A little hibernating from SloShots has been necessary this past month. Many changes going on in the life of this photographer. Most notably, going from living on the road to moving back to Las Vegas with the family. Bad news: less variety of locations to shoot all over the country. Good news: keeping all equipment in one place rather than transporting the whole kit and kaboodle every 6 weeks. It certainly helps (or hurts) my gear lust, now that I don’t have to worry about the portability of every new item I buy. Another bit of bad news is that I just realized that the Calumet backdrop I’ve had for years doesn’t fit in the one room in our house that I was planning for all my studio work. The ceiling is lower than I thought! Very frustrating, and now I have to figure out something else…

But on to some projects of the last month or so. Disko Madame (Meetu Chilana) returns with some ideas for a shoot she’s had for a while. Some hand, leg, and feet shots that hint at her stage persona. Sounded like it was right up my alley! We were in Miami at the time, and I knew of a great location: Art Center/South Florida on Lincoln Road. This collective of galleries has a hallway connecting them that is paved almost entirely in mosaic. I thought it would be a great, colorful backdrop for our purposes. We didn’t ask permission, we didn’t really think we needed to, but we certainly got some strange looks and even some attitude from the gallery owners. We figured the hallways were public, and we tried to stay out of everybody’s way, but it was certainly a small lesson in guerrilla photography.

I used a one speedlite setup, and there was some nice ambient light I used for fill. But it was some good practice for closeup shots with an off-camera wireless flash. It’s clear that Canon’s Speedlite system is great, easy and fast for experimentation. Working in manual on the 430 EX II is quick and easy once you learn the basics. And manual is the way to go over ETTL when the subject doesn’t move around too much.

It’s been too long since my last post. Tour life with the circus presents itself with many challenges, among them having to deal with change on a regular basis–change in scenery, lodging conditions, climate, etc. Dealing with these changes this time around took me away from doing any blog posting or even much image editing. Fortunately, it didn’t keep me away from shooting. And a happy challenge of this last spate of changes was a major solo road trip from Calgary to Las Vegas–a two and a half day road trip, over hill and dale, through cold and warm weather, rain and shine. I had my 7D close on my passenger seat at all times, as well as my foot hovering over the brake to stop for interesting shots.

It was mostly (but obviously not only) gray skies, which not only provided great even lighting, but also added a sense of desolate mystery to the landscape. Even though I was on a major highway the whole time, I still felt very isolated, and it seemed as if I could have stepped into a horror movie at any time. It was pretty awesome!

What wasn’t awesome was the speeding ticket I got in Utah for doing 90mph in a 80mph zone!

I’ve done a little more tinkering in Lightroom 3 with these pictures than I have with some of my other shots. I’m looking a little deeper at the presets how they can enhance the mood of each shot. I’m also trying to train my eye and discipline myself to actually throw some images into Photoshop for some extra editing. There was a barbed wire fence in front of the horses and an extra light post in the motel shot that I’ve removed. I’ve been a stickler for keeping all elements of the original image intact, thinking there was some sort of noble integrity to remain true to the image as shot. But I need to wrap my head around the fact that photography includes post-processing and editing. So cloning out distracting elements to help tell the picture’s story is absolutely fair game.

Another thing I’ve been neglecting is my reading. I guess having limited internet access in Canada for four months forced me to do some offline book reading. Now that I’m back in the States, I’m back to pouring over the feeds and blogs and such.

One e-book that I had been reading though turned out to be surprisingly off-putting. Jim Pickerell’s Secrets to Building a Successful Photography Career is more like a seventy-page argument discouraging starting a photography business than a peek at the secrets to its success. Early on, Pickerell tries to assure the reader, “This book is not meant to dissuade anyone from entering the field of professional photography, but rather to give them a realistic understanding of the opportunities and risks that lie ahead.” The farther into it I read, however, the more I wanted to keep my day job. It’s way too heavy ‘risks’ and way too light on ‘opportunities’.  On almost every page, Pickerell has a few excerpts of content repeated to drive the point of each section. Here are some examples:

In 2005, perhaps 30,000 to 50,000 photographers were producing stock. Today, that number likely exceeds 400,000–and they are all chasing the same $1.45 billion.

