ images I have in my Lightroom catalogs and out of all these images about 90% are shot with focal lengths of between 35mm and 135mm. If there is a winner in the focal length usage race it definitely belongs to the ever present 50mm. But even focal lengths around 200-300mm far, far outstrip anything under 24mm. In fact, there are so few ultra-wide focal length lenses represented that it shocked even me. 

The thinking at the time of acquisition (at the beginning of 2019) was that I was flushed with cash, wracked with anxiety about my family obligations, and as a result had entered into a sort of tunnel vision that convinced me of the need to plan for every photographic contingency, and to do so within the Fuji system. When the 8-16mm and the 100-400mm lens went on a rare sale I snagged them both, remembering the good old days of annual report photography when we might actually problem solve with our lenses and get dramatic photos from either end of the spectrum. I think now that must be a memory without actual substance.

I used the 8-16mm lens this year for exactly three commercial images. If you were to divide the retail price of the lens by the three shots you'd get a cost per shot of about $660 per image. If each image were, by itself, the final choice for a national ad I'd have no hesitation about the expense but as soon as the novelty of being able to get everything (including my feet) in the frame wore off the lens started to remind me of the fisheye fad of the 1970's. To me, all ultra-wide angle shots look the same; way too much foreground, extremely forced perspective and, generally an insult to human portrait subjects. 

To be honest, the fault is with me; I just don't see well in the wide angle space no matter how often or how hard I try. Maybe it's my long held prejudice that people who shoot long know exactly what they want in the frame while people who shoot short can't make up their damn minds about what to put in the frame. And people who profess to love the 35mm focal length above all others just can't make up there mind which way to go.....

The lens itself is/was pretty much perfect. It was obviously optically gifted even when used wide open. 8mm (12mm FF eq.)  was sharp and, when used with the automatic in-camera corrections, not subject to excessive vignetting or rectilinear distortion. 16mm was equally good. Were I the kind of photographer for whom life only starts under 24mm I think I would be overjoyed with such a solid and ultimately flexible lens. But since I tried to crop out about 85% of each frame I shot with the lens I think I assured myself that I'm not even remotely in the target market for such a great lens with those particular wide angle advantages...

My advice, if you think you may be in the market for a lens like this but you don't shoot for the bulk of your income? Spend a lot more time playing around with a 50mm until the thoughts of wide-angle-ality exit your brain and you forget the lure of being able to almost see around corners (even if what's in the corners is rendered tiny). 

To the folks who think this lens will magically transform them into world class architecture photographers? My personal experience is that the magic didn't work for me. Seems it actually takes skill and taste to make good architecture photos, not just super wide lenses. Crazy, huh?

After months of packing and unpacking for assignments I got tired of seeing $1895 languishing in the lens drawer, almost completely unused. I put the lens in my big, black camera bag and toted it over to Precision Camera where it offset the price of a second Panasonic Lumix S1 camera body. I noticed the lens sold quickly. No doubt to yet another photographer who currently believes the mythology of having to have all the bases covered, all the focal lengths represented. A fool's errand. At least for me. 

Whatever will I do now that I am bereft of the world's best 8-16mm lens for APS-C? I think I'll be just fine with Fuji's elegant, little 14mm f2.8. In fact, I've already used that one ten times as often as the 8-16mm and even if it is seldom used it's not a burden to bring along in a camera bag. Just in case. 

MMMV. 

Just a financial note: If I'd taken the (roughly) $4,000 I spent on the two outlier zoom lenses from Fuji (8/18 and 100/400) and put the money into Apple stock instead I would now have $6,720. Just a thought... that's the amount of appreciation in Apple stock just in the past 10 months. That would beat investing in gear and having to find jobs on which to use the gear. My financial guru has already chided me. Maybe next time.

Another Perfect Day in Austin. Version 20,693.

I hit the pool at 8:30 today. Couldn't quite make it to the 7:30 practice since the air was chilly and the bed was so comfortable. We got a lot of yards done by 10 am and spent most of it swimming in the sunshine. Getting a good charge on my solar powered wristwatch. I've been swimming well lately. It's the result of both working on breathing and arm stroke recovery but also adding some pre-sleep visualization to my swimming. I spent about ten minutes visualizing exactly how my stroke should look and feel. It's sounds woo-woo but it seems to make a difference. You don't fix the stuff you never think about....

We had maybe three cold and cloudy days in the week so there is a lot of pent up consumer demand for sunlight and warmer temperatures. People are out biking, running, walking and soaking up the good weather day; trying to sock some extra away for the next bout of cloudy weather. 

I'm heading out the door to play with the Pentax K-1 and the crusty, used 50mm f1.4 I'm falling for. It's a lens with a history, I am sure. Now I'm writing my own stuff with it. 

I'd love to write blog about how great the new Fuji X-Pro3 camera is but only the cool kids have gotten one to review. I'd love to write comparison between the Lumix S1 and its sibling the SR1 but, again, only the cool kids get to do that without splashing out for their own versions of each. Not something I'm interested in doing in the moment.

