the long apprenticeship

Whew. I had no intention of letting this blog go for so long. I've been getting adjusted to my new work schedule, and feeling more overwhelmed than usual.

What's funny about my new schedule is that I work way more than I used to. And I get paid less. If I wasn't enjoying the work so much, I think this would be called irony.

Tonight daylight saving is on my side, and I have an extra hour, and I'd like to just say hello, because I've missed writing here.

Work with my photographer friend Mark has been going pretty well. I'm looking at my time with him as a long apprenticeship where I get paid only a little -- but I get to ask a lot of questions.

I'm learning a lot. And not all of it is technical stuff. A lot of it is good life stuff.

When I started working with Mark last month, I felt pretty sure that he was a photography god. (Well, sure. I do have a tendency to idolize my creative heroes.) I was convinced that he was one of the lucky ones who was just born with a boatload of natural talent.

Now I'm changing my view. I still think he's a damned good photographer. But now I think that his success is due only in a small part to what he was born with. More of his success comes from how hard he has worked to build his craft, how he slaves away at making his photos really sparkle. The purity and clarity that I see in his finished photos isn't there straight out of the camera. It's a process, a secret sauce. He begins with strong composition. Then he makes thoughtful choices about editing, cropping, color balancing. And then things start to shine.

My work with Mark requires me to look at a lot of photos. Sometimes I have to sort through a couple thousand shots a day, making quick judgments about what stays and what goes. I have two things to say about this. First, I love getting paid to look at photos all day. Second, the editorial process is teaching me some good stuff about what makes a photo work. I can't quite verbalize what I am learning, but when you look at a couple thousand photos a day, you start to develop a pretty strong sense of what makes a photo successful. So I am tucking away good information about what I'm seeing each day. I'd like to try to start incorporating some of the ideas I'm picking up from my time at the studio in my own photography.

In the afternoon, we stop working and go downstairs to eat something. And we talk about photography. At his core, Mark is a people-watcher. He is a big fan of the work of Gary Winogrand (you may enjoy Winogrand's World's Fair, New York photo, or his spectacular 1969 image, Los Angeles, California).

We talk about Gary Winogrand a lot.

Gary Winogrand was a great photographer. Gary Winogrand also shot a ton of photos. According to this Wikipedia entry, he left behind more than 2, 500 undeveloped rolls of film when he died. That's a lot of film. He just shot all the time. If you shoot ten rolls of film a day and give the tiniest bit of attention to what you're doing, you're probably going to walk away with some very good shots over the course of your lifetime.

What I'd really like to do now is get over my fear of doing bad work. I have to remind myself that the only way to do something better is to do it badly for a while.

So much of my creative life the past couple of years has been about making a plan, hitting a wall, losing my way, falling apart for a while, and then starting over. This time around, I'm actually enjoying the process and yielding to the lessons as they come. This time I'm grateful to work my ass off for less money, grateful to learn, grateful to soak it all up like a sponge.

bokeh like butter

This morning was the first meeting of my six-week "people photography" course that I am getting to take through my new job. I'm not getting paid to take this class or anything, but the course is free. Which rules.

I wasn't sure what to expect from the first class meeting. The director of the school where I am taking the course had asked me beforehand if I had a basic understanding of how my camera works. I'm not a technically strong photographer, but I have a general idea of how the camera works ("Just put it on P and press the shutter!"), so I said yes.

The instructor, Dave, invited each of us to introduce ourselves to the class. The class includes about a dozen people of all different skill levels. There were people who had just gotten a new digital camera and wanted to learn how to get satisfying photos of their kids. There were people who worked in photography professionally who wanted to learn some new compositional tricks.

The director fired up a slide show of some of his favorite portraits from celebrated and little-known photographers, and some students started asking questions. What was exciting is that I found myself nodding along to all of the answers he gave. I actually understood what he was saying, and I understood why he was giving those answers. I would have answered the questions the same way if I had been teaching the class.

Dave gave us our first photographic assignment, made a lens recommendation (the 50mm f1.8, for those of you playing along at home), and set us free to go take some great portraits. We report to next Wednesday's class with JPGs from this week's photographic assignment.

It was an encouraging class. It helped me see that I am slowly developing my skills and learning to trust my instincts about what works and what doesn't. Also, just being in the same room with a group of people who are excited about improving their craft is really energizing.

There's a lot of wonderful little stuff happening here, stuff that isn't earth-shattering but still lets me know that I am on a good path. I am waiting for some more of the details to unfold and then I hope to share some of those little stories here.

