The importance of launching your dream without delay. Start now, not tomorrow.

Everyone is waiting for the stars to line up. They have a project or a scope of work in mind but they seem to need some sort of cathartic sign from the heavens to actually wake up and say, "today I start making portraits that I like and showing them to an audience I have chosen." 

The problem is that no one seems to want to grow their work organically. Step by step. They seem intent on going right from the purchase of a cool video camera to the creation of a feature film without going through any interim steps. They seem to feel that a good still camera and a couple of months of technical instruction via YouTube or Creative Live will make them into a full fledged artist and they want to come out of the gate with a one person show at a name gallery. It's the same in every field, kids go to chef school and want to come out the front door of their school and walk into the kitchen door of a Michelin three star restaurant and take over as the executive chef. At some point everyone realizes that this isn't the way a long career really works and since the true processes seem risky and time consuming they resist ever starting so that they never run the risk of falling in a big and unglamorous way. 

Photography may seem easy to a clueless accountant who ignorantly distills everything down to its technical skeleton and presumes that all images are commodities. The thickest ones try to find a template which would insure them that one size of experience will cover every photographic contingency equally. And it's so laughable. The grown ups in the room realize that nothing is as simple as it seems and that while the technical (step one, step two, step three) stuff is as simple to learn as math they don't get that non-linear and non-quantifying approaches to craft and art are as powerful as their opposite numbers in the realm of hard science. We don't all respond to the same subject matter in the same way anymore than every movie director directs in the same style. The differences between one brand of computer and another are not in the technical components anymore but in the design sphere and in the gracefulness of the interface and each company's ability to make products that people both enjoy owning and using and which are also the most efficient tools to learn and to bring to bear on tasks. This is why Apple dwarfs Dell now. Why the iPhone spanks the Samsung offerings and why people would much rather drive certain brands of cars, given the economic choice. 

But no matter how good a concept or story or vision or design is the value of it is relatively meaningless (frustratingly so) unless the artist, designer or writer brings it into the real world and shares it. I have thought long and hard about this and it's always been my contention that every art form and every endeavor exists as a continuum. If nothing has been started there is no continuum, only conjecture and desire. By actually starting on a project, product or story there is a power that flows into the artist. Every step forward reinforces this power to create. And here is the important part that I know to be true, the more I practice and shoot and write and explore the better I get. The process itself informs the final product. You have to produce and produce to improve and to grind and polish the vision so that you, the artist, can finally get what you want instead of settling for a shadow of what your vision could be. 

If you've always wanted to produce a portfolio of fine art prints then as soon as you decide on your subject matter you need to head out the door and start shooting. You may reject the first 10 or 100 or 1,000 images that you shoot but by the 2,000th image you'll probably have tried all the stuff that wasn't going to work and you'll have narrowed down into a groove of stuff that is working. By your 10,000th image you'll probably have figured out just how you like beautiful women or landscapes or videos about coffee to look and you'll be refining more and more with every image you shoot and every second of video you commit to. And then you'll start having some nice choices to put into that portfolio. A portfolio that becomes tangible and real when you start showing it to the audience you always wanted. 

Real life is littered with people who wanted to do something really cool but put off doing it "until they knew they were ready." The problem is that there's always just one more thing you could justify doing, learning or buying until you feel that you are ready. If I were to counsel someone on the creative process I would ask them what they love to look at and what they want to create. Then I would tell them to go start now. To use the camera in their hands, or the one they borrowed to get started because the process will inform them at every step of the way to a much greater and much more personal degree than any class, workshop or equipment review will. 

I love to photograph people. But clients don't always want to have photographs done in the styles I want to pursue. I could sit around and wait until the right clients present the right subject in the right setting and ask for exactly the style I want to shoot. If I wait for that I'll be 80 years old have nothing to show and nothing to cherish in the body of my work. When the work doesn't come to me I go to the work. I ask people (strangers, friends, acquaintances, real people) to come and collaborate with me in the studio. I try to get them excited about the prospect of having their portrait made in my style and we shoot and share and the process helps me continue to grow. The work I do for myself is the work I like to show to clients because it moves their future requests forward too. But mostly, just like swimming, the arts require constant practice and being immersed totally in one's art requires much more courage than accepting the security of a job the output of which you don't truly enjoy and don't really control. 

