Quick Social Media Tip

Increase your social media (linkedin, FaceBook, or Twitter) reach by a minimum of five qualified leads a week. Use programs & web sites to help you, like Mr. Tweet.

Take a Look

This is not the usual group of portfolios, whether you find it commercial or not I will leave up to you, but I will say that some of these photographers are very successful….

Using Headphones

When shooting video where the audio is also important – always wear headphones.  The camera meters might indicate that you are getting sound (visually) but it might not be good clean sound.  Headphones are important.

My Sketchbook

When studying fine arts in college my professors always emphasized the importance of carrying a sketchbook at all times. Ideas can pop up randomly when I least expect them, so to keep them from escaping me, I need to get them captured somehow before forgetting. The best part about a sketchbook is that I can brainstorm and revise whenever the creative moment hits me again. I always have some kind of idea in progress and my sketchbook helps me keep them going.

Quick Tip Week Starts With a Party

Consider throwing a casual party for local clients. It’s a great way to connect and get to know each other.

Vision And Art: The Biology of Seeing

Many of the corrections we make to photos, burning and dodging, and adjusting contrast or saturation, are designed to exploit quirks in our visual system. In Vision And Art: The Biology of Seeing by Margaret Livingstone, you’ll learn the biological and physiological foundations behind image sharpening, selective focus, contrast and the rule of thirds. This is an engaging and informative book written in plain english for anyone who enjoys the visual arts. In my opinion, it is mandatory reading for photographers, film makers, designers and illustrators. More than any other book, Vision and Art has helped to shape my approaches to photography and image corrections in the digital darkroom.

Summer Book : TRIBES by Seth Godin

It is summer 2009 and while some of us are packing the car for vacations to the sea shore or the mountains, many of us are choosing to “staycation”, or rather staying close to home or taking day trips to area attractions. Today’s economy is forcing us to re-evaluate, not just the family summer vacation but our business priorities as well.

Seth Godin the master marketer and author of the book Tribes, recalls that often quoted phrase, that life’s too short,  “…too short to fight the forces of change. Life’s too short to hate what you do all day. Life’s way too short to make mediocre stuff. And almost everything that is standard is now viewed as mediocre.”

It sure seems that business like we know it has changed forever, and that everyone with a camera is a photographer. Many companies require employees to self evaluate their work performance. These performance management systems feature not only an evaluation of the job description but also a personal development track. As self-employed photographers we rarely take the time to self-assess our development.

This summer I am staying close to home, spending time with my wife and daughter and taking the time to evaluate my personal goals, my business goals and even my photography goals. Am I making the kind of photographs that mean something to me? Am I working for the clients who use the type of photography that I want to create? Is my business plan providing the rewards that I expect? I am optimistic that the economy will recover. I am even more optimistic that I will emerge from this summer with a better picture of where I am going. Life is way to short.

If you are packing books for your summer, consider the Seth Godin Library and at the very least check out Tribes.

My Greatest Hits for Understanding Social Media, Recession Marketing and Branding

Here are a few books that I’ve read and re-read.  None of them specifically address the photography industry, per se. But it shouldn’t be too hard to connect the dots.  They serve as an excellent starting point for understanding the migration happening in social media, recession marketing and branding.

Small is the New Big
by Seth Godin

Tribes
by Seth Godin

Reality Check
by Guy Kawasaki

Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day
by Dave Evans and Susan Bratton

Groundswell
by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

The Open Brand
by Kelly Mooney & Nita Rollins

The Brand Called You
by Peter Montoya

Book Yourself Solid
by Michael Port & Tim Sanders

Twitter Power
Joel Comm

The Lean Forward Moment: Create Compelling Stories for Film, TV and the Web

If you’ve been following Gail Mooney’s multimedia and video posts and are beginning to experiment with video, you’ve found that video and multimedia require different approaches than still photography. The pacing of cuts, pans or zooms through the frame, or edits in a timeline are foreign concepts to photographers. In The Lean Forward Moment, Norman Hollyn illuminates the thought processes that will drive your editorial decisions and provides a fascinating insight into the minds of movie producers, editors and directors. He uses examples from classic movies, from the Godfather to Finding Nemo to emphasize his points. Well written and insightful, this book will help you understand how to plan, execute, edit and direct multimedia and video stories.

