A Gift for You
Tis the season, the season to look back and take stock of the year past as we look forward to the year to come. And I have had a year that requires much looking back upon. From the joys of a new book and new students to the quite literal heartbreak of a mid-year heart attack my year has been nothing if not eventful. My heart attack snuck up on me in July and it continues to sneak around my subconscious and my conscious mind. There are days when its residue is but the lightest of breezes but there are also days when it is the stiffest of head winds that blocks any path I might wander. When I try to embrace what happened my arms don’t yet seem to be quite long enough but when I try to battle the ‘Bastard’ as I call it, my heart just doesn’t seem to be in it. I now realize that my heart attack wasn’t a single hideous event but rather just another day in what I hope to be many years of days. I see it more as a gift now- both a wake up call to a more healthy life and a reminder of all that I have and all that I might be. This is not to say that I have discounted my heart attack or trivialized it in any way. The person that was wheeled into the operating room early that Saturday July morning was a different person that walked out 30 hours later. Crumbled was the edifice of invincibility that I had constructed and honed for 40 years since I first learned about heart disease and my family when I was 16. Gone was the hubris of health, the fallacy of fitness that I had held on to for four decades. And in its place? Well, I’m still not sure. I suppose I am a bit more humble about my health now and certainly more grateful. I seem to feel things now before I am even aware they exist and my appreciation and awareness of all things- good, bad or indifferent- grows daily. This is not to say that my critiques are going to be any more pleasant or that my workshops might actually be fun now. It was a heart attack remember, not a miracle. The last five months have been a journey of many, many days; my creative mind and open heart often not working in synchrony and often just plain not working. But now, with the help of my close friends, lots of love and the support of you my students and readers I see horizons that I haven’t seen for a long, long time. I have a new cardiologist now who actually listens to me, laughs at my lame jokes and scolds me when I try to get away with something. I also have a big new project that excites me more than I have been excited in a long, long time. Words are again trickling into my creative soul and images to capture now linger in my mind and memory cards. But this doesn’t just have to my wake up call. Let’s pretend I took one for the team and you, my dear, patient reader, are part of this team. It’s the holidays now, a time of presents and celebration, of an inspiring story and pledges of forgiveness and joy. Any presents you might want to give yourself? Any forgiveness you might want to extend to yourself. Any inspiring story you might want to start about you? I give you permission to try, to feel, to forgive in the days and weeks and months to come. I also give you permission to celebrate and to find joy everyday. It is my gift to me that I pass on to you. A re-gift if you like but a present nonetheless. You, of course, don’t need my permission for any of this but that’s okay, take it anyway. And if your days brighten just a little bit and your horizons become just a little bit clearer don’t thank me; thank yourself. You deserve it, just as I did.
Happy Holidays!
Happy Holidays to Everyone Wide and Far!!!! May your f-stops be plentiful, your shutter speeds accurate and your ISO noise-free! And may you have the courage to try something completely different this year and the joy to laugh at your mistakes and celebrate your successes.
Try it you might like it
Change “Change is a tonic.” Boy, I wish I had written that. But, I didn’t. Just another example of the many pithy things my small but perfectly formed brain has missed. It was written by William Zinsser, the author of the best book about writing (On Writing Well) and it rang true as soon as I read it. What he was getting at was that for all creative types (yes, that includes you), trying something different is creatively refreshing, creatively healthy and even creatively necessary. And by different, he means really different. A change is not trying a vertical composition instead of your usual horizontal or working on tulips instead daisies. A change is a radical departure from what you normally do. Think of a politician telling the whole truth or Brittany Spears going to a library. I took Zinsser’s advice and stepped bravely into a new world. For me the change was both exhilarating and reinvigorating. It was also darn scary. But I am now photographing subjects I had either overlooked or outright avoided my entire professional career. And, this is the important part, I am now more excited about my photography, I am a more skilled photographer and my pictures are better than ever. So, what was my change? I went from being a pure nature photographer – no hand of man, no people, no way- to all hand of man, all people. For 25 years I photographed all things nature, from grizzlies to wildflowers, from sweeping landscapes to dew drops on spider webs and I spent considerable time and effort getting power lines and rooftops, roads and contrails out of my pictures. And I was good at it, darn good. Now, I don’t care about power lines or fence lines, rooftops or black tops. If the light is good and the composition is good, I’m good. How liberating is that?! And now, instead of traveling all the time to exotic locales I am photographing 4 miles from my home on just a single square mile of property. How wonderful is that?! My subject? An old Vermont dairy farm. It is very pretty, very close and extremely satisfying. Here is what change did for me: First it challenged me. I knew how to approach moose and flowers but I had no idea how to approach a dairy farmer. Do I come in down wind? Should I wear camo? What is dairy camo? Turns out it wasn’t that hard, I just introduced myself. But how do I take a nice picture of a dairy farmer? Turns out you try and fail and try and fail and then you figure it out. It’s a puzzle and figuring it out is the best part of trying something new. Accepting change forced me to photograph things I had avoided- people, cows and the inside of buildings- and it forced me to take some really, truly dreadful pictures before I learned to take better ones. But remember-‘digital’ is Latin for ‘its okay to fail’. Without great failure you will never find great success. Photographing different subjects forced me to learn to use my camera differently. I shoot at high ISOs now. I handhold many compositions now (its tough to set up a tripod on a tractor) so I had to learn how to best do that and I take most of the shots without much forethought now…after all, I can’t ask the farmer to go back and replow that row or remilk that cow. I have to think very fast and react to get the shots I see. Photographing unfamiliar subjects also forced to change personally. This is the most difficult part, the scariest part and the most wonderful part of change. Photographing people forced me to overcome my innate shyness toward strangers and my hesitancy to put a camera in their face. It took me several months to begin to feel comfortable photographing people and get the strong images I wanted but now I am much more confident and relaxed photographing other people. Photographing people and where they live and work also forced me to interact with my subjects not just record them from a distance. You don’t get intimate, impactful pictures standing fifty feet away with a long telephoto. And when you start interacting with people you actually become part of their community and not just some odd ball that looks for spider webs and moose tracks and chases rainbows and sunsets. These are good things, no really they are. I know I am talking to a bunch of oddballs about this (remember, I am one too) but every so often it is good to spend more time with a human than with your hard drive. And even if you try this ‘change’ thing and fail miserably what have you lost? Nothing! Your flowers and sunsets will still be there for you. Besides, you might like it! So go ahead, try something different. You have my permission. It won’t hurt. Try it. Its okay.