While engineers are necessary and bright and help create things they are not heroic. Neither are accountants or administrators. They've chosen a different path. A path of problem solving for someone else overlaid with the vague promise of financial security and the security of repetition. I think the creative people who are totally dedicated to their art (music, design, writing) are the true cultural heroes of our time because they show us a vision of our culture as it is, as it might become and as it could be in its highest and best expression. They generally make their contributions without safety nets and without the general appreciation of mass culture or the worker bee layers of corporate culture. But at the highest levels of corporate endeavor there is an understanding that art, design, vision, creativity and coloring outside the lines works in concert with the hard science problem solvers to create products that thrill and brands that return wealth to stock holders. The hard science can't exist without a person in the mix who looks from the mountain tops with a big vision of what we could do and how we might leverage it into our daily lives. 

It all seems like play from the outside but from the inside true art and creative creation is a deadly serious undertaking. We will value the reality of movies far longer than we will value the outmoded technical delivery models of movies from the past. The content and style always have more lasting value than the technical details, even though they are unavoidably intertwined. That's why we value books from three hundred years ago but not the presses that created them. 

But the only way to enter the creative arena is to push the door open and walk inside. Everyday. That's where the real courage comes in.

(Photos included as illustrations only. They may not be at all related to the writing other than they are styles I like).

Go here and read something from someone far smarter and more accomplished than me: 

http://us9.campaign-archive2.com/?u=b19a461a45e26a1264d3ae169&id=68226246b5&e=8ebb9fde15

Turning Pro. If you are failing to launch then you NEED Steven Pressfield's latest book, called, "Turning Pro."

No books have had as much impact on my career as a writer and a photographer as have Steven Pressfield's two small books, The War of Art and Turning Pro. I have read and re-read The War of Art until my copy is falling apart. It is so well read that even my Kindle version of the book is dog-eared. 

Back in 2006 and 2007 I suffered from terrible and debilitating anxiety. I tried every imaginable solution and prescription. I talked to a therapist and a psychiatrist until I ran out of words. Then, one day I sat down in a comfortable chair in my bed room and read that thin book cover to cover for the first time. 

When I hit the last page and realized that my anxiety was a symptom of my own resistance keeping me from doing exactly what I wanted to be doing; what I knew I should be doing, I stood up, walked into the studio and got to work. My anxiety diminished as a I worked with only a few brief situational flare ups. In the next four years I had written five books about photography, recharged my photography business and gotten back to work on a long side-lined novel. I don't know how life would have been different had I not read The War of Art and I'm not sure I ever want to know. I do know that the book was instrumental in my grabbing the reins again and getting back to work and happiness. It's a cheap fix. About ten minutes worth of a therapist's time.  If you are stuck and can't seem to move forward or if your life seems to be engineering in all kinds of seemingly random drama that keeps you off track I suggest you buy and read the book immediately. I've given this advice many times over the last few years, mostly to artist friends, and everyone who has listened has ended up thanking me profusely. But of course it's Steven Pressfield who deserves the thanks. 

And that leads me to the next book, Turning Pro. This year I finished up my novel, The Lisbon Portfolio, and decided not to give into perfectionism but to launch an admittedly imperfect book rather than give into resistance and self-doubt and never launch the book at all. It was a big step and one I am grateful I took. But when you've launched something you think is big and scary there's a period in which you can fall into an artistic entropy. You might be waiting to be discovered. You might want to sit back and savor what you've done. You might imagine there are people who want to get together with you, have a beer or coffee and discuss the book. You go back to the same paralysis that most of us had in the first place. Before we launched. Before we pushed forward. Post partum project depression? 

