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December 2007 Archives |
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Sprocket |
December 18, 2007 |
Since leaving Redux in late summer I've made a few moves to form new, non-exclusive partnerships with other agencies that I admire. While I continue to have no interest in finding an editorial rep, I certainly do want to help foster as many potential conduits for new clients to find me and my work. And its in that spirit that I'm excited to announce JLPFL's newest friendly face, Wonderful Machine. Our connection was just made public this week (see above), and is truly in its very, very early stages, but its development is something that I'm really looking forward to watching. WM and its top dog Bill Cramer are doing something different than the traditional agency business model. Ultimately I see it as something of a hybrid between a full agency and a promotional source firm like At Edge or Blackbook - offering a la carte agency services (negotiating & estimating, production, digital post-production) and a fee-based promotional schedule (but at a fraction of the cost of the bloated source books). There is an additional cooperative system built into this, though that has nothing to do with my interest, but the concept in general is very interesting. Once things get started up next year (when they begin their fees), I think I'll come to think of Wonderful Machine sort of like a more elite and better produced PDN PhotoServe (which I was a member of for about 3 years and quit recently because it's really taken a nose-dive - damn that redesign is terrible). I really like that these non-exclusive deals are flexible and can easily be nixed if they aren't playing out for either side. Eventually I hope to find an advertising rep to sign up with to help me steer that side of the JLPFL office in a more focused way, but until then its great to open up new avenues and think about where the industry and role of the agency is headed. And while I'm speaking of being "open," let me also present an invitation (though its probably for not - aren't all of us readers just photographer's peeking into each other's blogs to have a laugh or waste time?)... but if you are a commercial rep out there and like what you see, do please get in touch! Posted to Misc. |
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Download: Wish list |
December 14, 2007 |
After a nearly completed, intense week (jobs for Elle Decor, the Guardian Weekend Magazine, Smart Money, Men's Journal, and the University of Minnesota) to put a shiny bow on and end 2007, I wanted to take a break and download my picks for Christmas presents while there is still time to shop and ship. Honestly, I don't want anything for Jesus' b-day this year but a big glass of wine and dinner with family (don't we all have enough shit?!), but here are a few of the things I've had my eye on to round out the expense account. (That's the kind of jerk I am, I don't want anything because I already bought it all for myself!) Big ticket items: Canon 50mm f/1.2 L lens - $1249 Epson Pro 3800 printer- $1175 Ooma VoIP hub - $399 Hot Light/Half-Made Worlds by Alex Webb - $??? Mid range gifts: Altec Lansing FX6021 speaker system - $170 Nooka Zup Zot 38 watch - $135 "In Rainbows" disc box - £40 Common Sense by Martin Parr - $40 My America by Christopher Morris - $30 Bargain gifts: JimiX wallet - $16 The Bourne Ultimatum - $14 20x200 gift certificate - $20 A very happy and safe holidays to you all from JLPFL! Posted to Download |
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Math |
December 6, 2007 |
Somewhere during the beginning of December I usually remember that back in early May I got really tired of entering data into QuickBooks and therefore really have no clue where I'm at financially heading into the last couple of weeks of the year. This evening while The Fiancée was studying for her pediatrics shelf exam tomorrow (I'd wish you good luck here babe, but I already know you're going to nail it!), I finally did some crunching and the results are pretty much what I expected. Overall, like a bunch of buddies I've talked with of late, my editorial numbers are down on the year in total days billed and total number of jobs. The good news is that they aren't as low as I was expecting when things were dead slow over the summer and into August (I was worried about a sub 60-day mark). As of this moment I'm less than 20 days off of my all-time best year, and less than 10 jobs off as well. Additionally, from a quick glance it appears that, due to above average (for me) space rates and stock sales, I'm actually going to have a 15-25% rise in gross income when all is said and done. I'm certainly not sharing this to be obnoxious -- god knows there are dozens of shooters who could make my bottom line look like a "Misc." (or even "Altoids") line item on one of their smaller invoices. I'm simply trying to share what things look like on my end of the world so that together we can take a hard look at what is going on. The first lesson I take from this snapshot of the JLPFL spreadsheet is that editorial assignment photography cannot be relied upon solely, let alone shooting 50 days for The Gray Lady a year. Like I preached (to myself) in an earlier post from April that Andrew was kind enough to link to this week (I had forgotten about that one, mate), the smart bet is on diversifying. And on that note, hopefully in 2008 I can further enlarge my sweet little green pie piece labeled "advertising & corporate." Lesson number two is that the 30% I was until recently splitting with a third party is a very precious thing. I can't imagine what I'd be looking at right now financially from a cash flow perspective if I had stuck around at Redux (or any agency). Actually, sure I can... it'd be a lot like last year and my infamous $75.00 Christmas check. The bottom line is that over the last 3 months I've booked just as many jobs, am making more money, and am getting paid on average 50% faster, allowing me to manage my business a hell of a lot better. Posted to Misc. |