While this flood of amateurs cannot help taking some market share away from professionals, overall demand is not growing fast enough–and for certain kinds of imagery not growing at all–to absorb all the images being produced.

Despite growing demand for images, still photography as a profession is taking a serious hit–and not just because of the current recession.

Getting accepted by a gallery doesn’t guarantee sales. About the best you can hope for in gallery sales is to break even. Only occasionally does something sell.

There are a lot more footage suppliers now than a few years ago, and supply far exceeds demand.

Monthly royalty checks have declined to the point where many photographers feel it no longer makes economic sense to risk the upfront investment required to produce marketable images.

In one choice section called “Brick Walls”, Pickerell opens by saying, “Many readers will dislike this story because it is so negative.” Talk about a page turner!

I would not recommend this book to aspiring photographers looking to start a business. It’s enough to say that it’s a tough business to get into and maintain, more so than even a few years ago. But I was lured in by the promise of “secrets” to building a business in spite of the risks. Instead, I was offered the following as somewhat of a conclusion:

It might be nice if everyone who sold pictures charged ten times as much, and if we could make it impossible for people to steal or give away their pictures, but these things are about as likely as world peace.

Ouch.

Had an amazing experience the other week photographing New York’s own, Meetu Chilana, also known as Disko Madame, lead singer of the New York band of the same name. Meetu is also one of the singers in Cirque’s Kooza.

There is a great building Calgary that houses Heritage Posters, which has a northern facing exterior wall plastered with vinyl records. The moment I first drove past this wall, I thought, “I gotta shoot this!”

Around the same time, Meetu and I had been talking about putting together a photo shoot of her lead singer/title character in her Disco-Bollywood inspired band. And I thought the two would mix beautifully.

Meetu had a lot of reference materials of old Bollywood films and videos of her live in concert for inspiration, so it was pretty easy to get a feel for her style. And I knew all the humor, color, and vibrancy of her character would be a comfy match for my visual tastes.

Since it was a northern facing wall, and we could only shoot around noon, the wall actually provided perfect shade lighting. I had a 430EX II mounted on a tripod on camera left. I recruited fellow Kooza performer (and photographer in her own right) Dasha Sovik to assist, mostly to add gold fill light with a reflector on camera right. Since the background was part of the whole concept of the portrait, I didn’t want to throw it too much out of focus, so I kept my aperture on the higher end.

I had originally wanted to use more of the wall in the portraits, using Meetu’s body to somehow hide the Rolling Stone’s tongue and store sign. Or I would have done some magic in Photoshop. But it turns out there was a dense patch of wall with only records which provided a more than ample backdrop for our purposes.

As for the post-processing, I wanted to have an old Bollywood feel, while still making it unique to Meetu. I played around with a lot of presets in Lightroom, as well as my own modifications. Some of the images I felt needed very little processing, outside of the usual white balance, exposure, punch, vignetting, spot removal, etc. And I thought some of the images did well with a little more heavy-handed processing. I found a preset in Lightroom called Old Polar, that lowers the temp, ups the clarity (way up), and adds some blacks. That seemed to do, but to really give it a more Bollywood feel, I threw the vibrance up to almost 100, and it gave just enough of a psycho-saturation, that I felt lent well to her character.

I’m hoping to work with her again on more projects. And (I feel like this is becoming a closing catchphrase) it was a great learning experience, that’s going to really inform further portrait shoots!

Click here for more from the Disko Madame photoshoot.

Back around the end of August, Robin and I were continuing our practice for stock photos of our little guy, Leo.

Robin had a great idea to incorporate the white high chair that was provided to us in our Vancouver apartment, with some food items. It was also an early foray into lighting with two Speedlites combined with major Photoshopping. Leo as always was a patient and willing participant. He gets a lot of attention and cooing, and we get some pretty great exposures of him.