I found myself in that place lately and nothing seemed to be exciting or fun. Nothing seemed like a logical next step until I found myself on an airplane with no physical books, no iPad, no magazines, nothing to read....except for the Kindle app on my iPhone 4s (with its tiny screen). Ever hungry for something new to read I remembered that I had downloaded Steven Pressfield's new book and had not yet cracked it open. The idea had been to wait until I had (mythical) free time to read it on my Kindle in a comfy chair; a glass of red wine on the side table and the cool winds of Autumn blowing outside the French doors of my bedroom. 

And here I was wedged into a middle seat on a Mesa Airways small jet heading back to Austin from somewhere else. I opened up the book and read it in the three hours while bouncing through the middle atmosphere. The message was simple. At some point you turn pro or you give up and put everything off until tomorrow. The only difference between pros in any field and everyone else is that they get up every day and do the work. Head cold, allergies, appointments, distractions, ego, addictions, love, sex, greed, new equipment, etc. are all secondary to the act of getting up every day and doing the work. Of starting everyday. And of finishing every project without "pulling the pin." (I'll let the book explain that). 

I finished the book as we landed in San Antonio. I headed to a book store and bought myself one of the familiar little black journals I use to map out and take notes for all of my writing projects and I sat down at a Whataburger fast food restaurant to have a jalapeño burger and to map out the entirety of my next novel. Two hours or three hours just writing and sipping on a Coke. I don't remember because I was so into the process. Then I drove up IH35 to my home in Austin and started mapping out the timeline for the story. Now I'm refocused. 

I know I need to split my attention between the photography that pays the bills and the writing but I've got a book on the stovetop and it's starting to simmer and everything else is settling back down and getting focused in my world. 

Some books are amazingly powerful. Especially when they come from people who speak from experience and decades of grappling with these universal issues of artists. But the books aren't just antidotes for artistic failure to launch, they apply to anyone who wants to pursue a passion but cannot get started. The excuse may be the need for long preparation or "just waiting for a part" but the difference between success and failure is starting and finishing. Not just talking about how cool it could be.... 

There's a resistance to doing the work we most love because in some respects we know it might fall short and disappoint us. But the Pros push through that and create the work. If it's flawed we'll get it right on the next one. And we'll start on that next one the minute we finish with this one. 

I remember reading about Steven Pressfield finally finishing the writing on his first real novel. He rushed to his friend's house, a fellow writer. Pressfield asked his friend, "What do I do now?" To which his friend replied, "Tomorrow morning you sit in front of the typewriter and start writing the next one!" And that's just what Pressfield did. Over and over again until he started to get each one just right.

What's on my Kindle? Some good stuff. But none better than those two books.

           

I made a statement about the decline of photography in 2013. Was I right or wrong? Or maybe the answer is somewhere in the middle.

Here's the link: http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2013/08/has-bubble-burst-is-that-why-camera.html

The avalanche of camera sales declines has accelerated in 2014 and the trend looks even scarier in 2015. Am I worried? What? Me worry?

More clients need more photos than ever before. They just need to find photographers who can light and see instead of just buying more cool stuff.

And if that raised your blood pressure a bit then you might want to re-read my most read blog post in the past two years. It's also a prediction of a different future....

http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-graying-of-traditional-photography.html

Learning to use my cameras to make better images for my clients. Reaching back for proven methods.

I've come to notice that I sometimes work too quickly with digital cameras. I understand that part of their appeal is the tight feedback loop that the review image on the rear screen gives and also the ability to shoot with a degree of abandon with the assumption that small glitches and technical wobbles can be fixed right up in post processing. But the things that can most generally be fixed are exposure and color and the things that are harder to fix are flawed compositions, non-optimal exposures and basically bad ideas. The last three parameters are the ones which would always benefit from me slowing down, thinking more and pushing the button on the camera less frequently. 

I did what is probably the last job of 2014 for my business on Thurs. last week. I am of course welcoming all stragglers and procrastinators to bring me "emergency shoots" between now and the end of the year but really, my clients rarely work that way. At any rate I was booked to go to a custom framing shop that services clients in both gallery businesses as well as large scale hospitality clients (big hotels around the country). I was working with a good art director and we'd scouted the business a few days earlier, which is always a more effective way to work. I've enjoyed working with the Nikon cameras in the second half of the year so I packed a Think Tank Airport Security case (the original) with a D7100 body and a D7000 body and a bunch of new and old lenses. 

