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.

He had, she said, “a perfect death”. On the day in question, he’d been to the races (at Exeter), had won on the horses, had a good lunch with his “second best friend” (apparently he was punctilious about ranking his friendships), and was writing his column (about the Exeter meeting) for a racing newspaper when he dropped dead in mid-sentence. The next day, Emma and her Mum woke up his computer and found that the last words he’d written were “In God’s good time…”.

© 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.

I like this idea. Photographers donate their time, expertise and prints around the holiday season, to give portraits to people who wouldn’t otherwise get them.

It looks like a grassroots kind of thing, with a loose central structure and real local organization. And amateurs and pros of all stripes are invited to take part.

I could certainly see how shooting and printing some children’s or babies’ portraits would be a really nice holiday gift for some folks.

I’ve just subscribed to the mailing list, so I’ll let you know if we get stuff going in Santa Fe. There are a lot of pro and serious amateur photographers around, so let’s see what we can do, shall we?

I’ve just signed up for mpixpro.com, having been a very satisfied customer of their prosumer mpix.com printing service.

I’m impressed so far. They offer a ood range of products (including prints on fine art paper, and some funky looking acrylic prints).

Their site seems to be set up so that you can direct clients there to see all the product and print options, but without showing the prices. That way, if you’re adding markup (which you should be as a pro shooter), your clients won’t see that, but they can make informed choices about what they’d like.

Mpixpro also provide white-label PDFs which describe the different product types. If you put them on your own site, it would give clients lots of useful information without getting the in way of your own branding and service. Nice.

The calibration prints are on the way, but if they’re as spot-on as my previous mpix jobs have been, I think I might have found my new printing home, after much shopping around. Turns out it’s the big brother of the place I already loved.

As we enter a new year, it’s a time for reflecting on what happened over the last 12 months, and making plans for the next.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what goals I should have for the year, and how I might reach them. Some of these are practical-sounding – like working out my budget for the photography and web design sides of my work – but once you start asking these sort of questions, they quickly end up bringing up much larger issues.

I’m in the fortunate position of working for myself, and last year I made money building and maintaining websites, taking photos, training photographers in Aperture, and writing articles. But I have to admit none of it was really based on a detailed business plan.

So I was very interested when I came across a great article by photographer Doug Menuez about how he came to redefine the work he did and enjoyed a more fulfilled (and more successful) life as a result.It’s worth reading in full, because it offers the kind of hard-earned advice that only comes from being broken down and finding a way to put yourself back together.

The thrust of the piece is that planning for a long career in photography (or I’d argue, any creative profession) must involve not compromising in the sort of work you do.

It’s a scary notion, especially in an economic climate like the current one, but Menuez argues that there’s really no choice:

If you create a book that you think will get you work based on your perception of what sells, or on the advice of anyone who steers you away from your core, you have a complex problem ahead. Yes, you may find some work that way, which is really tempting short term, while you tell yourself you’ll do the real stuff on the side or in the future. “Show the work you want to get” is a lasting truism and if you have chosen to show work other than the purist version of your creative vision then whatever jobs do come in will be based on that work. There are many shooters who do this exact thing and end up with a middling level of success, stuck on a financial and creative plateau, slowly starting to run out of gas.

His argument is that to do the work you think people want might get you short-term limited success, but you can’t really sustain it. The real money and success will follow those who are true to their own vision.

As we make our resolutions for 2009, it’s a good time to think about how we can pursue the work we find valuable (and how we can make it pay).

It’s a topic I’m still wrestling with myself, but having some kind of plan is better than just taking any and all work that comes your way. So the first step has to be working out what you will and won’t be prepared to do next year. That’s where I’m at right now – learning to say no, and working out what to say no to.

If you’ve got any insights or suggestions, feel free to share them with me in the comments.

It’s tempting to feel like we’ll never get there from here. And it’s quite possible we never will. But neither would they if they’d stopped trying.

Merlin Mann, who has a lot of smart things to say about creativity and productivity, is an amateur photographer looking to improve, and he’s hit on a crucial point about learning to do anything like this:

I think finding your own comfort with the process (whatever that process ends up being) might just be the whole game here — being willing to put in your time, learn the craft, and never lose the courageousness to be caught in the middle of making something you care about, even when it might be shit and you might look like an idiot fumbling to make it. What’s the worst thing that could happen?

This tolerance for creative sucking lies at the heart of making anything worthwhile.

I recently filed my article about the cattle drive I was on, and I’m happy with it. But up until the version that I finally handed in, it wasn’t all that good.

If you’d peered over my shoulder at any point before that – especially before my editor Ashley at New Mexico Magazine got involved – you’d wonder how I’d even managed to get the commission.

And that’s after years of working as a professional journalist. So how much more dodgy is most of our photography going to be when we’re just starting out.

We seldom see the first drafts of good stuff, or all the rubbish that good writers wrote before they got good. The same goes for photography. Ansel Adams said ‘ Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop,’ and he was Ansel Adams.

So I’ll just keep shooting and paying attention, and getting our of my own way. Slowly increasing my tolerance for creative sucking.

I’ve submitted one of my photos for inclusion in the next print edition of JPG Magazine, under the Zen theme.

It seems like a good fit to me, and it’s one of the photos that will be included in my show in February (more on that later).

So feel free to give me a vote.

Like $40 rebate on the $45 4G 133x cards. That’s a 4G card for (effectively) $4.

There’s a limit of 3 rebates per person, but get over to B&H now to stock up. And no, I don’t get a cut.

Thanks to Charles Mann for the tip.

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.