An industry lost at sea. An industry lost at see.

 The current camera crush is for the Canon 1Dmk2N.  I love the way it handles, love the finder with the newly added split screen, love it in conjunction with the 85mm Zeiss 1.4.  Everything seems so beautiful.

When you shoot any of the 85's at 5.6 you're in for a sharpness treat that's unbeatable.  Nikon, Canon, Zeiss......at f5.6 it doesn't matter.

In the past the industry of photography seemed like a well trimmed fleet of battle cruisers brimming with the hot weapons of the day and moving forward with a certain amount of cohesion and fortitude.  Now the industry (from a photographer's perspective) looks like a bunch of inflatable boats and Sunfish sailboats and air mattresses, along with some rusting tugboats and a few party barges, bunched together precariously on the swells.  Moby Dick lurking just under the froth.  Menacing.  Sharks circling.

The chatter on the APA (Advertising Photographers of America) forum today is all about the article that ran in the Washington Post on Saturday talking about David Hobby's role in hastening the decimation of the commercial markets for photography by teaching the unwashed the carefully guarded (eye roll insertion) secrets of the brotherhood of high day rates.  There is much tearing of holy cloth and gnashing of angst riddled teeth.

I think David Hobby is a convenient target but the reality is that there were never secrets that couldn't be found in books over the last 50 years.  It's just that most people are too busy/dumb/lazy to read  and they finally found a group of savants that were patient enough (or financially desperate enough) to stand up and teach them, step by baby step, to use their cameras and lights.  And the little screens on the back of the cameras took away the fear of not knowing while the "free" files took away the economic sting of a learning curve.  Nearly every cogent topic covered by Hobby on his Strobist Blog,  was in Bob Krist's 1996 book: Secrets of Location Lighting.  Really.  It was right there for everyone to exploit.

I bought a copy and devoured it.  And then there was Jon Falk's book, Adventures in Location Lighting,  1992.  This was an incredible book.  The book covered triggers, external batteries, DIY modifiers, reflectors, working in mixed light.  Sound familiar?  That was nearly 20 years ago.....

My first book is just an updated riff on Falk and Krist's classics.  We added CLS or TTL flash control and dialed it into the digital market but the salient points came from way back when.  Off camera flash cords that maintained auto control of flash?  Pretty standard on the Vivitar 283 from the early 1970's.

No, David is a convenient target but the reality is that the smart amateurs of the days past and present knew that the market for paid photography was a tough one and counted themselves lucky to have "real" jobs.

Three things are really responsible for destroying the markets (and don't believe for a second that all the APA photographers are worthless hacks who "just need to up their games"):  1.  Accountants took budgeting decisions out of the hands of creative experts and started to treat all imaging as a commodity.  Hence the pushdown for the cheapest images possible at all times. 2.  In case no one noticed the economy has been free falling since late 2006.....and photography is hardly a life or death substance that bubbles up, by necessity,  to the top of every budget.  And, 3.  Now, with enough hand holding and step by step instruction all the people who were too dumb to master traditional photography could fling themselves into the flattening market with abandon.  And since they lacked, for the most part, any good education in business or accounting or aesthetics or art or history they had no idea that they were producing visual crap. Or that they aren't even covering their cost of doing business.  The cream might rise to the top but which buyer has time to sort thru hundreds of barrels of crap to find the magic cream?  And once they find the cream will the accountants let them buy it?  Not when there's a plentiful supply of "good enough" stock at hand.

Will it change?   Does the universe care?  No.

Eventually markets will recover and most people will realize that they've been subsidizing their clients and they will relent and go back to real jobs.  People don't really want freedom because, to quote Janis Joplin, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose..."  And no one wants to be a loser....

We (old haggard photographers) will  stay in the profession as long as we can because we're addicted to the identity of being a photographer and the wonder of making art.  But it will all change.  And just like American students' math test scores;  not for the better.

So the APA members on the forum were talking about the final demise of the industry.  Our big battleship studios are long gone.  Our decided tactical advantage of "weaponry" has been degraded.  All we and they have left to offer is our vision and professionalism.  Now we have to find the clients who actually want vision and professionalism.  I suspect they are as rare as great white whales.  Or the budgets with which to hunt great white whales.....