In terms of their acceptability as stock photos, I’m wondering about the use of a black background. It was all we had at the time, but the contrast certainly is striking. I was just winging it with the 430 EX II Speedlites, just covering both with diffuser covers and placing one camera left, one behind Leo camera right, and using ambient window light from behind the camera. I let the ETTL do the settings automatically. I’ve since learned quite a bit more about studio-style lighting, and I may have done a few things differently knowing what I know now. But these still came out pretty well!

Yet another great learning experience all around.

Click here for more from the Leo Food series.

So this is what I woke up to this morning. Looks like my friends have all piled upon my carefully-crafted About Page image/Facebook/Twitter/Flickr, etc. profile picture, did their own photographic interpretations (with beauty mark and everything!), and posted them all over Facebook!

My profile pose was an homage to the cover image of Jon Stewart’s first book, America (The Book). I thought it would be interesting and quirky to have my Canon 7D next to me–almost as though IT is in charge and I, its trusty sidekick, await its instructions. I know imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but “flattering” isn’t the first word to spring to mind.

Thanks a lot Tony Hernandez, Voki Kalfayan, Jonathan Taylor, Julie Jenkins, the Jenkins spawn, and Christian Fitzharris. But don’t forget: I have some Photoshop skills and access to your Facebook images as well. Watch your back!!

And anyway, they’ll all be jealous after seeing the results of yesterday’s photoshoot! Stay tuned…

The contest is up and running! Please click here to vote 5 Stars for us!

Yours truly has partnered up with SkinCity Body Painting, LionHeart Theatrics, Miron Rafajlovic, and two amazing Cirque du Soleil acrobats to enter Cheetah Power Surge’s TV Commercial Contest.

Corine Latreille and Sergey Nazarov, an engaged couple who perform a breathtaking hand-to-hand act in Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza, approached me several months back about entering this contest they had heard about. They had seen my filmmaking work before, both in personal projects and with LionHeart, as well as collaborating with them most recently on SkinCity’s Missing Puzzle Piece project.

Coming up with the ideas for the commercial was easy, especially with their incredible talents and our adorable son! We found a great location in Vancouver, BC’s gorgeous Stanley Park.

My wife Robin quickly whipped up some beautiful sketches for body painting both of them, roped artist Jason Brass in to assist, and we were on our way. We were all thrilled with the results. And we hope you are too.

Please take a quick moment to visit our contest page and vote 5 Stars for us. There’s good money to be won, and our son needs diapers!

Click here for more behind-the-scenes photos!

This should come as no surprise to anyone, especially myself, but it becomes more clear to me almost every time I shoot that I have a long way to go with my photography.

Learning the bells and whistles is one thing, learning composition another, learning exposure is another, tapping into one’s visual artistic side is another, the list goes on. I consider myself an artistic person with a good eye for composition and a mind for technology. A few weeks of practice, and I should be starting to see some leaps of improvement, right? Not necessarily!

This past Sunday was a wake up call of sorts, and it taught me that patience and persistence are more layers in my journey. I’m sure there are even more I have yet to discover.

Michael, the Pickpocket in our show, received a cowboy hat as a gift from the mayor of Calgary. He was pulled onstage by Michael on opening night. Michael thought it’d be a nice gesture to send the mayor a picture of himself in the hat. He asked me, I was delighted to do it. I scouted a good location under the Cirque logo, I put the camera into AV mode, I set my ISO low since it was sunny, decided on a good aperture to get both Michael and the logo in focus, set the shutter speed to something respectable like 1/250, and we took about a dozen simple shots. The problem? The bright background of the logo and the relative dark subject that was Michael made for an uneven exposure. We were in a hurry, since it was during a show, so I just said that I would fix it in Lightroom. But going over it in my head after, there was so much I could have done that I didn’t think of on the fly. I could have brought out the flash for a fill, I could have set the AE lock, I could have recomposed or found a better location, etc. Thank goodness for what little Lightroom skills I have already, I was able to get across a passible image for him to use.

