I'm Still At It

I have been a busy guy these last couple of weeks. Our construction company had a booth at the local Home and Garden show last weekend and I attended a Lead Renovator Certification class this weekend. With all the other work going on, I didn't feel like I was getting much quality time with my camera, but, looking back on the time period, I did get some shooting practice in.

At first it was just the same old "get the camera out when the kids are being cute" routine. And a few before and after shots of a bathroom I taped and textured for a customer. But then Alicia brought me along on a portrait shoot of our friends, John and Kim. Alicia actually used more than one of my pictures in her blog post from that session. I also got to shoot more jewelry with my friend Bob as well, and the things I had learned from the first go 'round with him a couple of weeks ago sped our most recent shoot up tremendously.

The most amazing one for me was getting to work with Alicia to take pictures of a wedding design that Sara and Sharon from Serendipity Events put together just for us. They even brought a model bride and groom (real people!) with every detail planned and executed just so. The light was beautiful and we really enjoyed getting to take the photos at a nice mellow pace.

I have been feeling more confident this last week in my ability as a photographer, but each new experience emphasizes to me the need to work on one aspect or another of my skill set. Last week I noticed that I need to not always leave my aperture quite so tight all the time or I end up with shots that would be truly great except that a critical area is blurry. So I am learning in low pressure situations and enjoying it all. I keep coming back to the idea that pictures are truly everywhere, and it simply up to me to find them and frame them well.

One other thing I am looking forward to is the arrival of our new copy of Jesh De Rox's "Beloved Field Guide". If you are a people photographer, you should check out what this guy has going on. He sees people in such a full way that his pictures just naturally show the inner beauty of his subjects. His website is amazing, and some of the music on it is by a lady I worked with at Big Sky Bible Camp a long time ago named Amy Seeley. Her songs are deep and moving.

I am planning in the not-too-distant future to start shooting portrait sessions when Alicia is too busy with the new baby to be able to shoot for awhile. I am hoping to set up a couple of practice sessions before that, so don't be surprised if I call and ask if you would be willing to be my guinea pig!

"There's so much beauty around us for just two eyes to see. And everywhere I go, I'm looking."

-Rich Mullins, "Here in America", Liturgy Legacy album

Which is your favorite image? Feel free to leave a comment!

Inspiration

Now I'm not going to insult my mama and tell you that I am dumber than a box of hair, but, if you look at my schooling credentials, you might wonder. The fact is, I dropped out of home school two months into my sophomore year and went to work for my dad to help him build a small custom home. Have you ever tried to get a fifteen year old to do anything he isn't excited about? I am glad I wasn't in charge of me! After that, I drifted from receiving gift department inventory items and pricing them at Christian Book Supply, to blueprint and copy work, to other various construction related jobs including painting and being a plumber's laborer.

One late afternoon,at age 17, as I tidied up the work area at Blueprinter's Ink, I listened as Paul Harvey described, on The Rest of the Story, how it came to be that Eric Clapton got serious about playing the guitar. When young Eric was 13 years old, he received his first guitar, an acoustic, and put in a lot of frustrating time trying to learn the blues on it. He nearly gave up and, when at the age of 17 he failed out of art school, took a job working as a bricklayer for a time. From the repetition of his new job, he learned that he could get good at something he wasn't even all that interested in if he just put in the time and stuck with it. Armed with this new knowledge and an electric guitar, he applied himself more rigorously to his music and, since then, seems to have done alright for himself in the blues arena.

Here is what I eventually concluded from that story: If I believe that I should learn a task, something I might not even particularly care to do, I will work at it until I am good enough at it that I truly enjoy it. When I got married and needed to support our new family, I applied my Clapton lesson to building houses with my Dad. Not only did I try to be a better carpenter every month, I also read any books and trade publications I could get my hands on, searching for that one piece of information that would make the difference in my quality level and productivity. And I started actually enjoying things like drywall and framing (but not insulating, ever) and thinking like a site supervisor .

During the past week I have been trying to find a way to get better as a photographer, and my conclusion most days has been that I simply do not have the time. I tried shooting on Wednesday a couple of times, but I knew even while I was taking them that the pictures were no good. Then, on Thursday, I went over to our friend Bob's house to shoot some emerald and sapphire pictures for his Ebay store. Using our 5D mark 2 and an 85mm lens with a macro extension ring on the back, I shot for three hours with mostly natural light from the window. It was so addicting that I lost track of the time. I was metering and focusing manually, and the gems were so small that I couldn't tell if I had gotten the shot until I zoomed way in on the image on the LCD screen in the back of the camera. I took one gem picture where it looks almost like the reflection of a city at night in a shop window, and even though that picture is not completely in focus on part of the front of the stone, I am still excited about it.