The new lenses were the logical ones to use but something (just the right focal lengths? Just the right visual signature?) kept me using the handful of manual focus Ais lenses I'd packed. Maybe I just liked the feel of focusing for myself after a long year of snappy autofocus.

When we set up the first environmental portrait, using a Fotodiox LED panel (the 508AS) blowing through a large, one stop, collapsible silk diffuser, I was thinking about how we used to do this with slow, medium format cameras and even slower medium format lenses and how we used to confirm focus with a flip down magnifier in the waist level finder. At that moment something clicked and I decided to use the D7100 as a slow, medium format camera instead of a "do everything for you" camera of the new century. 

I switched out the new 85mm 1.8 G lens with 60mm macro and stuck the camera and lens into the manual focusing mode. I grabbed a Hoodman Loupe out of a pocket of the camera case and popped the camera into live view operation to fine focus the lens at high magnification. When I nailed the focusing down I took some time to look at every square millimeter of the scene in front of my camera and starting actively looking for ways to improve the whole shot. We moved out a small plant ( I don't like houseplants in photographs) we moved the subject over to one side a bit so his head fell into a dead space that needed filled in the background. I spent time moving to and from the camera correcting the subject's pose and posture. I set a custom white balance with a Lastolite gray target.  When everything was just right I used an external, incident light meter to set the manual exposure.

It was a more involved process than putting the person's face under the correct little, illuminated focusing square and trusting to the camera's measurements and the life jacket last resort of PhotoShop but what this more extended process seemed to allow my was more time to really concentrate on what I was doing. My mind was guided by the process to slow down and think better. When we stopped to review the images I'd taken I was pleased in a way I haven't been lately with my photographs. I'd gotten into the bad habit of taking to many shortcuts and using my camera's potential for automation to disengage from some of the more important parts of the process. 

When we made very good images in the past there were some denominators that were common in each engagement. We started from a steady base by using a tripod. We started with a steady conceptual base by understanding what we wanted to end up with before the camera even came out of the case. And by necessity, we got all the little steps right which slowed down the procedure and gave our brains some breathing space to be more critical, more focused on what was happening right there in front of us. Too often now we're already thinking of how we'll fix something in post as were shooting instead of slowing down and fixing the things we need to fix now. The ounce of prevention instead of the multi-hour engagement in a our troll-ish computer caves, cloistered away from friends and family and good influences. 

Today I'm heading out to shoot some fun stuff for myself but I'm taking a tripod and a loupe and I'm going to try and up the ante and start treating this APS-C sensor-ed camera like a mini-view camera. Setting it up, leveling it and choosing the perfect aperture of the scenes I hope to find. It's not that the tools are somehow in decline that's devolved photography as much as it is our collective abrogation of responsibility at nearly every step that has been the dangerous and damaging to our creative processes and the intellectual qualities of our photographs. But this is an easier fix than we imagine. It just requires that we re-engage holistically in the process instead of letting our cameras Phone it in.

Don't forget those special photographers on your list who are just pining away for their own copies of "The Lisbon Portfolio." My mom finished reading her copy yesterday and said the story was filled with action and lots of fun. It's my hope that you'll think so too. 

paper back.

kindle version

And if you are working on a last minute Christmas/Holiday gift list consider heading to Amazon.com from my site. I'll get some site sustaining referral fees from Amazon.com and you'll not pay a cent more for your purchases. A smile for everyone...

A long weekend without a camera in my hands.

In the last twenty years I've never left town without a camera of some sort.

I broke with a long tradition and habit this past weekend. I traveled to Charlotte, NC and back without a camera. Unless you count the camera in my iPhone 4s, and I really don't. I meant to take a camera, or rather my habitual nature meant to take a camera, but my rational brain kept saying, "you're going to have your hands full and your schedule is tight. A camera will just get in the way." This time I listened to my rational brain which is also unusual.