Please note when you read this that I'm only discussing the markets for paid, professional photography.  I'm not trying to run down hobbyists who use David's techniques for their art and enjoyment.  I'm not saying learning is bad or that techniques should be protected like IP.  I am saying that stupid people ruin markets.  We should do a much better job educating our populace.  They might then value their time and expertise (however garnered) and not want to give it away for less than free.  That would help everyone.

Land ho.



  

CRESTING THE MILLION MARK. CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION?

I have a few friends left in academia and they are almost always working toward having a book published.  Their books are specialized and are generally printed in runs of 2500.  I've had four books on photography published and their runs are more than double that.  If the  book does well, more are printed.  If it does poorly they let it die on the vine.

The bottom line for many traditional writers is that their work might only be viewed by a couple thousand people (who originally purchased the books) initially and several hundreds more by way of "pass along".

I recently checked my total ad page views in our "Adsense Metric" and discovered that this series of 588 blogs has had, in two short years, over one million page views.  That's an amazing number to me.  If you are an ad manager at a big company that probably doesn't even register.  But for one guy and the 21st century version of a type writer and a mimeograph machine.......well,  I like it.

Steven Pressfield has a new book out.  It's about getting things done.  He says that everything hinges on delivery.  That means finishing the project and putting it in the box and delivering it to the world.

I agree.  All the great ideas in the world are nothing unless you deliver them to the audience.  Thanks for being my audience.

Sorry Olympus. No big review on this one.

I hope people don't shorthand this article into a blanket denouncement of what might, for some people, be a good product.  But even though I've always been an Olympus fan this one's going back into the box and heading back to Olympus on Monday.  And in a way it makes me sad.  See, the images are really pretty good.  At least as good as the Canon G12 and the Panasonic LX 5 when shot at the base ISO.  And the built-in, pop-up flash really does a nice job.  The icing on the cake and the thing that tipped the product into the small circle of things I wanted to do a hands on test of was the ability to use the electronic finder from the Pen cameras.  I just knew I was going to love it.  But I didn't.

And most of it boils down to this.  The camera is too small for me to hold comfortably in my hands.  It's just to thin, front to back, and try as I might (an evening out and three days of trudging around downtown shooting as much as I could for hours at a time.....) I never warmed up to this little camera.  I'm only five foot, eight inches tall and I wish I had bigger hands so I could swim faster but if I did have bigger hands it would only exacerbate the problem at hand.......too little camera to hold on to.

With one of the thicker cameras you could quickly adapt a holding position that would allow you to walk down the street holding the camera in your right hand and pulling it up to your eye for a quick snap before pulling it back down and walking on.  It might be training but I feel like the G cameras and even the old, film Canonets had the grip ergonomics just right.

The menus, as usual, take time and mental energy to master and the dials and buttons are too small.  I hate the lens cap that pops off when I turn the camera on.  I lost it for about half an hour and so finally tethered it like a rank amateur at a Disney park.

I know a lot of people who profess to love their Canon s95's.  I'm sure they pull them out once or twice a night and take a quick photo of their friends and then throw the camera back into a pants pocket or purse.  If you are going to buy this camera you'll probably do the same thing.  Because even with the electronic viewfinder the whole thing is just out of balance with the way serious people shoot (maybe just me).

I know I'm going to get a lot of mail on this one so I'm going to defuse some of it right now.  No!  I'm not going to go out and shoot hundreds of test frames and tell you what I like and what I don't like about the images.  If I don't like handling it I'm not going to take the time to shoot it.

I'm not going to parse micro differences and split hairs in a comparison with competitors.  I'm just not going to review the camera.  If you like Olympus and you like micro dinky cameras this might be just what you're looking for.  I love the feel of the EP-2 and the EPL and I feel like the "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids" routine just went way too far on this one.

At the very least, if you buy this camera, you must buy some sort of aftermarket grip in order to use it with any comfort at all.

Several preachy posts in a row should be broken up with something less serious.

The nature of writing blogs for me is to have frank discussions about serious issues that face photographers and creative people in a tenuous time.  But sometimes even I get overwhelmed with my gloomy mein.  So I thought I'd dredge up a delightful memory I have from a different time in my photographic career.

