Some Thoughts about Holiday Marketing.

If you are the marketing director of a regional theater, and holiday plays are a big part of your yearly budget, it makes good sense to advertise as hard as you can during the last quarter of the year. If you have a retail store and you sell seasonal (4th Q) holiday stuff I think marketing is also strongly indicated. If you are a restaurant that can host large gatherings then, yes, go, market. But, if you are an advertising photographer who isn't interested in developing a following in family portraits or making hundreds of photos with Santa at the mall, you might want to delay your marketing push just a bit.

Relax and let your advertising agency clients and marcom directors, your product managers and your corporate communications people have a little breathing space. The budgets for 2015 are mostly gone by now and very, very few people are rushing to spend on, and produce, big projects right down the middle of the holidays. Seriously. My wife works at an advertising agency and I spent eight years in an advertising agency, and at this point in any given year the focus is on final execution. Is that brochure back from the printers? Is the new website up and running? Did the magazine insertions drop on time? Did we finish getting our clients' holiday cards to the list/sort provider? Did we get our corporate gifts out to the clients who pay attention to those little niceties?

I'm going to think that having you send them yet another e-mail blast about your latest project is something that's really far down the list of priorities for them right now, especially given their time management struggles of the season.

I certainly don't think you shouldn't reach out to your clients at this time of year but it's time to do it graciously, and with a light touch. A given is to send a tasteful and thoughtful holiday card along with a very brief note of thanks for making our year so great. If you must make your card all photographic think about making your card clever and fun instead of making it yet another folded, mailable, mini-billboard for your awesome capabilities.

If you have happy, continuing clients you might consider sending over a tray of holiday cookies from one of the premier bakeries in your town. Just send a small note along, don't bother having your business logo emblazoned with icing on the top of every cookie. If you know what your direct contact likes to drink (alcohol-wise) a discreetly delivered bottle of their favorite beverage is always well received but, please, no note that tells them you'd like to help them drink your gift.

The holidays are a time to be mellow and sincere and human. It's too easy for a promotion, timed to the holidays, to go dreadfully wrong and send a shallow, callow message.

Now, the time to go for the marketing juglar vein is the second full week of January. Save your resources and ready your campaign for the second and third critical weeks of the first quarter. That's when your client's wonderful children are safely back at school. The in-laws are long gone. The gifts are exchanged for all the things people really wanted. Staying home and doing chores is wearing thin for most of your clients. AND, they are just then sitting down to do strategic planning for the rest of the year. That's when you need to deliver your best shot. Or series of shots. A nice New Years postcard, followed by an e-mail blast, followed by a request to show new work, followed by a follow up card. A link to your new video project. Etc.

I can pretty much guarantee that your fusillade during the critical holiday weeks will get totally lost in the clutter or tossed by an overworked art director rushing to get gifts at the last minute. I can't guarantee your success in an early in the year surge but I can tell you that it works pretty well for the people who try it. By week three of January people are bored to be back at work and thrilled to look at anything you send them. Distractions welcome.

But all this means you have to be patient and get prepared. It's almost here. 

Love at first click. I've just used the new (to me) Nikkor 135mm f2.0 lens in the studio for a commissioned portrait and I couldn't be happier. Can't you tell from the expression on my self portrait? (recent edit, additions).

Amazing what a haircut, a shave and a cup of coffee can do...

This is today's before and after selfie event.

I wrote about waking up with a vision of a certain lens in my mind and then finding that exact lens later in the day. It all happened last week. Was it just Friday?

I made sure the lens worked as it should over the weekend and then, this morning, I used it to photograph a radiologist here in my west Austin studio. I used the lens the way I intended to: with continuous lighting, camera and lens on a steady tripod, and the aperture of the lens nearly wide open. My results were right on the mark. I loved what I saw through the lens and was very happy upon examining the 47 different files on my 27 inch screen.

As a side note, I think the reason so many people are happy when they shoot portraits on a Nikon D810, is that the camera has so much dynamic range that, when shooting in the low to middle ISO range the camera delivers the kind of exposure latitude we used to depend on when using color negative film. This is especially true if you are shooting 14 bit, uncompressed raw files. The amount of information in the files is massive and the dynamic range is very good at helping photographers preserve detail in the highlights and shadows.

I lit the doctor's portrait with LED lights. I use a 6x6 foot scrim to one side, angled from right next to the camera to about four feet out from the doctor at the other end of the panel. Two LEDs were aimed at the scrim. I used a third LED light on the background (same background we've used for this practice for nearly 16 years) and, I was going to use a fourth LED light as a hair light but it turns out this particular doctor is bald so I turned that one off.

I used a silver reflector to the opposite side of the main light for fill.

I used ISO 640 on the camera and that gave me f2.8 and a half at 1/125th of a second. Just right.