Then, the same day, the band Arcade Fire was in the audience. I thought it’d would be cool to get a picture of them holding my 9 month old son, Leo, who happened to be on site with my wife at the time. Same deal, I found a location that they would already be, I put the camera into AV mode, I set the ISO low (again, sunny, but with some shade). I bumped the aperture kind of narrow for some reason. I think I was thinking that maybe there might be some movement, I might need a wide depth of field, I don’t know what I was thinking. But when the moment came to start shooting these rock stars, I just pointed, composed and shot. I paid no attention to the shutter speed. I looked at the shots later, they were almost all out of focus. My shutter speeds were coming in a 1/30-1/50. Luckily, some came in at 1/80 and 1/100 and they were good enough for just our family collection. None were great enough to be proud of to my standards, the sky color was off, the focus wasn’t tack sharp, it wasn’t ‘perfect’.

My fellow photog friend Miron suggested that next time for those on-the-fly situations to just set the ISO and throw the camera into P mode. That way you don’t have to worry about anything, the camera takes care of everything without going into the dreaded Full Auto mode and risk the built-in flash to fire. Horror!

The Arcade Fire folks were so nice, that they got us VIP seats to their concert that night just up the street. I was able to sneak my camera past security thanks to some slippery slight of hand. And was able to take some cool shots of the concert. It did start to gnaw at my gear lust, I was dreaming of the amazing shots I could have taken with a 70-200mm 2.8 IS lens, but I’m trying not to dwell.

We met up with the band afterwards and some more fun with the camera ensued. All in all, it was a positive learning experience, and the less-than-perfect shots were not career-breaking. The photos just won’t go into my portfolio or anything.

As for continuing my learning, I’ve bought two more books to pour over. The first is Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. It was recommended reading in the Taking Stock book. The other book is something I stumbled upon early in my research, and I’m only now purchasing it. The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos by Michael Freeman.  My wife reminded me that while getting the technical side of photography is great, I should complement that with some photography art theory, composition, photography history, etc. So this book is a start. She also recommended I study up on the 1950′s Beat photographer Robert Frank. His influential 1958 book The Americans chronicled his two year trek across the US. He was close friends with the likes of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. I’m hoping to get my hands on The Americans at some point soon. For now, I’m just tooling around the net for his pics.

I was pretty down on myself in the short time after I took those shots on Sunday. But I’m starting to turn it around and forcing myself to view this as an opportunity to better my craft.

Here’s to getting better!

Not sure what happened when I shot this, but it's kind of a happy mistake...

The other night, I had the opportunity to roam around a party for a fellow Cirque performer and photograph the event. Our bandleader Seth is leaving the show after almost 4 years with it. A friend close to the show was commissioned to sculpt a bust of Seth as his going-away present. It was beautiful, and he was super surprised when it was unveiled. It was also the opening weekend party for the city run of Calgary.

I hadn’t planned on even going, much less photographing, but luckily I had my gear and a Speedlite 430 EX II. So I mounted that sucker on the camera and started floating around. It was a great learning experience, considering I’m so new at flash photography. It was the perfect setting for it — a festive environment, beautiful people, a rockabilly band. A lot of elements were there for me to stretch my skills and utilize what I’ve been learning.

After a quick set-up tutorial from Brad F, I was well on my way. He suggested I keep my aperture around f/8 or so to give a good midrange depth of field. That way, I could take quick shots on the fly and be pretty sure the shots would be in focus. I kept my shutter speed between 1/125-1/200.

And one of the most interesting things I learned was that the ISO really only affected the background of my images when using the Speedlite. So even if my ISO was, say, 400 for one picture, and 800 for another of the same subject, the only thing that would change would be the background. The subject in the foreground is unaffected by the change in ISO when hit with the flash. And the background, while mostly unaffected by the flash, is brightened by the higher ISO. Very cool!

I only had my 50mm lens on me at the time — I probably could have done better with the 24-70mm — and I’ve only done a cursory pass over these images in Lightroom, but it was still a great exercise, and everyone was happy and complimentary of the shots.

My work has taken me to Calgary, Alberta, Canada for about 7 weeks. We just came from Vancouver, BC, where we stayed for almost the entire summer. The weather there was unseasonably beautiful. In the 10 weeks or so that we were there, the sun shone for all but three or four days.