On Saturday, the kids were being cute in the dining room and I decided to get out the camera again (same setup minus the macro) and shoot a bit. I got a couple of good pictures and again did the work manually. Finally, a little bit of momentum. The main goal of my portrait shooting right now is to get pictures that look as if Alicia took them, and so far I am progressing toward that end noticeably. It's simple, right? I just have to use a tight lens, look for what is interesting, compelling or beautiful to me about my subject or subjects, find the pretty light, meter properly, direct the shot, focus properly and get some good moments. And do it over and over and over until I can nail it every time.

And it finally hit me that the answer to my question of how to get where I want to go with all of this lies in my level of inspiration. What else will cause me to choose shooting practice over any other activity when it feels as though I am already strapped for time and stretched beyond the limit.

All of my life I have struggled with a type of perfectionism, the kind that makes me not want to start something if it won't end up to be the mostest and bestest version of a thing that ever there was. I daydream about being an amazing musician or woodworker, picture myself doing perfect work that will last forever. Anything less would be a waste of time, right? It is much easier to not even start things I know I don't have the time or patience to finish well.

So it is tricky for me to work my way into the photo industry because, for photographers, inspiration is a fickle thing. We might not know what kind of pictures we are going to shoot at a gig, we might not be feeling confident or secure in our abilities because we got up on the wrong side of the bed, and we still have to expect great things of ourselves out of every shoot. We owe that to the clients who hire us. The grand secret is, once we are present behind the camera and looking, really trying to see what is interesting, compelling or beautiful to us on the other side of that lens, magical things can happen. We find perspectives that blow our minds and fill us with emotion. The inspiration is there when we look for it. And we can begin taking great pictures.

Assuming the lighting is decent, of course.

The Goal

Now that we all have the nice camera that we thought would help us take professional pictures and didn't, and that nice computer with programs on it that we thought would make okay pictures awesome and didn't, what next? I found it easy to say to myself for the last couple of years, "Self, your pictures are good enough. They are better than some professional pictures you see on the web or in publications, and lots of your friends tell you you are a good photographer." These personal pep talks happen between the sobriety checks I get when I realize just how much disparity there is between what I personally see as good photography and the pictures I take during a given year.

In order to move beyond this lame cycle, I am working on a definition of what I think constitutes a "good" photo so that I can move my lazy self in that direction. Here is what I have come up with so far:

"A good photo is one which represents a moments in time, in a way that is interesting, compelling or beautiful to the photographer and/or the viewer, and does not contain anything which would distract most viewers from focusing on the main point or feeling of the picture."

If I have my lighting just right, my exposure and composition dialed in and the subject just how I want them, so what if their eyes are only 3/4 of the way open? Everything else was fine. And maybe that kind of picture IS fine for me and mine, maybe we don't care about that kind of thing. But if I plan on putting myself forward as a pro, EVERYTHING about a finished image has to be good. One wrong element will direct the discerning eye away from the intended focal point and dash all hope for a good image. Last night, I got out some prints of family and senior shoots that my wife did before we went digital. And it was kind of funny, but also kind of sobering to see the types of basic errors she was making just three or four years ago on nearly every picture.

Good photography takes the intuition and focus of a Zen gardener or a Shaker craftsman, and that level of operation only comes with experience. I have complained about not having much time to polish my skills. In order to get the job done, I am in the process of organizing a list of the disciplines I need to work on.

Next post-Basic things that every photographer must control before any great picture can be taken.

The Problem

The little guy is asleep for the night and I am stoked. Let's do this!

I have taken some pictures I am proud of in the last few years, such as the one above. I like to think that many of them are on par with a lot of work I see that is regarded as professional. I have a general sense of composition, and I am getting better at catching the "moment" in my camera as time races by. But I know how few pictures I go for actually turn out and, thanks the PhotoVision dvd magazine we subscribe to, I get to watch pros (some of the best in the world) shooting live with real clients in real photo shoots, and I can see the painfully large gap between their consistency and mine. And now we come to:

The Problem

I know what I need to work on to get where I want to go with the whole picture business. My trouble is that I have a wife (no Alicia, you are not my trouble), three kids with baby number four coming soon, a construction business, lots of people in my life who I interact with, a life, etc. I am a church treasurer in my spare time and I do all kinds of random other stuff that may or may not fit into the etc. category. I run the business side of Alicia Brown Photography, and second shoot most of the weddings my wife covers. I am trying to be caring and intentional in my relationships with people, especially with my children (and that category seems to keep growing mysteriously). You could say the time I have to spend on honing my sweet photo skills is a bit limited.