When I took the glowering (not intentionally) self portrait above I purposely under exposed the background and took the fill reflector out all together. I also dropped the exposure on my face by half a stop. I did not take the portrait out of vanity but because I wanted to show what I meant when I said I like the focal length and the character of the lens, but I didn't have any great models lingering around the studio, just waiting to be cajoled into posing, so I took on the burden of representation myself.

The lens is quite sharp at f2.8. It is well behaved in every way. I, however, could use about five days of really good sleep, a haircut and a shave. A self portrait every once in a while has a way of humbling even the most self-delusional amongst us. Oh well....

(the beginning of my descent into the new Selfie Regime).

Why Leica? Why Leica indeed. Here is an interesting video. One or two tiny parts aren't safe for the workplace. But it's beautifully done and homage to great work from the last century.

https://vimeo.com/148355161

So many great photographic moments recreated in the service of this company's narrative...

Somewhere in Berlin with a Samsung Galaxy NX camera and the little kit lens.

Just passing by.
(Please click to enlarge).

Obviously, doing art requires some sort of tripod.

Juxtaposition. Out of time out of place.

So, would you believe that I was looking at some August Sander images from 1930's Germany and was so enthralled by his portraits of bakers that I decided to create a composite from a baker portrait made long ago; in the black and white film years?

Of course the original image of the baker  might have shown him standing at attention against a stark kitchen background, but a little time spent in a modulus molding program imbued him with the appearance of movement. And then, of course, to make a statement about the confluence of two time streams I had to composite him into a modern scene. But I am such a perfectionist that I needed to control every square centimeter of the image and so I created each person in the scene individually, using a three D modeling program. I went so far as to make authentic SXSW badges for each one of the secondary people in the composition and then calculated the exact amount of defocusing each would require, depending on where they would exist in the construct.

I didn't like the original carpeting so I had this carpet designed and produced. I photographed the carpeting at the final size I would use it and then dropped it into the construct. When I finished creating the image, after several months of intensive PhotoShop,  I worked with several curators from famous museums who helped me craft convincing and plausible artist statements. Armed with the images and the artist statements I embarked on the process of securing an embarrassingly enormous grant. This required the local government to divert several millions of dollars from programs to feed starving children but it allowed me the time and space to really refine my vision of hermeneutically colliding psycho-social spheric containment realities and then have them master printed large enough to attract top galleries. Imagine my lack of surprise or even registration of emotion when, Baker #7, Harbinger of the Duality Apocalypse, sold for a cool $10 million....

But it was all worth it because I can feel the ephemeral sense of reticence that is the foundation of the work.

Sorry, just feeling snarky today. Too much reading of works about modern artists via modern magazines about ART. My bad.

SelfieVision2015. When our universe became a mirror.

I'm throwing in the towel on elitism and snobbery. I'm ready to become a selfie taking, fully realized, modern human being. I pledge that everywhere I travel I will document me having fun, or being miserable, or whatever. I will not only use my phone to document every meal but will also shoot a bit wider as well so I can be seen....with my meal. I will document myself getting out of the pool in my slight pair of Speedo jammers. I will document myself pumping gas and yelling at the talk show people on the radio; with whom I disagree. I will document myself shooting assignments with other cameras. I will get a selfie stick. I will get a selfie wrench and a selfie hammer. I will get tiny flashes to fit on either side of my phone as it sits on my selfie stick so I can do minimalist, selfie lighting for more ART. I will get tiny, selfie soft boxes for my tiny lights on my selfie stick.

I will open a gallery and every print will be a selfie I have taken in some artistic fashion. If my own creative juices prove ineffective I will used the canned filters in Instagram with extreme (lack of) prejudice. I will lobby to have my selfie portraits used on the dollar bill, and the Euro. I will have selfie toilet paper made so I can admire myself in the most private moments, and share the gift of my image while others are takin' care of business.  I am trying to train Studio Dog to take her own selfies (but she seems stuck in the 1990's with the Zone System and the fine black and white print).

I will seek out my friends and acquaintances, and future friends and acquaintances, while I slide through public life and I will stop them and help them experience the ultimate in visual joy as I hold the small phone in my shaking (from excitement) hands and show them every image in my film roll. Sometimes I will stop and do the swiping motion that makes images bigger so I can excitedly zoom in and show them this great expression, or that great detail of clothing or jewelry.

I want to take it all further so I am getting a second cellphone so I can help my first cellphone take selfies of my cellphone and vice versa. And a third phone so I can document the first two phones selfying each other. This is all so exciting.

I am certain that I will dominate the searches on Instagram and other sharing sites. Who in their right mind would not drop everything to see a grey haired man in an anonymous, button down, blue broadcloth shirt, sipping coffee at a Starbucks?

Soon I will break into selfie movies and will regale everyone with programming. Watch me as I get frustrated trying to read the small type on the Netflix screen on our TV from across the living room. Sit captivated as you watch me take an enteric coated aspirin, some vitamin C, and some CoEnzyme Q10 with a glass of water at night.

Watch my video as I explain escrow to myself. I'm all so fascinating!!!! Why haven't we done this before?