I was on a week long assignment for a tour company that represented a large chain of "all inclusive" resorts in the Caribbean.  My favorite resort in their inventory was the property in Montego Bay, Jamaica.  The main building of the hotel complex was originally built as an estate for Prince Edward just before the second world war.  It was an amazing, solid place with a wonderful open air restaurant and a large swath of white sand beach.  I've been back on vacation with Belinda several times and we've always had a wonderful and relaxing time.  We even took turns (unintentionally) flipping over a little Sunfish sailboat in the bay.

The photo above was taken on my first working visit to the island.  This was one of our four models, hired in Dallas, who flew down to the property with my small crew in a chartered plane.  She was standing on the dock, getting ready to hop on a catamaran for a sunset cruise and I snapped this with one of the original EOS-1 cameras sporting a 70-200mm early L lens.  All of the film from this particular assignment seems to be Fujichrome 100.

We worked hard on this trip and got images all over the resort.  We even took a trip to climb the falls at Ocho Rios.  We worked hard, played hard and generally had a good time.  No one broke the rules.  No one went on a "diva" fit.  The client was pleased enough with take to assign us to five more island adventures over the course of the next year.

We worked from a shot list.  We kept our film cool and dry.  We kept the cameras and lenses out of the air conditioning so they wouldn't be affected by condensation.  We wore hats.  We used sunscreen.  I learned to scuba dive.  

The check came in the mail.  It was good.  

Now that was a boring blog.......

      

Inspiration. Intention.

I was photographed recently.  I'm not sure what the intention of the photographer was.  He wasn't being paid.  It seemed almost perfunctory.  I didn't look good, or gallant or brilliant.  More a deer caught in the headlights for 30 frames or so.

I took the photograph of Belinda, above, because her beauty inspired me.  I saw a mix of expression, grace and beauty, along with a light filled, rich and kinetic environment, the sum of which inspired me to grab the camera ever dangling from the side of my chair and softly, slowly and with great care, to enlist Belinda into a collaborative dance of photography.

Like most entanglements in life there was give and take.  Expressions lost to the vagaries of timing and bad technique.  Nuance gained by trying to overlay my emotional response to the physical reality in front of me.  To mix the subjective with the objective.  In the end it might only be a portrait that speaks to me. And that's okay because I am its primary audience.  But at its outset it was inspired by an overwhelming desire to capture the beauty I saw in front of me....

Note:  in keeping with our new philosophy of "Goodness and Light" this post has been edited severely.  It was more detailed.  Keep that in mind as you read the comments.

The Process of Reinvention Can Be Misguided. Sometimes you just need to be relaunched.

I had coffee with my friend and sometimes mentor, Will van Overbeek, this afternoon and I was blathering on about how we needed to re-invent ourselves for the new age of photography.  (I do go on.)  This time he stopped me and offered,  "No.  You're wrong.  We don't need to invent what we do.  We're artists.  We do what we do.  What we need to do is figure out new ways to market what we do."  And he reminded me that we're not like Coca-Cola, we don't need to mess with the formula,  maybe we just need to work on new delivery systems.

As in most things, Will is probably right.

In my capacity as a supportive member of a college photography program's advisory board I watch a lot of very, very famous speakers come thru and speak to the students and the local chapters of the ASMP.  I watch them show an endless show of cool images from "the good old days" and then I sit thru the second half of the show where they routinely admonish everyone who will listen to charge stratospheric prices, jet to NY to show your book,  dig around in the change jar on your nightstand and finance your own round the world shooting trip or grab a Red video camera, a couple dozen of your best friends and start making your own movie/music video/commercial/magazine or some other such suggestion.

After hearing such from at least a dozen people who HAD stellar careers in the 1980's and 1990's I got to wondering why I don't see their names attached to big, current ad campaigns, in the cut lines in the gutters of magazines, and in all the usual places we used to see their names.  Seems that when the phones stopped ringing back in 2006 most of them waited next to the answering machines for a while just dead certain that everything was going to come roaring back.  About 2009 the realization finally sunk in that things might take a lot longer (if ever) to come roaring back.  Longer than most could wait.