I have been writing now for twenty minutes and I need to stop soon. I am going to have to break the unveiling of my plan and any attached philosophical ramblings up into a couple of installments. So....

Here is the essence of my goal: I want to always be able to find the best light for my subject I can get, have my iso speed, exposure and lighting ready, and be prepared to capture that one instant when something special happens that might never happen again. It isn't rocket science, but it takes a great deal of experience that I do not yet have and want to get within a limited amount of time. I want to be a photo ninja. If Chuck Norris should ever direct one of his infamous lightening roundhouse kicks toward my head, I want to be metered and prepared to focus and get off a frame or two of his foot before I either duck or get wholloped into next week.

I plan to keep my Canon 30d with me most of the time starting tomorrow. And I hope to do some expounding on the details of my plan very soon.

Stay tuned.

Some Credibility

I come from a long line of photographers. My father was a photographer in high school and during junior college, working for his father shooting weddings and other events. My dad switched to building later on and hasn't looked back. My grandpa, on the other hand, has pictures in the Smithsonian and has photographed tens of thousands of people, including JFK and Barbara Bush.

So maybe the line isn't so long, but I've still got the genes, right?

I like to think so.

Grandpa gave me a camera when I was eight or nine. It was a little plastic thing that had a knob with pictures of a cloud, a sun, a flower, and a lady with cloudy hair. I took some pictures on a backpacking trip with it and they all have this weird white streak through them.

When I was seventeen, I asked him what camera he would recommend for me next, and he gave me grandma's Nikon point and shoot. She hated the one he provided to her as a replacement, and I loved the Nikon. It knew my thoughts. I didn't have to change any settings because it had no external controls other than power, zoom and timer. From sunrises to giant moths, that camera magically drank in light and cranked out nearly flawless images. I used it to shoot a photo that ended up on the yearbook cover of a school I went to. I should have stuck with the magic camera.

But no, I had to move onward. This time, Grandpa gave our family his Nikon FA, a 35mm SLR with a 35-105 zoom. And he gave me some advice which I have since come to treasure (but at the time almost completely ignored). He told me to read the instructions all the way through and familiarize myself completely with the camera before I shot one picture.

That camera was FUN with a capital FUN! I was shooting on program and aperture priority modes and I was GOOD. I could shoot standing handheld shots at 1/8 of a second and have the image focused on the eyes and crisp. I was using quality film and paying for quality processing. I took some senior pictures and random stuff and I still have an album on a shelf in our office with shots from those first few rolls with the FA.

There was a slight issue I couldn't figure out: I could focus the camera so that a near subject was looking great, but the background was always so blurry and I had to be somewhat close for a clear shot. One day, my dad noticed that a friend of my sister's had the same basic haircut as me and he wanted to take a picture, so I got out the nice camera and posed with my "twin." I remember my dad distinctly saying something about how the focus wasn't right, and then some nonsense about how the lens was in macro mode. Huh. I hadn't shot a single picture on that camera up to that date with real control over what I was doing.

Fast forward to fifteen years later. I now have dozens of weddings under my belt, a construction business and, oh-I-almost-forgot, a wife and three kids with baby number four about two months away. My wife is a TRUE professional with a website and nice gear and everything. I am now firmly in the "second shooter" position when we take pictures together and I keenly feel the need to sharpen my photography skills in a major way. I want to earn at least half of our living through photography and I want to control the camera and the light in a way that makes me excited and confident to load my camera bag in the car and capture memories for someone.

So here is the project: I will set goals for myself every week to polish my shooting skills, beginning with the VERY BASICS, and I will keep a journal notebook and a blog running to mark my progress. I picture myself a few months down the road as a sort of ninja, reacting almost without thinking, getting shots I never imagined could come from me. If you are shooting on the side for friends and hoping to go pro yourself, or just wanting more control over your DSLR (that's Digital Single Lens Reflex, a kind of camera for those of you not yet "in the know"), I hope to offer you inspiration and resources your might not yet have come across. Hopefully I won't flake out ;-)

Look, Ma, I'm blogging!