Shooting and Thinking Like a Pro
The hardest part of the class, Shooting and Thinking like a Pro, that I teach with Scott Rouse and Jeff Wendorff is coming up with a title that captures everything that we do in the class. I have taught the class for more than 15 years and it must have had half a dozen titles- Going Pro, Shooting Like a Pro, Earning Money with Photography, Thinking like a Pro, Getting Seen, What Next?, and the truly dreary, Career Development. Each one captures a piece of what we teach but none actually is completely descriptive. I suppose I could just combine all the titles- The Tricks to Shooting and Thinking Like a Professional Photographer With The Thought of Going Pro or At Least Earning Money or Even Getting Seen Since You Have All These Images and You Don’t Know What Next To Do With Your Photography or Career Development- better known as the TTTSATLAPPWTTOGPOALEMOEGSSYHATIAYDKWNTDWYPOCD class. I think I’ll stick with SATLAP (see above). I guess I should just be content in telling you that the point of the class is to help the participants realize that there is more to photography than just compiling a huge pile of random, unrelated images. In fact, the quest for the ever prettier individual image is an empty journey and ultimately an unfulfilling one in my mind. Trying to out-pretty yourself or your camera club friends all the time leads nowhere in the end other than to a big pile of images on your computer or to a picture covered hallway in your house. Don’t get me wrong, its great practice and it is always good to try to improve but what is the end result? Where is your photography going? What is your purpose? This class is about giving you a purpose in photography. It is about helping you realize the joys and great satisfaction of photographing with a goal in mind, of developing an idea and working on a project that leads to a gallery show or magazine articles or a book project or internet business. It is about learning the skills necessary to take all the kinds of images needed to tell a story- landscapes, macro, wildlife, action, environmental portraits- and the skills necessary to share the story with others- query letters, delivery notices, book proposals, gallery inquiries, calendar submissions and tear sheets, to name a few. In short, this class is about giving each participant the skills and more importantly the vision and courage to tell and then share a story through photography. Jeff, Scott and I get the satisfaction of seeing creative light bulbs go off and each student gets the satisfaction of leaving with a personalized project in hand and the excitement of a new purpose to their photography. This year the class material will be presented on an Apple IPad that is included in the cost of the class. The class is being held in Manchester Center, Vermont near where I live from the 17th to the 23rd of June. The cost is $1650 and includes the above mentioned IPad loaded with teaching and reference material. If you already own an IPad there is a discount in the cost of the class. If you have any questions about the class please email me and I will be glad to answer them. To sign up please contact Scott Rouse [email protected]
Wintery Photography
Tis the season for many of us to go out into the elements and photograph snowy winter scenes. I have done this for years and for many of them I was often disappointed with the images I got. They were perfectly nice and technically fine but there was something missing- they didn’t look wintery even though they were taken in winter. I finally figured out that in order for a image to look wintery there has to be snow on your subject. If you were doing a forest scene there has to be snowy trees with snowy branches for it to look properly wintery. If you were doing animals, there has to be snow on the animals or the animals have to be in a snowy scene (see above). If you were doing anything else there has to snow on whatever you are photographing- fence posts, dories, wreaths, barns, roofs, rocks in streams- it doesn’t matter, there must be an abundance of snow. Without snow on your subjects the image will often look like winter but it won’t be wintery. There’s a difference- winter is a fact, a statement and bare trees and snow covered ground are the facts of winter. Wintery is an emotion, a feeling and the more snow the more of the feeling of winter, the more wintery-ness, you get. Snow only on the ground is a winter shot. Snow on ground and on the trees is a wintery shot. [nggallery id=17] So how do you go about capturing wintery images? The best way is to go out either during a snow storm or right afterward. It doesn’t take much time for wind to come up and knock all the snow off limbs and roofs. The other trick is to go out and photograph in the first snow storms of the season. Snow seems to stick better to things early in the season, maybe limbs and bushes and rocks are warmer then, I don’t know but going out during the first big snow storm always works for me. If you have a storm that starts out as rain and then turns to snow those are great sticky snow conditions and even a couple inches of snow will result in wintery pictures. So be brave and go out in the winter snow and take a few pictures. No one else is taking pictures in winter, they’re all down in Florida taking yet another great blue heron, osprey or alligator photo. You’ll have the place to yourself. Go Nuts!!!