Book Review Week

I love reading biographies and these three very different stories are some of my favorites.

Limelight is a memoir by Helen Gee and traces her history opening this country’s first photography gallery. If you love photography and photographers, you will enjoy this immensely. It is a charming tale of Greenwich Village and the coming of age of photography as an art form.

Walker Evans a biography by James R. Mellow. Much has been written about Evans, but this exquisitely written biography is my favorite. Mellow’s carefully researched book rewards the reader with new insights and lots of wonderful stories.

Another biography favorite of mine is de Kooning, An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. This biography tells the story of de Kooning’s life, but it also provides an in-depth history into the New York art scene from the 1930’s to 1990’s. The book was published in 2004 and won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.

Creativity

Learn to trust yourself, trust your talent, trust what your heart tells you to make and do, have faith in the future and things that you cannot see or yet imagine. Learn to believe again in the possibilities of the unknown.

Ideas Worth Spreading

I first learned about the TED conferences several years ago from John Giammatteo, a Connecticut-based photographer who served with me on the ASMP National Board.  These annual conferences “bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers…to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.”

Ever since, I’ve tried to watch as many of the TED conference programs as I can and every year I’ve been awestruck by the mix of people, topics and information covered.

Over 450 free videos ranging in length from a few minutes to the 18 minute maximum are currently available at www.TED.com with more added regularly.

The 2009 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Global conference will be held in Oxford from July 21-24 and I can’t wait to see the new ideas, inspirations and information they’ll be posting this year.

5 Things You Can Do to Jump-start Your Creativity

1) Shoot film. Because you won’t get the instant feedback of digital, you’ll have to use bits of your brain that have probably been dormant for a while.

2) Go look at other art. Museums, galleries, wherever you can find art. Think about the process of these other artists and compare it with your own.

3) Meditate. Quieting your mind will help open it up to fresh ideas. Do this regularly for best effect.

4) Write. Journals, poetry, haiku, fiction, non-fiction, doesn’t matter. Words are often challenging for visual artists so doing this forces you to think differently. Try to describe your vision in words without sounding like a bad promo.

5) Do a group project. Get some of your creative buddies to all make something together or individually–using the same technique or object or theme–then get together and “show & tell.” Don’t restrict yourself to photos–try another medium!

These are just suggestions. The important thing is to keep reaching for creativity in your work. Sometimes the best way to do that is to challenge yourself by doing things you don’t normally do. Sometimes it’s to sit and let the ideas come. Try everything, and keep doing what works best for you.

Breaking the Rules

For quite some time now, I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz in the advertising world about how the days of using traditional print or television advertising to grab market share are fading.  People are too busy and have so much more control over what they’re willing to pay attention to that “interruption marketing” doesn’t really cut it any more.

It’s gotten me thinking that the same philosophy applies to our clients as well.

Not surprisingly, what advertisers are discovering is that the answer lies in creativity and innovation.  Some recent examples:

• Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s Grand Effie winning multi-platform campaign for Burger King which centered around a staged event in which customers’ reactions to news the Whopper was permanently discontinued were filmed.  See Adweek.com for details.

• Campfire’s immersive campaign for HBO’s new season of True Blood invites viewers to spice up the mundane world by participating in the “alternate reality” of the show’s Vampire inhabited society. Even the Financial Times took note.

It’s time for photographers to look beyond the (e-)mailer.  How can you leverage this same kind of thinking to reach potential customers and clients who don’t have the time or tolerance for traditional interruptions?

This Week We Focus on Creativity

Stop me if you have heard this before.

When I write  about photographing I sometimes feel that I’m repeating the same thing over in slightly different ways.

