Where's the Commercial Market?

I haven't posted anything here in a while and I apologize for that. In fact, I haven't posted at the rate that I wanted to so far this year. I've been preoccupied with finding jobs. And it's kind of tough to come up with creative thoughts when you are wondering where your next payday is going to come from. Photography has always been a tough business to make a buck in but what we have today is just a down right brutal market.

I had to come here today and write something after looking at a request for proposal to shot children's furniture and trying to figure out how I was going to bid on the job. The highest bidder is bidding $20/hr and the lowest bidder $13/hr. And when I started digging into my competition I found that two of the bidders have significant amount of studio space (10,000 sq ft) in New York City! Yes, New York City! Where $20/hr can't get you a prepubescence teen to sweep up if you provide the broom! And these guys are doing advertisements for all the big accounts out there. And here they are bidding on jobs not worth peanuts. Times are tough!

So what are we to do? It seems this economy isn't what it used to be and there are no indications things are going to get any better. Many people would say that is a good thing. More would say that it isn't. This much I know, we have it better than my Grandparents could have ever imagined (my Grandfather refused to believe we put a man on the moon when he watched it on TV). Yet most of us are wondering when its all going to come tumbling down.

For over the last year I have had the distinct feeling that all the advertising work I was getting was from people trying to slow or stop the decline in sales and not neccessarily from growing, thriving business. Now I can't get a job to save my life. So the question comes to mind; how much longer can I survive?

Fortunately, sales of my fine art prints are picking up but right now it's just enough to tread water. I do need to purchase a least one new camera and one new computer this year but the thought of making any of the lens purchases this year is out of the question.

I'm glad they no longer have debter prisons!

So if you're wondering what to do, please don't feel alone. And put a note in the comment section about what you're going through and maybe we can get through this together. I don't have the answers to making things better but I do know something has to change. I also know that means I (and many others) my be desperate enough to reach out for what appears to be a safe vine only to fall into the abyss. Trying times to say the least.

Composition

When anthropologists first started to study hunter/gatherer tribes in the Amazon Basin and the South Pacific, they were amazed to learn that the tribal people had to be taught to recognize people (or any other thing for that matter) in a picture. A lot may be inferred from that statement but this much is for certain – our perception is trained to interpret two dimensional media such as photography. And since we are trying to master photography, we have to master our visual perception to truly understand what photography is.

While I write this I am reminded of how I used to go about photographing things when I was first starting out in photography. I would shoot and shoot and shoot until I was sure that I got it right. I would change shutter speed, aperture, lenses, angles, perspective, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And more often than not I would be displeased with the results. When you consider this was back in the days of film, the waste of cellulose acetate has a lot more impact to both pocketbook and environment than the waste of ones and zeros we write to our hard drives these days.

Alessandra Bitelli Quote

Developing a composition is a creative process involving intuition and thinking more than following rules.

My Old Window Collection by Inma Abia

On March 19^th, 2011 I arrived early in Chiclana de la Frontera, Cadiz, Spain to experience the extreme low tides caused by the Supermoon. I don't know if the tide was visibly affected by the moon on that morning or not but I was glad to be there early on that beautiful morning.

Oddly enough, there is an abandoned fishing village there named Sancti Petri which caught my attention. Ignoring the "No Trespassing" signs I started to wander the streets of old, dilapidated houses in various states of decay. As it turned out, I wasn't the only photographer to be visiting this village on that morning.

David duChemin Quote

“Consider this your permission to indulge that inner anarchist. Stop following the path you ought to take; follow instead the one you long to take.”

Paul Cezanne Quote

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

On Balance III

I quoted Rudolf Arnheim a few posts back with his contention that our eyes have been reduced to instruments with which to identify and measure. And through a devoted study of his writing I have come to agree with him but the question remains, "How do we retrain our eye to find what we have been missing?" "How do we find the recognizable mental impression of something?"

My first indications in life that I had to retrain my eye was when I would come upon a scene that absolutely took my breath away and yet my photographic endeavors of such scenes were amateurish at best. My search for photographic methods to improve my photography helped but lacked a certain predictability and looked like everything else. I was looking in the wrong area for improvement.

On Balance II

Discussions on balance in regards to photographic composition seem to be superficial at best to me. There are good reasons for this among the vast majority of photographers but if you want to distinguish yourself you have to go the extra mile and get down into the nuanced details and understand composition at a whole new level.

Consider that painters sometimes take years to determine their compositions of which balance is an essential part. They'll make a sketch of the crucial elements and they'll contemplate it for a while and then develop another sketch and contemplate that one for a period and on and on and on until they come to a solid conclusion about the message they want to send. Granted, photography can be thought of as completely different in this respect but it's really only a different point of view of the same coin.

Upcoming Display

I will be showing seven of my pieces at the Riverwalk Art Center in Fond du Lac, WI this Friday 20 Jan, 2012 from 5 to 8PM. The pieces I will be showing are:

Heavenly Bodies, 24"x48" on aluminum
Bryce Canyon Amphitheatre, 24"x18" on aluminum
Moonlit Castle, 24"x16" framed and matted
Monument Valley Sunrise, 24"x16" framed and matted
Storm Over Zion, 24"x16" framed and matted
Arches Sunrise, 24"x12" framed and matted
Chapel in Autumn, 15"x20" framed

I hope to see you there.

Doug

Anonymous Quote

Before you compose your picture it's a good idea to ask your self why you're doing it!

Bryan Peterson Quote

There is no better time to crop a bad composition than just before you press the shutter release.
 

On Balance ... but Composition First

When I first started in photography, a lot of the essential qualities about composition confused me to no end. Regardless of who was explaining it to me, I just could not get the concepts of movement, tension, and balance. And without a solid understanding of these and other compositional qualities, how could I compose a picture with a clear message? I couldn't.

Except for the occasional accident my pictures lacked direction or originality. I could copy a technique, which I quickly found to be unsatisfying, but I couldn't get composition!

Composition is taught as a series of elements but it seems to me the most important part of composition is assumed to be understood. I believe the success or failure of a work rests upon the clarity with which we understand the message we want to convey and our understanding of how we see.

I remember back in the early 80's I was working on a composition of an old boat grounded along the shore. It had been there so long that it was visibly rotting and one of the things I really liked about the scene was the bright green moss growing on the stern of the boat.