Dear Charlie,
You’ve asked me in evaluating your work to be brutally honest. Admittedly, it’s something that other photographers have asked for, but I’ve always been reticent about honestly fulfilling such a request. I have often perceived it as the equivalent of a wife or girlfriend asking, “Do I look fat in this?” A frank, honest answer to that question is likely not going to end well.
However, you have been insistent about receiving such concise, unrestrained and to-the-point-feedback. So, I feel inspired to share with you why your pictures suck.
Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on the Candid Frame blog. We encourage you to listen to the podcast on iTunes.
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This is a followup to our original post about aspiring photographers getting caught in traps when they’re first starting out. The list of potential pitfalls is extensive, but some traps are quite common. These are the ones you must avoid at all cost if you want your business to thrive. Protect your career! I’ve been working full-time as a professional for over seven years. I learned the hard way. You don’t have to!
These are the traps that you must avoid.
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Multimedia has changed how I shoot. It’s also changed how I market and promote my work and myself. It’s resulted in changes to my workflow including the downloading, cataloging and editing of gigabytes and terabytes of digital still and movie files.
However, one of the most practical changes has been how to carry the additional equipment I need to produce multimedia. Along with the cameras and lenses, I now have to include space for a laptop, microphones, audio recorders, XLR cables, focusing rigs, LCD monitors, AC adapters, extra batteries and more. Suddenly that spacious photo backpack that was adequate for my still work was no longer viable.
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How many of you have ever built a camera? And if you have, how many of you have built a really big camera? We’re not talking about your typical 8×10 format, we’re going big. One year ago prior to the publishing of this story, I interviewed Andrea Pizzini–one of the creators of the Cube. The Cube isn’t something from the Star Trek universe, but it is still a very big feat of engineering. This Cube is a camera that must be dismantled, reassembled, and that shoots positives of more than 3 feet by 3 feet.
We decided to catch up with Andrea to see how the project has been coming along.
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The Great Gatsby is one of the latest movie crazes this year, and part of it is all about the looks and styling–just like Mad Men. But there is a lot that goes into the creation of these scenes from the wardrobe to the actual vision and everything to the editing. We scoured the web to try to find some of the best photo shoots inspired by the movie.
And here’s what we found.
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There are times when the latest, most advanced, feature-filled camera gets in the way of the very thing that it was designed for – making pictures. Surprisingly, it has little to do with the mechanics of the camera and more about the person holding it. In this case, it’s me.
I only started to be aware of this when I began shooting with my iPhone. As I increasingly used the phone to make images, I realized that I photographed in a very different way than when I shot with my HDSLR. In many ways, I was looser, more reactive. More importantly, I was having more fun.
The resulting images seemed to excite me more despite the fact that I didn’t have the benefit of interchangeable lenses, uber-resolution and a high burst rate. So, I began to think about the things that I was doing with my phone, which I could translate to my work with my “real” camera.
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