I can write a very, very short review of the Godox V1 flash (dedicated to the Pentax): It works as well as all the other third party, dedicated TTL flashes on the market. The round diffuser looks cool and the assortment of modifiers which attach via magnets is fun and useful. The lithium battery got me through well more than 400 bounce flashes on Thursday evening and I still had lots of little bars left showing me I wasn't about to run out of power. The V1 isn't very expensive (especially compared to its nearly identical cousin, the Profoto  A1) so if you want to try one and you decide it's not exactly what you need it's not a very painful mistake. 

Nothing else seems to be calling to me, gear-wise, in the moment so I guess I'll just be boring and not write about gear for a while. Get me too close to that Panasonic Lumix 50mm f1.4 and I'll have lots to write about. Trying to keep from looking directly at one. Must be strong........

Evening of photography goes about as well as I usually expect it to.

My first pair of glasses. Got them back in 1994, right after 

I accused Hasselblad of not making sharp prism finders...

But that's a different story.

I used to get nervous about jobs with tight schedules and no opportunity for do-overs. Mostly because the future of my business depended on keeping clients happy and continuing to book me for more jobs. For some reason gala events were the most nerve wracking. Organizations generally have one big fund-raiser each year and that means the clients are perennial amateurs; they don't do big events often enough to be comfortable and fluid with the process. They tend to replace expertise with adrenaline and lots of last minute dramas. 

While none of this really pertains to last night's client (they have their stuff together) it's hard to break habits and subconscious expectations. Five nervous and high strung event planners in a row sets a precedent and an expectation for the sixth event planner. I tended to come into the event jobs with a bit of armor on and a lot of redundant gear to offset the chance that a mechanical/electronic failure would hamper my ability to deliver good photographs for the client.

Yesterday I felt a little rusty because I haven't shot a large event since early September. I've also surrounded myself with a couple different systems and I was going back and forth, trying to decide whether to go with the tried-and-true cameras, lenses and flashes I used before or to try out something new (to me). 

Here's the job description: Go to the Four Seasons Hotel and photograph in two different ways. The first part of the evening is a cocktail reception in a lobby space in front of the grand ballroom. All of the attendees are partners in law firms or the spouses of partners in law firms. All 400 of them are there to honor one of their peers for his pro bono work for the organization I'm working with. The space is tight and, since most of the attendees are over 50 years of age, nearly everyone's voice is raised so they can hear each other. It's almost as loud as a rock concert, although there is no musical accompaniment. 

There are people from the board of directors of our charitable organization in the mix. Their name tags are festooned with an extra ribbon on the bottom that identifies them as such. Two ribbons on a name tag might indicate that a person is both a board member and a speaker at the event. My goal, and the expectation of the client's marketing team, is that I'll flow through the space, pull people together for quick, small group photographs, and, in the space of one hour capture nice images of couples, foursomes and small groups. Essentially, get a couple hundred pleasant photographs of everyone in the space, in various groupings, but be sure not to miss getting everyone whose name tag is embellished. 

I'm no stranger to many of the people in the crowd. Some know me because they have attended, and I have photographed, all nineteen years of galas for the group. Others know me because my company is commissioned by theirs to make portraits and marketing images over the course of the year. Still others I know socially. In a funny way we've all grown up together.  I was 45 when I photographed at the inaugural event. Now I'm 64. The faces of a quarter of the attendees are well known. Older than last time but still in the mix. We all wear dark suits and nicely shined shoes. Most of the men have gray or white hair. All have done well in their careers. That much was evidenced in the cash "auction" later in the evening. All for charity.

I dug my heels in and led with my art brain when I packed yesterday, much to the chagrin of my logical brain. I decided to work only with two Pentax K-1 cameras and two lenses. I brought along a 28-105mm zoom lens which I used in conjunction with on camera flash. For all the shots of speakers at the podium in the main ballroom I used a 100mm f2.8 macro lens. I've never traveled so light for an event like this one. Just to quell my fears of technical failure I did pack an extra 50mm lens to take over the grip and grin duties if the 28/105 glitched, and I did bring an extra flash.....just in case. 

Had logic prevailed I would have gone with the same camera and lens set I used a number of times before this. It would have been a couple of Fuji X-H1 cameras, the two f2.8 zooms (16/55+50/140) along with supplemental lenses that would cover the range. That, and a few dedicated Fuji flashes. 

On the other hand I just didn't feel ready to bring the Panasonics. Too new. No hands on experience with direct flash....

All my stuff fit in a small, black, photo back pack. 

I pulled an older, navy blue suit out of the closet. I bought it in 1994. It's in good shape and had just come back from the dry cleaners. The suit is 25 years old. It still fits just as it did when I wore it for the first time to an IBM function. I reached into the shoe repository and grabbed a pair of Vince Camuto cordovan oxfords. No cap toe, no fancy stitching. They needed a quick refresh so I polished them. 