But when they tried all the things they'd done in marketing past campaigns they found that success was now elusive.  The mantra of recent years is SEO and that's great if you selling commodity widgets.  You can rush to the top of the page and I pretty much guarantee that you'll attract the attention of several kinds of shoppers:  brides and bargain shoppers.  Great for wedding photographers but not so great for advertising photographers who've made careers out of differentiating their vision and offering a custom made intellectual property instead of a commodity that depends on price and availability.  (As I've said before, it's hard to scale up production on creativity....)

The other dodge of just about every photographer has been to rush to "free marketing" which means depending a mix of e-mail blasts, social marketing and a dynamic website.  Well,  guess what?  All those crowded front page websites with articles and blogs and words and links on them are design nightmares. And we're trying to sell to designers, right?  A well known photographer and workshop talent who embraced the "crowded page/Word Press/mixed blog=portfolio" websites last year reported yesterday that his page views fell by half since he changed over and drank the Kool-Aide on "dense pack" front page website design.

On the other hand mentor Will has been actually asking art buyers what they really want to see and it seems that the genre that generates the most (all) enthusiasm is not the "blog and portfolio in a blender" approach championed by SEO experts like Blake Discher from the ASMP but the good old fashioned, ultra clean design of a portfolio website.  Now that's not to say that other photographers don't flock to each other's site to see who's doing what and what kind of stuff might be best to "pay tribute to" but it does mean that the people who buy our stuff just really want to see the product (our photography) clearly and quickly and without a lot of clutter.  Probably the reason LiveBooks can still charge three or four big car payments to get you a site up and make it happy.

But the bottom line is that staying in business and pulling in jobs is harder than ever for guys who have the most tenure in the business.  We had old ways of doing things and were slow, both emotionally and logistically, to change course when the icebergs cropped up.  Doesn't mean the work isn't sellable but sometimes I feel like we put the marketing on a train to nowhere just as super highways sprang up all around the edges.

So, what are all the "super pro" veterans of our industry doing? Some have their heads down, learning new skills and producing video as fast as they can.  Others are finding new markets or brilliantly resurrecting old markets in new way.  And I salute these peers.  They've got their heads down working and you don't know who they are because they market exclusively to art directors and art buyers and not to their fellow photographers.

But a huge proportion are opting to stop shooting directly for money and to leverage their decades of name branding and affiliations with giant magazines and new organizations into the world of experiential entertainment.  And let me say right off the bat that I have no problem with people selling knowledge and cheap thrills to a legion of people who are rightfully curious about what working at that level WAS like.  But I also want to say that so, so, so many of the workshops are like astronomy.  When you look in the big telescopes you are seeing photons that left distant stars light years ago and have traveled thru time.  You are not seeing stars in real time.  You are directly experiencing past history.  And this is enchanting and fun and, at times, breathtaking.  But you shouldn't confuse it for what's happening right now.

Learning the language of the past is fun and satisfying but you should understand that it's probably not the current language nor will it be the language of the future.  If you do photography as a hobby, art or for fun then the only thing that matters when you take a workshop is whether or not it was fun, fulfilling or interesting.  If you do it for a business make sure you understand the inflections.  Make sure you can see clearly what is history, astronomy or nostalgia.  As the best coaches in sport say, "Play your own game."

Will is right.  Artists need to hew to their own vision.  We're not in manufacturing we're making a unique intellectual statement.  If one market isn't biting the logical thing not to do is to chase the same "look" as everyone else.  The logical thing to do is to find your market.

An interview with Michael O'Brien in which we discuss his new book, Hard Ground.

Michael O'Brien Speaks.  Hard Ground. from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.


For those of you who are unfamiliar with Michael's work, here is his website:  http://www.obrienphotography.com/  I met Michael in the 1990's when he moved his family to Austin, Texas after having done a six week assignment here for National Geographic.  He is an icon in the industry having done the ground breaking, "What's on your Powerbook?" campaign for Apple, Inc.  A beautiful and timeless campaign for Bank of America and countless amazing photographs for magazines, from Texas Monthly to Life.  And of course, National Geographic.

I decided to interview Michael after the publication of his new book, Hard Ground.  It's an amazing book. I hope you enjoy hearing Michael talk about what he does, how he does it and the thought processes behind it.

I'm so honored that he made time to do this interview with me.

The book is called, Hard Ground.