I’ve just finished watching the National Geographic documentary, The President’s Photographer, about the White House photographer Pete Souza (it’s available on Netflix on demand streaming if you’re a US subscriber).

It’s a fascinating look at an amazing job, and I admit to having a bit of a photographer’s crush on Souza. Partly it stems from his great book of images from President Obama’s career in the Senate and from his campaign, The Rise of Barack Obama.

One of the key things that struck me from the documentary was the sense of purpose that all the official White House photographers interviewed had in documenting everything that happens with the President. Every image captured ends up in the Library of Congress, for future scholars and historians to access.

This includes the formal events, the countless handshakes and speeches, but it also covers the more domestic and personal moments.

In fact these smaller scale images (particularly from Souza) are some of my favourites – and because of the White House’s enlightened picure usage policity, I include some of them in this blog post. These have an importance to a wide audience because of the post the man occupies, but a lot of them would be great images even if he wasn’t the President.

We’re not heads of state, but the idea of documenting the day to day life of our families also has great merit. These moments are priceless, too, if only to us.

And now because of digital cameras, phones that can shoot video and essentially limitless storage, we can capture and keep records of our own lives more easily than ever before.

Waiting until the special occasions or holidays to bust out the camera misses most of what’s really important in a family – the daily details, triumphs and joys.

So let’s all be our own official photographers, bearing witness to our lives and keeping a record for ourselves later and for future generations. It won’t be in the Library of Congress, but it’s no less important for all that.

Just had a few days in Southern California, which included some Disneyland time, as you can see from the above shot our our daughter at the end of a busy day.

As a confirmed Disney sceptic before I first went to the park last year, I’m now something of a zealous convert.

This is partly because the whole thing makes my daughter so happy, which is hard for a parent to argue with.

But it’s partly because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about running companies based on core passions and painstaking implementation, and few organizations do that as well as Disney.

I’ll expound on this later, but it brings to mind something Dr Phil McGraw has been heard to say (he’s another thing I thought I’d hate but actually came to value). He argues that bring up children requires two things: ‘You’ve got to love your kids, and have a really good plan.’

I think the same is true of businesses – large or small. The people at the top need to have a real passion for what they do or else there’ll never care enough about it or be able to pass on the required commitment and enthusiasm to their employees.

But they also need a well-thought out set of plans for who does what, why and when – which should obviously draw its inspiration from the original passion and vision.

Like I say, there’ll be a lot more from me on this sort of topic in the near future, but that’s it for now.

Here he is at Photocamp Utah with an hour of funny, honest and inspiring advice to would-be photographers. Standouts for me were his commitment to being a good photographer not a good photoshopper, being good to your clients and getting over your shyness – ‘People are the only people who pay’.

Enjoy.

© Matt Roth - mattrothphoto.com

I’m a natural light guy. Or have been until now.

Hugely unimpressed by almost all uses of on-camera flash, and fascinated by the challenge of capturing the quality of real light in my scenes, I used to swear I’d never use a flash.

And for most of my work – on location children’s portraits – that works well, most of the time.

I choose the right time of day, and a good location in possible, and chase after the kids always trying to maximise the catch-lights in their eyes, and get some flattering natural light falling across their faces.

But sometimes that’s just not possible.

A little flash light bounced off a nearby wall or ceiling might open up their shadowy face and cut the chance for motion blur. Or used outside, it could open up some opportunities to work with the sun to get some good effects.

David Hobby’s great site Strobist.com had been tempting me over the last while, but it was two recent posts that pushed me over the edge into doing something about learning some new techniques.

First, he linked to a post by Robert Seale, which outlined how he shot 4 different setups of Lance Armstrong in four minutes flat in the basement of Armstrong’s bike shop. Obviously Seale’s a lighting ninja with a bunch of kit, and assistant and talent to burn, but you can’t argue with the results.

Then I caught a blog post by Matt Roth, a staff shooter at a small Maryland paper who got the assignment to shoot local star high school athletes, and really went to town on it. Again, I don’t see work like this in my near future, but I’m definitely going to put some time in to get me comfortable with the basics at least.

There’s a Canon Speedlite 430EX (and Stofen diffuser) in my bag now, and the minimum stands and brolly setup on the way from Midwest Photo Exchange (or MPEX). I went with the 430EX over the Strobist-approved manual flashes so that I could use metered E-TTL on-camera if I had to.

Resources

I’ll be blogging my through the learning process as I go, but if, like me, you’re looking to get started with some guerilla lighting techniques, there’s a lot of good information out there. As well as the Strobist, Zack Arias’ blog has some good advice, and he teaches the OneLight Workshop (and has DVDs you might like).

And David duChemin, who knows his stuff, recently recommended the Seeing the Light eBook from Mitchell Kanashkevich. I’ve not read it yet, but David says, ‘if you don’t like flash because you “don’t like your images to look lit” then you need to check this one out’ – which sounds good to me.

Even though I shoot children’s portraits professionally, and take countless shots of my own daughter Fionnuala, it had been a while since I’d done a more formal shoot with her.

With Finn’s mother and grandparents pointing out that it was long overdue, we were out early into the Santa Fe morning in our neighbour’s garden (thanks, Loretta), to come up with the goods.

