Here's the Deal....

I see a lot of photographers pages with a FAQ (frequently asked questions) section, and most of them are complete fabrications. Not the answers, just the questions. People ask themselves the questions that they want to answer so they can get whatever information across that they would like to get out, and it's easier if they pretend that someone else is asking them. Now don't inundate me with "My FAQ section is absolutely true." If it is, that's terrific. The people that make them up know who they are. Even the ones that are made up aren't a big deal. No one's getting hurt and information is being passed along, which is more than I can say for a lot of photographers that act like they are dealing with state secrets or the formula for nuclear fission and no one else is worthy of knowing what they know.

"What's your point here Scott?" you may be thinking.

My point is, that there is only one question that I get asked frequently, at least once a day, and that is "What kind of camera do you use?", and that is probably the least important piece of information about a photographer that there is.

Not that it matters, but I bought my first 35mm camera in 1978, it was a Ricoh, and I bought it at Lechemere Sales at the Mall of New Hampshire. A few years later I bought a Minolta X-700 and a few years later I bought a second X-700. A few years after that, I injured my arm badly in an accident and need to change the way I worked so I bought a Nikon N90. I shot with that camera for over 10 years until I decided to go digital and bought a Nikon D50 a bout six years ago to dip my toes in the digital pool, and three years ago upgraded to a Nikon D200. There, now you know what kind of camera I have always used......and it doesn't make a bit of difference. No camera EVER took a great photograph any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel. A camera is just a tool, like a hammer or a drill. It's the person using it that matters.

Now this information might be quite depressing for those of you that thought you could go out and spend a couple thousand dollars on camera equipment and be a great photographer. It just doesn't work that way. Photography is an art, and art is a creative process, and you can't buy creativity. You can learn it, but you can't buy it. I've been to photography exhibits where all of the images were taken with SX-70's, 110 instamatics, and other varieties of toy cameras that cost about $20.

My friend Will Michael and I were discussing an image the other day (as we are often prone to do) when he said "Seeing takes discipline, it's more than just looking." I'm always talking about needing "vision" and Will's statement just cuts right to the heart of it. You have to actually see what is in the frame. All of it, not just the center. You have to look in the corners and n the background. You have to check your horizons and your plumbs to make sure that they are horizontal and plumb.

Ansel Adams is one of the all time photographic greats and a personal icon of mine. He also has one of the most misinterpreted quotes around.

"There are no rules for good photograph's, only good photographs."

People like to interpret this as meaning that Ansel Adams is telling them that they don't need to know anything about the photographic rules, that they can just go out and shoot 300 frames per minute haphazardly and get good photographs. Sure, you might get a good frame here and there, but a blind squirrel will find a nut every once in a while as well. What he meant was that just because you follow the rules does not guarantee a great image. There are lots of rules, and Ansel wrote plenty of them. Of course it's ok to break the rules, but you have to know that you are breaking them and be breaking them for a purpose. A horizon line that is 2 or 3 degrees off just looks crooked. A horizon line that is 20 or 30 degrees off can impart a feeling or an emotion and look like it is done intentionally and not just that you are holding your camera crooked.

If you want to take great images, you don't need a fancy camera. You need heart, passion, and vision. Everything else is just practice.

Photographers Motto: "Be Prepared"

"Oh man, if I only had my camera!" (slaps own forehead).

How many times have you said this? How many times have you heard someone else say this? Are you serious about your photography? Then you need to be prepared. You need to be ready to take the shot. You need to have a camera with you always.

I always carry my camera with me. I play poker. I have a regular Friday night game that I have been going to for years. Most of the time, on the thirty minute drive home, it's pitch black and I can't see anything that isn't illuminated by the headlights of my truck. Occasionally, the horizon will be just beginning to glow as I wind my way through the tree lined roads on my way home. For five years, that's 250 drives home after this card game, I've had my camera in the bag on the seat next to me in my truck. I never once stopped to use it, until two weeks ago.

Was it luck that enabled me to get this shot? No. It was being prepared.

Louis Pasteur wasn't known for his photography, instead, in 1862 he developed a process for treating liquids to reduce the numbers of harmful bacteria in them, making them safe to drink, Pasteurization as it is known. How is this relevant to photography? It's not, but a little extra knowledge never hurt anybody. What makes Louis Pasteur relevant to this conversation is his semi-famous quote "Chance favors the prepared mind." This is right up there with the unattributable sports quote, "Good teams make their own luck."

I don't believe in luck. I don't believe in fate. Both of these concepts require you to surrender control of your own destiny to some diaphanous idea. You are in control of what happens to you. Know your trade. Know as much as you can about what you are doing. Read, practice, read more, practice more. Learn not only how, but learn why. If you want to work in a particular specialty, learn how that business works. Find out who the important people and companies in the trade are. Learn about the hierarchy and how things are done.

Don't sit around waiting for your big break. Go find it. Put your knowledge to use. Practice. Get feedback, apply new knowledge, and be prepared to take any opportunity that comes your way. Don't assume that another chance is coming, because maybe there isn't.

Make the odds work for you instead of against you. Do you want to get a photograph published in a magazine? You are probably going to have to submit more than once. All other things being equal, the photographers that get the most images published, are the ones that submit the most images. The photographers that win the most awards are the ones that enter the most contests. The photographers whose work is seen by the most people are the photographers that send out the most work to be seen!

You need to think about more than just tripping the shutter.

How many times do you come across an eye popping scene? I mean something that you really stop to look at and just stand there awestruck? You get out your camera, bring it up to your eye, and depress the shutter...Hey! that image is really lacking the impact of the scene here that I am staring at....

Your eyes see differently than a camera. They have a different field of view, and they react to the light differently, so you need to be more than just a shutter snapper. You need to be a PHOTOGRAPHER. One of the skills you need to exercise is being a translator. You need to translate the scene for the photograph. There are many other senses involved in what you see than just your eyes.