It looks like Wednesday is going to be one of my "weekend" days in this new schedule (Saturday is now a work day). The schedule is not as predictable as I would like, but it's doing work I really enjoy. So far, quitting the corporate game is proving to be a great decision.

bits and pieces

The wonderful Doug Plummer has a great entry in his blog about the unchronicled, unsung skills needed to be a good photographer. As someone who is still trying to grasp many of the technical elements of photography, I found his perspective refreshing:

"...The technical minutia of photography is the easy part. It's just a skill set. The crucial element is your ability to connect with the diversity of subjects and clients and situations that a professional photographic life is going to throw at you. The crucial quality is curiosity."

I just love that thought. The whole entry is wonderful.

This has been an interesting week for work and photography. For the first time, I'm going to be working part-time in a situation that allows me lots of exposure (heh) to photographers and photography. The job is definitely small potatoes right now, but I'm still really optimistic about getting to learn more, meet new people, and increase my skill set. I feel like I'm at a plateau photographically right now — perhaps one of many plateaus I will reach during my creative life — and I am looking forward to reaching beyond it.

Photography-related links I've been enjoying lately:
- Kathleen Connally's "A Walk through Durham Township, Pennsylvania" photoblog
- Photographer Jeremy Cowart's portraits tagged "experimental"
- Bill Wadman's incredible 365 Portraits project. This guy is amazing. One new portrait shot and posted each day. Thanks to Paulie for the link.

Don't tell anybody, but it's 3:00 pm and I'm about to go sack out on the couch and watch a movie. I divided the morning between yoga and some freelance work. Tonight I'm getting together with a friend for some wine and conversation (her email was titled "we should drink more").

Life is pretty good.

prayers for a friend

My friend Bob has been missing for three weeks. He disappeared some time on August 1 in Washington County, Kansas. Authorities are starting to conclude that he drowned while exploring a river on the campground where he was staying. Though his body has not been found, the situation is not looking hopeful.

Bob was one of the people that really encouraged me when I was getting started with my photography. When I told him last year I was thinking about upgrading to a newer, faster camera, he encouraged me to shell out the cash for a Canon 5D, which is a really powerful professional digital Canon camera. "The caliber of your work easily justifies this level of gear," he wrote me in an email. "If you want to hold up liquor stores to get the money, let me know. I'll drive the getaway car." I didn't end up getting the 5D, but the thought of robbing liquor stores at gunpoint with Bob made me laugh.

Bob had a 5D himself, and he also had the technical skills to stretch the camera to its full capacity. He was known around my community for his ability to capture dancers twirling and smiling, finding moments of pure joy and connection on the dance floor. I still don't know how he did this while keeping faces in focus and the shots properly exposed.

He was one of my favorite dance partners, too. That's how I first got to know him. He was an extraordinary partner, tall and strong. I knew if I was dancing with Bob that I could cut loose a little bit and he'd always be there to catch me on the other side.

Some of my favorite images from Bob:
Mentone fire dance
The bass player
Me dancing in 2005 with my friend Bruce

I hate the thought that I might never get to see Bob again.

art and fear

Several years have passed since I visited the Inman Park Arts Festival. It's one of Atlanta's big spring arts festivals, and it's one of our better ones. Sculptors, woodturners, painters, jewelry makers, metalworkers, knitters, and, yes, photographers had art on display today when I visited.

At festivals like this, I always examine the photographers' goods most carefully. It inevitably becomes a little contest. I size up their photos. I mercilessly compare the quality of their work to mine. I create an imaginary graph with x and y axes and see who scores the strongest. (It's really kind of ridiculous.)

Today I saw some mediocre work there, and some really beautiful work. I saw some stuff that I really enjoyed. I even splurged on a wonderful black-and-white print from a north Georgia artist who shoots beautiful nudes.

It was only when I got home from the festival that I started to reflect on the uselessness of my little comparison game. Setting up a contest like that is basically an exercise in envy. It yields mostly resentment.

It occurs to me that these anxious feelings are an almost constant companion for my photography right now, to one degree or another.

It's a good indication that I need to re-program some of my thinking.

Julia Cameron might as well have been there with me today as I mercilessly eyed the artists' wares:

"Jealousy is always a mask for fear: fear that we aren't able to get what we want; frustration that somebody else seems to be getting what is rightfully ours even if we are too frightened to reach for it. At its root, jealousy is a stingy emotion. It doesn't allow for the abundance and multiplicity of the universe. Jealousy tells us that there is room for only one — one poet, one painter, one whatever you dream of being..."

As you might guess, carrying around an attitude like this tends to drain a lot of the fun out of art. It flavors the artistic process with bitterness — rather than the natural sweetness of playing, enjoying, noticing, exploring.