Now we’re in Calgary, and everything is different. It’s cold, rainy, and kind of uninspiring. We’re staying in Downtown Calgary, in some pretty depressing housing, and even for an architectural geek like myself, I find it incredibly difficult to find subjects, shapes, landscapes, anything to make me want to take out my camera, much less point it at something.

So I’ve been trying to stay productive by keeping up on my reading:

• Canon Speedlite System Digital Field Guide by Brian McLernon
• The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby
• Canon Speedlite 430EX II Instruction Manual
• AND Taking Stock: Make money in microstock creating photos that sell by Rob Sylvan

I’ve also been going over some old images from Vancouver, including the Black Eyed Susan series, and doing a clean-up of my old images. I’ve been tooling a little more with the SloShots site. I’m needing to complete my migration from Aperture to Lightroom. There are still some straggling images floating, and I would just love to get Aperture off my computer once and for all.

But while I’m a little down in the dumps here in Gray-Cow-Town, I’m starting to get my head wrapped around what it means to shoot stock photography. I’ve only just started Rob Sylvan’s book, and already I’m inspired to get ideas written down, and organizing my new photography life for when we move back to Vegas. When we get there, we’re going to hit the ground running, thanks to a lot of good prep work and research.

I’ve also been trying to make sense of the whole iStock debacle. I’ve not yet joined or attempted to submit any images to any microstock site, but iStock was at the top of my list to begin my process. They were going to be my first and primary go-to company. (And as coincidence would have it, iStock is headquartered here in Calgary!) But a little over a week ago, iStock announced that they will drastically change their royalty payout structure effective January 2011, sending the microstock community into nothing short of a major uproar. Contributors are so upset that they’re pulling their images and taking their business elsewhere.

Luckily, I’m in a place where I’m not even ready to submit any images anywhere, so I’m just going to sit back and closely watch how this plays out over the next few months, and make some sort of a decision when I’m ready to put myself into the arena. The whole affair is disconcerting, to say the least. Here I am, poised to join the ranks of great photographers in a new business venture, and the biggest, most popular company drops a huge bomb on everyone. I don’t want to miss out on any opportunity, but I don’t want to alienate myself from the rest of the community and seem like a scab. Quite a quandry!

In the meantime, I will get off my butt and freeze my fingers in the name of photographic art! Eventually.

I don’t want to disrespect great photographers who have slaved over years of art school or even just a college education with a photography-focused major. But in the times we live in now, with the resources we have at our fingertips: Is learning photography in school a waste of time?

I’m a beginner photographer as of this writing, but with the internet, as well as some talented, semi-pro photog friends, I’m already starting to feel like I’m close to being an ‘intermediate’. I’ve been considering taking digital photography classes at my local community college, but I’ll have to start at a beginner level class to satisfy prerequisites. And what are those classes going to teach me? What an f-stop is? Depth of field? How to open Photoshop? I know all these things! How do I know all these things? From websites, blogs, forums, digital books, YouTube videos, the list goes on. I have the learning tools, and even the feedback support group, at my fingertips.

It’s a question I’ve been asking around forums, and I’ve been getting a lot of interesting, mainly conflicting responses. On the one hand, teachers (as long as they’re good) could bridge any gaps that may form by learning on my own. Being in a classroom environment offers opportunities to critique and be critiqued, not only by the instructor but by other students in the class. On the other hand, being a comprehensive self-teacher could limit the gaps, and being deeply involved in social networking could foster healthy critiques over the interweb.

Then there’s the school (sorry) of thought that just hitting-the-ground-running and just getting experience is the best education. As a performer and having gone to college for performing, I struggle with whether I should have bypassed college altogether, and just learned by doing. Where would I be today? I have several pro photographer friends who I’d love to assist, learn from them for a few years, and take those fruits of knowledge to apply on my own.

There’s no doubt that the technical side of photography can be learned pretty thoroughly by reading, surfing, blogging, forum-ing (?), etc. Getting the artistry and finding one’s artistic voice is another beast. But I’m starting to feel we’re living through a paradigm shift, where art, technology, communication and education are moving away from the formal old-world classroom, and into a new, almost ethereal realm that’s about to take shape.

What do you think?