Fionnuala was telling me stories the whole time, so I just kept asking her questions and waited until she cracked herself up.

It was a joy to shoot, especially as it was taking photographs of Finn as a baby that got me to pick up the camera more seriously again in the first place.

The family is placated, and the whole thing got me looking forward to the paid job I’ve got scheduled this weekend.

Here are some of the images we came up.

Alec Soth – the photographer who would have been perfect to accompany me on my ill-fated bike ride down the Mississippi (but that’s another story) – recently had a simple but brilliant blog post over at the Magnum Blog.

He asked 35 of his fellow Magnum photographers 2 questions:

• When did you first get excited about photography?
• What advice would you give young photographers?

The answers are fascinating, but one from Alex Webb really struck home:

Photograph because you love doing it, because you absolutely have to do it, because the chief reward is going to be the process of doing it. . . . Take photography on as a passion, not a career.

This view gets to the heart of the conundrum keen amateurs like me face when we start making some money from our photographs.I certainly started taking pictures because I loved doing it, and the more pictures I took, the more I loved it.

But I’ve been lucky, and now a few people are paying me to take pictures for them, and I’ve got some photos in magazines and been a runner-up in a big competition that was open to professional photographers.

But I still have at least one other day job. Web design and consulting pays the bills, and I also still do some journalism – I used to freelance for national newspapers and magazines in Ireland, and I’ve had a book published.

I don’t want to be a pro – do I?

As more and more keen amateurs adopt digital SLRs, and websites and stock photo houses offer the promise of a photography income, it seems like getting paid to do what you love sounds like a great idea.

But you have to think hard about whether that’s a dream you really would like to come true.

Putting aside the very real question of whether I really could be a full-time working photographer at some point in the future (especially in the current climate), what I’m wrestling with here is should I even want to.

My friend portrait photographer and film maker Chris Felver told me in no uncertain terms that I should keep my photography as a hobby.

Because trying to make a living doing it is often difficult and disillusioning, and can stifle the passion that you had for photography in the first place.

Pure passion, no mortgage worries?

So if _do_ want to do it for a career, then you obviously need passion. But can you still fulfil your passion if you _don’t_ do it for a career?

I’m thinking of a couple of people I know from the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Flickr social group, whose work is at least as good as a lot of pro photographers – taylorkoa22 and jwoodphoto.

The have their real jobs, and still find the time to devote to photography without the worry of relying on it to pay the mortgage.

You could certainly argue that doing it as a serious hobby gives you more freedom than if you were a pro with weddings every weekend.

I’m in the fortunate position of being self-employed, so if I’m commissioned for a shoot I can take the time to do it without calling in sick. And if I want to spend a while tagging photos for uploading to a stock house in the middle of the day, I can do that.

My modest aim for 2009 is to cover my photography costs with my photography work. Definitely not jacking in the day job and having to make a living behind the camera, but taking a practical attitude to behaving and charging professionally to fund what’s an expensive sideline.

If I end up doing more and more photography of the sort I like, and less web work, that suits me fine. But if that doesn’t happen, that’s fine too.

So I’m sitting in Ecco, my favourite cafe. It’s hard to believe what happened yesterday.

I’m a green card holder, so couldn’t vote, but I knocked on some doors for the Obama campaign, and like millions of people, made some donations.

I have my naturalisation interview next month, and it makes me very happy that I’ll get to become a US citizen under an Obama administration.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen. Now the real work begins.

Bernhard Wolf‘s a street photographer in Vienna, and he does a simple/difficult thing very well.

He shoots a roll of black and white film while going about his daily business – meeting friends, taking a train somewhere, eating breakfast – and then he puts up all the pictures from the roll on his blog.

Some shots are better than others, of course, but it’s an engrossing experience, gaining this insight into his life, and the life of a city I’ve never been to.

The quality of his photography is impressive, and the pithy comments entertaining too.

Well worth a look: Yet another cute B/W-Color Blog

She went from being a model, muse and lover to Man Ray and Picasso to being a great surrealist photographer in her own right, before becoming a photojournalist during the Second World War (she was one of the first photographers into the Nazi death camps after their liberations).

Hers is a staggering and fascinating life, and an exhibition of her work has just opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Unfortunately, the New Yorker article’s not available online, but they do have a brief slideshow of her work.

The questions currently being debated in academia are just as important for serious amateurs to be aware of:

In short, what constitutes the bedrock of an education in photography has been called into question; it begs to be redefined and reconfirmed. What students should learn in a Photo 101 class is precisely what is up for grabs. Should they learn how to process film or how to parse pixels? Should they learn how light objects or how to emulate that effect in Photoshop? And when should students learn how to think and talk about the conceptual underpinnings of the medium?

Darius suggests a couple of books that might help in thinking about this process – and they’ve gone right into my list of photography books to read:

• The Nature of Photographs, by Stephen Shore
• The Education of a Photographer, edited by Charles Traub

It seems to me that even if you’d never contemplate completing a degree program in photography (or maybe any type of formal training), all of us who are interested in photography are engaged in a kind of informal education.

And it’s not just important to understand the technical issues that abound in photography – thinking (and learning) more about photography from a cultural and historical viewpoint has to be valuable.

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