What you hear, what you feel, what you taste, and what you smell all go into the overall presentation of what you are seeing. "How is that possible?" you might be thinking. Bear with me here. I'm going to exaggerate for effect.

You are at the seaside, and witness a beautiful scene of some flowers on a dune. It's incredibly beautiful to you at the moment and worth capturing to your CCD or film. Wait. Think for a second. What else is making the scene so darn "scenic" to you? You smell the salt air.You feel the ocean breeze on your face. You feel the sand compressing under your feet. You hear some gulls squawking as they ride the breezes overhead.You taste the salt in the air. All of these things are contributing to how you feel about what you are seeing.

Now what you need to do is translate this feeling to your image. Have you ever wondered why some images that appear to have such great potential look so "sterile"? No feeling. No passion. No vision. No heart. They just don't stir anything inside of you. Lousy translation.

Your next question is "OK Mr. Smarty Pants, how do I do this "translation" thingy you are talking about?"

I'm not telling you. I'm not telling you because I can't tell you. I don't know what you are feeling and seeing and hearing at these moments of epiphany. Only you know that. It's your job to tell me.

You're the artist, so art.

You need to be more than just a mechanic.

Thinking Outside the Box

"Thinking Outside the Box". We hear this all of the time, but what does it really mean?

My mother used to ask me, "If all of your friends jumped of a cliff, would you do it too?"

"No, of course not" I would tell her.

"Good, then you are thinking for yourself".

Now this is certainly an extreme oversimplification of the situation (I was probably 7 or 8), but you catch the drift. Use your head, don't do something just because everyone else is doing it, seek unique ways of solving old problems. If you have to get down that cliff to get home, don't jump just because everyone else is doing it, build yourself a sled, or a parachute, or a glider. You'll still get there, just with less damage, and less damage is good. You'll stand out from the crowd because you'll be the only one that isn't bleeding.

You might remember my youngest son from "The Lost Rolls". Well, he turned four this spring. He goes to the library once a week to hang out with all of the other kids in town that are too young still for school, but enjoy the thrill of a well written story about a fire truck. They also do a weekly art project.

A few weeks ago, the teacher had all of the children sit around and mix up a batch of plaster. The kids mixed handfuls of dirt into the plaster to make it look like wet dirt. Handfuls of the muddy compound were scooped out and formed into flat circles as the base for that weeks project. There were boxes of assorted sticks, rocks, and bark that the young artists were instructed to press into the mud to create their masterpieces. Rocks were pressed in as eyes, sticks became mouths, and bark became hair and ears. Some kids made other types of two dimensional art, using the natural materials to create some very impressive designs in the mud.

When I finally saw my sons piece, my jaw literally dropped. He saw what everyone else was doing and decided to go another direction.

Good job son, you are thinking for yourself.

He calls it his "forest".

Are Hobbyists Bad for Business?

Pricing of art/craft work is always a hot topic, with some people feeling that those with lower prices undercut the market and hurt the professional artist. I am not of that opinion.

There are several different types of Artisans.

Type one is the Professional Artisan. They create out of the love for their craft, and charge accordingly. Sales are not the priority, they are driven by creation, but they are supported by the income derived from their work.

Type two is the Hobbyist Artisan. They create for the fun of it, to pass time, maybe hanging out with a group of people and all doing the same thing at the same time. They sell their work simply to finance doing more of it. Their time is of no value, they seek to recoup their costs for materials so that they can do it again tomorrow.

Others work hard at what they do, trying to generate much needed income to help support their families or themselves. These people are stuck in the middle, being underpriced by the hobbyists, and not feeling like they can't sell enough at the higher prices.

It's tough to be in the middle. I learned a very long time ago that people either want to buy the cheapest, or they want to buy the best.

One of the co-op's that I am involved with recently had someone that knitted apply to be juried. Her work was of excellent quality. Her prices were between $15 and $20 for something that would take her about 6 hours to make. She was rejected because her items were inadequately priced for what we were trying to do.

Items that are inadequately priced skew the marketplace for everyone, but in this internet world that we live in, it is an inevitable issue that the folks in the middle will continue to have to deal with. People with the top quality work will continue to get top quality prices as long as they have the backbone to ask for them.

Are Mixed Feelings a Bad Thing?

I'm not writing this to get a lot of responses, or even generate a dialog. If that happens, so be it, but this is one of those blogs where I just want to express some mixed feelings about a topic.

As you have read in a previous blog, my work has recently been accepted into TrunkT HERE

Recently, the administration of the site separated photography from underneath the umbrella of "Art" and made it it's own category. I understand why they did it. The respect for the work being exhibited is great and they felt like it needed better exposure, and by making "Photography" it's own category on the header it certainly does this. I appreciate the additions viewers. But what does it say about photography as a craft when it is pulled out from within the "Art" category and put on it's own right next to it. Here is ART and over there is Photography.

TrunkT also just put out a notification that they will be publishing and distributing some coffee table type books of the artisans on their site. Initially, there were to be three books; Jewelry, Art, and Photography. They have since ended up combining the "Art" and "Photography" books into one publication. I will be interested to see how they title it.

I'm perfectly secure with my own feelings about my own work, but I am looking at the big picture here. Are there bigger sociological implications at play here?

I've been arguing for years that photography IS art. I'm not the first, loudest, or most important to do so, but I've gotten into many a heated debates about the topic. While the move is certainly well intentioned, does it have some other more subtle psychological ramifications about the perception of photography as art?

Or am I really just a delusional paranoid artist sharpening my knife to remove my ear and mail it to the administration of the site? Ears are highly overrated anyway. I've never liked the shape of my lobes.