But then maybe there’s only one thing to say. And it’s something along the lines of, “Everything is everything.” So after writing my last post (Taking Pictures for No Reason At All) I began thinking that the pictures that drew me into photographing—other people’s, not mine—were mostly freestanding images of great power. They were not usually part of a series or a story, and those that were really stepped out of the line and stood there alone. In other words, they did their own heavy lifting.

Specifically, I’m thinking of a Roy Decarava photo of an empty hallway, of a Robert Frank photo of a pedestrian walking past a building with a neon arrow on it (in Butte, I think), of a Duane Michals picture of a Russian acrobat. Emmet Gowin said that an Ansel Adams photo of new grass against a charred trunk really moved him in the same way.

I think of these photos as moments of purity, perhaps best understood in musical terms. What I mean is that we are all familiar with musical phrases, songs, whole pieces that don’t “mean” anything or narrate anything or convey a preselected thought or emotion. Instead they contain their effect without no outside reference necessary. We expect that of music.

On the other hand, we often think of photographs as being “pictures of things.” So we look for interesting subjects. I’ve done my share of that, but what really drew me on when I first started were those photos I took that just were. I was not chasing a job (I had one) and  I wasn’t trying to say something. I just wanted to take a picture that somehow held it’s own meaning, like a kind of pure presence. I hoped that with luck someone else might feel the same thing when they saw it. But that wasn’t what drove me. What I wanted was to be expanded by something I’d done myself.

I’ve spent years making a living, satisfying clients, trying to explore the world of things and ideas, and working to construct this being called Seankernan. But still the only thing that really excites me is when one of those ineffable pictures turns up in my take.  THAT’S what the work is. And that’s what I still want from photography. Not a job, a profession, not a show or a publication. I want to wake myself up.

The Future of Advertising

The other day, I read a fascinating article in the Financial Times about the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival which noted a “seismic shift” towards interactive and digital marketing over traditional advertising campaigns.

The shift from print to electronic media is old news to photographers – we’ve been talking about that for a couple of years now.   What struck me about this article was a quote from Chuck Brymer, chief executive of DDB Worldwide who said “We are charging for the ideas – that’s the value you [as an agency] provide.”

The old business model of agencies giving ideas away in order to grab a percentage of the media buy no longer works and agencies who fail to grasp the import of Chuck Brymer’s observation are in for a rough ride.

Similarly, photographers must examine the value that we provide and recognize that our true skill does not lie in our knowledge of lenses, f-stops or Photoshop but in our ability to tell a comprehensive and compelling story within the frame of a single image.

Another Really Quick Tip From Leslie

Check your records to see if any licenses are about to expire. Contact those clients to see if they’d like to renew.

Email Troubles You May Not Be Aware Of …

[by Carolyn Potts]

This week, on three separate occasions, emails from photographers that I know and love, ended up in my spam bucket. Each person was already in my address book; we’d had many successful email exchanges-there had been no previous spam quarantines. Want to know what happened?

In each of those cases the photographer had failed to notice that their business email addresses had more than one email account User name or Reply-to name. If all your User names are consistent, the email you send from your desktop, laptop or iPhone will all safely go through; any inconsistency in your Sender address increases the risk of your message being quarantined.

Looking for a Little Work as a Photo Instructor?

I always suggest sending a resume, either mailed or online, or both, right after January, and in the middle of August, right before the spring and fall semesters begin. These are both times where a photo program may find themselves needing a good instructor or two on short notice due to someone moving, getting a grant, or a variety of other reasons. No need to call or write to follow-up, if the resume fits and the school needs you they will call.

Video Quick Tip on a Budget

Overusing the zoom feature of a video camera is the sign of an amateur.  But there are times when you want to make a camera move.  If I’m in a location where I can put my hands on a wheel chair, I find it makes a handy device – kind of like a portable poor man’s dolly or steady cam.  You can usually enlist an interested bystander to push you while you roll the camera.  Shopping carts can also come in handy.

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