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Hired muscle |
December 3, 2007 |
The Fiancée stands in for The Donald in a rare appearance on the JLPFL roster as an assistant for a Golf Magazine portrait shoot down in the Dominican Republic. Since my buddy the Jackanory has been so busy of late traveling about (thanks for dinner last week!) and working that it falls to me (we should so form a post-Redux blogging club, right?!) to keep the blog-o-fire nice and toasty with new posts. And as it happens I was thinking of Mr. Hetherington and a post he wrote a while back about assisting this morning while stirring my morning coffee, and so I present this nicely dovetailed segue as such: My recent post about the creation of a freelance army of portrait photographers (no one is safe!) had me turning to another buddy Eric Larson to make sure I wasn't totally off-based, and eventually we started talking about assistants, as two editorial photographers will if you give them more than 20 minutes to chat. We were both sharing our recent difficulties to find an assistant who was really helpful without a ton of coaching, and that ultimately each of us relied largely on other photographer friends. Partly it’s because of the region of the country where we live (not in NYC or LA), but also because neither of us really get someone who doesn't want to be a photographer first and foremost. I've never assisted a day in my life for money, though of course I've helped out a friend here and there for a few beers. It wasn't that I chose not to assist when I was starting out, it’s that I never even considered it. I really don't think I have that gear in my brain to be a good assistant or to not need to be in total control. It's actually been a struggle since I started using a lot of assistants for me to become better at working with and teaching my assistants how to play a big role helping me on a shoot. I certainly have all of the respect and love in the world for those who have helped me (for better or worse), and for my many friends who started out as assistants before breaking out on their own, but something always makes me feel strange about the role of the first assistant in this business. As soon as I say that though I also find it very easy to be envious of the thousands of ideas and tricks (not to mention contacts) that I might have been exposed to if I had gone down a different path. Though recreating the wheel for myself over and over again (instead of borrowing one from a mentor or colleague as an assistant) has been a hard way to grow, at the other end of it I feel as though its really my wheel (and vision). Different strokes for us all and I love that about this industry, but I'm sure that I'll continue to use friends and other photographers as my go to guys and gals. I'm just not ready for some of these gung-ho pro/lifer assistant guys, festooned with gaffers tape and climbing locks, dressed like a kamikaze NYC bike messenger, and wielding light meters and additional rolls of Portra 160NC like ammunition. |
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On Assignment: Art Basel MB |
December 2, 2007 |
A skate ramp in the middle of ABMB's Art Positions stands in front of the hotels along Miami Beach. Skateboarding legend Tony Alva will be hitting the ramp for a performance during the exhibit on Wednesday night, Dec. 5th. I may have set myself up for this by using the phrase "Art Basel | Miami Beach craziness," but last night at my first official shoot connected to the 6th annual gigantic art fair things got nuts. Working for new client Monopol, the German art magazine, I showed up to the opening party for the 2007 ABMB for the Basel staff held this year at the Art Positions exhibit space (an outdoor space right next to the boardwalk) to do a large group portrait of the staff. And then the rain began. It rained off and on for 2 hours while staff slowly gathered. I had plenty of time to scout and make a plan, but couldn't actually get any gear set in place because of the weather, which I was anxious to do and get some tests done since I don't shoot 25-person group portraits all that often (and because it was such a large group I was shooting a mixture of my Hensel Portys and a Profoto 7b set-up, which though I knew it should work just fine talking together w/ Pocket Wizards I still wanted confirmation). We got there at about 6:45 p.m. for a 8 p.m. shoot time, and by 10 the rain stopped long enough and 3 out of the 4 Art Basel directors were now present. Go time baby! Josh Ritchie, The Fiancée, and I (big thanks guys!) got the location and lights set up and balanced pretty quickly and we were ready to roll. We called for the staff to come over and suddenly about 50 people started to walk our way. WTF?! I'd been told 20-25 by the client and then confirmed that with the communications manager. Suddenly it looks like I'm shooting a high school class portrait and I'm just about to freak out. By sheer dumb luck (uh, I mean superior foresight) our set-up was flexible enough to squeeze in the full lot, though with the extra persons the composition lost some of the umpfh (whaddya going to do). After a lot of shouting (I nearly lost my voice by night's end) I managed to get everyone in positions, directors front and center. Thank god these were creatives because they all immediately got it when I began yelling