I've felt for a while now that I'm at a threshold with my photography. I think today's experience at the Festival was just another reminder that I need to keep pushing to get into grad school. It's not even a particular degree I'm after — it's the structure of the curriculum, and the opportunity to learn new things while gaining a clearer sense of what my own work is about.

I want to pursue school mostly because I'm not doing myself any favors by staying in this small and petty place with my art. Sure, I want to take better photographs. I also want to get myself to a more open place, and stroll through the Festival with a desire to celebrate every piece of art I run across.

your voice takes you to what it wants to sing

Last night I drove through an hour of primitive rush-hour traffic to the Atlanta campus of SCAD so I could see Greg Gorman give a talk.

He's one of the most popular celebrity portrait photograhers in the country. Though his name isn't as well known as someone like Annie Leibovitz, he's photographed hundreds of stars over the years, people like Muhammed Ali and Marlon Brando and Al Pacino and Bette Davis. He does beautiful black and white studio portraits, high contrast images with simple backgrounds.

He spent an hour with the audience, going through his wonderfully impressive slide show. Then took some questions from the audience.

One person asked him how he got started in the business. He said after he finished college, he started shooting headshots in LA for $35 a day. Eventually he got good at it and began to draw attention from studios looking for glamorous images of their stars. He got a few projects shooting high-profile stars like Barbra Streisand. And the rest is history. Now Bette Midler invites him to lunch, Pierce Brosnan asks him to shoot his wedding, and Robert DeNiro comes to his rooftop parties (not kidding).

When I hear stories about "humble beginnings" like his, part of me is inspired. Another part of me gets hung up. It seems like the days of starting that small and working up to something that big are long gone. The world I'm living in today is saturated with people with digital cameras and expensive lenses who want to make a buck off their skills. The 60s are over, Jim Morrisson is no longer available to be photographed, and I don't live in LA. Brand new game.

At the same time, I know this line of thinking is too pessimistic. Really, any story that involves an artist actually making a good living by producing good work is a story that I can appreciate. Greg Gorman had a passion, and he followed it, and believed in the fact that he had something interesting to contribute to his field.

A couple of weeks ago I heard an interview on NPR with Patty Griffin (whose new album, Children Running Through, is making me happy). The interviewer asked Patty about her artistic process. How did she manage to write so many great songs? The response:

"I just really need to sing and sing and sing, and not worry about writing. Just by singing for pleasure, your voice takes you to what it wants to sing. And that is how the best stuff emerges. It just pops right out."

More and more, I'm coming to see that this process of getting into photography, into my artistic life, is just about doing it. Going after it, even if I am sure that the market is saturated already. (What the hell does market saturation have to do with my artistic vision, anyhow?) This is not about the experience of someone who got started making images 30 years ago, or 60 years ago, or 90 years ago. It's about being awake to what's happening around me, taking photos every single day, and following the thread of pleasure that runs through all of it.

photo-a-day

As a person who aspires to use my camera as frequently as possible, I've flirted several times with a new year's resolution to take one photo per day.

It sounds like a lovely goal, doesn't it? Just one photo each day! No problem! But usually I get to January 8 or 9 and then give up in frustration. Finding interesting photos is really challenging (at least for me). It takes a lot of effort to get a good image on a consistent basis.

Somebody who does this very well is Seattle photographer Doug Plummer. He's been posting an image a day for 600 days in a row (!). What's remarkable is that his daily photos are really good. You can view a Flickr slide show of 2006's photos here, or scroll through his photo-a-day site here.

One of the things I like best about Doug is how thoughtfully he writes about his photographic process in his written blog. He gracefully articulates a lot of issues for which I've never found language. Which is one reason that I make a point to visit the blog every day.

Even without the words, his work is delightful, and his dedication to his work is deeply inspiring.

looking up

Atlanta's most enthusiastic Flickr afficianados gathered on Monday night in Little Five Points for a little soiree. While sipping on a glass of red wine, I bumped into a fellow photographer named Jason. We'd never met, but we started talking photography.

It turns out that Jason is a candidate in the MFA photography program of a very good art school here in town. It turns out that the school he attends happens to be the same very good art school to which I hope to apply next year. They have an excellent photography program, a curriculum that asks just the questions I want to ask in my photography.

It was great to connect with him. We talked about different photographers we liked, approaches we take in our own photography. We talked shop. I walked away feeling encouraged and nervous and happy about my own photography and my application to grad school.

This jumble of delight was followed immediately by a wave of genuine terror at the thought of actually doing something with my photography.