I was traveling with my two parents who are in their late eighties. The both need to be in wheelchairs with Skycaps to make their way through big airports. My dad is becoming a bit forgetful and someone needs to be with them to make sure he doesn't leave his keys, wallet and passport behind at the security checkpoint like he did on last year's trip. My mother needs to be on oxygen and I've spent a good week learning the ins and outs of oxygen concentrating machines. The difference between pulse and constant, the stated battery endurance versus actual performance and the best way to breathe to make sure oxygen delivery is efficient. 

Skycaps guide the parents while I guide the carry-on luggage and oxygen machine extras. It's the kind of operation that has lots of moving parts and a lot of "if = thens" involved. Very much guaranteed to crank up the anxiety levels of even a calm and easy-going person. On the plane I get to make sure my dad doesn't accept too much coffee because those bathrooms are far away and it's a slow procession down the crowded aisles of pre-holiday jets. I also need to use a fingertip oximeter to make sure we got the oxygen flow correctly done for my mom. That's always an interesting competing intersection between appropriate levels and battery life....  I just wasn't up for tossing a camera into the whole mix.

I didn't really miss the camera (my perennial safety blanket) on the flight to Charlotte. I certainly didn't miss the camera as I paid attention to both the conversation of the Bulgarian cab driver and the beeping, low battery alarm on the oxygen machines while we traveled through Charlotte in a cab, to my sister's house. My mind was running the calculus of time spent versus stated battery reserves. Didn't even think to stare out the window and calculate the correct exposures in my mind. 

Where I missed my camera was my return the next day. I got dropped off at the airport by myself, carrying nothing but a small backpack with one change of clothes, a pen and a journal book. When I walked through the terminal I saw potential images everywhere. The sunlight was strong and clean outside the windows and it made the planes seem sculptural and somehow much more interesting. There were lines of architecture intersecting commerce that would have made wry, disassociated commentary, and at the very heart of the matter the camera is so wedded to my self-image that I felt somewhat naked and adrift without it. 

I flew into San Antonio, retrieved my car, and headed up the road to Austin. Heavy gray clouds hung over the highway like a dowdy, lumpy comforter. Little glimpses of sunlight popped up here and there and wherever there was a break in the clouds there was also a most picturesque and laser-like beam of warm yellow sunlight coating everything within a small cone of brilliance. I saw one image of a majestic roadside tree perfectly spotlit and magical against a background of desaturated gray clouds and un-illuminated landscape. And still no camera. 

When I got home I kissed the dog, kissed the wife and then went off into the studio to look for a camera to play with. The first one I came across was an old Alpa which had settled in next to an older Leica. They were both so comfortable. It was great to back home with my small family and a studio full of friends. 

Epilogue: The parents were delivered to my sister's house, safe and sound, and are enjoying their visit very much. The cameras have had their batteries charged and are enjoying some downtime. I'm learning to let go a bit; I walked with Studio Dog and Wonder Spouse this morning and didn't even consider bringing along a camera. I guess that's healthy...

What do I want Santa to bring me for Christmas? Hmmm. I'm easy. I'll give him a choice....

A Christmas card from a long, long time ago. Just found it in my samples drawer.

Ben. 1996.

Pity the children of photographers. They get more exposure than most rock stars. At least locally. Back in 1996 Belinda and I decided to do a Christmas card to send to friends and clients (the distinctions are sometimes vague). We headed into the big, commercial studio I maintained at the time. It was just east of the IH-35 freeway and was absolutely cavernous (but I nearly succeeded in filling it up with many different cameras and lighting instruments....). 

When we got everything set up we started to explore just how well a 15 month old could take direction. You know, "So, turn left and give me an innocent little expression and then bring your hands up and show me Blue Steel or Le Tigre (Zoolander references).  We didn't have wings on him but they magically appeared in the film we got back from the lab.....

We didn't write down what cameras and lenses we used or how we lit it and we certainly didn't have time to do the standard behind the scenes video. But we loved the way the final image turned out. 

I'm trying to think up a good card for this year but all I have to work with this week is Studio Dog; the boy is still away at college. I wonder if Studio Dog can balance on the top of a Christmas tree and wear a Santa hat. Not for a long time, just a few minutes.....