The event started at 6 pm and I needed to be there half an hour early in order to show my face and allay any fears from the client side that I might be late, or worse, not there at all. Even though we're only five or six miles away rush hour starts earlier and earlier in Austin. I left at 4:30 just to make sure that I'd be there on time. A little rain and a few detours later I dropped the car with a valet right at 5:30pm. A good decision as traffic wasn't going to get any better later. 

With the tight schedule of the reception and the even tighter spacing I needed to work without getting fancy with the flash. The room had those fake tungsten, LED down lights that are close to the same color temperature as older, incandescent bulbs but they come pretty standard with a bit of a green cast. I set my camera's color temperature at 3100K and then nudged the hue adjustment to a +5 of magenta to offset the green. I used a Godox V1 flash with a rounded front diffuser. I covered the diffuser with a CTO filter and then added a +5 green filter from my old Kodak/Wratten gel filter stash so the flash color would more closely match the ambient lights. On top of the filters I secured (by magnets!) a white dome diffuser which I used pointed at the ceiling of the room. Since the dome is 3D some of the light is direct and some spreads around the room but the majority of lumens come racing down from the ceiling. It's a decent look and it's easy to work a room that way. 

In good light the Pentax K-1 focused well and the camera and flash worked reasonably well in the TTL mode (once I figured out that I needed a minus 1/2 stop permanent adjustment to the flash output). When I got into chancier light the camera hunted from time to time and it took a couple of seconds to lock in. I spent the hour going from little group to little group. Mostly they existed as closed circles which required me to politely insinuate myself into their space, interrupt whatever conversation they were in and getting them to all turn toward my camera. I'd do two exposures per group, in a mostly successful strategy for getting at least one shot where everyone's eyes were open and no one had a horrible facial tic. As I say, I was mostly successful...

In events like this the honoree is in high demand and the client would love it if we could photograph him, individually, with everyone in the room. That's when you need to help set client expectations.....

After a frenzied hour of photographing and trying to make sure everyone was represented in the growing collection of photographs a merciful banquet crew stepped out from the main ballroom and sounded chimes to signal that dinner was nigh and that the doors into the ballroom were open. 

A quick note to those who've never had the extreme pleasure of photographing a nice gala at a Four Seasons hotel: They don't do rubber chicken dinners. I love working there because the food (and the wine) are always first class. BUT, no matter how much the client talks up the idea that you too will enjoy the fruits of the banquet kitchen you should know that you will do so only while jumping up to catch the next speaker and the next, and that plate with the perfect beef filet, paired with wonderfully executed jumbo shrimp will only arrive at your place as you are getting up to head to the front of the large room to photograph the guest of honor --- ahead of schedule. 

Once you return to your place your plate will have either been whisked away or your food will be cold. 

In the main ballroom I needed mostly to photograph anything or anybody that happened or happened to be at the podium on the small, clean stage. This year the lighting got improved by several levels. There were multiple spots on the stage and a clean wash onto a mostly white background with the client's logo and the branding for the gala. I don't use flash on speakers or presenters unless they are handing some lucky person an award and shaking hands. So, for the most part I'm trying to get close enough to make the image dynamic but far enough away so that my silhouette to the people behind me doesn't become part of the show. 

Once one locks in the exposure for the speaker at the podium there is little need to revisit the setting unless the lighting changes. Yay! One less thing to think about. I chimped during the initial introductory speech and zero'd in on a good color balance and a good exposure. It never changed. Never. Not at all. A good reason to use your camera on manual and not screw with your settings!

I used a single AF point because I didn't want to get home and discover that my "smart" camera had elected to "celebrate" the speaker's microphone that evening instead of their (normally) sharp eyes. 

I also shot raw because, well, I just did. I won't next time. Not needed. 

The 100mm is the only long lens I have for the Pentax system but I figured that with the 36 megapixel resolution of the K-1 if I needed a longer reach I could either crop after the fact or set the camera to shoot APS-C and get a 50% increase in magnification. I did a bit of both. 

The evening ended around 9 pm and we spent a bit of time making a group shot of the client's staff. I retrieved my car from the valet and headed home. 

The images look pretty good. There are a few that I don't like the tonality of some skin tones. It's funny, there must be something odd with make-up these days as the camera will often "see" all the people in the frame with no make-up with absolute accuracy but the person with lots of make up takes on a color cast that's hard to remove. Also, Texas men seem to have spent too much time in the sun so I routinely hit the hue control in post and slide the red hue slider to the right by +5 to +10 which takes out some of the magenta from their "over tan" and I also drop the saturation a bit. 

Out of about 960 frames I color corrected and delivered a gallery of 719 to the client today. It felt good to do the 19th year of the gala for the client. The only embarrassing thing is my realization as I worked on the files today, that I have used a different camera system for nearly every different year. Ah well. It keeps that part of the process fun.