In many ways, it's much, much easier for us to be unaccountable to our own artistic impulses. We know very well how to lumber along through the work week. How to be a successful wage slave and keep our supervisors happy and count down the days until the weekend. (When I go to the office, I wear an ID badge around my neck all day. I know exactly which doors it will open and which ones it will not.)

The thought of potentially going to school for photography makes me accountable for my creative longings, and this thought is genuinely frightening.

"Well, it's just a hobby," I've said to others over and over again. "I don't do it professionally. Just for fun." Only yesterday, I told a friend, "Well, I want to study photography. I mean, the company's paying for it, so why not." I knew what I was really saying: I'm not dumb enough to think I really deserve a degree in photography from this fancy school.

There are doubts at every turn. When Jason said something nice about my photography, I was ready with my bow and arrow to shoot down his compliment. (I am an excellent archer.)

Julia Cameron, that wonderful self-help guru for artists, writes, "Perhaps the greatest barrier for any of us as we look for an expanded life is our own deeply held skepticism.... It does not seem to matter whether we are officially believers or agnostics. We have our doubts about all of this creator/creativity stuff, and those doubts are very powerful."

What I'm seeing tonight is that all those doubts are starting to wear me out. Carrying around these duffel bags full of arrows and reasons why I should not be taken seriously as a creative person is actually kind of exhausting.

I think I want to try something different. I think I want to see what happens when I put the duffel bags down, and stop spending so much of my best energy developing reasons why I can't give a voice to my own creative desires.

I like the way Rumi put it: "Listen. Make a way for yourself inside yourself. Stop looking in the other way of looking."

"You're a purist..."

Two and a half years ago, I was given a digital Canon Rebel camera for my birthday. At the time, it was not just a nice camera; it was a very, very nice camera. 6.3 mpx, 2.5 frames per second, RAW shooting capacity. It was one of the few times I've been in the "early adoption" end of technology. I usually wait around for everyone else to buy the new gear and then discover all the problems with it. This time, I was the only kid on the block with one of these cameras.

Before the Rebel, my photographic interests were supported with great dignity by a gorgeous old 35mm Pentax SuperProgram handed down to me wth pride by my father. A fabulous battleship of a camera from the late 70s, it was one of the first semi-automatic 35mm cameras on the market. It offered a manual focus only, but my father was especially proud of the fact that he could switch it to "auto" and let the camera calculate the best shutter speed and aperture for the shot.

When I received the Rebel, I found myself taking photos of everything. Photos of my breakfast cereal, photos of my shoes, photos of the power lines criss-crossing the horizon. I felt like a six-year-old who had just been cut out of a full-body cast. I was all over the place. I swore I'd never go back to film; digital was so freeing! I held onto the Pentax for sentimental reasons, but shoved it carelessly back into its ugly gray camera bag, then carted it around from one apartment to another, falling deeper and deeper in love with that slick little digital camera.

Well, I'm not sure how to say this, but all of a sudden, I'm thinking about film again. Well, of course. You saw that coming, didn't you?

Last weekend, I shot a roll of old BW film—expired, naturally—last weekend while walking around town with my friend David (above). Then we paid a visit to The Camera Doctor, and got my camera all checked out.

At the store, I laid my digital camera on the counter, and placed the old Pentax next to it. The Doctor, Steve, hardly gave the digital camera a second glance. But picked up the Pentax, cradled it lovingly in his hands.

"Now, this is a very nice camera," he said. He opened up the camera, and held it up to the light, fiddled around with the aperture. He clicked away on the shutter. "All metal parts. That's real good. This is worth a lot of money."

The walls of The Camera Doctor's store are lined with old cameras from almost every age of photography. There are rows of medium-format cameras with crinkled old bellows, glass cases of boxy Brownies, pyramids of Holgas, and democratic 35mms just like mine lining all the shelves behind the register.

It had felt good to shoot a roll of film again. There is so much about photography that is very physical, and film cameras help you remember that. I had forgotten about the sound that a film camera makes when you press the shutter button, and the small pleasure of pausing to advance the film lever with your thumb. (A little gesture that says, I just took a photograph. And now I believe I will take another photograph.)

It's very different from taking digital photos. The film camera is so slow and thoughtful and deliberate. It has a slender little profile, weighing even less than the Rebel. None of those dense mysterious microchips hiding inside. Just real physical moving parts. Glass, mirrors, metal. As I shot the roll of film, I remembered how it felt to hear the click of the shutter as it physically opened in the darkest parts of the camera body, letting in just the right amount of light.

Trying to be cute, I teased Steve about being a purist. He did not smile. He looked at my digital camera. "No, I'm not being a purist. Listen to the words. That thing is not really photography. It is electronic communication." He held up the Pentax. "This is photography."