about the GUTTER! running down the center of our portrait (Monopol always runs their monthly feature double-truck). By this time it was 10:30 and had been dark for hours and hours so I had to drag the curtain for 1-4 seconds to get some/any detail and color in the clouds above and boardwalk behind. Dragging an exposure isn't a big deal with 1, 2 or even 5 people. But with 50 its a pain. We wrapped the first set-up after a few dozen shots and I told everyone to go get (another) drink while we regrouped. The second set-up took advantage of a very cool skate ramp that had been built right in the center of the Art Positions exhibit. Without the rain there were dozens of ways I'd love to have done the group shot on the ramp, but with all of the treated plywood wet there was no way we would be able to get everything dry and safe to have 50 people climbing all over it (my liability insurance is only $2 million folks). So our second shot was fun but pretty safe, lit by 2 large softboxes and a beauty dish running down the 60 feet of ramp. Once everyone was in place (herding cats) and the shot was in the bag, Judy passed out numbers written with Sharpie on some commercial grade paper towels we found and I had everyone hold them up in front of them for a Where's Waldo picture. We then went from either side of the group shot and put numbers to contact information for the whole group (the magazine had to have names and titles for everyone). Thanks to all the staff (many of whom were still fighting jet lag) for being so patient and great to work with, and most of all to Josh and Judy who saved the day. All told and despite the rain and numbers everything went off well and we were on our way home just short of midnight. Truly if you are anywhere near Miami over the next week you should try to make a huge effort to get down for the ABMB fair and/or the now 23 additional satellite art fairs going on (including Photo Miami and the AIPAD Photography Show). There is just so much cool shit to be seen and experienced and the weather this week is looking pretty sick as well. If you do head down give us a shout and we can grab a drink. And if you are skate fan the legendary Tony Alva will be hitting the above mentioned ramp that I shot on last night during the opening night of the exhibit this Wednesday. Posted to On Assignment, Photographs |
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Evolution |
December 1, 2007 |
As things in Miami have been heating up with the near arrival of Art Basel | Miami Beach craziness, I spent a mostly quiet week in the office editing, invoicing, confirming upcoming jobs, and having several exchanges that brought me back to thinking again about my evolution over these past 5 freelance years. At this point almost all my freelance photography friends fall into one of two categories: conflict photographers or portrait photographers, with very little middle ground in between. The conflict photographers don't always shoot war of course, but they are almost always hired to shoot the edgy sort of vibe that their experiences shooting conflict helped define in their style. The portrait photographers nearly always shoot exactly that, even if their passion is or once was the same "reportage" that inspired both groups in college. Maybe these two groups always existed, but it seems to me that the grey area in between is shrinking ever more dramatically by force of the market for editorial photography, which has become overwhelming filled with portraiture. Every magazine is filled to the gills with smiling and stoic faces captured in canned situations. Portraits are the photography market. And even though portraiture is an incredibly broad category including many, many different types of styles (which I do find exciting), when viewed from my background in journalism it all feels ever more homogenous. Ultimately, we are all portrait photographers. Perhaps what leaves this annoying aftertaste in my mouth is that I didn't really choose to become a portrait photographer. The only choice I made was to not try my hand at conflict photography, and therefore because I still wanted to be a freelance editorial shooter capable of juggling lots of different assignments I was pushed towards the other camp (of course there are dozens of other specialties I'm ignoring here; architecture, aerial, food, etc) by market demand. The shift in the market is pretty easy to chart as well: declining budgets (and/or increasing shareholder demands on profit gains) equals less interest in documentary assignments that by their very nature are more expensive to produce (waiting for the decisive moment for days is costly) than the vast majority of portrait shoots. The only thing to be done is to rationally understand who and where you are, what it is you want from your career, and then to make whatever changes may be available. In saying "I am another portrait photographer," I at the very least free myself up to think about if that's the one-line sentence (from Soth's thread) that I want to define my work. Ultimately I'm not unhappy with being a portrait photographer, I'm just sorry the market is not more diversified. I know that I haven't given myself fully over to portraiture, but I'm not going to run in the other direction and march off to war either. Instead I simply hope to continue to use the genre of portraiture to explore my personal style and passions, and continue to do my own personal work that explains what I care about on a much deeper level. As much as its important to understand how others may see you, at the end of the day its up to your own inner critic as to whether you are leading the life you desire. Posted to Misc. |
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